InsideOut: Interview with Dr. Maya Angelou

by Owen Lipstein January/February 2009



Dr. Maya Angelou—best-selling author and poet, civil-rights activist, educator, historian, actress, playwright, producer, director, daughter and mother—shares all sides of herself in her recent best-selling book Letter to My Daughter (Random House, 2008). She shared quite a bit of herself with us as well.

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Owen Lipstein: I’ve been listening to your book, literally just walking around town listening to your book. And it is totally delightful. There’s a whole other dimension to a book like this when you actually hear the author speak.



Maya Angelou: Well, I believe that prose and poetry are best conducted with musical accompaniment. So whether it’s in the background, or the melody of the poem, or in the speaker’s voice—when it’s musical, it’s irresistible.



OL: Well, it is irresistible. I’m thinking about the chapter in which your mother says, “You really should tell the truth. But people really don’t want to hear the truth.” I wonder if you could tell us what this means to you.



MA: Oh, yes, this is true. She said, “When people ask you how are you, all over the world, people say, ‘Fine, and you?’
“‘Thank you. Fine. And you?’”
And it may not be the truth. And they certainly don’t want to hear it from you, since they themselves [have] already lied. I agree with that. However, I think it might be a wonderful experiment to say, “Well, actually, my back is hurting. My right knee is getting me all mad. And my eyes are not seeing as well.”
I know that there are those who would say, “Doggone. Why did I ask?”



OL: We’re all conditioned not to tell someone how terrible they look, or how much weight they’ve gained or lost.



MA: And hairdos? Some of those hairdos… It’s real silly not to tell people. I think you ought to just go and tell the truth. Try it, for once.
I mean, you won’t be asked back many places. You have to make sure that you’ve seen what you came there to see, because you won’t get another chance. On the other hand, you will have some time to buckle down and think clearly about your own ailments, and how you can get rid of them, or else speak of them in better and more attractive terms.



OL: Well, it’s a good thought. [Laughter] In one of your stories, you describe your experience as a young woman drinking some coffee in Morocco. Can you tell us why you think this story resonates?



MA: It was my first trip to Morocco. I was with [a production of] “Porgy and Bess,” traveling, as one of the singers and dancers. At the time, I didn’t have Arabic. So I was really a bit crippled. But I did have French—I mumbled around with French, pointing a lot. A group of black men, older black men, beckoned to me. I went to them across a really ugly, dirty empty lot, where they had some tents pitched in the lot. I stood beside them, and I found they didn’t have Arabic. I had Spanish and French. They didn’t. And I didn’t have any other language that they spoke. So I bowed a lot and smiled a lot. And just as I was preparing to go, one of the oldest men shouted to a woman—I didn’t understand the language, but I knew it was an order—and the woman came back bringing a small cup of coffee. It’d be like the Turkish coffee, or espresso smell. She brought it, and gave it to me.
I looked at her feet [and] there were all sorts of bugs running around, but I had to drink it. So I took a sip and I thought, I’ve got a cockroach on my tongue. And, what to do? I was with these men, and this one woman. I was raised by a really sick grandmother, in a little town in Arkansas, and I knew how to behave in front of older people. So I just opened my mouth and swallowed the whole cup of coffee—with about four or five cockroaches. And I held myself. I bowed. I smiled. And I [left] through that parking lot with the broken cans and glass and old pieces of furniture and got to a building, [and] just as I got beyond their sight, I let the nausea have its way.
I must have had to relieve myself [in this way] 10 times in the next month or so. I finally arrived in another town back in France and I saw an old “Reader’s Digest.” In the Digest, there was an article about African nomads who travel to the north, all the way past the Sahara, into the cities of Morocco and Algeria and Egypt. They live by bartering, so they don’t have much money. [With] the little cash they do have, they [would] buy raisins, and in order to honor a visitor, they would put four raisins into a cup of coffee. This little coffee—the Turkish coffee. And as if somebody had hit me over the head with a brick, I realized that those men had honored me by putting raisins in my coffee.
I was not only a woman: I was young. And I didn’t speak their language, so they couldn’t know that I was reasonably smart. And yet, they had honored me. And for almost two months, I had kept in my mind that those were cockroaches. I [had made] myself throw up, and here, the people had honored me.
So I decided then and there, if human beings eat [some]thing… if I see that it’s reasonably clean, and my cultural upbringing has not put me at odds against it—that is, [that] it’s nauseating—I will eat it. I will eat it wherever I am, if human beings eat it.



