Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise imagine...

# I open my mouth to the Lord

# And I won't turn back, no

# I will go, I shall go

# To see what the end is gonna be. #

APPLAUSE

Few people have transformed the way that we think about race and culture

as the poet and writer Maya Angelou.

Nearly 50 years after the publication of her first book,

her cry for a world of equality and tolerance

is as powerful and relevant as ever.

And what's remarkable is that her writing

was directly based on her life.

And what a life.

A trailblazing activist, who worked alongside Malcolm X

and Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou was also a singer, a dancer,

an actress, and made her directorial movie debut at the age of 70.

So she was a consummate performer.

And I think that whatever else it is, this is a life lived on stage.

Lift up your heart and say, simply, "Good morning."

You have a woman who was like a tree trunk, you know what I mean?

She's like a redwood,

and she has deep, deep roots

within American culture.

I would hate to see her just remembered for one thing.

The Phenomenal Woman is not just the title of something she wrote,

it's who she was.

Just before she died, in 2014, Angelou was captured on film.

And tonight, Imagine presents the extraordinary story

of an American legend.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill

of things unknown but longed for still

and his tune is heard on the distant hill

for the caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage

can seldom see through his bars of rage

his feet are tied his wings are clipped

so he opens his throat to sing.

One of the first memories I have, I was three years old,

and my brother Bailey, five.

My father and mother had agreed to disagree,

and neither of them wanted the problems of having two toddlers.

So they put us on a train and sent us from Los Angeles to Arkansas,

with tags on our arms.

No adult supervision.

Pullman car porters took us off trains, put us on other trains.

And we arrived in Stamps,

a little village in Arkansas about the size of this room.

I thought it was the worst thing, when I declared my mother dead,

so that I wouldn't have to long for her.

Yes, that was terrible rejection.

My brother has never recovered.

My grandmother owned the only black-owned store

in that little village.

And she had one more child, my Uncle Willie.

She was the child of a former slave.

Amazing. I think my grandmother started teaching me to read

that afternoon when we arrived.

My brother Bailey taught me,

"Just learn everything, put it in your brain.

"You're smarter than everybody around here. Except me, of course."

In my memory, Stamps is a place of light, shadow, sounds,

and enchanting odours.

The yellowish acid of the ponds and rivers.

The deep pots of greens cooking for hours with smoked or cured pork.

And above all,

the atmosphere was pressed down with the smell of old fears.

Is that all the size of the bridge?

SHE LAUGHS

I was terribly hurt in this town,

and vastly loved.

Uncle Willie was crippled, his whole right side was paralysed.

My uncle Willie taught me my times-tables.

He'd say, "Now, sister, do your fourses, do your sevenses,

"do your elevenses." I learned my multiplication tables exquisitely.

'And when "the boys", as they were euphemistically called,

'when the Klan would ride down the hill toward the store...'

Maya? Bailey Jr?

Both of you.

'We had to hide Uncle Willie.'

The potatoes, the onions.

'Cos a white girl could say, "Well, he made an attempt to touch me." '

It just shouldn't be.

'We had to help Uncle Willie to get down in the bin.

'And we'd cover him with potatoes and onions.'

And I could just picture his tears going into the eyes of the potatoes.

The Klan would ride up in front of the store.

Bailey and I would peek out the window.

Tall horses that looked so big,

they didn't look like horses you see every day.

Big guns.

So one of my fantasies when I was, oh, seven,

six or seven, was that suddenly there'd be a...

Somebody would just say "Shazam,"

and I would be white and I wouldn't be looked at with such loathing

when I walked in the white part of town, which I had to do.

You really wished...

..either that you could dry up in a moment

and just shrivel up like that.

And, instead of that I'd put my head up and walk through, grit my teeth,

surviving. But, my God, what scars does that leave on somebody?

I wouldn't... I don't even dare examine it myself.

And when I reached for...

..the pen...

-To write?

-To write.

I have to scrape it across those scars to sharpen that point.

If growing up is painful for the Southern black girl,

being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor

that threatens the throat.

It is an unnecessary insult.

And then at about six or seven,

my father took me and my brother, Bailey,

back to St Louis to my mother, to her family.

She had left California after they separated.

The Negro section of St Louis in the mid '30s had all the finesse

of a Gold Rush town.

Prohibition, gambling and their related vocations

were so obviously practised

that it was hard for me to believe that they were against the law.

My mother had record players, and jazz and blues songs.

It was amazing, and she danced.

She wore lipstick.

And, oh, my grandmother would never do anything like that.

My mother's boyfriend was intoxicated with my mother.

In his rage at his inability to control her

and have her when he wanted her,

he raped me.

I was seven.

The act of rape is the matter of the needle giving

because the camel cannot.

The child gives because the body can and the mind of the violator cannot.

I told the name of the rapist to my brother who was nine.

I said, "I can't tell you his name because he said he would kill you."

He said, "I won't let him."

So I believed him. The man was put in jail

for one day and night and released,

and a few days later the police came to my mother's mother's house

and said the man had been found dead

and it seemed he'd been kicked to death.

My seven-year-old logic told me that my voice had killed a man.

So I stopped speaking for five years.

I clamped my teeth shut, I'd hold it in.

If I talked to anyone else, that person might die too.

I had to stop talking.

My mother's people tried to woo me away from my mutism,

but they didn't know what I knew.

I think they wearied of the presence of this sullen, silent child.

So they put me and Bailey back on the train,

back to Stamps to my grandmother.

And one of the first things I remember was my grandmother

braiding my hair, and my hair was huge.

She said, "Sister, Mama don't care these people say you must be a idiot

"or you must be a moron cos you can't talk.

"Mama don't care. Mama know when you and the Good Lord get ready.

"Sister, you're going to be a preacher, you're going to be

"a teacher, you're going to teach all over this world."

I used to sit there and think, "This poor, ignorant woman,

"doesn't she know I will never speak?"

There was a lady in town, Mrs Flowers,

and she would take me to her house.

