Maya Angelou by Lupton Mary;

Author:Lupton, Mary; [MARY JANE LUPTON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4332327
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Chapter 5

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976)

When Angelou’s second volume, Gather Together in My Name, reached its conclusion, Maya, luckily released from a life of drug addiction and prostitution, vowed to maintain her innocence. In the following volume, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, Maya, now in her early twenties, displays a sense of self-rejection that negates the more positive ending of Gather Together. She’s too tall, too skinny. Her teeth stick out. Her hair is “kinked” (4). She is distrustful of people who show an interest in her. How similar this portrait is to the beginning of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where she believes herself to be ugly and deplores her ruffled purple dress. The description is also reminiscent of negative self-images in other autobiographies by African American women, for example, in the early pages of Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), or in the racial confusion experienced by bell hooks when her parents gave her white dolls when she longed for “unwanted, unloved brown dolls covered in dust” (1996, 24).

For the lonely Maya, the major escape is contemporary music. She frequently visits a record store on Fillmore Street in Los Angeles, a place with turntables and stalls for listening to the newest records. Here she is befriended by a white woman, Louise Cox, who offers the suspicious Maya a job. Here she meets her first husband, Tosh Angelos.

Throughout this troubled autobiography, Angelou’s emotions are focused on her son, Guy. She marries Tosh Angelos, in part to please her son. But the marriage is not workable and ends in divorce. Maya is once again a single mother—once again the person responsible for Guy’s needs, his well-being, his survival. Her achievements and failures as a mother-identified woman conflict with her aspirations for a career. These antagonisms form a pattern of tensions in this, Angelou’s most complex volume.

Angelou’s conflicts are concentrated in three basic areas: her marriage; her responsibilities as a mother, daughter, and granddaughter; and her desire to experience the joy of her self. Two incidents in particular contribute to the feelings of dissatisfaction that permeate the book. One is the death of Maya’s beloved grandmother, Momma Henderson; the other is Angelou’s characterization of herself as someone out of tune, someone whose confusion over priorities leads her to certain regrettable errors in judgment. In the final scene, set in Hawaii, these uncertainties are partially resolved.

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