The Full Biography
Maya Angelou. Writer. Poet. The Stamps girl who stopped speaking for five years and then wrote the book a country could not put back on the shelf.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a tall woman at a presidential lectern, reading a poem into a cold January as if a nation had asked her to open the year. The year was 1993. The poem was “On the Pulse of Morning.” What the still cannot show is Marguerite Annie Johnson of St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, a child who decided her voice had killed a man, and a memoir, twenty-four years earlier, that had already done the civic work the inaugural only confirmed.
She was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter, a nurse and card dealer. The marriage was calamitous. When Marguerite was three and her brother Bailey Jr. was four, their father put them on a train alone to Stamps, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. Momma Henderson kept a store that sold what people had to have, and she made it through the Depression by being exact. The children learned church, credit, and the particular weather of a Jim Crow town that knew their grandmother’s name.
At seven they were sent back to their mother in St. Louis. Vivian’s boyfriend, a man named Freeman, raped the child. She told her brother. The family heard. Freeman was convicted and jailed for a day. Four days after his release he was beaten to death. Marguerite decided her speaking had done it. She stopped speaking for about five years. That is the first pressure, and it is the whole of the file this page will keep on the crime: one clean paragraph, because I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the civic object, and that childhood is why.
Back in Stamps, a teacher and family friend, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, would not let the silence become a life. She told the girl that loving poetry was not enough until she spoke it. Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe, James Weldon Johnson, the Black women on the shelf — Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset — went into a mind that had nothing to do but listen. When she was fourteen the children moved to Oakland to live with Vivian again. In San Francisco, at sixteen, she became the first Black woman hired as a streetcar conductor in the city. At seventeen, three weeks out of school, she gave birth to a son, Clyde, who would take the name Guy Johnson. The door was not a publisher. It was a wage, a baby, and a voice that had decided to come back.
She married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician and sailor, in 1951. The marriage ended in 1954; the professional name she built from her brother’s nickname and his surname did not. She danced with Alvin Ailey in a short-lived pair billed as Al and Rita. She sang calypso at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. She recorded Miss Calypso and appeared in Calypso Heat Wave (1957). In 1954 and 1955 she toured Europe and North Africa in a State Department production of Porgy and Bess, learning languages the way other people collect hotel keys. John Oliver Killens pointed her at New York and the Harlem Writers Guild. In 1960, after hearing Martin Luther King Jr., she helped organize the Cabaret for Freedom and served as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s northern coordinator.
Then Africa. With the South African activist Vusumzi Make she went to Cairo and edited at the Arab Observer. When that household ended she took Guy to Accra, stayed through his recovery from a car wreck, and worked at the University of Ghana, the Ghanaian Times, Radio Ghana, and the National Theatre. Malcolm X came through Accra. She came home in 1965 to help him build the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was killed. In 1968 King asked her to help organize a march. She postponed. He was assassinated on her fortieth birthday. James Baldwin, whom she called her brother, would not let the year finish her. At a dinner with Baldwin and the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, a Random House editor named Robert Loomis challenged her to write autobiography as literature. She did.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969. It took her to seventeen. It made a Black girl’s Arkansas and a silenced throat into a national book. It is still the book people try to ban when they are afraid of a girl telling the truth, and still the book a classroom reaches for when it wants the country to hear itself. Six more autobiographies would follow. The first one is the object.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.Maya Angelou
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a triumph of voice. The turn is the decision, after Malcolm and King were killed and a childhood she had carried in silence, to put the story where a stranger could hold it. She was not a mascot the movement could send to a lectern and call finished. She was a woman who had already been a conductor, a calypso, a tour singer, a Cairo editor, and a friend of the two most hunted men in American political life.
In 1972 Georgia, Georgia became the first produced screenplay by a Black woman. In 1973 she was nominated for a Tony in Look Away. In 1977 she played a supporting part in Roots and took an Emmy nomination. And Still I Rise (1978) gave the culture the defiant poem people still recite as if they had written it. She wrote for Roberta Flack. She composed. She published essays. The autobiographies kept arriving after the first monument: Gather Together in My Name (1974) took her through the waitress and the hustle; Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976) is the Porgy years; The Heart of a Woman (1981) is New York, King, and the marriage to Make; All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) is Accra. A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) closes the stretch from Malcolm’s death to the writing of Caged Bird. Mom & Me & Mom (2013) is Vivian at the end. Seven books. The first one is still the object. The others are the proof she would not stop filing.
In 1982 Wake Forest University named her the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies, a lifetime chair. Winston-Salem became the house. She taught. She cooked. She kept office hours that did not care how famous the airport was. The lecture circuit, into her eighties, became the second job: some years, eighty appearances. Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (1971) brought a Pulitzer nomination for poetry. She appeared in John Singleton’s Poetic Justice (1993). In 1998 she directed Down in the Delta, a feature, a Black woman in the other chair on a family picture set in the South. Hallmark hired her name for cards. Committees hired her for boards. The civic machinery that had not known what to do with a silenced girl in Stamps now could not get enough of the woman who had written the silence down.
