The news of Maya Angelou’s death arrived with the abruptness of a great twister — violent, without warning, tearing things up and flipping things over.
I ached the way the soul aches in the world when a great soul is lost from it.
So begins a magnificent column which describes the ability of Angelou to speak to and inflame the souls of others, and which demonstrates the power of beauty of the writing of Blow.
You need to read Maya & Me & Maya, subtitled "What Maya Angelou Meant to Me" from which I have just shared the opening.
Blow will explain connections - how part of his youth was spent one county over from where Angelou was raised.
He places her in a pantheon of writers whom he calls his literary fathers and mothers, people like Alice Walker and Langston Hughes, and others, and says of them
They helped me to see myself and love myself when I felt least seen and least loved.
They saved me.
By now you have a sense of the power - and yes, beauty - of this column.
You should read it.
Let me add a few observations if I may.
Like too many Americans I was woefully unaware of Angelou's work until January 20, 1993, when Bill Clinton, emulating John F. Kennedy's having had Robert Frost read a poem at his own inaugural some 32 years earlier, had Angelou read a poem for the occasion.
That led me to read more of her work.
Later her life would intersect mine in a different way, when as a teacher I spent several months teaching at a non-profit charter middle school part of a complex dedicated to Maya Angelou, with her blessing. Her life and her words served as an inspiration to our staff and our students.
Blow writes
Reading her words, for the first time, I could see myself and my life in literature.
I cannot say that her words had that impact upon me, unless one were to say that my scribblings in notebooks and the words I offer online somehow could pass for literature. Except like much of the literature that I have read since adolescence, her words enabled me to see the world through different eyes. Perhaps I first experienced how different my life as an upper middle class white Jewish male was from so many when I read Ralph Ellison. Other writers among those listed by Blow as his literary parents also stretched my imagination, opened my senses to a world that I had not even recognized had existed. Perhaps this was because this reading overlapped my own growing awareness both of the injustice I saw exposed through the burgeoning Civil Rights movement that played a major role in my own life, and because it invited me to experience the world through the perceptions and and expressions of others very different from me. I suppose the closest parallels I can offer are two very different writers who also stretched my awareness and opened my soul. The first was John Steinbeck, who so often wrote about the differences and clashes between mainstream society and some subset - think of works as varied as
Grapes of Wrath,
The Wayward Bus,
The Pearl, and
Cannery Row. The other was Feodor Dostoevsky, whose ability to expose and integrate into a larger picture troubled aspects of the human soul spoke rather clearly to the troubled adolescent I was.
There is a richness to what Blow shares of his experience of Angelou. One expression that grabbed my attention was this:
She gave the people I knew — and the person I was — value, and she did so with a phenomenal power of presence, her words lingering and her voice swelling.
Ponder that. Think how important it is for that connection to be made. If the canon of literature our young people experience is too narrow they miss that opportunity for themselves. And that presumes that we do not, as current educational policy seems to imply, devalue literature because it does not have immediate financial reward either for those who consume it or in making them productive cogs in the economic machinery of the nation.
But perhaps that is why we need literature, lots of it.
To broaden our perspectives. I started with Steinbeck. I read books by Blacks and Hispanics, then began to explore the Jewish experience, particularly relevant given my own last name of Bernstein. I read literature in translation like Dostoevsky, but also from France, Italy, Germany, Japan . . .
My imagination was broadened, my understanding and sensitivity was deepened.
Blow writes of Angelou
She demonstrated to me, even as a child, the overwhelming power of a great story well told, the way it could change hearts and change history. I am forever in her debt for that.
great story well told
change hearts and change history
I teach Social Studies. I have taught Social Issues and Comparative Religion, American History and World History. Most of the time I have taught Government, and next year I will teach Economics.
Somehow in all I have taught I have found myself using literature - novels, memoirs, poetry, dram - as well as film (the past few days my government students have been watching "12 Angry Men") and music and art and architecture . . ..
The greatest learning, that of the most depth and impact, comes about when both the mind and the soul are engaged.
Stories help us make that connection.
So do storytellers, who can provide for us a framework through which we can make sense of the world, who can if they choose give us hope.
Which is why I will end this post not with the end of Blow's magnificent column, but with some material a bit earlier, one which describes wonderfully both the person and the impact of Maya Angeloy:
Angelou subscribed to a sort of grand unification theory of humanity. Where others saw difference, she saw sameness. Where others lost hope in the midst of acrimony, she held fast to the possibility of harmony. This was her great gift — being a light in the darkness.
While in search of the truth, she became the truth.
It is to my mind in becoming the the truth, as Blow describes her, that she clearly shows how she is a literary parent of Charles M. Blow, whose own writing is itself a search for truth.
Read his column.
Savor it.
I did.
Peace.