INTERVIEWER
You once told me that you write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible. What’s the function of the Bible?
MAYA ANGELOU
The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the
Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read
the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read
it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself
how beautiful English is. Though I do manage to mumble around in about
seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of
languages. It will do anything.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read it to get inspired to pick up your own pen?
ANGELOU
For melody. For content also. I’m working at trying to be a Christian
and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good
Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good
friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy—it’s serious business.
It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it done. I did it all
day, hotdiggety. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be
it, and then in the evening if you’re honest and have a little courage
you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I only blew it eighty-six times. Not
bad. I’m trying to be a Christian and the Bible helps me to remind
myself what I’m about.
INTERVIEWER
Do you transfer that melody to your own prose? Do you think your
prose has that particular ring that one associates with the King James
version?
ANGELOU
I want to hear how English sounds; how Edna St. Vincent Millay heard
English. I want to hear it, so I read it aloud. It is not so that I can
then imitate it. It is to remind me what a glorious language it is.
Then, I try to be particular and even original. It’s a little like
reading Gerard Manley Hopkins or Paul Laurence Dunbar or James Weldon
Johnson.
INTERVIEWER
And is the bottle of sherry for the end of the day or to fuel the imagination?
ANGELOU
I might have it at six-fifteen a.m. just as soon as I get in, but
usually it’s about eleven o’clock when I’ll have a glass of sherry.
INTERVIEWER
When you are refreshed by the Bible and the sherry, how do you start a day’s work?
ANGELOU
I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a
hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work
by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is
absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never
allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. I
stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go
home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an
orderly dinner—proper, quiet, lovely dinner; and then I go back to work
the next morning. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go into the room and there’ll
be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the
sheets. We think they are moldy. But I only allow them to come in and
empty wastebaskets. I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I
don’t want anything in there. I go into the room and I feel as if all my
beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything. No milkmaids, no
flowers, nothing. I just want to feel and then when I start to
work I’ll remember. I’ll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again,
something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. And I’ll remember how
beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. If you
pull it, it says, OK.” I remember that and I start to write. Nathaniel
Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the
language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look
easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course,
there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya
Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a
natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and
wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work
at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the
auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I’d
see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people’s
backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it’s a light
orange, then the beautiful colors of the people’s faces, the white,
pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan—I would have to
look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of
their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours
in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That’s
that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and
say, I love you. Come to me. I love you. It might take me two or three
weeks just to describe what I’m seeing now.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know when it’s what you want?
ANGELOU
I know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is.
Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I
can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is
the art of saying, “No. No, I’m finished. Bye.” And leaving it alone. I
will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I
won’t do that.
INTERVIEWER
How much revising is involved?
ANGELOU
I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a
shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to
do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop—I’m a serious cook—and
pretend to be normal. I play sane—Good morning! Fine, thank you. And
you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have
houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then
after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning.
And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save
two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really
admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe
fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve
had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the
years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And
many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never
speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much.
And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I
send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever
mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again.
About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I
was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about
fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams
over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept
every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor
sees it, is the most important.
INTERVIEWER
The five autobiographical books follow each other in chronological order. When you started writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings did you know that you would move on from that? It almost works line by line into the second volume.
ANGELOU
I know, but I didn’t really mean to. I thought I was going to write Caged Bird
and that would be it and I would go back to playwriting and writing
scripts for television. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s
wonderful. Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition
established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the
first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always
saying I meaning we. And what a responsibility! Trying
to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to
make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth
century has been a great challenge for me. I’ve written five now and I
really hope—the works are required reading in many universities and
colleges in the United States—that people read my work. The greatest compliment I receive is when people walk up to me on the street or in airports and say, Miss Angelou, I wrote your books last year and I really—I mean I read
. . . That is it—that the person has come into the books so seriously,
so completely, that he or she, black or white, male or female, feels,
That’s my story. I told it. I’m making it up on the spot. That’s the
great compliment. I didn’t expect, originally, that I was going to
continue with the form. I thought I was going to write a little book and
it would be fine and I would go on back to poetry, write a little
music.