She made lemonade and tea cookies, delicious.

And she'd serve me and she knew I didn't speak

and she'd read one of the poets to me.

She'd done this with me for three or four years.

And finally, I was at her house one day and she said,

"Maya, you don't like poetry.

"You'll never like it until you speak it,

"until you feel it come across your tongue, over your teeth,

"through your lips, you will never like it."

So finally I went under the house where there used to be chickens

and the dirt was soft like powder.

And I tried poetry.

Now, to show you how out of evil there can come good,

in those five years I read every book in the black school library.

I read all the books I could get from the white school library.

I memorised James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar,

Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

I memorised Shakespeare, whole plays.

50 sonnets.

I memorised Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry.

I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant.

I had Balzac.

When I decided to speak...

..I had a lot to say.

I have written a poem for a woman who rides a bus in New York City.

She's a maid. She has two shopping bags.

When the bus stops abruptly, she laughs.

If the bus stops slowly she laughs.

I thought, "Mmm, uh-huh."

Now, if you don't know black features,

you may think she's laughing

but she wasn't laughing,

she was simply extending her lips and making a sound.

Ha-ha-ha.

I said, "Oh, I see, that's that survival apparatus."

Now let me write about that to honour this woman

who helps us to survive.

70 years in these folks' world

The child I works for calls me girl

I say, "Ha-ha-ha, yes, ma'am"

for working's sake.

I'm too proud to bend and too poor to break,

So, hmm-hmm-hmm, I laugh

until my stomach ache,

When I think about myself.

My folks can make me split my side,

I laugh so hard, ha-ha-ha, I nearly died.

The tales they tell sound just like lying,

They grow the fruit, but eat the rind.

Hmm, I laugh, ha-ha-ha,

until I start to crying,

When I think about myself.

Ha-ha-ha.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha-ha.

A painting of Maya is to be placed

in the Smithsonian Institute.

It's quite an honour.

Thank you, thank you.

-Ms Angelou?

-Yes, sir?

-Oh, my goodness gracious!

-Hey, you girl!

Oh, honey.

I wish my grandmother, who died 50 years ago,

I wish she was alive

and could see this.

APPLAUSE

Wow!

Oh, my land.

We have made tremendous gains.

Not nearly as much as we want to.

If I had that power, I would make everybody an African-American.

At least for a week.

Know what it's like.

Know what it's like to get on a bus or any public conveyance

and have people look at you as if you have just stolen

the baby's milk.

Look at you and turn their face away.

And still saying, "I forgive you."

I'm not starting any... I'm not starting any race riots.

I forgive you.

And I forgive myself.

My lord.

-AUDIENCE MEMBER:

-Do it.

Huh? That's it.

My son says, "Do it, Mom."

LAUGHTER

I want to acknowledge the presence of my son.

The greatest thing that ever happened to me was to give birth

to Guy Johnson, and to have the privilege

and the pleasure and the fear and all of that

of raising that black boy in a white country.

I was 16, living in San Francisco, I was almost six foot.

And there was a boy who used to say,

"Hey, Maya when you going to give me some of that long brown frame?"

And so one day I saw him in the street and I said,

"Say, you still want...?" He said, "What?"

I said, "Let's go somewhere." So he had the keys to a friend's house...

..and we went there and we had sex.

And I thought, "Is that all there is?"

People making such a big miration.

I had watched people in the movies

and they were just so pleased to be in each other's arms.

I didn't feel any of that.

And I ask him, "Is that all there is?"

And he said, "Yeah."

So I said "OK, bye," and I went home.

And a month later I found out I was pregnant.

My mother never made me feel guilty, she never made me feel ashamed.

She asked me, "Do you love the boy?" I said "No." She asked,

"Does he love you?" I said, "No."

She said, "We're not going to ruin three lives.

"You're going to have a beautiful baby."

And that's just the way she treated him,

and me.

And then a fellow started coming, he had been a sailor -

Tosh Angelos, a Greek.

I didn't think that white and blacks would get together like that.

But I liked him, he was bright.

He had read as much as I had read.

He had read the Russian writers.

And he liked my son.

When he asked me to marry him, his mother said,

"You can't marry her, she's black."

He said, "I noticed that first."

My mother was so disgusted with me, she moved a 14-room house

two days before the wedding, 500 miles away.

14 rooms.

But then she fell for him.

He was a good husband, he was a good father, she fell for him.

So a few years later when I said to her, "I'm leaving him", she said,

"How can you? How dare you?"

But I won't stay in a relationship if there's no love there.

In his nine years of schooling,

we had lived in five areas of San Francisco,

three townships in Los Angeles, New York City,

Hawaii and Cleveland, Ohio.

I followed the jobs, and I had taken Guy along.

What I remember most when I think of a childhood memory is the fact that

she would come to school wearing her African clothes and her hair natural

and some idiot kid in the class would say,

"Yo' momma from Lost Africa."

And I'd have to pop him!

And then I would come home and I would ask my mother,

"Don't you have a sweater, skirt outfit?

"One of those Penny's things?"

And she would say to me,

"This is your history.

"You come from kings and queens."

And I would look at her and I would think, "Yes, it's unfortunate,

"my mother's demented."

My mother was working in nightclubs at the time.

I got jobs in strip joints.

I didn't strip, but then I didn't have to.

I had a costume that was about big enough to put in the palm of my hand

like that. So I didn't have much on to strip.

Bands always wanted to play for me because I danced.

The other strippers just walk out and...

# Tea for two and two for tea... #

And take off something and throw it in the audience.

But I would hit it.

And so I met people who invited me out.

And I said, "Have you heard calypso?"

And they said, "No."

So I sang some calypso, just a cappella.

And they said, "You should come and open in the Purple Onion."

So if I would sing, I would make three times the money.

And so I stopped dancing as a rule and started singing.

Maya Angelou!

APPLAUSE

I talked some friends of mine

into going to this little club, late '50s.

