SOURCE: “Women Writers Talking,” edited by Janet Todd, Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1983, pp. 59–67.

In 1969 Maya Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir of her girlhood in Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco, California. The book quickly became a contemporary classic. More fully than any writer before her, Angelou laid bare the pain of the black girl's coming of age. She counted the costs of being doubly disenfranchised in a society that denied black women's beauty and worth. Yet interlaced with the sadness was joy, conveyed in the spiritual peace and power of her grandmother and in the élan with which her mother lived her life. Ultimately, Caged Bird is a song of triumph: the young Maya's triumph over self-hatred, the triumph of the black communities that sustained themselves despite the white world's racism, and the triumph of a writer whose love and command of language are profound.

Three subsequent volumes, Gather Together in My Name, Singin', Swingin', and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, and The Heart of a Woman, document Angelou's womanhood. They record her successful careers as dancer, singer, actress, and civil rights administrator as well as her extensive travels in Africa and Europe. With the last book she has chronicled her life and times up until the early 1960s.

Over the last decade she has published three books of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, and And Still I Rise. In addition she has written several movie and television scripts, including the adaptation of Caged Bird.

Yet, it is on her four memoirs that her literary reputation mainly rests. In the following pages, Angelou discusses the art of autobiography—her sources and her method. Her claims for the originality of her form prove unexpectedly convincing. Hers is an audacious experiment. While the results have been uneven, the best of her books—like The Heart of a Woman—blend the individual and the collective, the witty and the wise, in an inimitable style. Angelou subscribes fully to her own dictum: “A good autobiographer seems to write about herself and is in fact writing about the temper of the times.”

Assisted by Wendy Kuppermann, I interviewed Maya Angelou in New York in December, 1981. Angelou's calendar was characteristically full. She was to fly to Ghana the next day to arrange for a course, “African Culture and Its Impact on the West,” she will offer next fall at Wake Forest University where she has accepted a professorship. Work in progress includes a book of narrative, free-verse poems that signal a new direction for her poetry. Although it will be a year or two before she starts writing the next one, she promises that more volumes of her memoir will be forthcoming.

Cheryl Wall: You have just published The Heart of a Woman, the fourth volume of an autobiography that began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969. Yet from passages in all four books, a reader may infer that Maya Angelou is a private person. If this inference is correct, how difficult has it been to relinquish, that privacy in order to share your experiences with readers?

Maya Angelou: The difficulty is met early on by making a choice. I made a choice to become an autobiographer. You know the saying, “You make your bed and do whatever you want in it.” I find autobiography as a form little used. I know no serious writer in the United States who has chosen to use autobiography as the vehicle for his or her most serious work. So as a form, it has few precedents. But I decided to use it. Now, I made that choice, I ain't got no choice. Unless I found it totally untenable—if it was running me totally mad or if I lost the magic—then that would be a different matter. I would start to look at fiction or go back to plays. But having said I'm going to write autobiography as literature and to write history as literature, then I have made that agreement with myself and my work and I can't be less than honest about it. So I have to tell private things, first to remember them and then to so enchant myself that I'm back there in that time.

I love teaching Caged Bird because the voice of the child from the very beginning is so authentic. I understand that as a part of the PBS television series, Creativity, you returned to Stamps and once there, you said, “became twelve years old again.” Did you revisit the scenes of your childhood before writing that book? How did you reawaken that part of your past?

It's a kind of enchantment. It's a scary one, whether it was in that book or in Gather Together in My Name. I go to work everyday about 6:30 in the morning. I keep a hotel room and I go to the same room each day, and it takes about a half hour to shuffle off the external coil and all that. Before I go—it's like a trip in a time machine—my concern, my hesitation in fact, is that I won't be able to come out. It is truly strange. But to write it so that the reader is there and thinks he's making it up, to make the reader believe that she is the one who is doing that, or is the one to whom it is being done, you have to be there in the place. Ohhh!

Can you elaborate on the process? When you have finished for the day, is it easy then, or is it possible to put the past aside, to leave it in the hotel room?

