Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou could easily have surrendered to despondency and despair given the countless obstacles life placed in her way. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in Saint Louis, Missouri, she was sent to live with her Arkansas grandmother at the age of three when her parents divorced. There she was exposed to the cruelty of southern bigotry and prejudice at first hand.

When she was seven, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and kept the horrific secret from all but her brother, Bailey. After the man was killed by her uncle, she blamed herself for telling anybody and entered a world of self-imposed silence for five years. Becoming pregnant in her senior year, she dropped out of school at age sixteen and gave birth to her son, Guy, and then set off on her own to raise him as a single mother. She worked at a wide variety of jobs to support herself and Guy, at times being a Creole cook, a cocktail waitress, a streetcar conductor and, reportedly, even a madam. Her first marriage ended in divorce.

She became friends with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and took part in the civil rights movement; his assassination, which occurred on her birthday, provided additional trauma. She gathered up these appalling experiences and combined them with the deep religious faith imparted by her grandmother and her own indomitable thirst for knowledge.

Writing her first autobiographical book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, provided her with solace while helping her deal with her grief over King’s death. The alchemy of her resilient personality and talent miraculously served to transmute the lead of loss into the gold of triumph and she soon found herself a figure on the national stage. She studied dance with Martha Graham, acted in Jean Genet’s The Blacks and toured with the opera, Porgy and Bess. She became conversant in Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish. Several United States Presidents tapped her for service; President Clinton asked her to compose and read a poem (“On the pulse of the Morning”) especially for his inauguration. She has written more than thirty books and several screenplays, yet still found time to serve as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Her wide range of accomplishments and intellectual interests has truly made her America’s Renaissance Woman and an inspiration to all.

 

This Lemonade Profile was written by La Vaughn Rynearson, an Artistic Lemonade contributing writer.

 

 

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