And what I remember is Maya making her entrance.

Very tall...

..very grand.

No shoes.

# Mo and Joe run the candy store

# Telling fortunes behind the door... #

That she was an original is certainly an understatement.

# Run, Joe... #

She was exact and refined with her movements,

She was limbs.

I mean, she was a beautiful Giacometti sculpture.

At the time that was the trend in music, Afro-Caribbean, calypso,

and Maya was known as Miss Calypso.

# Always busy in the marketplace, makes me dizzy in the marketplace

# 'Tis a wonder to me to constantly see

# All that happens in the marketplace

# That flower girl has an innocent face,

# The most well-bred in the marketplace

# She's a voodoo girl from dusk till dawn

# She'll cast a spell just for fun... #

The voice was no great voice, but she knew how to use it.

# Just a wonder to me to constantly see

# All that happens in the marketplace. #

We had a dance troupe in Los Angeles called the Lester Horton Dancers

and we heard that we were to be on a bill with Maya Angelou in Las Vegas.

Now this was like '56, '57.

At that time Lena Horne, Belafonte, Sammy Davis,

they were all big name black performers but they couldn't mingle

in the lounges. They had to perform, go back to their room.

So when we get to Las Vegas, we realise that we're confronting this,

you know, we can't go here, we can't go there.

I mean, we were a young company.

So we looked to Maya for guidance and we followed her lead.

And she didn't protest overtly, she just, you know,

I guess made mental notes that this has got to be corrected.

MUSIC: Summertime by George Gershwin

Well, Porgy and Bess came and performed in San Francisco

and someone told me they're looking for a dancer.

So, I thought, "Hmm",

and they would pay much more and I'd get a chance to travel around

the United States. And maybe get a chance to go to Europe.

I auditioned for them and they accepted me.

I sang the role, Ruby, but the truth is, I couldn't really sing, I mean,

I could sing but I wasn't a trained singer, I really was a dancer.

And at least once every two or three weeks,

one of the singers would say to me, "Maya, I'm sorry to tell you,

"but you flatted that G or you flatted that A."

I didn't even know I was singing in the alphabet, I just sang the role.

It was a wonderful experience...

..because we went all over the world.

The horrible thing for me was I had left my son.

I'd left my son.

And I called him at least once a week

and we'd talk and cry on the phone.

It was terrible. I felt so guilty.

He didn't know how I loved him.

And finally, when I got home and saw Guy Johnson... Oh, my land.

The reunion was so sweet.

There was a play opening in New York and I was asked to come to New York

and to audition.

My mother had a chance to do the understudy in Hello, Dolly!

with Pearl Bailey as the lead.

For my mother it would have meant living continuously in New York

without leaving me for at least a year.

And it was regular money.

The director and the producer both loved her...

..but Pearl Bailey came back and said, "Oh, no,

"I ain't going to have this big, old ugly girl be my understudy."

There are very few times in my life that I remember my mother crying...

..because this meant she had to go back out on the road

and find other work.

It was devastating...

..because I knew all the sacrifices my mother made to keep me.

35 years later, when Pearl Bailey was getting a lifetime award

and they asked her, "Who do you want to give it to you?"

She said, "Maya Angelou."

And guess who gave it to her and never said a damn thing?!

For the next year and a half,

save for my short, out-of-town singing engagements,

I began to write.

At first I limited myself to short sketches, then to song lyrics,

then I dared short stories.

I had met Langston Hughes in California, and John Killens.

And they both said, because I was writing, they said,

"Come to New York, come to New York and join the Harlem Writers Guild.

"Let us criticise you and tell you how good you are or how bad you are

"and we'll see."

Playwrights and writers

have all gone through the Harlem Writers Guild.

People asked what was going on?

We were just writing, trying to get our work written and published.

Then you come to the group and what you want is the criticism.

And the criticism is always constructive.

You don't want to go out and tear your thing up

and throw yourself into the river, you know.

And of course Lewis Michaux had Michaux's bookstore

on 125th and 7th.

And that was a very, very important place.

Maya, Rosa Guy, Louise Meriwether...

Max Roach, Paule Marshall was there in that group.

I must say that we loved bars, all of us loved bars.

Me, Rosa, Maya - we are bar-stool people.

Right on the corner of 96th Street and Columbus Avenue was a grill,

and James Baldwin's brother worked there as a bartender.

James Baldwin was never in the Harlem Writers Guild.

He was, you know, in France, but any time he would be in town,

he would be at that bar.

I first met James Baldwin in Paris in the early '50s.

I was with Porgy and Bess.

And I met him, he was small and...

..hot, dancing himself.

I mean, his movements were always the movements of a dancer.

So when I met Jimmy, well, we liked each other.

I remember the respect that they gave one another.

The excitement that they both are expressing themselves,

they're both brilliant people in a room,

after a couple of drinks saying what they really feel.

I'm a kind of poet and I come out of...

..a certain place, a certain time, a certain history.

-You know?

-Right.

And the people who produced me...

James Baldwin was merely my mother's friend, Jimmy.

I had no idea the majesty of his work at the time.

What I recall is my mother coming home after conversations with him,

and talking about what she was going to do

as a result of having met with him.

What Jimmy was, was angry.

He was angry at injustice, at ignorance, at exploitation,

at stupidity, at vulgarity.

Yes, he was angry.

I don't know what most white people in this country feel,

I can only conclude what they feel

from the state of their institutions.

I don't know whether the labour unions and their bosses

really hate me.

That doesn't matter, but I know I'm not in their unions.

I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people

but I know the textbooks they give my children to read

and the schools that we have to go to.

Now, this is the evidence.

You want me to make an act of faith on some idealism

which you assure me exists in America,

which I have never seen.

APPLAUSE

It was the awakening summer of 1960

and the entire country was in labour.

Something wonderful was about to be born and we were all going to be

good parents to the welcome child.

Its name was freedom.

We have no alternative but to keep moving with determination.