I always leave no earlier than 12:30, even when the work is going poorly; if the work is going well, I'll stay until 1:30. Then I leave the hotel and go shopping for my food. And that's real! And I'm six foot tall and my face is somewhat known. In a little town (and I always manage to live in small towns), people will have maybe the day before or week before seen me on the Merv Griffin show, but since I operate in the town I'm not a celebrity from whom people feel separate. So people see me and they say, “Hello, Miss Angelou. I saw you on the so and so.” But they have also seen me in the gardening shop and in the old folks home and playing with children, so I'm kind of a celebrity with honor. But that means that when I come out of that hotel room and go to the market, suddenly my feet get the familiarity of the place. I'm encouraged back into the time in which I live. And it's real again.

Then I go home and have a drink or two or however many and prepare dinner. I love to cook. I am a cook. I write, cook, and drive. Those are my accomplishments.

All of which you started early.

That's true, too true. After I've put dinner on and showered, then I read the work. So by 4:30 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, I read what I have written that day. I start then to cut extraneous “ands,” “ifs,” “toos,” “fors,” “buts,” “howevers”—all those out! Any repetition of description, out. Just cut, cut, cut. And then I leave it and set the table and sit down to dinner. And about nine o'clock I pick up the work again, now with all those cuts, and look at it again and start making marginal notes. And I'm finished with the yellow pad. The next morning I take a fresh yellow pad and go out and start the thing all over again. And I do that five days a week.

In about a month, when I've got stacks of yellow pads, I will pull all the pages off and put them in order and I will take one day to read it all. Then I start to write again. As I write it the second time, I see how cavalier I have been with the language, with the craft, so I try to make that one really clean, hot, terse. And then when I've finished that, I go back to work. But at least in the period, I'm not doing that going down inside and it's a lot like a vacation in a way.

How long does the entire process take, for instance with this last book?

About a year and eight months.

Autobiographies by black women have been exceedingly rare, and to my knowledge, none of the few before yours has probed personal experience very deeply. Why and how did you select the form?

The form is intriguing. Maybe third, certainly half into Caged Bird, I realized that a good autobiographer (whatever that means and I don't know what that means yet—I'm learning the form. I am molding the form and the form is molding me. That's the truth of it.), a good autobiographer seems to write about herself and is in fact writing about the temper of the times. A good one is writing history from one person's viewpoint. So that a good one brings the reader into a historical event as if the reader was standing there, bridled the horse for Paul Revere, joined Dred Scott, actually was there. What I'm trying to do is very ambitious, because I am trying, I hope, to lay a foundation for a form. And I know it's ambitious, it's egomaniacal. I know all that, I don't mind. There it is. I mean, I do mind; I'd love to be nice and sweet and loved by everyone, but there it is.

There are writers now and coming who will develop that form. It is important to remember how new the novel as a form is. So somebody in the next twenty, thirty, five years, or next year will write autobiography going through the door I have opened, or cracked anyway, and really show us what that form can be. One has to see it as stemming from the slave narrative and developing into a new American literary form. It's ambitious, I told you, it's ambitious. …

By the time I left Momma, I knew what was right and what wasn't. I have a painting now by Phoebe Beasley called Sister Fannie's Funeral. It depicts women sitting on fold-up chairs, and it reminds me of all the women in my grandmother's prayer-meeting group. There's one empty chair that for me is Momma's. Whenever I have a debate within myself about right action, I just sit down and look at that and think now, what would Momma say? So, morals and generosity, good things, I believe I got at Momma's lap.

Your grandmother and her teachings seem always to have been an anchor. Many black children coming of age today don't have that link to their past; is there anything that can replace it?

Nothing. I see nothing. It's tragic. There is no substitute for parental and/or family love. And by love, I do not in any way mean indulgence. I mean love … that quality so strong it holds the earth on its axis. The child needs that carrying over of wisdom from the family to the child directly, and there is no substitute. Society cannot do it, despite the 1984 concepts of Big Brother and a larger society caring for a child and imbuing the child with values. One needs it from someone to whom one is physically attached.

That whole theme of the maternal figure is apparent in the work of many black women writers and white women as well. That leads me to wonder, is there a community of writers of which you feel a part—Afro-American writers, women writers, particular individual writers?

