Maya Angelou

3 Pages 636 Words

Maya Angelou is a writer, poet, performer, and a director. Before anything else, she is woman; a black woman. She was born Marguerite Johnson, on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. After her parents’ marriage broke up, Angelou and her older brother, who gave her the nickname “Maya,” moved to the rural town of Stamps, Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother. In the mid-1930s, after the two children had returned to St. Louis to live with their mother, her mother’s boyfriend raped Maya, who was only seven. A few days after she was forced to testify at his trial, her rapist was found beaten to death in an alley, apparently murdered by some of Angelou’s uncles. Traumatized by the whole experience, Angelou stopped speaking altogether, and she and her brother, Bailey, moved back to Arkansas.
Through her study of writing, literature, and music, Angelou gained the will to speak again. Maya had found the voice that would be heard by everyone in years to come. By the age of 12, she became known in the town of Stamps for her precocious intelligence. While attending high school, she won a scholarship in dance and drama to the California Labor School. In addition to her studies, Angelou worked to earn extra money, becoming San Francisco’s first African-American and first female streetcar conductor. Just after she graduated from high school in 1945, her son, Clyde “Guy” Johnson, was born. She held a succession of jobs in San Francisco and San Diego—where she worked as a nightclub waitress and as a madam for two prostitutes—and was turned down for enlistment in the United States Army after her background check revealed that the California Labor School was in fact suspected by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a training ground for future Communists.
In the early 1950s, Angelou was married for three years to a Greek-born former sailor, Tosh Angelos; she took a variation of his name as her stage name f...