Angelou is quite open about her literary influences, naming at least a dozen in Caged Bird. Authors and genres are therefore likely to have influenced her autobiographies. Christine Froula (1986) makes the connection between Maya’s rape in the first autobiography and Shakespeare’s 2,000-line poem “The Rape of Lucrece,” which Maya memorized upon regaining speech. Other influences include authors such as James Weldon Johnson and Edgar Allan Poe; genres such as slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and serial autobiographies; and individual autobiographies in the African American tradition.
Other than their length and thematic material, Angelou’s autobiographies conform to the standard structure of the autobiography: they are written, they are single-authored, and they are chronological. As will be observed in forthcoming chapters, they contain Howarth’s required elements of character, technique, and theme. However, the six volumes that make up Angelou’s series far exceed the standard number of volumes in an autobiography, so much so that they are in a subgenre known as “serial autobiographies.”
Serial Autobiographies
A serial autobiography is a set of two or more related texts that reflect on, predict, and echo each other so that they are seen as parts of a whole. For later volumes there are earlier ones behind them that must be recollected, just as in the larger tradition there are authors from the past—Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Laurence Dunbar—who must be remembered if the reader is to maximize his or her experience. Some African American critics call this attention to past literary tradition by the name of “signifying.”
Angelou has written six autobiographies. She enjoys the multiple format, the “stretching” required in going from book to book: “I pray that in each book I am getting closer to finding the mystery of really manipulating and being manipulated by this medium, to pulling it open, stretching it” (Angelou, quoted in Kay 1989, 195). While the continuous fluctuation of the serial form allows the writer a freedom not available in the fixed, single autobiography, it also has pitfalls, including the increased need for transitions, for cross-references, for continuity, and for discipline.
There are numerous examples of the multiple autobiography within the black literary tradition. The foremost would be Frederick Douglass’s two-part autobiography: the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, followed by a second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. The first volume is so widely considered to be the model slave narrative that few contemporary readers have become familiar with its sequel, My Bondage and My Freedom, a broader and more detailed work than its predecessor. William L. Andrews calls it that “rare ‘I-narrative’ of the American 1850s,” one that explores Douglass’s “identity, mission, and message” (1986, xxvi).
Richard Wright (1908–1960), well-known for the best-selling novel Native Son (1940), is also the author of a passionate autobiography, Black Boy (1945), a recollection of childhood and adolescence which is frequently compared to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 1977, seventeen years after Wright’s death, a sequel to Black Boy was discovered, thus changing its status from single to serial autobiography. The sequel American Hunger, written in 1944 at the time he was working on Black Boy, is a political autobiography that covers Wright’s early involvement with the Communist Party in Chicago and New York. The volumes are ages apart in tone and narrative style: American Hunger is dry and abstract in comparison with the painful and compelling Black Boy. Reading the two works as a pair makes the reader recognize just how smooth Angelou’s transitions are from volume to volume, how consistent her character.
These are but a few of the important serial autobiographies published by African Americans since the Civil War. White authors who have extended the initial autobiographical impulse into a series include Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, and Theodore Dreiser. One of the twentieth century’s most admired novelists, Doris Lessing (1919–2013) worked for many years on a three-part serial autobiography. The first, Under My Skin, begins with her childhood on a farm in Zimbabwe in southern Africa, while the second, Walking in the Shade, chronicles her life as a writer and single mother living in London during World War II. The third was never finished.
But the autobiographer who has the most in common with Angelou is the white American playwright Lillian Hellman (1805–1984). Almost as prolific as Angelou, Hellman wrote a serial autobiography consisting of four volumes: An Unfinished Woman (1970), Pentimento (1973), Scoundrel Time (1976), and Maybe (1980). The first of the series, An Unfinished Woman, won the 1970 National Book Award for best book in Arts and Letters—the very same year that Angelou was nominated for (but did not receive) the same award for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Both Hellman and Angelou developed their sense of language and dialogue by working in the theater, with Hellman receiving praise for her early play The Children’s Hour (1934), a frightening drama about a schoolgirl’s destructive behavior toward two women teachers. After her return from Ghana, Angelou was active in the theater in terms of writing, acting, and directing, although she never achieved Hellman’s stature as a playwright. Both Hellman and Angelou positioned their autobiographies in America, England, and continental Europe, with Angelou taking her international setting farther, into Africa. Both writers have been publically lauded in their lifetimes. Lillian Hellman received a standing ovation at the 1977 Academy Awards for the film Julia, which was based on an episode from her autobiography Pentimento, while Angelou has had many similar honors, perhaps her greatest being the invitation to read “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1993 inauguration of President Clinton. Finally, both engaged in an unlikely project when they combined the memoir with the cookbook. Hellman’s Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections, written with Peter Feibleman, was published in 1984, whereas Angelou’s ventures in the same genre were not realized until more than two decades later.