INTERVIEWER
What about the genesis of the first book? Who were the people who helped you shape those sentences that leap off the page?
ANGELOU
Oh well, they started years and years before I ever wrote, when I was
very young. I loved the black American minister. I loved the melody of
the voice and the imagery, so rich and almost impossible. The minister
in my church in Arkansas, when I was very young, would use phrases such
as “God stepped out, the sun over his right shoulder, the moon nestling
in the palm of his hand.” I mean, I just loved it, and I loved the black
poets, and I loved Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe, and I liked
Matthew Arnold a lot—still do. Being mute for a number of years, I read
and memorized, and all those people have had tremendous influence . . .
in the first book and even in the most recent book.
INTERVIEWER
Mute?
ANGELOU
I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the
person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my
child’s mind—seven and a half years old—I thought my voice had killed
him. So I stopped talking for five years. Of course I’ve written about
this in Caged Bird.
INTERVIEWER
When did you decide you were going to be a writer? Was there a moment
when you suddenly said, This is what I wish to do for the rest of my
life?
ANGELOU
Well, I had written a television series for PBS, and I was going out
to California. I thought I was a poet and playwright. That was what I
was going to do the rest of my life. Or become famous as a real estate
broker. This sounds like name-dropping, and it really is, but James
Baldwin took me over to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer one evening.
All three of them are great talkers. They went on with their stories and
I had to fight for the right to play it good. I had to insert myself to
tell some stories too. Well, the next day Judy Feiffer called Bob
Loomis, an editor at Random House, and suggested that if he could get me
to write an autobiography, he’d have something. So he phoned me and I
said, No, under no circumstances; I certainly will not do such a thing.
So I went out to California to produce this series on African and black
American culture. Loomis called me out there about three times. Each
time I said no. Then he talked to James Baldwin. Jimmy gave him a ploy
which always works with me—though I’m not proud to say that. The next
time he called, he said, Well, Miss Angelou. I won’t bother you again.
It’s just as well that you don’t attempt to write this book, because to
write autobiography as literature is almost impossible. I said, What are
you talking about? I’ll do it. I’m not proud about this button that can
be pushed and I will immediately jump.
INTERVIEWER
Do you select a dominant theme for each book?
ANGELOU
I try to remember times in my life, incidents in which there was the
dominating theme of cruelty, or kindness, or generosity, or envy, or
happiness, glee . . . perhaps four incidents in the period I’m going to
write about. Then I select the one that lends itself best to my device
and that I can write as drama without falling into melodrama.
INTERVIEWER
Did you write for a particular audience?
ANGELOU
I thought early on if I could write a book for black girls it would
be good because there were so few books for a black girl to read that
said this is how it is to grow up. Then, I thought, I’d better, you
know, enlarge that group, the market group that I’m trying to reach. I
decided to write for black boys and then white girls and then white
boys.But what I try to keep in mind mostly is my craft. That’s what I really try for; I try to allow myself to be impelled by my art—if that doesn’t sound too pompous and weird—accept the impulse and then try my best to have a command of the craft. If I’m feeling depressed and losing my control then I think about the reader. But that is very rare—to think about the reader when the work is going on.
INTERVIEWER
So you don’t keep a particular reader in mind when you sit down in
that hotel room and begin to compose or write. It’s yourself.
ANGELOU
It’s myself . . . and my reader. I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a
fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader.
I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going
behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who
will pay the dues. There’s a phrase in West Africa, in Ghana; it’s
called “deep talk.” For instance, there’s a saying: “The trouble for the
thief is not how to steal the chief’s bugle but where to blow it.” Now,
on the face of it, one understands that. But when you really think
about it, it takes you deeper. In West Africa they call that “deep
talk.” I’d like to think I write “deep talk.” When you read me, you
should be able to say, Gosh, that’s pretty. That’s lovely. That’s nice.
Maybe there’s something else? Better read it again. Years ago I read a
man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro.
