![]() But in Africa there is patrilineal control, so the father can decide whether he wants his children to go to school, who he wants them to marry, and things-really important things. That is, children inherit from their mother’s family, so that things stay in the mother’s blood line. We came - we were brought here from societies which had matrilineal inheritance in West Africa, which - our matrilineal inheritance still obtains in West Africa. And the story of the black woman is about the most noble story I know of mankind, in the history of man. You see, black women have been incredibly free to struggle for hundreds of years. MAYA ANGELOU: Well, black women wear them only in white people’s eyes, in the white society’s eyes. If you say, oh, that’s a junkie, that’s a nigger, that’s a kike, that’s a Jew, that’s a honkie, that’s a - you just - that’s the end of it.īILL MOYERS: Are black women still wearing these myths, these labels, these categories? You don’t have to wonder if they are waiting for the Easter bunny or love Christmas, or, you know, love their parents and hate small kids and are fearful of dogs. And then you don’t have to deal with the physical fact. ![]() All you have to do is just put a label on somebody. MAYA ANGELOU: It doesn’t want to deal with the human quality of me.īILL MOYERS: Categories are more manageable? And that is the society’s problem, not mine.īILL MOYERS: What do you mean it doesn’t want to cope? I think it knows and doesn’t itself want to cope. And I mean I’m a woman, I’m black, I’m human. I don’t know if the society doesn’t know who I am. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. Being free is as difficult and as perpetual - or rather fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or good Moslem or good Zen Buddhist. MAYA ANGELOU: Well, one works at it, certainly. How does a person who is both black and female come to grips with a society that doesn’t know who you are? She came back to America to write, among several works, the screenplay for the film, “Georgia, Georgia” and two powerful books, a bestselling autobiography and a collection of poems, “Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die…”īILL MOYERS: Blacks and women are both trying to get free of’ clichés and stereotypes. She lived in Africa for three years, editing an English-language magazine in Cairo - she speaks six languages - and teaching music and drama in Ghana. ![]() She toured Europe and Africa with “Porgy and Bess,” taught modern dance in Rome and Tel Aviv, played the female lead off-Broadway in “The Blacks,” worked with Godfrey Cambridge on “Cabaret for Freedom,” and spent a year helping to raise funds for Martin Luther King in the North. In the early 1950’s she studied dancing with Pearl Primas in New York and later appeared as a singer in San Francisco’s Purple Onion. She was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, by her grandmother and came as a teenager to join her mother in San Francisco, where, by the way, she became the first black fare-collector on the Market Street Railway. Yet all these categories fail to do justice to the scope of her life. Someone has said Maya Angelou’s career has touched more bases than Henry Aaron. Singer, teacher, dancer, poet, authoress, actress, editor, songwriter, playwright. On a recent trip to San Francisco I sought her out at her cottage in Berkeley, across the bay, to share with you the spirit and insights of this gifted and very human woman. But I heard of’ her accomplishments, read her books and continued to nourish the memory of that first encounter. And when finally we met, at another time and far beyond those one immutable boundaries, we hardly stopped talking for hours - two strangers from the same but different place. She moved in the tight and hounded other world of’ the South, whose boundaries black children crossed only in their imagination, if at all, and even then at intolerable risk. I lived in the gentle and neighborly white world that opened generously to ambition and luck. We had grown up in the South, only a hundred miles apart as the Greyhound bus goes, but world beyond worlds in the inner experiences that shape the childhood. BILL MOYERS: A few years ago at a dinner in New York I met Maya Angelou.
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