The work before the memoir is why the memoir could be written. A streetcar uniform in San Francisco. A calypso bill at the Purple Onion. A State Department Porgy and Bess that taught her European and North African rooms. A desk at the Arab Observer in Cairo. A newsroom and a theatre in Accra. Northern coordinator for the SCLC after she heard King. A plan to help Malcolm X build the Organization of Afro-American Unity that ended in a killing. A march King asked her to help organize, postponed, then cancelled by another killing on her fortieth birthday. James Baldwin and Jules Feiffer and Robert Loomis at a dinner table. The page after that dinner is the civic object. The rest of the career is a woman who had already been all of those jobs refusing to become only a lectern.
Six things most people never knew
- The five silent years were a decision, not a medical blank. She thought her voice had killed a man. Mrs. Flowers made her speak poems until speech was possible again.
- She was a San Francisco streetcar conductor at sixteen. The first Black woman the company hired. The uniform was a dream her mother told her to arrive early for.
- The name is a brother’s nickname and a husband’s Greek surname. Maya, from Bailey. Angelou, from Angelos. Marguerite Johnson walked into the Purple Onion and came out a billing.
- Porgy and Bess and the Cairo desk came before the memoir. She was a working artist on three continents while the book was still unwritten.
- King was killed on her fortieth birthday. April 4, 1968. Baldwin pulled her toward the page. Caged Bird is what the year finally paid.
- The inaugural poem was the second civic act, not the first. Frost had done it in 1961. She did it in 1993. The book in 1969 is why the lectern made sense.
She married the Welsh carpenter Paul du Feu in 1973. They divorced in 1981. Guy was the child who lasted through Cairo, Accra, and the American years. Oprah Winfrey, who met her as a Baltimore anchor, became a friend and a public daughter of the work. Friends from Winston-Salem describe a neighbor who cooked, taught, and kept a schedule that did not care how famous the airport was.
The later years
On January 20, 1993, she stood at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration and read “On the Pulse of Morning.” Frost had done the job in 1961. She was the first woman and the first Black poet to take that lectern. A Grammy came for the recording. More memoirs and essays followed, including Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013). The lecture halls kept filling. Wake Forest kept the chair. Winston-Salem kept the kitchen. Oprah Winfrey, who had met her as a Baltimore anchor, became a public daughter of the work and a visitor to the house. Guy remained the child who had lasted through Cairo and Accra. Friends from the neighborhood describe a woman who cooked for students and kept a schedule that treated a campus office as seriously as a presidential lawn.
The medals piled up the way the honorary degrees piled up: National Medal of Arts in 2000, Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011, three spoken-word Grammys, more than fifty hoods from universities that had not always known what to do with a girl from Stamps. She did not retire the voice. She used it until it was tired. She recorded. She published children’s books. She sat for interviews in which the voice was still trying to make a stranger braver. School boards kept trying to take Caged Bird off the list, which is a form of proof the first book is still doing civic work. She kept teaching the book they wanted to ban.
Home in the last decades was a house in Winston-Salem and a calendar that still looked like a tour manager’s. She had been a conductor, a calypso, a Cairo editor, a Ghana newsroom, a northern coordinator for King, a friend of Malcolm’s, a memoirist, a professor, and a woman who would not leave a story untold. The inaugural is the still. The chair at Wake Forest is the daily job. The last books are a daughter filing Vivian and a woman closing the 1968 year on the page. She did not become a monument that only spoke in January. She became a neighbor who also happened to be a climate.
She died at home in Winston-Salem on May 28, 2014. She was eighty-six. The obituaries led with the caged bird and the inaugural, which was correct as a pair of titles and still smaller than a life that had included a streetcar, a calypso, a Ghana newsroom, and a friendship with two men the country killed. Guy remained. The seven autobiographies remained. The voice, on disk, remained.
After she was gone
Guy remained. The seven autobiographies remained. School boards still fight the first one, which is a form of proof. “Still I Rise” still walks into graduations. The other line she gave the culture — “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” — is quoted by people who have never opened Caged Bird. The book is the correction.
She came out of St. Louis and a store in Stamps, stopped speaking after a murder she thought she had caused, learned the poets by ear, took a streetcar job, had a son at seventeen, sang calypso, toured Porgy, edited in Cairo, taught in Accra, buried two friends the movement could not protect, wrote the silence down, taught at Wake Forest, and read a new poem to a new president. The still at the lectern will last. It should. The life behind it was a train to Arkansas, a five-year quiet, and a refusal to leave the story untold.
If you only remember the inaugural, you have the photograph. If you remember Stamps, the streetcar, Ghana, and the woman who spoke because Mrs. Flowers told her poetry demanded it, you have her.
Portrait: Brian Stansberry · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons