Remembering Maya
Angelou
It is a surreal movie, my remembering a phenomenal woman who
became an American icon and a national treasure. The movie misbehaves, or
rather it behaves like a piece of conceptual music. A single note followed by
18 minutes of white noise followed by a blues passage from “Big Mama” Thornton
singing “Summertime” followed by an hour of silence suddenly ending with Pavarotti
singing James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” in Italian. Remembering Maya Angelou is a cinema trip.
I need to remember “Sympathy,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem
about that unhappy bird in a cage, and how Angelou knew why that caged bird
sang. And she elaborated the metaphor
without a mask.
I need to remember the force and grace of her reading at
Jackson State University, to remember Margaret Walker saying “I did not know
she was so tall.” And at that reading
how Angelou explained nothing worthwhile is free, thus schoolchildren should
learn responsibility by paying a dime to hear her read.
I need to remember why Angelou’s voice can’t be imitated,
why now we have the echo of the voice on vinyl or CD, why I need to listen to
her calypso songs. And the voice, its laughter, ringing in my memory of her
being at the Natchez Literary and Cinema Festival. I remember her smile as we danced together at
a private party given by one of her aristocratic friends from Ghana in a fancy
apartment in Washington, DC; I remember another party in DC at the home of the
elegant Eleanor Traylor where Angelou told Paule Marshall and Eugene Redmond
that they must come into the kitchen to hear a white Aborigine she had
discovered sing ancient music. That must
have been the party at which I talked with her then husband Paul de Feu. He reminded me of Austin Strauss who had been
married to my classmate Anne Moody and then later to Wanda Coleman. I guess I am remembering that love and
integration and marriage are quite a trinity.
I remember Angelou reading at a National Black Arts Festival
in Atlanta and how a young black woman from Canton, Mississippi cried out “You
tell’em Maya.” Dr. Angelou stopped, cast
a stern gaze upon the woman, and said “You must not speak to your mother like
that.” Neither Maya Angelou nor Nina
Simone suffered fools when they performed.
Eugene Redmond reminded me the day after Angelou died that
he had a photograph of me and her at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn when she
received the Langston Hughes Award. I am
talking. She is listening
intensely. I am delivering a message
from Grace Killens, the widow of Angelou’s mentor John Oliver Killens. I remember she said, “I must send her
something. She and John were always so
kind to me.”
I remember Angelou inviting me to sit at her special table
during one Zora Neale Hurston Festival for dinner and drinks. I remember her saying on another occasion to
a group of us that we should pray for Nikki Giovanni. “She is not well.” I remember Angelou telling
me and Richard Long about a telephone call from some reporter for some New York
newspaper, asking her about some unflattering statement Bill Cosby made about
African American people. Her response to
the reporter was “Did he lie?”
I remember reading her poetry and prose, seeing her read “On
the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inaugural, reacting very positively and
sometimes not so positively to her work.
I remember my parents taught me to have good manners and respect for my
elders and to be humble in the presence of greatness. I remember talking with and listening to Maya
Angelou in the ambience of awe, pure awe.
But then too, I remember, that some famous people are ordinary people
who have the gift of making themselves extraordinary, uncommon, phenomenal,
unique. They touch the world. And when
they depart this world for elsewhere, what is most worthy of remembering is
their legacy of struggle to make this planet Earth a place where equality,
tolerance, and peace might flourish and that I am obligated somehow to continue
the always unfinished work of their legacy.
I reckon I remember more about Maya Angelou than I am
willing to tell, and the footage of what must remain private will never appear
when my surreal movie is spoken. It is sufficient
that I understand the caged bird escaped and sing even more brilliantly than
the woman commemorated in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.”
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
June 4, 2014
Tribute program at Café Istanbul, New Orleans, LA
