If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
With a presence that is all embracing, Dr. Maya Angelou has released to the world a volume of poetry and prose to the women she has adopted as daughters and to those who have claimed her as mother in Letter to My Daughter. Not unlike other works such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or The Heart of a Woman, Dr. Angelou reveals to the women of the world, as Literary Publicist and EDC Creations CEO Ella Curry put it, in the rhythm of her poetry and the elegance of her prose”, an expression of numerous useful lessons in terms of the people she’s met, the places she’s travelled and the events of her life.
When Dr. Angelou met with Curry on September 11th, 2008, the seventh anniversary of a very scary and profound time in US history, it was to discuss the release of her new book Letter to My Daughter. What came out of that interview were the pure magic of spirit and a great appreciation of life’s experiences.
After speaking of friends long and recently passed, Curry, considering the political climate in which we find ourselves as a nation, asked Dr. Angelou about her own activist history. In the late 1950’s, Dr. Angelou was appointed by Dr. Martin Luther King to the position of northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Ever the storyteller, Dr. Angelou took us back to that time envisioning her as she was, tall, thin and with enormously billowing natural hair. Dr. Angelou goes on to tell of the experience, “A number of the people really, they were made really uncomfortable…people around the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in New York. One woman dropped a note in a column in the New York African American newspaper, The Amsterdam News. She wrote, “Who is this person who has come from the west coast with the savage hairdo? Don’t they have beauticians or at least barbers out there on the coast?’” An anecdote like that is priceless and is only an example of many magical moments in Curry’s interview with Dr. Angelou.
Given the topic, Dr. Angelou moved on to describe the electricity of the time. She said, “It was heavy and so exciting because you’d have to be in his presence to sense the authority that Rev. King had.” When Curry asked if Angelou saw similarities with the buzz created around Democratic Presidential-nominee Barack Obama, she had this to say, “Yes, I sense some of that. Of course, Senator Obama [is living] in another time. He is very inclusive, which is a wonderful thing. At the same time when Rev. King first started, he was not inclusive, he wasn’t exclusive but it was only at the end of his life that he began to include openly.” She went on to illustrate the fact with King’s organization of the Poor People’s March, a march that was not about race as much as it was about the struggle of the poor, no matter what skin they might be in. Regarding Dr. King, she continued, “When he became that inclusive, he really became dangerous.”
Such insight from a woman who has lived in both periods is truly priceless. Dr. Angelou knows something about inclusiveness as she addresses Letter to My Daughter she writes, “You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all.” Thank God she is as we are all eager to listen.
About Laura Major: Laura Major is a multicultural fiction author and freelance writer residing in the greater Phoenix area of Arizona. Her first novel, Mismatched was published by Amira Press in February of 2008. Laura also manages a multicultural website, Sable Lit Reviews.com, one of the few of its kind providing commentary on the multicultural impact of current events as well as multicultural book reviews.
