When Poets Speak of Life and Speak in Prose
When Poets Speak of Life and Speak in Prose
Reviewing Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ and Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Maud Martha’
In Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Knife, he contrasts the worlds of novelists, poets, and memoirists and how one can shade into another. “The journey across the frontier from Poetryland into Proseville often seemed to go through Memoiristan,” says Rushdie. That was true for poet Maya Angelou, who published her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969.
But while some poets might shift readily to memoir, others try their hand at fiction. Promise, the debut novel of Rushdie’s fifth wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, came out last year. Seventy years earlier the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks took the same path, successfully venturing into Proseville with her 1953 novel Maud Martha.
Tell Her No, Watch What Happens
When she got the job as San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor, Maya Angelou was thrilled. Naturally. The position was hard won. Responding to a help-wanted ad, the sixteen-year-old Angelou appeared at the front desk. The receptionist tried brushing her off, but Angelou pushed back. The receptionist deflected again. “We were firmly joined in the hypocrisy to play out the scene,” she later recalled.
What hypocrisy, exactly? That a black woman in the supposedly non-racist non-South could get a job that might otherwise go to a white applicant. “The miserable little encounter had nothing to do with me, the me of me, any more than it had to do with that silly clerk,” she said.
The incident was a recurring dream, concocted years before by stupid whites, and it eternally came back to haunt us all. The secretary and I were like Hamlet and Laertes in the final scene, where, because of harm done by one ancestor to another, we were bound to duel to the death. . . . I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer.
But then, nah! Upon reflection, she knew better.
“All lies,” she said, “all comfortable lies.” Now more determined than ever, Angelou worked every angle she could and pestered the railway office until they finally relented. She got the job! “For one whole semester the streetcars and I shimmied up and scooted down the sheer hills of San Francisco.”
Maya Angelou would do pretty much anything if you told her she couldn’t, a quirk of character she later admitted could be used to manipulate her.
‘I’ll Start Tomorrow’
In an interview with the Paris Review, she referred to it as a button others could press to get what they wanted—including her agreement to write what became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from which the streetcar story comes, the first in a string of seven memoirs that followed Angelou’s unfolding life through the decades.
By the time she was forty, friends and acquaintances knew her life warranted at least one. She’d already worked as a dancer, actor, newspaper editor, university administrator, and broadcaster. All that, bundled with her globetrotting and civil rights activism? There had to be a marketable story there.
They called Random House editor Robert Loomis and pressed him to extend a book deal. As she recounts in her sixth memoir, A Song Flung up to Heaven, Loomis tried but Angelou refused, repeatedly. She was a poet and playwright, she told him, not a memoirist. Besides, she was busy with a television show for PBS. But Loomis was persistent. Novelist James Baldwin told him about her secret button, and Loomis tried it.
“I won’t bother you again,” he told her. “And I must say, you may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature.” He emphasized the crack in the door: “Almost impossible.” That was all it took.
“I’ll start tomorrow,” she said.
The next morning she placed a yellow legal pad on her mother’s kitchen table in Stockton, California, and began writing. “I thought if I wrote a book, I would have to examine the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise. . . . Rise out of physical pain and the psychological cruelties. Rise from being victims of rape and abuse and abandonment to the determination to be no victim of any kind. Rise and be prepared to move on and ever on.”
The pages of her yellow legal pad filled with stories of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas.
Shakespeare and Company
Products of a doomed marriage, Angelou and her brother live with their grandmother when their parents split and go different ways. When the pair later rejoin their mother for a season, the adolescent Angelou is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. He threatens to kill her brother if she tells, but the truth comes out and Angelou’s uncles murder the offender.
His blood weighs on her conscience and in Angelou’s childish, mixed-up moral calculus she determines it was her testimony that caused his death. As a result, she decides she’ll shelter the world from her dangerous voice; she goes mute for five years. A perceptive neighbor in Stamps eventually tugs her out of herself, using literature as a means to re-enliven Angelou’s own voice.
“During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare,” she says. “He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Dubois’ ‘Litany in Atlanta.’” Poe might have been her second white love. She received a volume of his poetry as a graduation gift from her brother. “I turned to ‘Annabel Lee’ and we walked up and down the garden rows, the cool dirt between our toes, reciting the beautifully sad lines.”
Lest you think Angelou wandered into a library and never left, it’s worth mentioning the month she spent living in a Southern Californian junk yard, homeless. Or the time—without training or a license—she drove her drunken, slumbering father home from a luckless trip to Mexico. Or when she fled the house after an altercation with her step-mother, bleeding from a cut, when the frenzied woman began waving a hammer.
Such events might shock, but the most shocking thing? Angelou never submits to the unfair and unfortunate. When she’s denied her job application at the railway company, her mother supports her fight to get the job. “As I’ve told you many times,” she says, “‘Can’t do is like Don’t Care.’ Neither of them has a home.” Angelou translates: “There was nothing a person can’t do, and there should be nothing a human being didn’t care about. It was the most positive encouragement I could have hoped for.”
