Original title – A Sister For The Ages. From March 8, 1989. – JDW
I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ …
There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt. – Maya Angelou
Like some great white knight riding to our rescue, one great black woman rode into town.
Maya Angelou, MISS Maya Angelou, appeared here recently as part of Julie Mancini’s Portland Arts & Lectures series.
Maya means ‘mine’ and for too few days she was ours.
Miss Angelou performed twice, once at the First Congregational Church, hard by downtown south park blocks, and then at Jeffereson High School in a neighborhood with more than its share of abandoned homes and drug houses. The first audience was primarily white adults, upper-middle class and college-educated. The second consisted of high school students from around the city, many of them black, many of them poor, all of them young.
Miss Angelou’s message remained the same: “All my conscious life, all my aware life, has been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world… the liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own.”
Miss Angelou is definitely free. She knows why the caged bird sings. With word and gesture, with poem and song, with style and example, she communicates to all races, both sexes, of every age.
She has been bodacious enough to invent her own life daily. It is a life well examined, a paradigm for us all.
I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.
Such a powerful speaker! At times, her face would express some feeling withheld; anger, tears, disappointment, fears, doubts… but just for a moment, and then it would be gone. Miss Angelou knows the meaning of struggle, she knows the value of victory. She shared her special vision with the hope – someday – that vision will be common.
She’s pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down for a long time.
Life has touched, not always softly.
She in turn touches us.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
I listened twice twice to the words of Miss Maya Angelou and I heard and I believed. I read her poems and prose and I was moved and improved.
I joined with her in laughter and I was enlightened and lighter.
She seemed to reach out, to get her loving arms around all twelve-hundred (1200) students, to hug them close to her bounteous bosom, to make them feel warm and safe and proud and hopeful. And, as tears of love came to her eyes, she implored them to refuse drugs and to read poetry.
Get off the streets and get into the libraries, she said.
Nothing that is human, she reminded us, is alien, because we are all human, black and white, red and yellow.
Her example, vital, full of grace, standing right in front of us, that was her greatest gift.
Miss Maya Angelou is the truth. And the children understood that. And at least a couple of lives were changed.
I heard her once – Miss Maya Angelou – read this poem out loud and I swear I knew exactly what she was saying.
I swear I did.
Caged Bird
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.