The world lost Maya Angelou today. It was announced this morning that the poet and memoirist passed away at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the age of 86. Born on April 4, 1928, Angelou described in prose her experiences of growing up in the South, where Jim Crow laws reigned supreme, at a time when the Great Depression was ravaging the country. In 1969, she published her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which details the hardship, abuse, and racism that she endured in her youth. “It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life,” she wrote. “It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense.” The book would go on to become a bestseller—and elevate Angelou into the arena of literary greats. Her friend James Baldwin called the book “a Biblical study of life in the midst of death.” Angelou would go on to write five more memoirs, capturing what seems like only a fraction of her rich and adventurous life. As well as a writer, Angelou was a calypso dancer (she briefly formed a two-person dance troupe with Alvin Ailey), a civil rights activist (she was friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X), a college professor, a mentor to Oprah, and a Tony-nominated actress.
If you were raised in the United States and came of age in the nineties, you are familiar with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It was probably assigned to you, as it was to me, in your middle-school English class. Her words sensitized a generation to injustice. Her love for literature, in particular Shakespeare, which helped her overcome the darker periods of her life, was contagious. Angelou borrowed the title from a line in the poem “Sympathy,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar:
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings.
We bid you farewell, Maya Angelou.
The post In Memoriam: Maya Angelou, 1928–2014 appeared first on Vogue.
