Virago, 2008, 316 p.

This is the third volume of Angelou’s autobiography. For my reviews of the first two see here and here. In this one her story carries on through her ongoing attempts to keep herself and her son solvent. She even marries (when her mother asked her why she had agreed to it she replied simply, “He asked.”) Eventually, though, her husband gets bored of marriage and leaves.

She gets a job dancing in a bar and hustling drinks, but salves her conscience by letting her customers know the ones she is served are not alcoholic. Her life is transformed by seeing a performance of Porgy and Bess – the first time she had seen black performers of a high standard – and she gets to know the cast when they come to the bar. This eventually leads to her joining the cast on a European tour.

I must admit that until I read this I had not known Angelou came to fame as a singer and dancer rather than a poet.

In Italy she feels wonder to be in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, and finds Italians welcoming but adds, “I hadn’t been in Europe long enough to know that Europeans often made as clear a distinction between black and white Americans as did the most confirmed Southern bigot. The difference, I was to discover, was that more often than not, blacks were liked, whereas white Americans were not.”

She has a facility with languages, going so far as to learn Serbo-Croat for the visit to Yugoslavia, picking up some Arabic for the trip to Egypt. On the ship taking the company there an encounter with a Greek doctor lets her know that black females from the US were attractive to European men as they represented a chance to become a US citizen by marriage.

Through it all though she is haunted by the fact that she had to leave her son behind in the US. The book ends with her return to the States and taking up family life again.

Pedant’s corner:- Chris-tian (is that hyphen a hangover from a line change in the manuscript?) “My only applause for the first three performances were the desultory claps from Eddie” (My only applause … was the..,) hiccoughing (hiccupping,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, crafts (it was a gondola – a sailing vessel – so the plural is craft.) “From my third-floor (which the French perversely called second-floor) room” (perversely?) Cheops’ (Cheops’s,) “even their approach to the common musical scales are as different as odds and evens” (their approach … is as different,) Smallens’ (Smallens’s,) “an entire cast of Negro singers were nervously rehearsing” (an entire cast was nervously rehearsing.) A commendation, though, for ‘culs-de-sac’.

Virago, 2010, 221 p. First published in1974.

This is the second volume of Angelou’s autobiography, the first of which I reviewed here.

In it she takes up her life from the time she gave birth to her son. Things were booming due to the war and jobs were reasonably available. After the war times became harder and blacks were expected to go back to previous lives. She flits from one job to another through the book always having to find provision for her son to be looked after.  She worked variously as a tram conductor, a tap dancer, a cook, a brothel keeper, a catering manager and briefly as a prostitute herself when under the influence of one of the men whom she misreads. In this regard Angelou seems to have been spectacularly naïve. Where men are concerned here, blind spots keep recurring. Her brother Bailey and an old schoolfriend called L C at different times help to disabuse her of her lack of insight. In amongst all this she attempted to join the army but was eventually turned down since the dance school she had attended was apparently a Communist front organisation, a fact of which she was blissfully unaware and which on the evidence given here was not at all obvious. A boxing match in which a young man she knew was participating also opens her eyes to the crueller capacities of men in general.

A particularly sad incident during this time concerned Bailey’s much loved wife Eunice who unfortunately died far too young. It turned him into a harder, less open person.

In the later stages of the book, as a warning, a man called Troubadour shows her the depths to which heroin dependency can take addict.

As in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s continuing memoir illustrates slices of life which have not often been reflected in literature.

Sensitivity note: the book employs the terms “nigger men” and “Jew boys.” (Both spoken by a black man.) Such were the times.

Pedant’s corner:-  Polonius’ (Polonius’s,) Williams’ (Williams’s,) “Stamps’ General Merchandise” (Stamps’s,) “slight of hand” (sleight,) “a dry cleaners” (dry cleaner’s,) “Black Shorts’ feet” (Shorts’s.)

Virago, 2007, 313 p.

This is the first volume of Angelou’s autobiography and was originally published in 1969. Its span covers a touch more than the decade of the 1930s.

She was born Marguerite Johnson; the contraction Maya came about from the pet name her brother Bailey used for her. At the age of three when her mother and father became estranged, her upbringing, and Bailey’s, was given over to her grandmother, whom she calls Momma, living in a town called Stamps in Arkansas. Momma was a formidable woman, steeped in the Bible but with an unusual position. She owned a shop (or store, as it is here) and was better off than many of the white people there (the memorably dubbed powhitetrash, who nevertheless looked down on her.) In fact during the depression Momma had been able to lend money even to some of the professional whites to help tide them over.

Life as a young black girl in that time and place was as circumscribed as you might expect. This is made especially evident at Angelou’s graduation from her (black) school when the (white) speaker praised only athletic accomplishments. The audience stilled as it realised that while in contrast to the money the white kids’ school was to receive that for hers meant whites “were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren’t even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises.” She thinks, “What school official had the right to decide that those two men must be our only heroes?” Nevertheless Joe Louis’s status as a standard bearer for blacks is well illustrated by their reaction to the radio commentary on his fight with Primo Carnera.

The early part of the book has the feel of a novel. Angelou’s recall is impressive and she had the same wish for a different appearance as the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (in effect to be more white;) in Angelou’s case specifically to be rid of her curly hair. Her memoir also shares with that book instances of sexual abuse. (At the age of eight, while staying for a few months with her mother, Angelou was raped by her mother’s live-in boy-friend.) The emphasis on religious belief, though strong in Momma’s case – Angelou transgresses her code in ways she didn’t understand at the time, sudden tripwires previously unexplained by adults are something of a feature – are not as to the fore as in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain but its importance to black life is plain. It is books that become solace, both for Maya and Bailey, books that tell of a different life and point the way toward it, books that perhaps made the difference in the way her life turned out in comparison to others who found no such support.

In her late childhood Angelou and her brother moved to San Francisco to live with her father where she noticed that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese businesses disappeared from San Francisco to be replaced by Negro ones (Negro is the word Angelou uses) with an influx of Southern Blacks. Her father – also called Bailey – takes her with him on a trip to Mexico where she undergoes a rite of passage of sorts when he gets drunk and she attempts to drive his car back from what she feels is the middle of nowhere, making it fifty miles to her destination with only one mishap.

Her conclusion, speaks for itself. “The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

Pedant’s corner:- Du Bois’ (the ‘s’ in Bois is unpronounced, the sound’s inclusion in the possessive has to be signalled, then; Du Bois’s,) Stamps’ (Stamps’s,) Flowers’ (Flowers’s – used two lines above,) Williams’ (Williams’s.) “Bailey and I lay the coins on top of the cash register” (laid the coins.) “fewer Amen’s were heard” (Amens,) Jenkins’ (Jenkins’s,) Dolores’ (x 2, Dolores’s,) “to staunch the flood of fear” (stanch,) “focalized on” (focused on.)