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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
By the time the poet and playwright Maya Angelou published the first volume of her memoirs, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," at the age of forty-one, she had already survived a number of personal misfortunes that might have crushed a lesser will and stilled a less hardy pen. When she was three, Marguerite Johnson (Angelou is a variation on her first husband's name) and her four-year-old brother, Bailey, were dispatched alone on a train from Long Beach, California, where they had lived with their parents, to the home of their paternal grandmother, whom they called Momma. Angelou writes:
We had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed--"To Whom It May Concern"--that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., . . . en route to Stamps, Arkansas. . . ., Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother. A porter had been charged with our welfare--he got off the train the next day in Arizona--and our tickets were pinned to my brother's inside coat pocket.
We're in "Jane Eyre" territory here. But, growing up under Momma's watchful eye in the American South, these orphans of convenience lived in a world that was, in Angelou's recollection, largely untroubled by social ambiguity--a world neatly divided between black and white and between women and men, which is to say, between good and evil. The evil that Angelou witnessed there was generally directed at black women--the mules of the world, as Zora Neale Hurston called them. It shaped her days and, in large part, informed her current public persona of fiery, lyrical dignity.
As a young girl, Angelou saw her grandmother, a religious and thrifty matriarch who owned the only general store in Stamps that catered to blacks, bend but not break when confronted with white girls who refused to address her as "Miss." And she saw Momma protect her son, the partly paralyzed Uncle Willie, with whom she ran the store, from the Ku Klux Klan by hiding him in her deep, rooty-smelling vegetable bin. Then, one day, when Maya was seven, her no-account daddy, with his smile as slick as brilliantine, appeared unannounced in Stamps. "It was awful for Bailey and me to encounter the reality one abrupt morning," Angelou writes. "We, or at any rate I, had built such elaborate fantasies about him and the illusory mother that seeing him in the flesh shredded my inventions like a hard yank on a paper chain." It was time for the children to return to their glamorous if feckless mother, Vivian Johnson, a sometime nurse and poker dealer, who was now in St. Louis. Their father ferried them there and disappeared a few days later. "And I was neither glad nor sorry," Angelou adds. "He was a stranger, and if he chose to leave us with a stranger, it was all of one piece."
Vivian, the hard, gin-drinking sister of four no-nonsense brothers, would shoot a man as soon as look at him. She was light-skinned with straight hair, and had...
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