Machado de Assis is a South American writer—black father, Portuguese
mother—writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I
went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was
in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the
conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a
trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had
watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I
found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to
write. I would write so that the reader says, That’s so nice. Oh boy,
that’s pretty. Let me read that again. I think that’s why Caged Bird
is in its twenty-first printing in hardcover and its twenty-ninth in
paper. All my books are still in print, in hardback as well as paper,
because people go back and say, Let me read that. Did she really say that?
INTERVIEWER
The books are episodic, aren’t they? Almost as if you had put
together a string of short stories. I wondered if as an autobiographer
you ever fiddled with the truth to make the story better.
ANGELOU
Well, sometimes. I love the phrase “fiddle with.” It’s so English.
Sometimes I make a character from a composite of three or four people,
because the essence in any one person is not sufficiently strong to be
written about. Essentially though, the work is true though sometimes I
fiddle with the facts. Many of the people I’ve written about are alive
today and I have them to face. I wrote about an ex-husband—he’s an
African—in The Heart of a Woman. Before I did, I called him in
Dar-es-Salaam and said, I’m going to write about some of our years
together. He said, Now before you ask, I want you to know that I shall
sign my release, because I know you will not lie. However, I am sure I
shall argue with you about your interpretation of the truth.
INTERVIEWER
Did he enjoy his portrait finally or did you argue about it?
ANGELOU
Well, he didn’t argue, but I was kind too.
INTERVIEWER
I would guess this would make it very easy for you to move from
autobiography into novel, where you can do anything you want with your
characters.
ANGELOU
Yes, but for me, fiction is not the sweetest form. I really am trying
to do something with autobiography now. It has caught me. I’m using the
first-person singular and trying to make that the first-person plural,
so that anybody can read the work and say, Hmm, that’s the truth, yes,
uh-huh, and live in the work. It’s a large, ambitious dream. But I love
the form.
INTERVIEWER
Aren’t the extraordinary events of your life very hard for the rest of us to identify with?
ANGELOU
Oh my God, I’ve lived a very simple life! You can say, Oh yes, at
thirteen this happened to me and at fourteen . . . But those are facts.
But the facts can obscure the truth, what it really felt like. Every
human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up.
It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s
the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking
spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t
grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth,
the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you
take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find
out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe
even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial
costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What
it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.
INTERVIEWER
Aren’t you tempted to lie? Novelists lie, don’t they?
ANGELOU
I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great
novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling
the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people,
made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about
the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep,
fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other
and love each other.
INTERVIEWER
James Baldwin, along with a lot of writers in this series, said that
“when you’re writing you’re trying to find out something you didn’t
know.” When you write do you search for something that you didn’t know
about yourself or about us?
ANGELOU
Yes. When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are,
what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on
from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that. But I’m also trying
for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really
love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to
explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and the delicacies of our
existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real
wit is shown in language. We need language.
INTERVIEWER
Baldwin also said that his family urged him not to become a writer.
His father felt that there was a white monopoly in publishing. Did you
ever have any of those feelings—that you were going up against something
that was really immensely difficult for a black writer?
ANGELOU
Yes, but I didn’t find it so just in writing. I’ve found it so in all
the things I’ve attempted. In the shape of American society, the white
male is on top, then the white female, and then the black male, and at
the bottom is the black woman. So that’s been always so. That is nothing
new. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t shock me, shake me up . . .
INTERVIEWER
I can understand that in various social stratifications, but why in art?
ANGELOU
Well, unfortunately, racism is pervasive. It doesn’t stop at the
university gate, or at the ballet stage. I knew great black dancers,
male and female, who were told early on that they were not shaped,
physically, for ballet. Today, we see very few black ballet dancers.
Unfortunately, in the theater and in film, racism and sexism stand at
the door. I’m the first black female director in Hollywood; in order to
direct, I went to Sweden and took a course in cinematography so I would
understand what the camera would do. Though I had written a screenplay,
and even composed the score, I wasn’t allowed to direct it. They brought
in a young Swedish director who hadn’t even shaken a black person’s
hand before. The film was Georgia, Georgia with Diana Sands.
