| |
this just in
by Debra Kamin
phenom
She was so tiny.
Stooped and tiny with her bosoms down to there.
She looked frail, breakable, like a mottled piece of china in a smart
black frock and pearls.
She was nothing like I had imagined.
I had seen pictures of Maya Angelou all my life—on book jackets,
posters, and the front pages of newspapers. I had heard her on NPR describing
her haywire childhood in that velvet purr of a voice, and I had spent
many a school night, curled in bed with an over-thumbed volume, mouthing
her lyrics with the reverence some save for psalms.
I had expected someone larger.
In nearly all of her works, Angelou makes herself into a monster. “I
was ugly, flat-footed, and too dang tall,” she has said of herself
as a girl. Biographers put her at over six feet tall. And with her more
than sixty doctorates, her Grammy, her Woman of the Year Award and her
Lifetime Achievement in Literature award, I expected someone of stature.
But the Maya Angelou I saw, leaning on her cane on the way to the microphone
in the gymnasium at the University of California, San Diego, was diminutive.
And with the poor lighting and even poorer acoustics, it was questionable
whether she was there at all.
I was disappointed. I was seated in an uncomfortable metal seat in a poorly-lit
hall designed for sports, not Sapphics. If I strained my eyes enough,
I could just see past the rows of halter-topped sorority girls to the
stage, where the 78-year-old poet was dwarfed by the podium.
But then, the lady began to sing. And I finally understood what it was
all about.
Her life is a song in itself. Her stories are magical, I’ve always
believed, because she has a richness of experience to draw upon unlike
any other modern American. In her challenges and triumphs are at least
a dozen lifetimes, condensed and tackled by one phenomenal bulldozer of
a woman. One of my favorite Maya Angelou quotes, memorized many years
ago, reads, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,
but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” And to hear
Dr. Angelou tell the story of her magnificent existence in poesy, song,
and plain language, is enough to give even the most downtrodden visitor
a taste of that courage.
Angelou was three years old when she and her brother Bailey were put on
a railroad car and sent across the country with nothing but a note pinned
to their jackets to help them get there. She was raped at age seven and
turned silent, only to find her voice five years later.
Few people thought she would be anything except a failure. And as I closed
my eyes in that gym, letting her words wrap themselves around me, the
song became a question. Where is my excuse? Where is yours?
Poetry, pronounced in the author’s own voice, is jolting. It is
a stiff energy drink to the soul, served cold. My thighs tingled. My hands
shook. I wanted nothing more than to jump out of that bleacher seat, run
into the night, and start my life from scratch.
But I couldn’t move. I sat, riveted, through Dr. Angelou’s
final goodbye bow, and was even then thirsty for just a little bit more.
If American history had had its way, Angelou would be on an anonymous
Grandmarm in Stamps, Arkansas. She would be poor, dumb, and equally ignorant
and ignored. This was no affirmative action baby. This was a woman who,
by pure genius and gumption, pulled herself up and out and onward.
Where is my excuse? Where is yours?
When this phenomenal old lady leaves this world, among her many legacies
will be absolute baselessness of prejudice. One evening with Dr. Angelou
is enough to unravel all tenets of racism. In her spirit, I enthusiastically
stood behind our cover story this month. May the stories of these brave
gay Jews, who have so often faced marginalized just like Dr. Angelou,
inspire you to lose a little more prejudice, live a little more life,
and, as Dr. Angelou would put it, grab the world by the lapels.
For feedback, contact editor@sdjewishjournal.com.
|