Given these resemblances, it is a bit surprising to read the concluding interview in Dolly A. McPherson’s Order Out of Chaos (1990), only to discover a strong rivalry between Angelou and Hellman. Angelou’s resentment of Hellman is supposedly based on literary distinctions. Angelou tells McPherson that Hellman’s books are “one-dimensional” or “romantic.” Her black characters are stiff as “cardboard,” while her white ones fail to represent the masses (1990, 135). Angelou seems unnecessarily harsh in her assessment.
Autobiography and Truth
In Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), Roy Pascal theorizes that autobiography must be a presentation of truth—truth in characterization, truth in relationship to the world, truth in point of view. Many other critics share Pascal’s opinion, including Angelou’s biographer, Dolly A. McPherson (1990, 72). Another follower of Pascal insists that autobiographies are “limited by the writer’s need to speak in the spirit of the truth.” He warns that the autobiographer should “never allow himself to jeopardize credibility” (Mandel 1968, 224).
Angelou’s views to some extent diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth. Angelou, who is well aware of the truth-in-autobiography theory, admitted to George Plimpton that she has on occasion “fiddled with” the truth, combining several characters for literary effect or being considerate to people who are still alive (1994, 18). In this author’s interview of June 16, 1997, Angelou said: “Certain things overstate the facts…I want to always leave something for the reader to do, to imagine, to fantasize. I want to tell the truth but I can’t because I’d ruin the thing.” When I asked what she meant by “ruin the thing,” she responded: “Well, losing the reader is ruining the thing. If I tell the truth…in language which shocks but does not terrify, which shakes somebody up but doesn’t make them run away, I may impart something which might be of help” (“Icon” 1997).
What frequently goes unsaid when discussing the so-called truth in the history of African American autobiography is that in many instances the truth has been censored or hidden, out of the need for self-protection. Black autobiographers wri
ting during the abolitionist movement (the antislavery movement that flourished during the several decades before the Civil War) had to restrain or disguise their opinions, even toward their compassionate editors. Slave narratives withheld certain ideas that might have put the slave-teller in danger, no matter how well intentioned the transcriber might be—secret hopes for rebellion; a buried contempt for white men as rapists; and other hostile opinions toward white benefactors. Jennifer Fleischner, author of Mastering Slavery (1996), insists there is much to learn from the gaps or omissions that appear in the slave narratives, since these gaps can reveal disguised attitudes toward self, race, and resistance.
The nineteenth-century slave narrator, a recognized victim of the system, was supposed to give an honest account of life on the plantation, with its beatings from white overseers and sexual abuses from white owners. Not only what the slave wrote had to be “true,” but its truth had to be upheld or verified, in the preface or appendix, by conscientious white editors, publishers, and friends. Thus, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was verified in the preface by abolitionist leaders William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Solomon Northrup’s 12 Years a Slave (1853) was verified through its dedication to the abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
Although Maya Angelou explored the effects of slavery and verified its power in her life and works, her concept of truth and black womanhood was transformed by its contemporary content. In Caged Bird, for example, she records a life story begun in fear of crosses burning in the night, a life that is directly affected by the brutal remnants of slavery. Her story ends, like the typical slave narrative, in celebration of her personal freedom and with the decision to tell her story. Angelou’s autobiographies, documented with historical personages and events, thus verify the changing attitudes toward race and gender from 1931 to 1969.
As David Levering Lewis observes, her stories contain such “inner truthfulness that each of her books is a continuing autobiography of much of Afro-America” (1997, 133). Sondra O’Neale alters the truth factor, locating it in a feminist vision. She claims that the specific truth Angelou tells is the truth about the lives of black women. From this perspective Angelou is able to correct historical errors and offer a role model not often seen in American culture (1984, 35).
As a woman, Angelou tells truths about all women’s lives. For black women the neglect of their histories and their literary works has been devastating, despite the change which occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, and other black women exploded into bookstores and lecture halls, telling their stories. Angelou addresses her own issues—about rape, marriage, talent, community, responsibility to her son—from the perspective of an African American woman. In so doing she introduces material not very often developed by autobiographers, black or white. As Joanne Braxton notes, Angelou’s autobiographical sources derive from “her celebration of the black women who nurtured her” (1989, 197).
