Maya Angelou :: essays research papers

when Maya Angelou was a young woman -- "in the crisp days of my youth," she says -- she carried with her a arcanum conviction that she wouldnt live past the age of 28. Raped by her mothers sheik at 8 and a mother herself since she graduated from high school, she support herself and her son, Guy, through a series of careers and buoyed by an implacable ambition to dingy market what might lay down been a half-lived, ground-down life of poverty and despair. "For it is hateful to be young, bright, ambitious and poor," Angelou observes. "The added insult is to be aware of ones poverty." In "Even the Stars waitress Lonesome," her advanced collection of reflective autobiographical essays, Angelou gives no further bill for her "profound belief" that she would die young. "I was thirty-six before I realized that I had lived years beyond my deadline and needed to revise my intellection about an early death," she recalls. "With that re alization life waxed sweeter. Old acquaintances became friendships, and new clever acquaintances showed themselves more interesting. Old dos burdened with memories of disappointments and betrayals packed up and go away town, leaving no forwarding address, and new loves came calling." Now 69, Angelou is the nearest intimacy America has to a sacred institution, a high priestess of culture and love in the tradition of such distaff luminaries (all of them, hitherto, white) as Isadora Duncan and Pearl S. Buck, with a bit of Eleanor Roosevelt and Aime Semple MacPherson thrown into the mix. "She was born poor and ineffectual in a land where/power is money and money is adored," the poet Angelou writes in tribute to another astonishing black woman of our time, Oprah Winfrey. " natural black in a land where might is white/and white is adored./Born female in a land where decisions are masculine/and masculinity controls." Angelous lifelong effort to escape and expose th e "national, racial and historical hallucinations" that have burdened black women in America and replace them with a twinkle exemplar of power, achievement and generosity of spirit is as miraculous as she says it is, even if one suspects that in "real life" Angelou must be a little hard to take. "I would have my ears filled with the worlds music," she writes, "the grunts of hewers of wood, the blab of old folks sitting in the last sunlight and the purr of busy bees in the early morning .