A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  These episodes were hugely painful for the committee but I saw then that that was what the fair also should be about. Feminist concerns about marginalization within the book trade were matched by feminists of colour’s concerns about marginalization within the feminist book trade and indeed feminism in general. It was a sobering lesson.

  The poet and novelist Jackie Kay also remembers the power of Audre Lorde at the time of the fair: ‘In those early days of the black feminist movement—of the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and the Black Lesbian Group (BLG)—Audre’s words were a breath of fresh air. We had only just found each other. We were only just hearing each other’s stories. Some of the fifty or so members of the BLG had never met other black lesbians before. We’d come from all over the country, from Glasgow and Glossop to London, and the two things converged—discovering each other and reading the work of Lorde.’

  Jackie, who was part of Sheba, accompanied Audre Lorde to interviews and talks: ‘There was a fervour that greeted Audre. She had the aura of a superstar. To hear her was to be aware that you were in the company of somebody who would become legendary. You knew that her words would reach an ever-widening audience . . . A framed poster of “A Litany for Survival” signed by Audre hangs in my kitchen. It has come with me from house to house since she first gave me the poem when she came to stay in 1984 and I was twenty-three.’

  I find it fascinating to note what happened between some of the high-profile black American women writers and UK feminist publishers around this time: we found each other. Alice Walker was published by the Women’s Press, Audre Lorde was with Sheba. Toni Morrison, who had been published in the UK by Chatto since the 1970s, was now enthusiastically published there by Carmen.

  And in 1984, Maya Angelou came into our lives at Virago. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had never been published in the UK despite it being well known in America since its publication in 1969. Maya Angelou told us that her memoir had been sent to British publishers in the 1970s but they had all turned it down, saying no one would be interested in the story of a young black girl growing up in the American South. She loved us for taking a chance on her, characterizing us as her small and feisty ‘English’ publishers. As we grew to know her, we came to understand that she highly prized courage and loyalty. ‘I’ve got your back’ was something she said often.

  We published all seven of Maya Angelou’s memoirs, her essays, volumes of poetry—and a cookbook—over the next few years. She came often to Britain and we watched as the country fell deeply in love with her: she captured every size and shape of heart—old, young, ignorant, wise, proud, and shy. When I first took her around the UK I saw that it was as if people were thirsting for her: they drank deeply of her words and felt lifted by her spirit. They flocked to her, at times weeping, literally wanting to touch her hem, at other times shouting with the pleasure of seeing a six foot tall woman dance across a stage unashamedly, outrageously sexily, head tipped back with a huge, infectious laugh. ‘My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.’

  She was in the mould of the people who inspired her: she was a preacher with a sermon, writing and speaking, as she said, with ‘the rhythms and imagery of the good Southern black preachers’, and she was a teacher with a lesson: ‘I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.’ We are more alike than unalike was her very powerful mantra.

  Maya Angelou believed in poetry; she trusted in it and she used to say that she knew from a young age that you could live by its strengths. The grandmother who raised her and whom she called Mama, said to the little Maya, ‘Sister, Mama loves to see you read poetry because that will put starch in your backbone.’

  She had hundreds of poems (po-ems she used to call them, in her slow, rich, deep voice) at her fingertips and could—and would!—sing or recite them at a beat.

  And even in a most terrible time, after being raped by her mother’s boyfriend at age eight—after which she became mute for years—she wrote that poetry was her saviour. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings she tells how the splendidly named Miss Flowers beguiled her back to speech: ‘She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life. Her voice slid in and curved down through and over the words.’ That sensuous quality, that appreciation of the nourishment of the written word is what I loved about Maya Angelou and her writing.

  This child, with little formal schooling, brought up in Stamps, Arkansas amidst the poverty and segregation of the Deep South had been, by the end of her life, at age eighty-six in 2014, awarded more than seventy honorary doctorates and honoured by two presidents; she wrote and performed her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ for President Clinton on his inauguration and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. She was justifiably proud of those facts, happy to be called Dr Angelou.