That's a question … I'm a member of the community of writers, serious writers; I suppose much like a drug addict is a member of a community. I know what it costs to write … as soon as that is so, one is part of that community.

I'm part of the Afro-American writing community, because that is so. I'm writing out of my own background, but it is also the background of Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn Rodgers, Jayne Cortez. All the black women who are writing today and who have written in the past: we write out of the same pot.

I know that the title of Caged Birdis taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Does the new book's title allude to the poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson, the poet of the Harlem Renaissance?

It certainly does. “The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn …” I love that woman. I have Bronze [Johnson's second book, published in 1922]. It's in my nightstand. I will not put it even in my own private bookcases, let alone in the library. It's in my nightstand and there it will stay.

How long have you known of her work?

Since I was a very young person. I love Anne Spencer too. So different … born a year apart … but so different.

Many Afro-American writers cite music as a primary influence on their work. References to music recur in your prose and poetry. In fact, you begin Singin', Swingin', and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas with the statement: “Music was my refuge.” Do you believe Afro-American music in particular has shaped your work as well as your life?

So much. I listen for the rhythm in everything I write, in prose or poetry. And the rhythms I use are very much like the blues and the spirituals. So that more often than not they are in 3/4 or 4/4 time. For example: [she reads from The Heart of a Woman] “The drive to the airport was an adventure in motoring and a lesson in conversational dissembling” [p. 76]. “His clear tenor floated up over the heads of the already-irate passengers. The haunting beauty of the melody must have quelled some of the irritation, because no one asked Liam to shut up” [p. 77]. “It seemed to me that I washed, scrubbed, mopped, dusted and waxed thoroughly every other day. Vus was particular. He checked on my progress. Sometimes he would pull the sofa away from the wall to see if possibly …” [p. 141]. It is always there, wherever; it seems to me that there is the rhythm. And the melody of the piece, I work very hard for that melody.

A young woman told me that I had it easy because I have the art which Graham Greene has of making writing, a complex thing, seem so simple. So I said yes, it's hard work, and she replied, yes, but you have the art. But [to paraphrase Hemingway] “easy reading is damned hard writing.”

Until I read The Heart of a Woman, I had not realized how very much involved you had been with the civil rights movement. In this book you really capture the incredible sense of momentum, the vitality, and the hope. How important were those experiences as catalysts for your art?

I suppose it's so important for me in my life that it must come through in the work. Despite living in the middle of murk, I am an optimist. It is contrived optimism; it is not pollyanna. I have to really work very hard to find that flare of a kitchen match in a hurricane and claim it, shelter it, praise it. Very important. The challenge to hope in a hopeless time is a part of our history. And I take it for myself personally, for me, Maya. I believe somewhere just beyond my knowing now, there is knowing and I shall know. This I shall overcome. There is a light, no larger than a pinhead, but I shall know. When I say I take it personally, I take that tradition of hoping against hope, which is the tradition of black Americans, for myself.

That may perhaps be defined as a spiritual quality. Do you see your writing as political as well as spiritual?

Well, yes. In the large sense, in that everything is political. If something I write encourages one person to save her life, then that is a political act. I wrote Gather Together in My Name—the most painful book until The Heart of a Woman. In the book I had to admit, confess; I had to talk about prostitution, and it was painful. I talked to my son, my mother, my brother, and my husband, and they said, “Tell it.” I called the book Gather Together in My Name, because so many people lie to young people. They say, “I have no skeletons in my closet. Why, when I was young I always obeyed.” And they lie like everything. So I thought all those people could gather together in my name. I would tell it.

I had a lot of really ugly things happen as a result right after the book's publication. Then I arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, and I was doing a signing in a large department store. Maybe one hundred fifty people were in line. Suddenly I looked and there were black fingers and long fingernails that had curved over in the mandarin style. And I looked to follow those up and the woman had a wig down to here, a miniskirt, a fake-fur minicoat, which had been dirtied—it might have been white once—false eyelashes out to there. She was about eighteen, maybe twenty. She leaned over and said, “Lady, I wanna tell you something, you even give me goddamn hope.” If she was the only person … The encouragement is: you may encounter defeats, but you must not be defeated.

Apart from your grandmother, can you identify what gave you that belief?

