(April 4, 1923 - May 28, 2014)
Maya Angelou's name belongs with those of Godfrey Cambridge, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), and Ntozake Shange as outstanding black contributors to the American theatre. They have conveyed the pain and the power of the American black experience through the medium of drama. "All my work, my life, everything is about survival. All my work is meant to say, 'You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated...I try to tell the truth and preserve it in all artistic forms." (Black Women Writers At Work.)
She was a poet, a playwright, a composer, a singer, a director, a stage and screen performer and an autobiographer. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, her first autobiography, won instant critical success and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970. In this inspiring and extremely moving book she tells about her early years during which she suffered such physical abuse that she didn't speak for ten years. And then she started to sing, was liberated from the "cage" and found her voice through the poetry that attests to the complexity of the black woman's experience and her intense and intimate assertion of self.
Her Broadway debut was a Tony nominated role in Look Away. Off Broadway credits include Calypso Heatwave (1957), Jean Genet's The Blacks, and Cabaret For Freedom at the Village Gate. She adapted her book of poetry, And Still I Rise, into a one act musical, produced in Oakland, California in 1974. Reviewer Janet Boyarin Blundell noted that Ms. Angelou, "seemingly unafraid to approach anything. . .includes comments on aging, the disappointments of love, anger at the abuse of black people, and the everyday aspects of womanhood." The title poem's opening lines demonstrate her passion and determination to survive no matter what.
"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise."
She received many honorary degrees and awards, among them a Yale University Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship, a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her first collection of poetry, Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie. She was a member of Actors' Equity, AFTRA, on the Board of Trustees for the American Film Institute and one of the few women members of the Directors Guild of America.
The millions who heard her speak at Obama's first inauguration, listened to her deep, dark tones, and the carefully articulated prose, with its own rhythm, music, and amazing grace notes.
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting her one Sunday afternoon in her home in Winston Salem, North Carolina. The chair of the theatre department at North Carolina School of the Arts and his wife took me there for a visit. Here was this tall, imposing, colorful, magnetic woman and I was in awe. She had the ability to hold your attention with her stories which she told with a humor and laughter that was magical. But then she disappeared into her kitchen where she was making a stove top pineapple upside down cake (her recipe). Delicious! She gave me a tour of her home and at one point it was just us two girls sitting for a few moments engaged in a one on one conversation. What I remember is the way she connected through her eyes and her truth.
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