People either loathed it or complimented me. Both were wrong, because it
was not what I wanted, not what I would have done if I had been allowed
to direct it. So I thought, Well, what I guess I’d better do is be ten
times as prepared. That is not new. I wish it was. In every case I know I
have to be ten times more prepared than my white counterpart.
INTERVIEWER
Even as a writer where . . .
ANGELOU
Absolutely.
INTERVIEWER
Yet a manuscript is what arrives at the editor’s desk, not a person, not a body.
ANGELOU
Yes. I must have such control of my tools, of words, that I can make
this sentence leap off the page. I have to have my writing so polished
that it doesn’t look polished at all. I want a reader, especially an
editor, to be a half-hour into my book before he realizes it’s reading
he’s doing.
INTERVIEWER
But isn’t that the goal of every person who sits down at a typewriter?
ANGELOU
Absolutely. Yes. It’s possible to be overly sensitive, to carry a bit
of paranoia along with you. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It
keeps you sharp, keeps you on your toes.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a thread one can see through the five autobiographies? It
seems to me that one prevailing theme is the love of your child.
ANGELOU
Yes, well, that’s true. I think that that’s a particular. I suppose,
if I’m lucky, the particular is seen in the general. There is, I hope, a
thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be
defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a
diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is
crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves.
Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I
write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that
we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter
the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much
better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than
unalike. There’s no real mystique. Every human being, every Jew,
Christian, backslider, Muslim, Shintoist, Zen Buddhist, atheist,
agnostic, every human being wants a nice place to live, a good place for
the children to go to school, healthy children, somebody to love, the
courage, the unmitigated gall to accept love in return, someplace to
party on Saturday or Sunday night, and someplace to perpetuate that God.
There’s no mystique. None. And if I’m right in my work, that’s what my
work says.
INTERVIEWER
Have you been back to Stamps, Arkansas?
ANGELOU
About 1970, Bill Moyers, Willie Morris, and I were at some affair.
Judith Moyers as well—I think she was the instigator. We may have had
two or three scotches, or seven or eight. Willie Morris was then with Harper’s
magazine. The suggestion came up: Why don’t we all go back South?
Willie Morris was from Yazoo, Mississippi. Bill Moyers is from Marshall,
Texas, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump—about as far as you can
throw a chitterling—from Stamps, my hometown. Sometime in the middle of
the night there was this idea: Why don’t Bill Moyers and Maya Angelou go
to Yazoo, Mississippi to visit Willie Morris? Then why don’t Willie
Morris and Maya Angelou go to Marshall, Texas, to visit Bill Moyers? I
said, Great. I was agreeing with both. Then they said Willie Morris and
Bill Moyers would go to Stamps, Arkansas to visit Maya Angelou, and I
said, No way, José. I’m not going back to that little town with two
white men! I will not do it! Well, after a while Bill Moyers called
me—he was doing a series on “creativity”—and he said, Maya, come on,
let’s go to Stamps. I said, No way. He continued, I want to talk about
creativity. I said, You know, I don’t want to know where it resides. I
really don’t, and I still don’t. One of the problems in the West is that
people are too busy putting things under microscopes and so forth.
Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts. All I want to know is
that creativity is there. I want to know that I can put my hand behind
my back like Tom Thumb and pull out a plum. Anyway, Moyers went on and
on and so did Judith and before I knew it, I found myself in Stamps,
Arkansas. Stamps, Arkansas! With Bill Moyers, in front of my
grandmother’s door. My God! We drove out of town—me with Bill and
Judith. Back of us was the crew, a New York crew, you know, very “Right,
dig where I’m comin’ from, like, get it on,” and so forth. We got about
three miles outside of Stamps and I said, Stop the car. Let the car
behind us pull up. Get those people in with you and I’ll take their car.