We've gone too far now to turn back.

Dr King came to New York to speak, at Riverside Church,

and I went with friends and we were so moved.

He was just... He was irresistible.

And his idea of non-violence was absolutely

what I had been waiting for.

I had lived around so much violence and been myself violated,

and when Reverend King came and said

we can change the world with non-violence,

it was like pouring water on a parched desert.

I needed that, and I was ready for it.

And so I and Godfrey Cambridge, a comedian,

wrote a piece called Cabaret for Freedom to raise money

and we gave it to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

in New York.

Bayard Rustin suggested that I be asked to come in

as the northern coordinator

of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And Reverend King came, and he reminded me of my brother.

Small, beautiful speaking voice.

So when Dr King sat in my office, he became a big brother.

I became a little girl again.

When Harlem became politicised,

really politicised in the '50s and '60s,

it was so amazing.

It was a crazy time in Harlem.

Mr Michaux's bookshop was right in the middle of everything.

He'd have 500 people out in front of his bookshop as they'd be talking.

And I didn't know it was the precursor...

..to Malcolm.

When America says "In God we trust",

she means she trusts in that white God who showed her how to steal

this country from the dark skinned Indians, who showed her how to

kidnap you and me and bring us over here and make us slaves.

When I use the term God, I'm speaking about our God,

the God of our forefathers, the black man's God.

I saw her with Malcolm X from time to time and people like that.

But I remember her being very angry, very angry, to tears.

Because she was fighting the devil, the white devil as she called it.

It was the time of afros, dashikis,

a re-establishment of the African and American black roots.

Many African Americans made friends with Africans who had come to

United Nations. They got whisky and drinks and invited African Americans

to the parties. It was wonderful.

We made friends.

Now that Africa is getting independent and in a position

to create its own image,

those of us in the west look at the African image

and see how positive it is and we begin to identify with it.

We become proud of our African blood, our African heritage.

And your western imperialists and colonialists

consider this to be a grave threat.

And then we heard that Patrice Lumumba from the Congo

had been killed.

NEWSREEL: This was Patrice Lumumba in June, 1960.

The premiere of the new Congo Republic

waiting for the ceremonies that would mark Congolese independence.

Less than two weeks in the future lay the army mutiny

that would plunge the Congo into near chaos.

Colonel Joseph Mobutu,

whose forces seize Lumumba at the beginning of December.

And the African Americans took it as if Patrice Lumumba was in fact

an African American right off 125th Street.

We started asking people in Harlem

to come down to United Nations and protest.

People who had never been down to Times Square, people born in Harlem,

full of anger at the way Africans were treated on their homeland.

We filled the General Assembly at United Nations.

Adlai Stevenson was at the desk.

We believe that the only way to keep the cold war out of the Congo

is to keep the United Nations in the Congo.

And, at one point, Rosa Guy's sister screamed, "Murderer!"

at the top of her voice.

Whereupon all the people got up and started fighting.

NEWSREEL: The speech is interrupted

by a well organised demonstration in the gallery.

Most of the group are American Negros,

members of African nationalist groups in New York.

My mother taught me a love of justice...

..a love of doing what's right.

She said to me, "If you really have something to protest,

"you should be on the streets."

My mother was leading this demonstration and I was with her.

We were protesting the damage done to people in the South

who had gone down there for the freedom riots,

and we had about 400 people.

Three blocks away, the mounted police pull into the street...

..in formation.

People in the demonstration began going to the sidewalk.

Because in those days they ran over people, they stomped them,

trampled them and left their bodies in the street.

And I was looking at my mother and she...

We kept on.

And I said, "Ma, come on, you're going to get us killed, let's go."

She turned to me and she said,

"One person standing on the word of God is the majority."

I looked at her and I thought, "You really have gone crazy!"

The sergeant in charge started to walk past us.

My mother pulled out this big hairpin out of her headband

and stuck it in the sergeant's horse.

The sergeant's horse neighed and reared up, the sergeant fell off,

the people came back from the sidewalk and we finished that march.

Whew, hadn't seen courage like that.

Brought right up to my face.

She took me on a trip or two.

I first saw Maya in 1961 at the St Mark's Theatre in the Village

when she played in Genet's The Blacks.

The Blacks was a piece that really shook everyone,

it started avant-garde theatre in this country.

Genet set aside six actors who were black,

six actors who were also black but wore white masks

representing the whites.

Maya played the white queen.

The combination of Queen Elizabeth

and all of the white female royalty of Europe.

One of her lines was, "I am the lilywhite queen of the west,

"centuries and centuries of breeding."

And it erased the consciousness of race to such a degree

that it's called the theatre of the absurd.

Racism is absurd.

It's interesting that black people can play white people,

the good and the bad,

because we've had centuries of having to study their faces,

understand that a smile could mean "You get flogged today."

Or a frown can mean, "I'm selling you off to Mississippi", you see?

The whites, of course, reigned above,

they were on a ramp that was six feet into the air.

The blacks were on the ground.

And each one of the whites would come down the ramp and offer

their objections to blacks even existing.

And as it happened, they were killed by the blacks, each one of them.

And as they descended, the blacks ascended...

..and they took power.

Some whites got up and walked out.

Some blacks got up and walked out.

One man was running so fast, he fell downstairs and broke his leg.

One woman fainted, a man had a heart attack.

Well, I think it brought to mind for the first time,

to many white people, that they were responsible

for most of our anguish because of their ignorance.

I remember walking out of that play and being ashamed of being white.

I was so taken by its polemic.

At that time Maya was searching desperately for her African roots,

upon whose shoulder she stood.

Maya met Vus Make at the United Nations -

an attraction ensued.

I went to John Killens' house one evening

and there was a South African, a freedom fighter.

Now I've always been a patsy for men who could think.

Oh, goodness. And this man just opened up his brain

and he was fabulous.

Well, I thought it was very odd.

But I remember when she was introduced to him,

here was this Maya up here at eight feet tall and here he was, right,

and she took him by the collar and she...