My mom, my mom is outrageous. And I'm a Christian or trying to be. I'm very religious. I try to live what I understand a Christian life to be. It's my nature to try to be larger than what I appear to be, and that's a religious yearning.

Although all your books give insight into a quintessentially female experience, The Heart of a Woman seems to explore the most explicitly feminist themes. For example, your treatment of single motherhood and the portrayal of your marriage to a South African freedom fighter. Has the feminist movement influenced your reflections on your past?

No. I am a feminist, I am black, I am a human being. Now those three things are circumstances, as you look at the forces behind them, over which I have no control. I was born as a human being, born as a black, and born as a female. Other things I may deal with, my Americanness for example, or I may shift political loyalties. But, these three things I am. It is embarrassing, in fact insulting, for a woman to be asked if she's a feminist, or a human, if he's a humanist, or a black if he's black inside. It goes with the territory. It is embarrassing for a woman to hear another woman say, “I am not a feminist.” What do you mean?! Who do you side with?

The book is about a woman's heart, about surviving and being done down, surviving and being done down. If I were a man, I hope I would have the presence of mind to write “The Heart of a Man” and the courage to do so. But I have to talk about what I see, what I see as a black woman. I have to speak with my own voice.

One of the most moving passages in The Heart of a Woman involves a conversation among women married to African freedom fighters. You and the other women—most of whom are African, one of whom is West Indian—forge a powerful common bond. Is there a broader lesson in that scene; are there bonds linking black women on several continents?

If you have the luck to encounter women who will tell. That experience had to do in particular with African women. In Egypt, through the poet Hanifa Fahty, I met a group of Egyptian women involved with the Arab Women's League. They were at once struggling against the larger oppressor, colonialism, and against a history of masculine oppression from their own men. I understood it. Unfortunately. I would like to say it's such a rare occurrence that it was exotic; unfortunately, I understood it clearly. It would be the same if I were in Vietnam and talked to the Vietnamese women. It is one of the internationally pervasive problems, and women today are choosing to take courage as their banner. Courage is the most important virtue because without it you can't practice any of the other virtues with consistency.

Do you see alliances being formed among women in various societies who are facing like problems?

I haven't seen them yet. It must happen. But you have to consider that certain movements are very new. One of the many American problems built into the fabric of the country, beyond the woven-in lie of “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” beyond the inherent lie that the people who were writing those statements owned other human beings, one of the serious problems has been looking at the idea of freedom as every human being's inherent right. Just by being born, you've got it. It is ridiculous as a concept. It is wishful, wistful, and foolish. Freedom and justice for a group of animals is a dream to work toward. It is not on every corner waiting to be picked up with the Sunday paper.

As a species we have not evolved much beyond the conceiving of the idea. Now that's fabulous, and for that we need to salute ourselves. But to say that we have conceived the idea and the next moment it is in our laps is ridiculous. We have to work diligently, courageously, without ceasing, to bring this thing into being. It is still in the mind. It will take us hundreds of years, if not thousands, to actually bring it so that we can see it. We need to tell our children that this quality which has been conceived of most recently by human beings is something wonderful to work for. And your children's children and your children's children's children and everybody will be working to pull this order out of disorder.

The joy then is in the struggle.

Yes, yes, then you begin to understand that you love the process. The process has as its final end the realization, but you fall in love with the process.

We are new as a species. We just got here yesterday. The reptiles were on this little ball of spit and sand 300 million years. We just grew an opposing thumb—I think it was last week—and grew it by trying to pick up something to beat somebody down.

The terrifying irony is that we live such a short time. And it takes so long for an idea to be realized. Can you imagine the first person who had these fingers and saw this little nub growing and said, “Got the nub, pretty soon we're going to be able to hold on to the whole hatchet?” Not to know that it was to be another three million years. You see?

Thomas Wolfe calls us “dupes of time and moths of gravity.” We're like fireflies—lighted by an idea and hardly any time to work at it. Certainly no time if we don't realize it has to be worked for. At least in this brief span, we can try to come to grips with how large an idea it is and how much work it demands, and try to pass it on to one other person. That's more than some people can achieve in a lifetime.