Tag Archives: Maya Angelou

Singin’ and Swingin’ & Getting Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou

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Singin’ and Swingin’ & Getting Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou is the third volume of her seven book autobiography. As ever the writing is really good but this one was a real eye-opener for me, was there no end to Maya’s talent?!

In this one Maya gets married to a white man of Greek extraction – and gets divorced – he didn’t want a wife he really just wanted someone to look after him and the house. Maya was happy being a housewife for a year, she learned gourmet cooking and enjoyed the security that her husband gave her, then she needed more in her life. She had given up her job in a record shop when she got married and now she had to start again and support herself and her young son.

She got a job in a nightclub as a dancer, with white women who were strippers, but she was very popular with the clientelle. A couple of job changes later she gets an offer she can’t refuse, a part in the musical Porgy and Bess which has been wildly successful at home but is now going on a tour of parts of Europe and Africa.

Maya fnds herself in a similar position to her mother in the past, she had had to leave her children with her mother and Maya now has to do the same with her young son Clyde. She’s torn but can’t pass up the chance of visiting Paris, apart from other places. Canada, their first port of call had a magical sort of promised land reputation for the black cast and they were so excited to get to the place that escaped slaves made for in the past, it meant freedom for them. Canada didn’t disappoint, in fact nowhere did.

This one is really entertaining but apart from that it’s so noticeable how Maya takes every opportunity to learn something new. She buys a dictionary and phrase book for every country that she visits and wastes no time in getting out there and conversing with the locals. She even tackled Serbo-Croatian. The tour is just as succesful abroad as it was in the US and although it’s 1954 and they were visiting places where often the people hadn’t ever seen any black people, they were welcomed and feted. It was a new experience for them.

Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou

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Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou was first published in 1974 and it’s the second book in the author’s six volume  series of autobiography.

It begins in World War 2 which for some was a good time, jobs were plentiful in civilian life and black people who had been scraping a living doing bottom of the pile jobs had been able to earn good money in factories which were making munitions and other things needed for the war effort.  It was a good time for some, but with the peace all that stopped and unemployment loomed.

Maya got work as a cook in a restaurant, and she was good at it, but one of her male customers showed interest in more than her cooking, and so begins his charm offensive. Maya is in need of love, she’s an easy victim for a handsom older man, but it doesn’t last long. She’s reluctant to move on because her baby son has settled with a baby minder, but Maya’s brother persuades her to move to another state to begin again.

I liked this book but not quite as much as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first one in this series. Maya seems to have been a strange combination of street-wise sassiness and complete naivete where a certain sort of man is concerned. I suppose that more or less being abandoned by her own mother left her vulnerable and open to being abused by scumbag men.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings cover

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was first published in 1968 and in the UK it was reprinted in 1988 by Virago. As I recall it was very popular back then, just about everyone seemed to be reading it – which just about guarantees that I won’t read a book, I hate to join the crowd I suppose. I’m thrawn (stubborn) that way!

However, when I watched that TV programme about Maya Angelou going on a pilgrimage to Robert Burns’s birthplace, and taking part in a Burns celebration, as well as visiting the famous Bachelors’ Club, I felt that I had to read this book now. Maya Angelou came across as such a lovely warm and funny person, it was time to catch up with her writing. This is the first in her series of seven autobiographies and I’ve already requested the next two in the series from the library.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is of course about the first 16 years of Maya’s life as a black child growing up in America’s south in the 1930s, mainly Alabama. Life was tough and traumatic but her upbringing by strong women in the shape of her grandmother and mother must have gone a long way to shaping the successful woman that she eventually became.