Special mention must be made for her time as a calypso singer in the 1950s when she adorned vinyl LPs as “Miss Calypso.” Interview subjects in the film also described Angelou as a “consummate performer,” who sang and danced long before she penned autobiographies.
The nearly two-hour documentary, airing tonight, is but a snapshot into a life and career that echoes moments from Angelou’s 1969 autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The film covers the poet’s treks to Africa, her performance as the White Queen in Jean Benet’s play “The Blacks,” and her work as a civil rights advocate, among other milestones. “The poem struck her very deeply because it wasn’t just the observation of the maid, but it was all of her life,” Whack said. Recall the maid’s “too proud to bend and too poor to break” line. The fact that this was not fair and there was nothing you could do about it was a common thread in Angelou’s work, Whack said. “I don’t think we often enough stop to wonder, ‘How did that Black man feel?’ when his throat starts to ache … when you must cry, but you won’t,” she added. “Black Americans, for centuries, were obliged to laugh when they’re weren’t tickled and to scratch when they didn’t itch,” she said. The maid’s story, excerpted in the documentary, is also embedded in a larger poem of Angelou’s, titled “For Old Black Men.” The poem describes fathers who “nod like broken candles” and who “laugh to shield their crying.”Ī year earlier, in another reciting of the poem, Angelou states it more plainly. “To grin and bear it, and then to bear the unbearable that this is who they were.” “The mask was the two-facedness that Black people had to have in the country to survive,” she told the PBS NewsHour. Rita Coburn Whack, who co-directed and co-produced the documentary, said she’s seen Angelou recite the poem several times over the years, often times intermingling it with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1892 poem, “Masks.” Angelou often alluded to those masks as a form of survival for Black people in America in her work, Whack said. So - ha, ha, ha, ha - I laugh! Until my stomach ache And the laugh - the ha-has - grows increasingly desperate every time Angelou, with tears pooling in her eyes, mimics the maid’s hollowed laughs in her poem: With this poem, Angelou invites them to recognize the painful history that drives the motivation behind the Black woman’s laughs.Īngelou demonstrates by widening her lips like a rubber band, resistant to keeping up the facade. People hang onto the cadence of her words. The reaction shots of the white, Texas audience are telling.
In several moments, Angelou is seen upending someone’s worldview. The poet, who died in 2014 at age 86 before the completion of this film, recounts many of her life’s memories in the documentary. The scene appears early on in the PBS documentary “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise,” as part of the “American Masters” series. That’s that survival apparatus,” she says. “She was simply extending her lips and making a sound - ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“Now, if you don’t know Black features, you may think she’s laughing, but she wasn’t laughing,” Angelou continued.
Angelou, who was also an author, performer and activist, was a keen observer of the world around her. “I thought, hmmm, uh huh,” the poet told the crowd, verbalizing her internal thought process. The unnamed woman, who was carrying two shopping bags, laughed whenever the bus stopped abruptly. She says she wrote it to honor a maid she once watched ride the bus in New York City.īut it was the woman’s laugh that caught Angelou’s attention. This story was originally published in 2017.īack in 1988, Maya Angelou described to a predominantly white crowd in Salado, Texas, how a maid’s smile inspired one of her most enduring poems.
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