I suddenly was taken back to being twelve years old in a Southern, tiny
town where my grandmother told me, Sistah, never be on a country road
with any white boys. I was two hundred years older than black pepper,
but I said, Stop the car. I did. I got out of the car. And I knew these
guys—certainly Bill. Bill Moyers is a friend and brother-friend to me;
we care for each other. But dragons, fears, the grotesques of childhood
always must be confronted at childhood’s door. Any other place is
esoteric and has nothing to do with the great fear that is laid upon one
as a child. So anyway, we did Bill Moyers’s show. And it seems to be a
very popular program, and it’s the first of the “creativity” programs . .
.
INTERVIEWER
Did going back assuage those childhood fears?
ANGELOU
They are there like griffins hanging off the sides of old and tired European buildings.
INTERVIEWER
It hadn’t changed?
ANGELOU
No, worse if anything.
INTERVIEWER
But it was forty years before you went back to the South, to North
Carolina. Was that because of a fear of finding griffins everywhere,
Stamps being a typical community of the South?
ANGELOU
Well, I’ve never felt the need to prove anything to an audience. I’m
always concerned about who I am to me first—to myself and God. I really
am. I didn’t go south because I didn’t want to pull up whatever clout I
had, because that’s boring, that’s not real, not true; that doesn’t tell
me anything. If I had known I was afraid, I would have gone earlier. I
just thought I’d find the South really unpleasant. I have moved south
now. I live there.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps writing the autobiographies, finding out about yourself, would have made it much easier to go back.
ANGELOU
I know many think that writing sort of “clears the air.” It doesn’t
do that at all. If you are going to write autobiography, don’t expect
that it will clear anything up. It makes it more clear to you, but it
doesn’t alleviate anything. You simply know it better, you have names
for people.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a part in Caged Bird where you and your brother want to do a scene from The Merchant of Venice, and you don’t dare do it because your grandmother would find out that Shakespeare was not only deceased but white.
ANGELOU
I don’t think she’d have minded if she’d known he was deceased. I
tried to pacify her—my mother knew Shakespeare but my grandmother was
raising us. When I told her I wanted to recite—it was actually Portia’s
speech—Mama said to me, Now, sistah, what are you goin’ to render? The
phrase was so fetching. The phrase was “Now, little mistress Marguerite
will render her rendition.” Mama said, Now, sistah, what are you goin’
to render? I said, Mama, I’m going to render a piece written by William
Shakespeare. My grandmother asked me, Now, sistah, who is this very
William Shakespeare? I had to tell her that he was white, it was going
to come out. Somebody would let it out. So I told Mama, Mama, he’s white
but he’s dead. Then I said, He’s been dead for centuries, thinking
she’d forgive him because of this little idiosyncrasy. She said, No
Ma’am, little mistress you will not. No Ma’am, little mistress you will
not. So I rendered James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee
Cullen, Langston Hughes.
INTERVIEWER
Were books allowed in the house?
ANGELOU
None of those books were in the house; they were in the school. I’d
bring them home from school, and my brother gave me Edgar Allan Poe
because he knew I loved him. I loved him so much I called him EAP. But
as I said, I had a problem when I was young: from the time I was seven
and a half to the time I was twelve and a half I was a mute. I could
speak but I didn’t speak for five years and I was what was called a
“volunteer mute.” But I read and I memorized just masses—I don’t know if
one is born with photographic memory but I think you can develop it. I
just have that.
INTERVIEWER
What is the significance of the title All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes?
ANGELOU
I never agreed, even as a young person, with the Thomas Wolfe title You Can’t Go Home Again. Instinctively I didn’t. But the truth is, you can never leave
home. You take it with you; it’s under your fingernails; it’s in the
hair follicles; it’s in the way you smile; it’s in the ride of your
hips, in the passage of your breasts; it’s all there, no matter where
you go. You can take on the affectations and the postures of other
places and even learn to speak their ways. But the truth is, home is
between your teeth. Everybody’s always looking for it: Jews go to
Israel; black Americans and Africans in the Diaspora go to Africa;
Europeans, Anglo-Saxons go to England and Ireland; people of Germanic
background go to Germany. It’s a very queer quest. We can kid ourselves;
we can tell ourselves, Oh yes, honey, I live in Tel Aviv, actually . . .
