Guest Author
When some voices are stilled, a chorus must sound in their honor. Maya Angelou falls in that category. The woman who gave a spectacular lyricism to a childhood under Jim Crow stepped off stage last week. Her shadow will linger for a long time.
For me, an immigrant, a man of color, I discovered Maya Angelou late, secondhand mostly, not from reading her directly but from hearing her words emanating from the mouths of women to whom Angelou gave voice.
There is a certain pride, a transformative glow that comes over them when they utter Angelou’s words. It says those words take them to a new, safer, higher place.
“It’s the fire in my eyes, flash of my teeth, the swing in my waist, joy in my feet, I’m a woman phenomenally.”
“You understand why my head’s not bowed. I don’t pout, shout or jump about or talk really loud. When you see me passing, it should make you real proud.”
I saw Maya Angelou for the first time in person when she visited Florida A&M University in 2010. She was more than 80 years old, the lioness at dusk. She was dressed in black and wore dark glasses. She was frail. The lights were kept dim to accommodate her troubled eyes. But her voice, oh that voice, filled the hall. It had lost none of its power and resonance. My notes of those nights are lost to history but the impact remains.
Every word was like currency, valuable to my ears. My chest heaved; my heart welled. I wanted to rush outside and pay her to come back inside. She talked about her biography. Her humble beginnings, from silence to the cinema, her wit, her wisdom garnered from a life lived every minute. She reminded us that each word should count.
Soon afterward, my daughter was selected by her elementary school to address the local school board. She chose a Maya Angelou quote for the occasion. Like many other women of color, the 9-year-old found her voice in the lines of Maya Angelou.
Some question the merits of Angelou’s credentials as a poet. What is unquestioned is that her words have been uttered as pure poetry from the lips of black women for generations. And when they spoke those words, whether the women were 9 or 90, 13 or 30, 16 or 60, they spoke with a wisdom and an insight that stays with us, that echoes in our heads.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” Angelou said.
In recent years, Oprah made Maya Angelou hip. Who hasn’t heard the phrases, “When you know better, do better. When you get, give; when you learn, teach”?
Honest, homespun, indisputable wisdom. Vintage Maya Angelou.
Andrew J. Skerritt is author of Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial and the AIDS Epidemic in the South. He lives in Tallahassee. Follow him on Twitter @andrewjskerritt. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
