Rainbows in the clouds
Maya Angelou inspires Mizzou audience
Nancy Heckart and her six-year-old daughter waited, a vase of roses in hand, to meet Maya Angelou before her speech on March 17 at Jesse Auditorium. Heckart learned about Angelou’s appearance after tickets already had sold out.
“She had a big impact on my life,” said Heckart, a therapist who works with survivors of sexual abuse. Angelou herself is a survivor — her frank writing about the experience inspired Heckart. “Hers is a story of hope.”
Heckart faxed a letter to Angelou’s publisher about what Angelou’s work meant to her — she even named her daughter after the poet. Heckart got tickets and an invitation to meet the renowned poet before the performance.
When the three met, Angelou plucked a rose out of the bouquet and asked the elder Heckart to press it in a book for “little Maya.”
Angelou’s rainbows
On stage at Mizzou, Maya Angelou sang in a resonant, honeyed voice, “When it looked like the sun wasn't going to shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds.”
And so the tale of those who inspired her began.
Angelou spent part of her childhood in Stamps, Ark. with her grandmother and her Uncle Willie. Willie Johnson’s body was atrophied on the left and muscular on the right. He spoke with a slur. Johnson wouldn’t even go to the next town because he felt ashamed of his condition.
Johnson taught his young niece her multiplication tables in front of a potbellied stove (she always worried he would throw her in). Angelou recalled hiding Willie in bins of potatoes and onions when “the boys” would ride in the night and terrorize, beat and kill African-American men. “They didn’t agree with God’s choice for the color of peoples’ skin. They didn’t wear sheets. They didn’t have to,” Angelou said.
When Willie Johnson died, Angelou returned to Arkansas. She met Charles Bussey, who told her that her uncle was the greatest man who ever lived. It surprised her. It turns out Johnson had given Bussey a job and taught him multiplication tables. Charles Bussey went on to be the first African-American mayor of Little Rock, Ark.
"Even dead, he’s being a rainbow in my clouds," Angelou said.
Bussey told Angelou to see a lawyer in Louisville, Ark. who would help her attend to Willie’s affairs. The attorney was a young white man mentored by Bussey. Many years later in Washington, D.C., at the groundbreaking of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, another man introduced himself to Angelou. He was a congressman and the grandson of that lawyer from Louisville, Ark.
“I looked at him, and I looked right back at crippled Willie. I have no idea the width, depth, breadth and height of Willie’s rainbows,” Angelou said. “Where was the end of his influence?”
Poison and affliction
Using her own influence, Angelou asked the audience at Mizzou to refuse to use, or be present for the use of, racial pejoratives of any kind.
“I refuse to sit in any company and have any pejoratives used. It is poison,” Angelou said. “If you have poison and you can take the content and pour it in Bavarian crystal, it’s still poison.”
In an interview before Saturday’s speech, Angelou talked about the necessity of hope.
“If you really have no hope, you become not just jaded, you become cynical,” Angelou said. “Cynicism is a terrible affliction — with young people, it’s even worse, it means you’ve gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. For your own self’s sake, you have to keep hope alive, for your spirit, for your health, for your own journey.”
Surviving and thriving
What has made Angelou survive and even thrive? In an interview before the speech, Angelou recalled a conversation almost 60 years ago with her mother, whom Angelou described as “a woman who no one ever wanted to be on the wrong side of.”
“Baby, I think you’re the greatest woman I’ve ever met,” Angelou said, quoting her mother.
It took time, but Angelou started to believe her mother’s words.
“It just liberated me so,” Angelou said. “I try to be that to young people who come along who are my children or my students. I try to be that encouragement.”
As Angelou left the stage of Jesse Auditorium, she took a moment to say goodnight to “little Maya.”