And kissed him in the mouth and said, "You're going to be my...

"..husband."

And he was.

SHE CONTINUES LAUGHING

Our plane landed at Cairo on a clear afternoon,

and just beyond the windows,

the Sahara was a rippling beige sea which had no shore.

He was working for the Pan Africanist Congress,

the South African Freedom Movement.

You had South African exiles all over the place in those days.

He was the representative in Egypt.

Maya and Vus lived in Cairo...

..where she wrote for newspapers.

But they could not sustain the relationship.

Vus was trying and so was I,

but neither of us was able to infuse vitality into our wilting marriage.

We had worn our marriage threadbare, and it was time to discard it.

I knew that other women would be in that house before the sheets

lost my body's heat.

I was living in Cairo and my son had finished high school.

He was 17.

He wanted to go to the university in Ghana.

Their first day there,

friends took him out for a drive and let him see the countryside.

And a truck ran into his car.

A doctor studied the x-rays and she said,

"A hard sneeze and he could be dead," because his neck was broken.

I broke my neck in Cape Coast.

In those days there was no hospital in Cape Coast.

A couple in a Volkswagen saw the accident,

they piled me in the back and drove me four-and-a-half hours to Accra,

where I woke four days later.

I was told that he would never walk again and I said,

"With the help of God, my son will walk out of the hospital."

He was in intensive care so I was there and I said,

"I see you walking."

He said "Mom, that which I feared is upon me.

"Mother, I have to ask you something no-one should ever ask a mother.

"You're my best friend.

"Mother, if there's no recovery, pull the plug, let me go."

I started shouting, "Then I see you talking, laughing,

"I see you swimming."

He said, "Mom, please, there's some sick people in this place.

"Don't make so much noise."

And about the sixth day, a nurse came in, she said,

"Miss Angelou, come with me."

She pulled the blankets off my son's feet

and his toes went like that.

It virtually destroyed her.

I think she felt if she was there she could have prevented it

for some reason or another.

I had some pictures I had taken at the picnic,

really the last day of Guy's full physical health

and so I made copies for her, I thought she might like to have them.

And when I showed them to her,

she became very upset and she just pushed them away.

Her reaction let me know how painful that still was for her,

so many years later.

She decided to stay in Ghana.

I was already living at the YWCA hostel and I knew they had space.

Ghana was exciting at that time.

Kwame Nkrumah was the president and he projected

the African personality.

He had studied at Lincoln University in the United States and he had

sort of extended an invitation.

There were African Americans who had moved to Ghana.

Dr WB DuBois, one of the great thinkers of our time,

had come to Ghana to live.

Then I went to work in the university.

There were so many Ghanaians who has studied abroad.

Many people came to teach at the university.

You could get into any kind of discussion on any subject

in Ghana at the time, in-depth conversations.

Maya was very well known in Ghana.

She also liked to entertain.

So we had parties at the house.

Constant parties. We had one hell of a good time.

You could call people and ask them to come over for breakfast and they

would come in tens and twenties and you could make hotcakes and waffles

and some people had never had them before.

It was just... It was a great place to live.

When Malcolm X came to Ghana, the African Americans who were there,

we gathered around him like his children.

And he liked me and we liked each other.

I met Malcolm X at my mother's house in Ghana.

My mother went out and bought about six chickens,

and she rarely fried chicken,

and I was almost sorry to meet Malcolm X

because the chicken was so good and I had to share it with him.

But the thing about Malcolm is, for a person of his stature,

for me to ask a question and for him to think about it and then come back

with an answer...

..captured my heart. And his answers were so phenomenal.

We wanted to meet so he could tell us what was going on in the States

and what his plans were.

And we found out that his quest was to find an African government

that would take the United Nations genocide convention

and make a charge against the United States.

African nations and Asian nations and Latin American nations look very

hypocritical when they stand up in the United Nations condemning the

racist practices of South Africa and saying nothing in the UN about the

racist practices manifest every day against Negros in this society.

This is Maya with me,

and our delegation went into the American Embassy in Ghana

to deliver our petition condemning the United States.

Have you had any commitment from any nations in Africa

to support your...?

I would rather not say at this time.

In fact, we couldn't get any African government to bring any charge

against the US because of the American money, the cash.

He wanted to see as much as he could see of the African continent.

He said in Ghana, "I've gone to Mecca, I've taken the Hajj.

"And I have met men with hair blonde as corn silk

"and their faces as white as milk,

"and I have been able to call them brother.

"So, obviously, I was wrong.

"All white people are not blue eyed devils."

Now it takes a lot of courage to say to the world,

"You remember everything I said last week?

"Well, I don't believe that any more.

"I want to have enough sense to see the new thing and enough courage

"to say the new thing."

I loved him so much.

Maya came back because she wanted to work with Malcolm.

GUNSHOTS

So she was shattered that he was murdered

before she really had a chance to talk to him.

For me, I had two heroes.

Malcolm and...

..Dr King.

They were the people...

..that I would've looked to...

..to lead.

Martin Luther King...

..was killed on my birthday.

I had worked for him as his northern representative and he had asked me

to come back and I was going to go back and then...

NEWSREADER: Dr Martin Luther King,

the apostle of nonviolence and the Civil Rights Movement,

has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

Police rushed the 39-year-old negro leader to a hospital where he died

of a bullet wound in the neck.

It just, just knocked me out.

And I fell into mutism again.

I just...

..just couldn't bring myself.

And finally after about five days, James Baldwin came to my house.

Bam-bam-bam on the door, "Open this hmm-hmm-hmm door.

"I'll call the police."

So I opened the door and he came in, he saw I was really unkempt

and my house was a mess and I've always left a pretty house and...

He said "Go take a shower, put some clothes on,

"I'm taking you somewhere."

We went to Jules Feiffer's house, the cartoonist.

And Jules Feiffer and Judy Feiffer, his then wife, told stories,

and Baldwin told stories.