The truth is a stubborn fact. So this book is about trying to go home.
INTERVIEWER
If you had to endow a writer with the most necessary pieces of
equipment, other than, of course, yellow legal pads, what would these
be?
ANGELOU
Ears. Ears. To hear the language. But there’s no one piece of equipment that is most necessary. Courage, first.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever feel that you could not get your work published? Would
you have continued to write if Random House had returned your
manuscript?
ANGELOU
I didn’t think it was going to be very easy, but I knew I was going
to do something. The real reason black people exist at all today is
because there’s a resistance to a larger society that says you can’t do
it—you can’t survive. And if you survive, you certainly can’t thrive.
And if you thrive, you can’t thrive with any passion or compassion or
humor or style. There’s a saying, a song that says, “Don’t you let
nobody turn you ’round, turn you ’round. Don’t you let nobody turn you
‘round.” Well, I’ve always believed that. So knowing that, knowing that
nobody could turn me ’round, if I didn’t publish, well, I would design
this theater we’re sitting in. Yes. Why not? Some human being did it. I
agree with Terence. Terence said homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me. When you look up
Terence in the encyclopedia, you see beside his name, in italics, sold
to a Roman senator, freed by that Senator. He became the most popular
playwright in Rome. Six of his plays and that statement have come down
to us from 154 b.c. This man, not born white, not born free, without any
chance of ever receiving citizenship, said, I am a human being. Nothing
human can be alien to me. Well, I believe that. I ingested that,
internalized that at about thirteen or twelve. I believed if I set my
mind to it, maybe I wouldn’t be published but I would write a great
piece of music or do something about becoming a real friend. Yes, I
would do something wonderful. It might be with my next-door neighbor, my
gentleman friend, with my lover, but it would be wonderful as far as I
could do it. So I never have been very concerned about the world telling
me how successful I am. I don’t need that.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned courage . . .
ANGELOU
. . .the most important of all the virtues. Without that virtue you can’t practice any other virtue with consistency.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of white writers who have written of the black experience—Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner?
ANGELOU
Well, sometimes I am disappointed—more often than not. That’s unfair,
because I’m not suggesting the writer is lying about what he or she
sees. It’s my disappointment, really, in that he or she doesn’t see more
deeply, more carefully. I enjoy seeing Peter O’Toole or Michael Caine
enact the role of an upper-class person in England. There the working
class has had to study the upper-class, has been obliged to do so, to
lift themselves out of their positions. Well, black Americans have had
to study white Americans. For centuries under slavery, the smile or the
grimace on a white man’s face or the flow of a hand on a white woman
could inform a black person that you’re about to be sold or flogged. So
we have studied the white American, where the white American has not
been obliged to study us. So often it is as if the writer is looking
through a glass darkly. And I’m always a little—not a little—saddened by
that poor vision.
INTERVIEWER
And you can pick it up in an instant if you . . .
ANGELOU
Yes, yes. There are some who delight and inform. It’s so much better,
you see, for me, when a writer like Edna St. Vincent Millay speaks so
deeply about her concern for herself and does not offer us any
altruisms. Then when I look through her eyes at how she sees a black or
an Asian my heart is lightened. But many of the other writers disappoint
me.
INTERVIEWER
What is the best part of writing for you?
ANGELOU
Well, I could say the end. But when the language lends itself to me,
when it comes and submits, when it surrenders and says, I am yours,
darling—that’s the best part.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t skip around when you write?
ANGELOU
No, I may skip around in revision, just to see what connections I can find.
INTERVIEWER
Is most of the effort made in putting the words down onto the paper or is it in revision?
ANGELOU
Some work flows and, you know, you can catch three days. It’s like . . .I think the word in sailing is scudding—you know, three days of just scudding. Other days it’s just awful—plodding and backing up, trying to take out all the ands, ifs, tos, fors, buts, wherefores, therefores, howevers; you know, all those.
INTERVIEWER
And then, finally, you write “The End” and there it is; you have a little bit of sherry.
ANGELOU
A lot of sherry then.
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