  Ursula Owen learned about Caged Bird from a feminist magazine, read it and immediately knew it was for us. She made a small offer for UK rights to Maya Angelou’s US publisher, Random House. Within days I received a short, crazily typed letter, full of xxx and crossings outs, from the English upper-class memoirist and ‘muckraker’, as she was known in America, Jessica Mitford, telling me that she was going to make it her business to tell the British about her great friend. Though from vastly different backgrounds they had met in America, I would guess through the Civil Rights Movement, and we were to discover that they were utterly devoted to each other. Maya Angelou claimed that Decca (as Jessica was called) once came to her rescue, literally facing down the Ku Klux Klan with the words ‘I am Maya’s mother.’

  I photocopied Jessica Mitford’s letter and sent it to all the literary and feature editors with review copies of the book. It had the immediate effect Decca had intended: the British wanted to know more.

  Maya Angelou came to London to meet us all. I always say that ‘came to meet us’ is just too tame a description: in our tiny office, this elegant, tall woman with a big heart and large laugh recited her famous poem—‘Phenomenal Woman’—just for us. It was obvious that we would invite her back for the launch.

  So it was that fifteen years after the US publication, in 1984 we published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in a Virago paperback. We printed just 8,000 copies.

  I remember thinking hard about how to launch this extraordinary book and ‘phenomenal woman’, and decided that we needed to reach both community and television audiences. Maya Angelou’s first UK event was at a community centre in Paddington, in a space for about a hundred people. Her now-famous bravura performance on stage was unknown to me and others in the UK back then and we were utterly bowled over as she recited poetry, sang songs, encouraged, danced, laughed. Afterwards, I sold all the books I had brought with me. One man hissed ‘capitalist publisher’ at me as he purchased his copy, but the event is one that I treasure deeply. After, it was very late and we fell, exhausted, into a taxi to take us back to the Basil Street Hotel; it had been recommended to her by James Baldwin, who loved the place. Maya Angelou taught me so many things, but one stark lesson was that after a performance a woman needs food and drink! It took all my powers of persuasion to get the hotel kitchen even to give us miserable little sandwiches. Not preparing for after the show was a mistake I never made again . . . Both of us now relieved, eating crisps and sandwiches, and drinking whisky (Maya’s favourite), we toasted the beginning of a great success.

  Her appearance on television the next day took Maya Angelou to another level. After Noon Plus on Thames Television was an important daytime programme hosted by an amazing woman, Mavis Nicholson—maybe the Oprah Winfrey of the UK at the time, a woman not afraid to ask bold questions. She and Maya liked each other immediately and when Mavis asked Maya about being raped as a child, Maya told her the story openly, honestly, simply. Those watching in the studio cried and then applauded as Maya turned the story to show she was a woman un
bowed. She said then and would often say to audiences: ‘You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.’ Immediately, the switchboards were jammed as viewers rang in: ‘Who is that amazing woman?’ Our first print run sold out and we quickly did another cautious 8,000 which again immediately sold out. Today, the Virago edition of this first volume has sold nearly a million copies and it is on courses, required-reading lists and remains, to my mind, one of the world’s great autobiographies. We’ve now sold over two million copies of her books.

  Maya Angelou was prominent in the Civil Rights Movement—as an activist and a campaigner working with Martin Luther King—but arguably her greatest contribution to campaigning for equality and change came through her writing. She was part of the Harlem Writers Group and she dedicated her artistic energies to inspiring justice, dignity, unity, and pride in oneself—what she called self-love. Maya’s fierce belief was that each of us has a deep worth—a simple yet profound fact. Her activism was in her prose: ‘History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.’

  Maya Angelou had a fondness for jokes and stories and songs—sung by anyone; a delight in good food and excellent whisky; she adored driving big cars and wearing fabulous clothes (on one of her first trips, her shoulders were draped in a fur coat), and on her hands flashed large, gold jewellery. She was proud of her success; she had more than earned it. She had been born into a brutally mean and segregated America in 1928. After the birth of her son, when she was just seventeen, she endured many hard years of struggle as a nightclub dancer, cook, and performer before she became a civil rights activist working with Martin Luther King and, later, the writer we came to love.