And Baldwin asked me, "Tell a little bit about your grandma.

"Tell a little bit about Stamps, Arkansas."

So I started by saying, "In Arkansas, racism was so prevalent

"that black people couldn't even eat vanilla ice cream."

And so it made everybody laugh!

And they asked me to tell that story, tell another.

She was absolutely captivating,

and she just told these stories in a very matter of fact...

There was nothing show off-y about it.

Judy Feiffer, the next morning, called Random House

and talked to Bob Loomis. This was 1968.

She called me one day and she said,

at their house the night before they had a party and this woman,

Maya Angelou, was there.

Now in that group there are some wonderful talkers.

Jules... I think Philip Roth was at that party.

But Judy said this woman told the best stories.

They were stories of adventure that she had.

They were stories about her career in nightclubs in California.

On and on and she said, "She's got a book in her of some kind."

Well, I hate to tell you how many times I've heard that.

But I called Maya, she was in California, I believe, then.

I brought up the subject, she was not warm to it.

He said "Would you write an autobiography?"

I said "No, thank you, no, no, I don't...

"I write poetry and I have plays."

I had written a ten-episode series for PBS.

So I went out to San Francisco to produce it.

Hello, my name is Maya Angelou.

'And Bob Loomis called me about three or four times.

'Oh, he harassed me for about six months.'

Now, in those days, the younger people and somewhat unknown people

did not write books.

I called several more times...

..got nowhere.

And finally, he said, "Miss Angelou, I won't call you again."

I said, "That's good." He said, "Because, you know,

"writing autobiography as literature is almost impossible."

I said, "Well...

"Well, in that case, I'll try."

And, believe it or not, she started to write.

It needed some work, but it was only because,

in a true sense, she was an amateur.

Amateur, you know, means someone who loves something.

It doesn't mean you're not good.

And we also decided that although she'd done a lot in her career,

that she should try, maybe, just to write about her childhood.

So, she began.

"When I was three and Bailey four,

"we had arrived in the musty little town,

"wearing tags which instructed that

"we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, Jr."

She was able to go way back and remember,

in a very meaningful way, things that, I think,

she'd never told anybody.

When we first published Caged Bird, it was a new genre,

she was a new writer.

Sales at first were not what I thought they should be.

It turned out to be a landmark book,

still a touchstone for a lot of people.

I felt it was...

me, I felt it was a girl sitting next to me.

It reflected my own mother's life,

which was a life of neglect and mistreatment and abuse.

And I gave a copy to my mother.

I met Bill Clinton and one of the first things we talked about

was that book.

When I read it, I couldn't believe that these things happened to her

and that she was free enough to talk about them.

I'd never heard of another

black woman, young girl,

who had been raped.

So I read those words and thought,

"Somebody knows who I am."

Here is a black woman who takes off the cuffs.

Here's a black woman

who writes her story.

It was a very important literary feat, because it said -

it's OK for a black woman to say what happened to her,

in public, in a literary form.

What she did, and it's not easy,

was find a way of replicating who and what she was on paper.

And a lot of writers can't do that.

I thought...

from the time she was very young,

she was always paying attention.

She just didn't miss much.

And that's a great gift, because if you're really paying attention

and then you can put it into words,

you can empower other people as they absorb your experience.

She said, "You know, sometimes when I'm acting,

"I see myself acting.

"But when I write, I'm lost completely in what I'm doing.

"There's nothing else but that."

In fact, she even hibernates when she writes, she often rents a room.

I know she likes to, you know,

have that room in the hotel,

where, you know, she takes her, her cards,

that yellow legal pad.

All of her life, Maya wrote in long hand.

She'd sit down with a Bible and a thesaurus

and she makes draft, after draft, after draft, after draft.

Just a desk, a chair, a pen

and maybe some Johnny Walker.

Jack Daniels.

Scotch.

She's a singer, she's a writer,

she's a poet, and yet the books are not precious,

they do not sound contrived or too ornate, they're very simple.

That's what's so hard to do and do it well.

'Autobiography is awfully seductive.

'Once I really got into it, I realised that I was following

'a tradition established by Frederick Douglass,

'which is the slave narrative.

'Speaking in the first person singular,

'talking about the third person plural.

'Always saying "I", meaning "we." '

Her language base was classical.

See, Maya didn't read modern poetry until later,

and that's a lot of people who come from country do that,

cos they're not exposed to modern poetry!

Reading the older writers mean that your language

is going to be archaic.

And there's nothing wrong with writing Caged Bird

in a language that's partially Victorian and biblical.

Everybody in the world uses words,

uses, "How are you? Fine, thank you."

Verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, pronouns.

The writer has to take these most known things

and put them together in such a way that a reader says,

"I never thought of it that way before".

It's a challenge.

And I know many writers, and I'm one, who says,

"Lord, are you sure you wanted me to do this?"

At that point in her life, Maya was, you know,

climbing up the ladder of success.

I mean, she was being acknowledged as a writer.

She had met Paul

and Paul was very supportive of her.

Years ago, I fell in love with a man, who, I'm happy to say,

was in love with me.

And we lived together in great harmony,

out in California.

But then he wanted to get married,

and I don't care much for the institution,

but he insisted.

And so, I called Jimmy.

He said, "Does your reluctance to marry him have anything

"to do with his being white?"

So, I said...

"..Maybe."

He said, "But his being white didn't keep you from falling in love

"with him?"

I said, "No." He said, "But it keeps you from making a public statement

"of your love, is that it?"

I said, "I suppose so.

"People - I mean, my people - you know, what will they say?"

He said, "Maya Angelou, you talk about courage all the time.

"You tell everybody else to dare to love,

"but you don't have the courage.

"Are you a hypocrite?"

And he talked to me harder than he'd ever talked to me before.

"So, what the hell you going to do, girl?"

I said, "I'm going to marry the man, what to do?"

I finally married my own husband.

My mother has a theory that most people marry

other people's husbands.

