“I thought my voice killed him,” she says. She tells how she became effectively mute for five years thereafter. Four days after his release, he was murdered, presumably by members of Angelou’s family or friends of the family. She describes the rape and how she told her brother about it, resulting in her attacker going to jail - for a single day. Some of it is in her own evocative words. Angelou’s song-and-dance talents are jaw-dropping to people who have only thought of her as a writer. Some of its power is in its extraordinary vintage footage. And Still I Rise, which has already aired on PBS but is still available for streaming and on DVD, captures all of this richly and deeply.
AMERICAN MASTERS MAYA ANGELOU TV
She toured in a national company of Porgy and Bess and appeared in the TV production of Roots.īut she was made legendary by both her poetry and her fearless autobiographies, in which she candidly disclosed such personal crises as her rape at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend when she was only eight. She was the editor of an English language newspaper in Egypt. She was the first female African American streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Angelou was a poet, yes, but she was also a dancer and a club singer. It was not, Clinton made clear, merely that “it seemed so perfect that somebody who had spent those years in Stamps, Arkansas would be on the platform with the new - then young - president from Arkansas.” It was instead more about the great arc Angelou’s life had traveled. “It did not take long after we decided that a poet should be at his inauguration to ask Maya Angelou.” “I remember so vividly Bill’s and my conversations about his inauguration,” Hillary said. Mercifully perhaps, she died two years before she could see much of the hope that attended the early days of the Barack Obama presidency fade as a new era of nationalism, factionalism, and racial tension has arisen in America.īoth Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the premiere at the Schomburg Center and spoke about Angelou’s legacy and about the reason she was chosen to deliver that 1993 address. Clinton was often jokingly referred to as America’s first black president, but Angelou lived long enough - 86 years - to witness most of the administration of the man who filled that role for real. She became even more of a global icon when she delivered her celebrated poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993. And they frame too why both she and this elegiac new documentary matter so much.Īngelou was a force in American arts and letters even before her acclaimed autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969.
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That temperamental fulcrum-the pivot point where grit, strength, artistry and the gentle business of nourishing other people achieve perfect balance-may best describe the wonderfully contradictory character Angelou was. “You’d risk your life for her shepherd’s pie too.” “I’d always let her know I was raiding the refrigerator so she’d know it was me,” Whack said before a recent preview screening of the film at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Late at night, long after dinner, Whack would sometimes get a craving for one more taste of that night’s meal-but she’d keep that gun in mind.
Angelou may have been known to the world for her writing, but she was known to her family and other intimates for her extraordinary cooking. That was something Rita Coburn Whack, the co-director of the new American Masters documentary on the life of Angelou, And Still I Rise, had to keep in mind when she would spend nights at Angelou’s home while working on the film.
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