Talking Back to Maya Angelou

A writer’s byline follows her even as she becomes a different self and develops into a different kind of writer. I do not valorize the dead; our best work—as people and artists—happens in those moments when we can best serve the living.

I was most moved by Maya Angelou when viewing her in connection to an artist I will always learn from: James Baldwin. Her support for her brother in the important 1989 documentary “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket” is seen in her face; it’s a face that can hold the screen, especially when she describes Baldwin’s great generosity of spirit. (Another tale has the writer taking Angelou home to meet his mother, a woman with many children, and saying something like, “Well, the last thing you need is another child, but here she is.”) In the documentary, Angelou talks intelligently, emotionally, and openly about Baldwin’s ability to transgress certain categories, like the American penchant for defining the world through gender. She’s also very funny about the acceptance of blacks in Paris during the great modernist age. “They were so exotic and so colorful,” she says. “Who wouldn’t want them?”

Wanting—I think that’s a word that applies to Angelou’s work as a memoirist. She wanted so much, and she got so much in the bargain. Along with the Baldwin documentary, which certainly deserves wide distribution, Angelou herself worked in film as a writer, producing two scripts of historical interest: “Georgia, Georgia,” from 1972, starring the unforgettable Diana Sands, and, ten years later, the fascinating “Sister, Sister,” featuring the legendary Rosalind Cash. In that television movie, Cash plays an emotionally down-on-her-luck woman who wants to be embraced by her stern older sister, Diahann Carroll. If you come from anything like Angelou’s admired family, you will recognize the verisimilitude of her words, and how Cash fits her body into them. It’s a great performance. “Georgia, Georgia” haunts me because I have never seen it. I procured a copy through some museum friends, but, before they could set up a screening, they misplaced the DVD. It’s a haunting of a haunting—the now dead Sands and Angelou lost in the bowels of carelessness.

But, even without having seen it, I know that the film is of great historical value, like the black-and-white images that we have of Angelou as an actress, particularly in the 1961 production of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks,” featuring Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Browne. In that show, Angelou played the Queen, an imperious figure with lines of such linguistic lusciousness that you want to bite into them, no matter how rotten they are in the center. While these are the elements of Angelou’s life and work that interest me most, and I am a different person from the one who wrote this essay about her books, I stand by what I’ve written and am, as always, grateful to those artists who produce the work that inspires me to speak as well, which is what our remembered dead leave the living.

Photograph of Angelou, taken in 1974, by Wayne Miller/Magnum.