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The
Heart of a Woman |
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by
Maya Angelou |
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(front
cover of book) |
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___________________
Maya Angelou has had more lives than the proverbial cat, and in The Heart of
a Woman she continues the account of her remarkable life begun in I Know
Why the Caged Bird Sings. In the first book of her bestselling
autobiographical series, she describes her traumatic childhood in the small,
segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s. Gather Together in My
Name picks up the story in the postwar years, when Maya, a single teenager
with an infant son becomes, in short order, a cook, a madam, a dancer, and a
prostitute. Next comes Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like
Christmas, an account of her twenties and her unsuccessful first marriage to
a white man. The Heart of a Woman, the fourth in the series, takes us
through one of the most exciting and formative periods of Angelou's amazing
life: her beginnings as a writer and an activist in New York.
Angelou has a happy knack of attracting the best and the brightest into her
orbit, and The Heart of a Woman offers a veritable cornucopia of black
luminaries in its pages. Singer Billie Holiday, writers John Ellins and Paule
Marshall, jazz musicians Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and actors Godfrey
Cambridge and James Earl Jones--Maya meets and learns from them all. Political
activism soon follows as Ms. Angelou first organizes a theatrical benefit for
the Reverend Martin Luther King and then becomes the director of the New York
Southern Christian Leadership Conference office. Her involvement in the civil
rights movement eventually brings her into contact with African freedom fighters
Oliver Tambo and the charming Vusumzi Make, whom she marries and follows to
Africa.
The Heart of a Woman is as honest, painful, funny, outraged, and
outrageous as Angelou herself. From her debut at the Apollo Theatre to her
meeting with Malcolm X, Maya Angelou gives us something to cheer about and
plenty to ponder as well.
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