How many husbands?

I've had enough.

THEY LAUGH

But I finally have my own.

-I'm a woman!

-You's a woman now.

I'm a woman, and I was looking for a man.

What is your husband's name?

Paul du Feu.

du Feu.

Paul du Feu was a very interesting guy.

He had come out of England, out of the construction industry,

and he was a writer.

He had a tendency to drink...

..to his fill.

He had written a book called

Let's Hear It For The Long-legged Women.

A lot of people thought, because he was with Maya,

that the book was about Maya.

But it just so happened that his significant other

before Maya had been another six foot woman, Germaine Greer,

who was England's leading feminist.

My mother was just beginning to become prominent,

and they bought a number of houses

where they just tore them apart and reconstructed them.

I mean, the time I went up to see them,

he was under the house, repairing things, you know.

And Maya was being Miss Homemaker.

You know, she was in the kitchen, which is her sanctum, really.

She loves the kitchen.

Paul would roast goats and pigs, and they had parties.

I thought that her relationship with Paul was the most compatible

that I witnessed over the years.

He seemed very caring.

She seemed at peace with herself when they were together.

I could see Maya looking at Paul, with a look that was just...

You can't describe it any other way but,

"Wow, this woman is really taken with this guy, you know."

They were solid.

I mean, they had their differences,

but they communicated, you know, in a good way.

So, when I heard that it was over...

..I was shocked.

Maya was on the road and, increasingly,

Paul didn't go with her.

Paul drank increasingly and Maya, you know,

she could turn up one too.

Paul said to me, personally,

that he didn't feel there was room for anybody else,

besides the written word, in Maya's life.

My mother has not had the good fortune to know...

..love...

..that lasts a long time.

One thing they cannot prohibit,

the strong men coming on.

The strong men

getting stronger.

Strong men,

stronger, stronger, stronger.

# I've been downhearted, baby...

# Ever since the day we met. #

What a pity.

'I was doing a score on Love of Ivy.'

# You know our love is nothing but the blues, woman. #

'We had BB King for two songs and I needed a lyricist.'

# Baby, how blue can you get? #

And so, I saw her in New York and asked her,

would she be interested in doing the lyrics for BB King

for this movie, with Sidney Poitier

and Abbey Lincoln?

And she said, "Sure," and she wrote the lyrics for two songs.

One was a big hit.

I'm going to ask you one last question

and then we'll be finished.

The question is - what is the blues?

Now, wait, Mr King.

One of the things I'm interested in here

is the relationship of the Blues to African music.

I didn't discover till Maya confessed it to me,

that her and BB...

that the relationship went past lyric writing.

We've heard that ladies will cry when something happen to them.

A man won't cry on the outside, but he usually cry inwardly.

It might be one of those funny type of things that you...

I feel that you may laugh at me about it,

so I'll get out to myself and I sing about it

and eventually it becomes a song.

You see that's poetry.

That shows that you're not only a poet in your music.

No, it's true.

And I said, "If I knew that, I would have told you to stay away,

"because Blues singers give the Blues, they don't get the Blues,

"they give the Blues."

# How blue can you get, woman? #

And he gave her some blues too, cos he gave her a rough time.

# The answer's right here, in my heart. #

When I was young, my father would...

He would shout, "Come here, bring the kids, bring the kids!"

and we'd go running in.

And he'd go, "Look at this, coloured girl on TV!"

And he'd just be sitting there, looking at it.

At that point, the main images that we were getting on the screen

were people that I didn't recognise.

But Roots was as if my family

was on the television.

And I don't mean my ancestral family but my real family.

Now that you are a man, what will you do?

The Roots mini-series comes out in '77.

Black directors, black actresses,

and here's Maya, the grandmother of Kunta Kinte.

You can grow as tall as a tree and I will still be your grandmother!

The '70s and the '80s was a great time for Maya.

Maya was cooking.

I mean, Caged Bird was made into a movie.

Maya became the first black woman member

of the Directors Guild Of America.

"Woo, tell me about it!"

She had this series of autobiographies come out.

Just smokin', you know.

And poetry - Pray My Wings, Heart Of A Woman,

Singin & Swingin & Getting Merry Like Christmas.

A singer, dancer, actress, screenwriter,

editor, lecturer, author...

Joy was a word that Maya wrote in her autograph,

tens of thousands of times.

I'd be with her and there'd be lines in the gymnasium,

wrapping around inside the gymnasium.

I always knew that what Maya Angelou held as a poet and a writer

was something that the world needed to feel and experience.

I was asked, would I consider writing a poem

for President Clinton's inauguration?

And I said, "Yes".

And then I started to pray and ask everybody,

"Little children, what do you think?"

I wanted a poem, nobody had done a poem since Robert Frost.

Once I made that decision, I didn't really think about anybody else.

Maya Angelou had spent a lot of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas,

which is about 25 miles from Hope, where I was born.

My grandfather had a little grocery store

in a predominantly African-American neighbourhood.

When I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,

I knew exactly who she was talking about and what she was talking about

in that book.

That's a contradiction in terms,

-"public poem."

-Yes.

Poem is private and interior and all that.

And people, as soon as the statement was made to the press,

people would see me in the supermarket or on planes and say,

"How's the poem going?"

-Gosh.

-"Finish that poem yet?!"

-Yeah, exactly.

I knew she got me, she understood the time we were living in,

she understood the world we were living in.

And she knew what could be our undoing as well as our unchaining.

Now, we had no idea what she was going to say.

And Bill didn't come with any set of directions, like,

"Well, I'd like you to talk about this and I'd like you

"to talk about that." He just said, "I want you to write a poem

"and deliver it at my inauguration".

But I knew she'd make an impression.

She was big, and she had the voice of God.

A Rock, a River, a Tree

Hosts to species long since departed,

Marked the mastodon...

And the minute she started talking

you could just feel the change rolling across the crowd

and everybody started listening.

But today, the Rock cries out to us,

Come, you may stand upon my back...