Readers of Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self will discover, from biographical sources, interviews, and Internet sources, an assortment of “truths” about Angelou, her son Guy, her brother Bailey, her first husband, Tosh, and her unidentified African lover. There is much critical material on which to draw. But for the purist, the truth and the integrity of an autobiography or of an autobiographical series must be contained within the text itself—with the way character and theme and setting are interwoven into one singular vision.
Autobiography and the Black Literary Tradition
Gender
Maya Angelou is one of the many contemporary African American women whose works are written in the form of autobiography. Angelou has much in common with Zora Neale Hurston (1901–1960), whose autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), tells how she rose above her origins in Eatonville, an all-black town in Florida, to become a famous folklorist and novelist. Like Hurston in Florida, Angelou in Arkansas flavors her autobiography with the language of black folk culture. As Angelou writes autobiographical texts that include the Bambara people of Africa, Hurston had written books such as Tell My Horse (1938), which describe her experiences with voodoo ritual in Haiti.
A second woman autobiographer whom Angelou resembles is the poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), in that both Brooks and Angelou locate their autobiographical experiences in Africa. In her autobiography Report from Part One (1972), Brooks describes her journey to East Africa in 1971. Her arrival is mixed with joy in being in the land of her ancestors but sadness in seeing her own language diminish in importance. Like Angelou, Brooks is unable to resolve the contradictions between being an African American while identifying with Africans, for whom she remains a stranger.
A third autobiography that demands attention in this survey is Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). A student at Tougaloo, a historically black college in Mississippi, Moody took part in a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, in what was to become one of the early, memorable actions of the civil rights movement. Like Angelou, Moody knew and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. An activist, Moody played an integral part in the grassroots movement of the 1960s, whereas Angelou, who was in Africa from 1962 to 1965, saw her commitment to the American protest movement curtailed upon her return by the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Further books for exploration in the area of the black women’s autobiographical tradition are Nikki Giovanni’s partial autobiography, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971), which begins well but loses its autobiographical structure, becoming part book review and part essay; and bell hooks’s Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), a free-flowing autobiography that attempts to offer black women a model for writing about their lives.
In addition to gender distinctions (and these categories frequently overlap), one needs to place Angelou’s work within the historical development of African American autobiography. Two of the major black autobiographical structures, the slave narrative and the travel autobiography, are discussed more fully later in this chapter. Other significant forms are the prison autobiography, the success narrative, and the autobiography of the artist.
The Prison Autobiography
The prison autobiography is the genre most directly related to the earliest black narrative form, the slave narrative; they share many themes, among them captivity, self-education, mistreatment, and the desire to escape. The prison autobiography achieved prominence in the period surrounding the civil rights movement of the 1960s, through the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and other articulate defenders of the black liberation movement.
Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) was written from Folsom prison by the man who rose to become a leader of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver describes how his prison experience made it possible to free his mind from being oppressed by the white woman, whom he has come to see as an ogre, her claws sunk into his chest. Cleaver’s attack on white women had a significant effect in discouraging the interracial sexuality common in the early 1960s. Cleaver used his prison years as a way to deal with his troubled sexuality and to construct an ideology supported by the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and other theorists.
Reading, learning, and being able to recognize historical distortions are part of the mental discipline described in prison literature, for it was only within the walls of the jail that many African American leaders were able to set their minds free. In his autobiography, Malcolm X is frequently thankful for the prison experience, because in jail he taught himself to read: “I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did…. Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day” (1965, 41).
For Angela Davis, who was arrested by the FBI on conspiracy charges in 1970, her prison autobiography Angela Davis (1974) is extremely impersonal
, as if she were deliberately avoiding the kinds of sentiment that would identify her as a female. In a philosophical application of the knowledge that she already had when she went to prison, she denounces its disorganized structure and inadequate facilities. Davis notes that the library holds little other than “bad literature whose sole function was to create emotional paths of escape” (51), although she does locate the autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois. When Davis learns that she is permitted to order books from publishers, she orders ten copies of George Jackson’s radical autobiography Soledad Brother (1970), which the guards prevent her from distributing. Despite the strict regulations, Davis is able to learn through her prison experience, especially through the relationships she forms with women prisoners. She also relished visits from friends and lawyers affiliated with the Communist Party.
Angelou’s autobiographies share elements of the prison narrative, but on a symbolic rather than an actual level. The central image of the caged bird, presented throughout the six volumes, represents her imprisonment within the racist structure of Stamps, Arkansas. After she is released from Stamps, the racial discrimination continues, but with less intensity. She soon becomes aware of other forms of imprisonment—through drugs, marriage, and the economic system.
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