Sistah, I'm Still Singing Your Name

When you’re a young child, like me, who rarely speaks in front of people, your role models are almost guaranteed to be different from everyone else.

The redwood tree roots of Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson, April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, did not grow as they were told. Ignoring continental borders, they spanned the breadth of the earth, finding tiny me, on a minuscule island, in a vast sea.

I watched the televised movie first as a child. But, when I read the autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I slipped into an untraceable realm. There I found a faithful playmate who would let me sit in my silences and never tease me about my appearance. Curled up on the porch with her at her grandmother’s house in Stamps, Arkansas, we’d glean through endless passages over hours. Our love affair for books long-established, imaginations migrated unfettered while her brother Bailey finished his English homework inside.

Without my saying, she understood the feeling of having entire galaxies inside your chest bursting for expansion and exhalation, as painstakingly slow satellites journeyed millions of light-years to find you existed at all.

She was patience; a held wisdom beyond ebony eyes.

But in later adulthood, I also saw in her the living embodiment of the Orisha Goddess Oshun. A honey-sweet disposition and bearing, she would disarm insults and bloodthirsty warmongering with quintessential feminine conversations. Smiling as hands and feet are quietly bound in an instant for retribution and penitence. Give honor and courtesy where due and all will be well.

There is always a way to fight back.

Majesty, in my view, surrounds those in history who live life incinerating the societal constraints of their era, setting the skies ablaze with their flames. More majesty could not have surrounded three-time Grammy Award-winning Maya Angelou. A poet, editor, screenwriter, and civil rights activist who authored over 35 books, she excelled as an actress and director on stage, television, and in film, garnering numerous honorary doctorates over her lifetime.

Not boastful of her many firsts; she was the first African American female cable car conductor, first female African American of a national bestseller with her 1969 memoir, as well as one of the first female African American members of the Directors Guild of America.

In San Francisco, in the 1940s, she worked as a cocktail waitress, prostitute, cook, and dancer. Raped at the tender age of seven-years-old according to Angelou's own account (multiple articles list this age as eight- years-old), she was traumatized and refused to speak for nearly five years. A single mother at 16-years-old, there was not one life experience retold for an audience of billions that diminished the confidence in her bearing or the fire of her brilliance.

As a writer, I struggle with the balance of sharing my work to a vast unknown public because of the many deeply personal and emotional raw happenings throughout my life.

Maya standards.

*Me squinting up past the clouds*

"Whew, child! Ooh-fa-chickeeee!!!"

As often is the pattern with many creatives and artists, my spirit roamed perpetually restless from varying jobs and career choices. Nothing satiated even for sustenance’s sake. The buried deep beckoned to yearnings untamed that would reap a bountiful harvest on different soils.

Paths that Maya Angelou walked were forged anew, dismissing briars, pestilence, and uneven ground amidst a host of intimidating obstacles. She flourished in spite of—well—everything! I still admire the heck out of her hard-won regal defiance in the face of an environment steeped in the boiling waters of racism, discrimination, misogyny, bigotry, and hatred of the era.

In life, some regents rule through blood, and then there is a royalty that rules through grace. I consider it a privilege to have walked the same earth as that grace-born royalty who is Queen Mother Maya Angelou.

Even with her passing to ancestral realms on May 28, 2014, her presence for me never diminished. I only speak of her in the present tense as she continues to inspire.

After emerging from my writing cocoon, I was disheartened to find that many editors did not accept submissions for rhyming poetry.

This internationally acclaimed author rewrote the manual on rhyming poetry and everybody wanted a copy.

Restraining my too broad smile, I envision a stately dressed Maya Angelou sauntering up to a nationally recognized editor’s desk with her casual poetry submission (just on a whim.) I try to visualize the face that would attempt to refuse this Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient with over 50 honorary doctorates on account of “we don’t accept rhyming poems for publication.” I wonder what line of work said editor could secure next without an employment reference.

I am laughing so hard there is an imminent danger of urinary bladder disengagement.

But Mama Maya is all dignity and grace because, “Dani,” she says, “we never surrender our poise and stoop to such levels of disrespect.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, immediately attempting to reel in my disruptive shrieks.

Through clenched teeth smiles, mumbling through a mouth corner, “We can laugh in the car,” she says. And we do.

Maya Angelou is blanket-warm support and encouragement from the ethers on my coldest, darkest days. A reminder of the force that lies beneath the surface of the unwritten. A powerful element of change waiting to be repeatedly unleashed on a misbehaving world.

How dare I ever stop writing?

I think of how heartbroken she must have felt after her close friend, Dr. Martin Luther King, was assassinated on her birthday in 1968. She refused to celebrate for consecutive years following that fateful day.

After my life’s most devastating traumas, she is an empathetic understanding that allows full displacement of grief. Extending a gentle hand and firm voice, she says, “You cannot stay here.”

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Angelou toured and lived overseas in Europe and Africa, expanding her horizons, and encouraging me many decades into the future to do the same. I made it to the UK, and she is insistent that even amid a global pandemic, I travel as far and fast as I can, while I can. She has my best interests at heart. For this, I am both humbled as well as grateful.

As a result of her presence in my life, I cannot leave the house without a book, notepad, and pen (I used to always also carry a backpack--I've pared down.)

In the spirit of embracing life’s multiplicity of possibilities, I could be sipping hot tea in downtown Cairo before the muezzin’s noonday call to prayer. Or bathing in the mineral-rich thermal waters of Pamukkale, Turkey, by sunset. Or having a mini-shit fit and telling myself to get over it under a night sky in my lodge on the banks of the Amazon River, Ecuador.

I’d better always have something to write on and read.

As Maya Angelou so succinctly said, “Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.”

She prompts me to a higher gradient, humbly reminding me that her first book became a national bestseller and that her shoulders are for future generations to stand on.

So I sing my homemade hymn of thanks flung skyward, traipsing into all those other realms where the majesty of Maya Angelou now leisurely resides…

…and I keep on writing.

Personal note: I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this story about one of my treasured role models. If you enjoyed this story to the point that any portion made you smile, please like, share, and follow my mentor's guidance:

"If you have only ONE smile in you, give it to the people you LOVE." - Maya Angelou