Four days before Mayo Angelou passed away from this world, she talked to her 385,000 followers on Twitter.
“Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God,” she said.
And then she was gone.
But, of course, poets are never gone. Their words, if they are strong and clear enough, live.
There is no way to prove what history will make of Angelou, though if we had to guess, we would expect she will be revered longer than any of us.
She had a voice that sang clear and pure over the rumble of a hard life.
The one-time high school dropout, waitress, actress, singer and first female conductor of San Francisco street cars never went to college though she spoke six languages and was given 30 honorary degrees from colleges.
She was a self-taught everything, but mostly self-taught about being an American which she often elevated without seeming smug or haughty. She understood the nation’s identity well enough so that Wake Forest University sought her out to teach American Studies. She was a magazine editor in Egypt and a college professor in Ghana.
As a 7–year-old, she had been raped by her mother’s boyfriend. He was later killed by avenging uncles. The horror left her mute for five years.
When she finally spoke again, the horror had fled to be replaced by a stirring, powerful, hopeful but almost gentle defiance. She truly did understand “Why The Caged Bird Sings,” her seminal work.
“I created myself,” the woman born in St. Louis as Marguerite Ann Johnson once said without a hint of self-promotion.
She was the lyricist, and the music was life.
When she died at 86 this week in North Carolina, she left the world, but her words did not.
“Look where we’ve all come from … coming out of darkness, moving toward the light,” she once said. “It is a long journey, but a sweet one
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