She recently appeared in the production ofRoots for television and has been an interviewer on the public television series, Assignment America.

But it is her prose reminiscences of her early life that have established her place in American life and letters: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has become a classic of the “development genre” of the adolescent’s education and search for identity, in the great tradition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Huckleberry Finn, Black Boy, and The Catcher in the Rye. The work tells of its protagonist’s childhood and adolescence in rural Stamps, Arkansas; St. Louis; and San Francisco, in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Reared successively by an awesomely religious grandmother (on her father’s side) and then by her strong, beautiful mother, Angelou resonantly describes the black rural South during the Depression, the wealthier black sections of St. Louis, and the ghettos of San Francisco during World War II, as well as her own education (which included being raped by her stepfather at age eight). The book ends with the birth of her illegitimate son when she is sixteen. Gather Together in My Name continues the saga as Maya and Clyde eke out an existence; Maya works variously as a cook, a prostitute, and a madam, and learns about the horrors of heroin in the black community.

Running through the first two volumes of her autobiography are two parallel but sometimes contrasting themes of Angelou’s life: the black gospel tradition instilled by her upbringing in the CME Church and personified by her grandmother (“Momma”); and the black blues or urban street tradition derived from the city eduation she gains in the Midwest and West and personified by her mother. These motifs recur in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas. Although Angelou’s grandmother does not appear in person in this volume and dies while Angelou is hospitalized for appendicitis, her memory and influence are pervasive. When her young son Clyde is embarrassed at the ranting of a street preacher, Angelou realizes guiltily that the black religious tradition so important in her own early years is not being carried on. She begins teaching Clyde Bible stories and later assuages her own longing by attending a black charismatic church in San Francisco.

These details suggest the tension between the religious motif and the blues motif, which occupies more space in this volume. It is this urban street tradition that Angelou usually turns to in continuing to work out her own identity. She cultivates the kind of special savvy that makes her suspicious of a job offer from a white woman in the record store; that ultimately causes the breakup of her marriage to Tosh the Greek; that makes her deal honestly with customers while the only black B-girl in a North Beach, San Francisco, strip joint; that lends poignancy to her adventures with black American exiles in Paris.

Much of this volume is taken up with Angelou’s adventures as the primary dancer in the touring company of Porgy and Bess in the 1950’s. She gets her start in the North Beach burlesque house, and, because she dances and does not strip and explains to customers that the champagne drinks they buy for her are 7-Up, she is noticed by the chic coffee house crowd. She is “adopted” by the whites at “The Purple Onion” and begins a successful season as a calypso singer, followed by the then-unknown Phyllis Diller. It is at “The Purple Onion” that Angelou gets her name, taken from her married Greek name, Angelos. “Maya” was her brother’s way of referring to her when a child, “mya sister.” While at “The Purple Onion” she auditions for and gains a place in a Broadway musical but accepts instead the role of Ruby in Porgy and Bess. The all-black cast travels throughout Europe and the Middle East, often performing in areas where American blacks had never been—Yugoslavia, Egypt, Israel.

Memorable scenes, in terms of both politics and race, are described exuberantly by Angelou, as she finds uneducated Yugoslavs in Zagreb who know Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Deep River,” or marvels on landing in Alexandria at seeing for the first time dark-skinned peoples whose ancestors are the same as her own. She chronicles the tumultuous receptions the company gets at La Scala, in Paris, in Athens. And she includes wonderful anecdotes about herself and various cast members. In Yugoslavia, for example, most of the females were physically pursued by love-sick Yugoslavs—to their hotel rooms, outside the theater, on the street—and sent flowers, candy, and messages. Maya’s own “romance” with the persistent “Mr. Julian” is hilariously detailed. When he claims in broken English that he cannot live without her and that he is sending her his heart, Angelou wonders how literally to understand this passionate Easterner. The heart appears in her dressing-room, a glass-encrusted bread-dough creation, complete with instruction in three languages, “Do not eat.” In Cairo, to cite another adventure, several of the women decide to have their hair straightened, in order not to have to use hot combs. Angelou hurriedly leaves the luxurious beauty parlor when the chemicals begin to burn her scalp, but the others endure and have beautiful bouffant hairstyles—for about a week, until their hair falls out. For the rest of the tour, most of the women in the cast are forced to wear wigs. Angelou has other encounters in Europe, meeting some of the famous black expatriots, such as Bricktop in Rome, and performs her calypso at night clubs on Paris’ Left Bank, welcomed as an exotic personage and treated differently from the more frequently encountered blacks from French Africa.

It is her plaguing sense of guilt over the “abandonment” of her son that sends Angelou back to San Francisco, where she fights psychological depression, deals with Clyde’s psychosomatic skin rash, and finally begins a new career singing and dancing on the club circuit, this time taking Clyde with her. Like the other two volumes of her autobiography, this book thus ends on a beginning of sorts, just as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had concluded with the birth of Clyde.

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas gives us a statement and a glimpse into the life of a strong black woman, but the revelations about her racial and sexual identity are not as strong as they might be. In fact, this a much more “public” book than her other two volumes, less revealing and interesting in the sense that there is diminished introspection on the narrator’s part. Questions are raised in the reader’s mind that Angelou does not treat: How does Clyde respond to his lack of a father, both before and after Angelou’s marriage? Where does Angelou fit into the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement? How did she react to the McCarthyism of the early 1950’s? What were her reactions to the various political regimes visited on tour? What are her inner feelings about men and marriage, after the breakup of her own? What is her attitude toward being black and female by the end of the volume? Her brother Bailey, so important in her life in the previous volumes, is barely mentioned, and her father is not mentioned at all. More than these, however, the reader wonders about the underlying reasons for her marriage to Tosh, and the real reasons for its failure. And finally, why is she so opposed to bringing Clyde on the tour with the company: is it really a fear of the homosexuality of the males on the tour, as she states at one time?

The position of the black woman in the women’s movement in the United States is a fascinating one, not yet carefully delineated or chronicled. Angelou’s works are often used in women’s studies courses since she is a strong black feminist. This work could give us a good deal of insight into the early adult life of a strong black woman at a period in American history (the 1950’s) when the feminist movement was at its lowest ebb. Angelou’s most explicit statements on the subject come as she is discussing her failing marriage and her loss of independence and identity. But there is so much that is omitted, so little inwardness, that, curiously, this autobiography is in danger of becoming that mere recital of meetings with the rich and famous that lesser autobiographies often are. Angelou readers await with interest the fourth installment of this fascinating inner and outer life.