The rock comes from a 19th century gospel song.

# Oh, I went to the rock to hide my face

# Rock cried out...#

No hiding place down here.

Across the wall of the world

A River sings a beautiful song...

# I'm gonna lay down my burden

# Down by the riverside

# To study a war no more. #

Your armed struggles for profit

Have left collars of waste upon

My shore.

Yet, today, I call you to my riverside,

If you will study war no more.

And once you had that?

Then, I could talk about all of us.

There is a true yearning to respond to

The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,

The African, the Native American, the Sioux,

The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,

The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,

The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,

The Privileged, the Homeless, the Teacher.

They all hear

The speaking of the Tree.

Each of you, descendant of some passed

On traveller, has been paid for.

Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare,

Praying for a dream.

Give birth again

To the dream.

'It was wonderful.'

Sculpt it into

The image of your most public self.

I thought it was monumental.

Because it was inclusive.

It was understandable.

It was the whole package.

I mean, it was a phenomenal woman at a moment in history where she

belonged with a president with whom she could relate.

It just pulled it all together.

Here, on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister's eyes, and into

Your brother's face, your country

And say simply

Very simply

With hope

Good morning.

She just did it. I mean, it was just breathtaking.

That poem is kind of like an eternal gift to America.

And it'll read well 100 years from now.

Right after she delivered the inaugural address poem,

so many requests started coming in.

If she lives another lifetime,

she wouldn't be able to fulfil the requests

to speak at universities and colleges.

That is some...

Woo!

# My name's Maya, that's a fine name

# It's not your name but it's fine just the same. #

Dr Maya Angelou.

Maya Angelou.

Ladies and gentlemen, Maya Angelou.

Dr Maya Angelou.

The poet Maya Angelou is here.

-Kim, you had a question.

-Yeah, I wanted to ask Maya

her views on interracial relationships?

Oh, thank you, and first, I'm Miss Angelou.

-Miss Angelou.

-Yes, ma'am.

I'm not Maya. I'm 62 years old.

I have lived so long and tried so hard

that a young woman like you, or any other, has no license

to come up to me and call me by my first name.

That's first. That's first.

Also, because at the same time, I am your mother, I'm your auntie,

I'm your teacher, I'm your professor, you see?

I wrote the book Gather Together In My Name

to tell young people

that I would admit where I'd been.

I had written about a very rough time at 18.

I went on to a national show

and the woman who interviewed me, who I knew slightly,

said, "Maya Angelou, how does it feel to know you're

"the first black woman to have a national bestseller non-fiction,

"second book nominated for the Pulitzer,

"and to know that, at 18, you were a prostitute?"

The fellow I liked told me he was desperate

and I was so green.

I'll tell you why I wrote that, though.

Because so many adults told, and tell, young people,

"I've never done anything wrong,

"my closet is free of spectres and ghosts and skeletons."

So I thought...

..they could all gather together in my name.

I would tell the children, "Listen, I've done this,

"this has happened. I have forgiven myself, I have gotten up".

I was afraid that when I told it that there would be sneering at me.

Just the opposite.

Just the opposite happened.

My Aunt Pauline passed this quilt down to me.

It was made by my great-great-grandmother.

The first time I ever sat down with her was during the making of

How To Make An American Quilt.

And I was giving her her proper reverential due

and calling her Dr Angelou, or...

And she would say, "Alfre, stop it, you call me Maya".

And I looked at her and I said, "I'm not calling you Maya!"

I said, "OK, let's compromise, we'll go with Miss Maya".

Let's go right away while we've got the sun and no airplane.

In the late '90s, Dr Angelou was going to make her directing debut.

Cut!

I knew she was a creative genius, so I didn't have any qualms of being

directed by a first-time director,

but poets tend to be more introspective.

Poets create alone.

And a film set is the absolute opposite.

It's loud, it's boisterous, until action.

# Little darling

# Gotta go now. #

Maya Angelou's film Down In The Delta mirrored the

migration of the sharecroppers,

coming up to the north for opportunity, for safety.

And they start to live away from the land, on concrete,

and that starts to change a person,

especially people who have worked the land.

And it starts to make the family dysfunctional

after a couple of generations.

-BUZZER RINGS

-Loretta!

-Open up!

-What?

'And the mother...

'realises, you know what, the remedy to that...'

Come on home.

'..is getting back to the land,

is going down where people say,

"Good morning, how are you, sir?" "I am fine."

Where there is community.

Dr Angelou believed in the beauty

and the healing power of the South...

..and of family and connection.

150 years of family history right here.

The whole crew would sit and she would talk about

the historical significance of a particular scene and what would be

happening in that space 100 years ago.

It was like we were on an archaeological dig,

on sacred ground.

When I was living in Ghana, the people there looked at me

and thinking, "I look so much like them, that maybe I was a daughter

"of one of the people who had been taken."

So, we all wept.

It was very difficult to be in the place where the slaves were housed

until the ship would come.

Those who could run away ran away.

Women took their babies by their feet and slung them against trees,

so that they wouldn't be sold into slavery.

I could hear the wails

of people in caverns, in chains,

knowing that they would never see their beloveds again.

That they would be put into ships and sailed across seas...

..creating for me and mine the worst times in our lives.

We've undergone experiences too bizarre and yet,

here we are, still here.

Today, upwards of 50 million.

And I know there are people who swear there are more

than 50 million black people in the Baptist Church...

LAUGHTER

..and they're not even counting backsliders

and the three black atheists in the world.

Still here, still here!

Amazing!

I think at some point we have to stop and wonder,

"How did we come to a place where young men

"call the other gender 'ho'?"

What happened?

And to use the N-word, as if that's OK to use.

It's not, and you know it's not.

When I was working on my new album, The Dream of the Believer,

and Dr Maya Angelou was a friend of mine,

she wrote a piece for it and we placed it in the song.

Once you find your shoulders dropping,

and your speech gets slow and hazy,

you'd better change your way of being.