I like to think of Maya Angelou as a Missourian, although she spent only a small part of her life in the state. She was born in St. Louis in 1928 with the name Marguerite Anne Johnson. Upon the break-up of her parents’ marriage when she was three years old, she and her older brother Bailey were sent to live with their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas.
This is where her story begins in the memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The most well-known of her books, it follows her life through the age of 17, ending with the birth of her son. She shared more about her remarkable life in subsequent volumes, conducting readers on a tour of the circuitous route that led to her achievements as an author, poet, performer, activist, and somewhere in there, San Francisco’s first Black streetcar conductor. It’s a truly American story: a scared little girl feeling abandoned by the world grows up to write an inaugural poem for one president (Bill Clinton) and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from another (Barack Obama).
But many details of her story show less pleasant aspects of the country, including enduring racism. Angelou describes her grandmother’s worried anguish when then-teenaged Bailey fails to come home on time: “The Black woman in the South who raised sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.”
Maya and Bailey found themselves shuttled back and forth a few times among parents and grandparents. During their second St. Louis sojourn, 8-year-old Maya suffered an assault that traumatized her to the point of muteness. She stopped speaking to anyone but her brother. But after they returned to Arkansas, her grandmother’s neighbor and friend, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, helped her regain her voice through the power of literature, inviting the girl to read great books with her.
Eventually, Maya’s parents both migrated to California, and the two kids followed. This is where the story wraps up, but not before some major learning and growth on Maya’s part, including a short stint as a runaway living on the streets. She fell in with a group of other homeless teens who provided her first experience of true cooperation and equality among different races. The influence was lasting and her words about it seem like a good place to conclude, as they describe so much of her life’s work: “After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. The lack of criticism evidenced by our ad hoc community influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance for my life.”