  She had a great generosity to her friends and loved a party where we could dance—which we did often. She had a special hip-rolling move that I and others tried to learn; I too love to dance. One of Decca Mitford’s great friends was the broadcaster Jon Snow and on one of her visits to London—this time to direct a play at the Almeida, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John—Maya rented his house, a little cottage in Kentish Town, for over a month. That house became the stage for many an evening performance; drinks and singing with the likes of Salman Rushdie (who gave a very passable rendition of ‘Waltzing Matilda’) and discussions with Christopher Hitchens; Helena Kennedy was a regular, as were all of us Viragos: Ursula Owen, Ruthie Petrie, Harriet Spicer. A memorable sight and sound was Decca and Maya singing with gusto—gloriously and badly and very loudly—their favourite tunes: ‘Right Said Fred’, followed by ‘Bang, Bang Maxwell’. Maya often encouraged Decca to sing a very sweet old ballad about Grace Darling, a girl who saved drowning sailors near Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast in 1838, and about whom Decca wrote a book. Maya always joined her on the line that she loved for its particular oddity: ‘Grace had an English heart’.

  Other remarkable singing moments took place at Hay-on-Wye—a festival that she loved, particularly when we could stay at the very grand Llangoed Hall with its expansive halls and rolling lawns. Peter Florence, the director, an actor and a Welsh poet at heart, could rise easily and gracefully to her banter and songs. He had the audacious idea on one visit to have Maya Angelou sing with a Welsh male voice choir, and they came along—in shorts and T-shirts—for an afternoon rehearsal in one of the large, beautiful rooms of the hotel. The sun poured in across the polished wooden floor and we clustered around the grand piano in pleasurable anticipation. The idea was to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ together. A nod to Maya Angelou and her ‘backing singers’ and they began—and clashed and stuttered and stopped dead. Bewilderment.

  ‘Ah,’ said the pianist to Maya, ‘you sing it like that.’

  ‘I do,’ said Maya, arching her eyebrow. She was not the one to change her style—slow, swinging, jazzy.

  That evening, under lights, in the big tent, with the men in smart suits and Maya in a long glittering dress, the men showed their worth and sang along—in Maya’s way. The choir finished with the famous Welsh song ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome’ and we all cried.

  There was lots of crying around Maya—sometimes because we were moved, which was often, and sometimes we cried with laughter—and sometimes, away from Maya, we cried in frustration and fatigue. She had many Virago publicists: first me, and then others including Sarah Baxter, Julia Hobsbawm, Susan Sandon, Fiona McMorrough, and Susan de Soissons, and she did take us all to our limits. Maya had a saying, ‘When I come, I bring my all’, and there was no doubt that she expected it all back too. When she came to London I would put my life on hold: it was Maya time, she took priority. Though my husband, and later my two children, admired and enjoyed being with her. They called her Auntie Maya, and Maya asked to be my daughter’s godmother. When she learned that my son, Zak, was a baseball fan she sent him a ball signed by Hank Aaron, a black player, who with Babe Ruth remains one of the most famous players in baseball history.

  I have a sweet letter from August 1987 that came with some pretty silver earrings. On Basil Street Hotel notepaper, in her firm round hand, she wrote, ‘These earrings appear to be abbreviated ballet slippers. Giving them to you might seem to imply that I am encouraging you to stay on your toes. Perish the thought. You do not need that encouragement. Thank you and all your V Pressing sisters. Joy! Maya.’

  Coming off a train at Victoria with Maya Angelou and our entourage (she always had a companion from the US travelling with her and generally more than one of us from Virago went when the publicity tour was extensive) after a successful but very long trip, I remember feeling absolutely drained, almost unable to drum up the last bit of energy to get us and all our stuff from the station to the hotel when, as if by wishful, magical summons, Jon Snow appeared on the platform. Cool and calm, broadly grinning, welcoming and pushing a luggage trolley, he picked us up and whisked us off. Jon understood, as we did, that she was special, a one-off, a woman who pushed us, not just to publish her well, but to be better ourselves: to be more open, more generous, to respect oneself, and she did inspire one to do one’s best—to go beyond one’s best, even.