It’s exactly the kind of encouragement her memoir imparts. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Angelou’s life from age three to sixteen. She would need another six memoirs to tell her life in full. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn Brooks’s semi-autobiographical novel Maud Martha somehow comfortably squeezes a couple decades into just 114 pages, at least in the Faber edition I read.
Perfectly Sculpted Vignettes
While novelists often make poor poets, an observation Rushdie emphasizes with his own publishing history, he also notes the reverse is true. “Not many poets successfully cross over into the world of the novel,” he writes. Brooks escapes his verdict; while she only wrote one novel, she succeeded spectacularly. And she did so by bringing her skills as a poet to the job.
Brooks takes her titular Maud Martha through a series of thirty-four perfectly sculpted vignettes, each sharpened to a point as piercing as a pin, with scarcely a spare word on the page; the first two chapters are, for instance, just four paragraph each. Brooks narrows her gaze down to an event, a feeling, a frustration, an exultation, an outrage, a hope. Through her carefully chosen scenes and sparse dialog we inhabit an exquisitely crafted world that feels as concrete and true to life as a photograph.
“To be cherished was the dearest wish of the heart of Maud Martha Brown,” opens Brooks. But Maud Martha isn’t cherished. The story follows her from childhood in her Chicago home to early love, marriage, childbirth, and the expectation of a second baby.
Along the way, she experiences racism from her white neighbors—from theatergoers, from a cosmetics saleswoman, even from a department store Santa Claus, directed at her daughter, no less. She likewise experiences colorism from black neighbors who regard lighter skin as more desirable, more beautiful than her darker complexion. And the love of her husband? “She knew that he was tired of his wife. . . .”
What protects her? “Maud Martha is saved,” says Farah Jasmine Griffin in Read Until You Understand, “by her tremendous sense of self and her capacity for seeing and creating beauty on her own terms.” She takes what the world gives and interprets it to her own ends. She revels in sunshine and dandelions:
The sun was shining . . . and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world—or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower; for would its kind not come up again in the spring?
Whereas Angelou’s true-life tale explodes in your lap, Brooks’s story is quiet, searching, largely domestic. “There is as much said in the spaces, in the silences, as there is in each episode and scene,” says novelist Alice McDermott. It’s “a short novel with more life—harsh, beautiful, mournful, celebratory life—than many door-stoppers.”
It’s no wonder Maud Martha recently made the Atlantic’s list of 136 great American novels. But note the adverb recently. The real wonder is its renaissance. Amazingly, the novel faded from view shortly after publication. When critic Margo Jefferson wanted to read the book in the 1970s, it was long out of print. She had to scrounge up a copy in the New York Public Library. It wasn’t reprinted until the 1990s when indie, black publisher Third World Press brought it renewed life.
It merits celebration. Per Rushdie, we may not always follow the literary peregrinations of poets into memoir and fiction, but Angelou and Brooks offer trips worth taking.
Maud Martha and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were the April books for my 2024 classic novel and memoir goal. Normally, I review fiction and memoir separately, but these two seemed to pair nicely, thanks a little unexpected nudge from Salman Rushdie. For novels, here’s what I’ve read so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year:
January: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
February: Alice Walker, The Color Purple
March: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
April: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
May: Chuang Hua, Crossings
June: Willa Cather, My Àntonia
July: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
August: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
September: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
October: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
November: George Eliot, Middlemarch
December: Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
For memoirs:
January: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
February: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
March: Richard Wright, Black Boy
April: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
May: Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland
June: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
July: Stephen King, On Writing
August: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
September: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
October: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
November: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
December: Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share it with your friends.
Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. It’s free for now, and I’ll send you my top-fifteen quotes about books and reading. Thanks again!
I read Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” as a companion to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” as comparative literature for contrasting perspective, and it was instructive. As Mockingbird is told through the voice of a grown white woman recalling her childhood experience in the segregated south, this story is likewise told by a grown black woman doing the same. Each story is about a child’s examination of prejudice, but Scout in Mockingbird is looking from the outside in while Angelou is deep inside, trying to make sense of the white world – almost as if from Plato’s cave, interpreting shadows.
Their similarities and learnings are as poignant as their differences. Angelou writes
“What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”
It’s all a world of double standards, and they are a fearful thing. They allow you to hold diametrically aligned but contrasting views in the cradle of your mind with no moral angst whatsoever. It takes children a while to get the hang of it, but not long. The problem, of course, is that we all are guilty and remedy requires a hard lonesome fight against the resolute crowd.
Revisionist history is as old as mankind and truth has always been canonized by the victors. In time, facts matter less and less until all that remains is the operationalized outcome. This plays even harder when rationalization smooths over moral inconveniences. Solidarity helps, and societies conspire to protect their mores, but miraculously the outliers manage to find their lonely voice. Folks like Lee’s Atticus raise children who learn by their courageous example and the few take up the torch to move us inelegantly along.
Sometimes, thank God, they even write books.
A good author is not limited by limitations of format or genre.