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| Maya Angelou |
The first time I
interviewed Maya Angelou, in 2002, I got hammered. What was supposed to have
been a 45-minute interview in a hotel room near Los Angeles had turned into a
16-hour day, much of it spent in her stretch limo, during which we'd been to
lunch, and she had performed. On the way back from Pasadena she asked her
assistant, Lydia Stuckey, to get out the whisky.
“Do you want ice and
stuff?” Stuckey asked.
“I want some ice, but
mostly I want stuff,” said Angelou with a smile, and invited me to join her.
Then came a traffic jam.
The car came to a crawl. But the whisky kept flowing. So did the conversation.
We talked about South Africa, writing, growing old, staying young, our mothers,
growing up poor and living abroad. We laughed a lot too: at ourselves, each
other and general human folly. She reserved particular ridicule for my hotel,
which she thought was pretentious. (She was right). Her laugh was no small
thing. She threw her head back and filled the car with it – and it was a big
car. Episodically, when words alone would not suffice, she would break, without
warning, into verse – sometimes her own, sometimes others'.
When I asked her how she
dealt with people's response to old age, she recited the final verse of her
poem, On Aging:
I'm the same person I was
back then
A little less hair, a
little less chin,
A lot less lungs and much
less wind.
But ain't I lucky I can
still breathe in.
And then the laughing
would start again. As her car pulled away after dropping me off at the hotel,
she put her head out of the window, waved, and shouted like a teenage girl:
“That's swanky!” She was 74 and high on life. I honestly couldn't tell if she
was drunk or not. There'd been plenty of serious talk throughout the day. But
she'd also been singing and laughing since the morning. Anyone who knows her
work and her life story – which is a huge part of her work – knows that this is
a huge part of her currency. Those maxims that people learn on their death bed
– that you only have one life, that it is brief and frail, and if you don't
take ownership of it nobody else will – were the tenets by which she lived.
She had an
extraordinarily full life. By the time she reached 40 she had been a
professional dancer, prostitute, madam, lecturer, activist, singer and editor.
She had worked with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, lived in Ghana and Egypt,
toured Europe with a dance troupe and settled in pretty much every region of the
United States. And then she wrote about it, the whole time crafting a path as a
poet, epigrammist and performer. “My life has been long,” she wrote in one her
last books. “And believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try
many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still."
In a subsequent interview
I described her as the “Desiderata in human form” and “a professional
hopemonger”. She lived as though there were no tomorrow. And now that there
really is no tomorrow, for her, we are left to contemplate – for us as well as
her – where daring can get you.
But with her passing,
America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and gifted raconteur. It
has lost a connection to its recent past that had helped it make sense of its
present. At a time when so many Americans seek to travel 'color blind', and
free from the baggage of the nation's racial history, here she stood, tall,
straight and true: a black woman from the south intimately connected to the
transformative people and politics who helped shape much of America's racial
landscape.
A woman determined to
give voice to both frustration and a militancy without being so consumed by
either that she could not connect with those who did not instinctively relate
to it. A woman who, in her own words, was determined to go through life with
“passion, compassion, humor and some style”, and would use all those attributes
and more to remind America of where this frustration and militancy was coming
from.
She described the 9/11
attacks as a “hate crime”, and said: “Living in a state of terror was new to
many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of
terror in this country for more than 400 years.”
When I asked her whether
Bill Clinton's presidency had satisfied the hopefulness of the poem she had
delivered at his inauguration, she said: “No. But fortunately there is that
about hope: it is never satisfied. It is met, sometimes, but never satisfied. If
it was satisfied, you'd be hopeless.”
By the time of our second
interview, seven years later, her health had deteriorated considerably. She was
using a walker rather than a cane; could come down the stairs unassisted but
went up in a lift. She was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease, which left her with a plastic tube attached to her nose for much of
the day to give her oxygen. One of her lungs had collapsed. “I smoked for 40
years, so I'm paying those dues,” she says.
But if her body was
failing, her mind was in rude health. “Well, I'm dealing with my 81-itis,” she
said. “And I expect that next year it will be 82-itis. I don't have as far to
go as I had to come. But I'm not making any arrangements, and I plan to keep
working as long as I can … I'm fine as wine in the summertime.”
