{"id":5610,"date":"2014-05-29T00:33:54","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T07:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=5610"},"modified":"2014-05-29T00:36:55","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T07:36:55","slug":"maya-angelou-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/29\/maya-angelou-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Maya Angelou Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from TIME Magazine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Maya Angelou: A Hymn to Human Endurance<\/h1>\n

\"Maya<\/p>\n

Remembering a life of relentless creativity.<\/h2>\n

When Maya Angelou was 16 she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. By the time she was 40 she had also been, in no particular order, a cook, a waitress, a madam, a prostitute, a dancer, an actress, a playwright, an editor at an English-language newspaper in Egypt, and a Calypso singer (her one album is entitled \u201cMiss Calypso.\u201d) It wasn\u2019t until 1970, when she was 41, that she became an author: her first book,\u00a0I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings<\/em>, told the story of her life up to the age of 17. That remarkable life story ended today at the age of 86.<\/p>\n

In her last years Angelou\u2019s work became associated with a certain easy, commercial sentimentality\u2014she loaned her name to a line of Hallmark cards, for example\u2014but there was nothing easy about her beginnings. She was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was 3. When she was 7 her mother\u2019s boyfriend raped her. She testified against him in court, but before he could be sentenced he was found beaten to death in an alley. Angelou\u2019s response to the trauma was to become virtually mute \u2013 she couldn\u2019t, or wouldn\u2019t, speak in public for the next 5 years. She often cited this silent period as a time when she became intimately aware of the written word.<\/p>\n

Angelou eventually regained her voice, but her life remained chaotic. She became a mother at 17, immediately after graduating high school. She bounced from city to city, job to job and spouse to spouse (she picked up the name Angelou from one of her husbands; \u201cMaya\u201d was her brother\u2019s nickname for her). She spent years living in Egypt and then in Ghana. By the time she was 40 her life story and her distinctive, charismatic way with words had her friends\u2014among them James Baldwin\u2014begging her to write it all down. She finally did.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings<\/em>\u00a0Angelou describes herself as \u201ca too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.\u201d Although generations of high school students have been assigned it, the book\u2019s unsparing account of black life in the South during the Depression, and of her sexual abuse, is not easy reading. It is Angelou\u2019s tough, funny, lyrical voice that transforms her story from a litany of isolation and suffering into a hymn of glorious human endurance. That extraordinary voice\u2014dense, idiosyncratic, hilarious, alive\u2014brought novelistic techniques to the task of telling a life story, and its influence on later generations of memoirists, from Maxine Hong Kingston<\/strong> to Elizabeth Gilbert<\/strong>, is incalculable. (Angelou also mixed fact and fiction, unapologetically, long before James Frey<\/strong>.)<\/em> The themes she expounded in\u00a0Caged Bird<\/em>, of suffering and self-reliance, would be braided through the rest of her long life\u2019s work. \u201cAll my work, my life, everything is about survival,\u201d Angelou said. \u201cAll my work is meant to say, \u2018You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.\u2019 In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at TIME.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from TIME Magazine Maya Angelou: A Hymn to Human Endurance Remembering a life of relentless creativity. When Maya Angelou was 16 she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. By the time she was 40 she had also been, in no particular order, a cook, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}