  An example. One Sunday afternoon my family and I went to see Maya Angelou at a hotel in Covent Garden and we found her in a beautiful plush red sitting room with Alice Walker, who happened to be staying at the same place. Maya, knowing from me that my daughter, Amy, aged about thirteen at the time, had a nice voice, suddenly asked if she would sing for us all. I was stricken. Would Amy want to do it? Could she do it? I knew she could sing, but under those circumstances? While I was debating whether I should intervene, Amy stood up, moved to the back of a chair, where she rested her hands, took a deep breath, and sang out in a clear soprano ‘My Ship’ from Lady in the Dark. Amy couldn’t have been prouder.

  We all remember her words. After her death, Alice Walker said, ‘I envision Maya as a kind of General of Compassion, offering an army of words of encouragement.’ Michelle Obama thanked her for words that were ‘clever and sassy’, and powerful.

  In the month before she died I went to visit Maya Angelou in her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Miss Lydia Stuckey, her beloved assistant of some years, made us pancakes for brunch and ribs for supper, and we drank large glasses of cold white wine. It was a Sunday and they wanted to watch a religious programme with a Baptist preacher, followed by reruns of Oprah Winfrey shows. ‘Ope’, as Maya called her, and Maya were devoted—Maya referred to her as her ‘daughter’; over the years they came to each other’s aid and celebrations. Oprah had thrown huge parties for Maya’s seventieth, seventy-fifth, and eightieth birthdays. Most memorable for me was a party that lasted three days under marquees in the grounds of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where Maya Angelou was Reynolds Professor of American Studies (for more than thirty years at her death), which culminated in a Sunday-morning service with twenty golden harps, songs by Maya’s church choir, and Jessye Norman singing ‘Amazing Grace’.

  Now Maya was eight
y-four, she was connected to an oxygen tank to aid her breathing, and she wore dark glasses to protect her weak eyes. I said I was sorry, thinking she was in some pain, and she shook her long index finger at me, ‘No!’ She did not want pity. ‘I never complain,’ she reminded me fiercely. On the table were large yellow legal pads covered in her elegant, looping handwriting. I knew that she always began her books in this way, and tantalizingly we talked of what she was writing about. Memories of people she’d known she said: Jimmy Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. A roll call of men who had changed the twentieth century—as had she. I knew that it was James Baldwin who in many ways was the catalyst for Maya’s memoir-writing. In the desperate days after Martin Luther King was assassinated (on Maya’s birthday, 4 April) Baldwin had persuaded Maya to dinner with the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judy. Both were civil rights activists. They told stories all night, and soon after Bob Loomis from Random House rang and invited Maya to tell her story. Convinced he was put up to it by Baldwin, she demurred until finally he said, ‘Well, it’s hard to write a good autobiography.’ ‘I’ll start tomorrow,’ came her answer.

  Sitting in her kitchen we talked too of the Obamas, whom she deeply admired, when I noticed she had a photo of them near the table. She asked after my children and my husband, and wanted to see photos of them. After a while I said a lingering goodbye. As my taxi sped through the countryside back to the airport I sat up straight—with starch in my backbone.

  Though the black women writers making a mark in Britain were on the whole American, our list at the time also included black British women, particularly poets, including Grace Nichols, Jean Binta Breeze, Merle Collins, and Amryl Johnson. Grace Nichols’s slim but boisterous and poignant volume, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, was first published in the same year as the Virago edition of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; it remains a bestselling collection and is on school curriculums. It tells of being a West Indian woman who is now in the cold UK, thinking of food and warmth. We went on to publish more of Grace’s work, including novels. Ruthie Petrie was Grace’s editor and she commissioned an important book for Virago that was published in 1985. The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzi, and Suzanne Scafe ‘describes Black women’s celebration of their culture and their struggle to create a new social order in this country’. We also published Melba Wilson’s Healthy and Wise: Black Women’s Health.