Dec 21, 2009

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes | Social Concerns

Maya Angelou's two years in Ghana in the early 1960s provide the material for the fifth book in her continuing autobiography. The title, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), is an obvious play on the popular spiritual, "All God's Chillun Got Wings." A clever reference to the ongoing search for place is couched in terms mindful of the black's ultimate home. Living in Ghana when she was in her mid-thirties — a mature woman — she wrote this book when she was in her mid-fifties.

Critics greeted All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes with generally kind...