OL: Have you been able to live up to that?



MA: Not all the time. [Laughter] Sometimes I’ve blown it, probably from my own ignorance. But I’ve tried to forgive myself as quickly as possible.



OL: One of the things that comes through in this book is the incredible love and forgiveness that your parents showed you throughout your life. There’s a chapter about the conception of your son, and how you were worried about telling your father and your mother. I thought the story showed their tremendous love and acceptance.



MA: Well, I had gone to summer school, finished high school in San Francisco. And my brother had warned me, “Don’t tell Mother, or she’ll kick you out of school. And you have to have a high school diploma.” So on what was V-J Day, and my Dad’s birthday, I also had a graduation. I decided that was the night I would let him know. So I left a message on his bed saying, “Dad, I’m sorry that I brought shame on the family. I’m pregnant. I’d like to talk to you about it.”
My father came in. I could hear his footsteps outside my door, hesitating, and then continuing to his own room. And he didn’t come back until the morning. I didn’t go to sleep, of course, wondering what he was thinking. My mother was away, looking after some business things.


The next morning he said, “Hey, baby. Come on downstairs, have a cup of coffee. I want to talk to you.” I went down with trepidation, fear, my knees knocking. He gave me a kiss and didn’t look at me as if I was vulgar. He said, “Now, you know, I have to let your mother know. How far along are you?”
So I said, “I’m within three weeks of giving birth.” But he misunderstood that to say that I was three weeks pregnant. And so he telephoned my mother, who flew in immediately.
She came to me and she said, “You’re more than any three weeks pregnant.”
I said, “Yes, ma’am. I will give birth in three weeks.”
She said, “Hmmm.” And then she said, “Run me a bath.” But in our family, that’s the most intimate thing you can do, and the sweetest thing you can do for another person, is to run her or him a bath. And if you’ve been arguing, sort of at odds and ends with each other, you can make up simply by saying, “Would you run me a bath?”
So, my mother [asked me to] run her a bath. I was so relieved. I did. And then she asked me to sit in with her. And she asked, “Do you know who [the] father is?”
And I said, “Of course.”
She asked, “Do you love him?”
I said, “No. I only was intimate with him once.”
And she asked, “Does he love you?”
I said, “No.”
“Well, then there’s no point of ruining three lives,” she said. “Yours and his and the baby’s. So, we’re going to have a wonderful baby. That’s all there is to that.”



OL: You were sort of the prodigal daughter, if you will. And instead of getting the disapproval you thought you might from your father, you got forgiveness and love without question.



MA: Yes, exactly.



OL: And it just seems so simple—but in actuality, I think, probably rare.



MA: I’m sorry about that, because it really is simple. My family—we’ve had a great, great gift in my son. My son is the best thing that ever happened to me. And through me—to a lot of people. My mother and father were so on the money: They never once tried to make me feel I had done the wrong thing, or [that I] was dumb, or stupid. They never did that, ever. We simply had a wonderful baby.



OL: Well, it’s amazing. I loved your story about Bob and Decca. Please tell us more about that.



MA: Well, Bob and Decca—Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford—were family friends of mine. I was going to speak at Stanford [University], I think, in California. And so I called and stayed with Bob and Dec, who would have expected that. And Bob said, “You know, there’s a good restaurant, and they do a sort of French bistro dinner once a month, but you have to be informed about the place, and you have to have made a reservation two or three months ahead of time.”
So Decca asked Bob if he would call the owner and say, “We have a guest from New York, a writer.” Well, he did. And the owner—as told by Bob—had a table for the three of us.
So we arrived, and the food was good. The owner came around, and he said, “My wife and you are very good friends.”
So I asked, “Oh, really?”
And he said, “Yes. Her name was Lillian.”
And I said, “Oh, I don’t know that name.”
He said, “Oh, that’s her name. That was her name with me. But you knew her in Los Angeles, and her name then…”
He gave me another name and I said, “I don’t recognize it.” So he looked at me quizzically. And then he came back with a photograph.
He said, “Here she is.” And I looked at the photograph. I had never seen that woman. And he said, “Now, there you are.”
So I said, “Yes, well, uh-huh. She certainly looks good.”
He said, “Well, she’s happy now.” So that was good.
On our way out, the telephone rang, and the owner said, “Just a minute. Here she is on the phone.” I was so hoping that I would recognize something in the woman’s voice.
She said, “Girl, what are you doing out here? Why didn’t you let me know?” I realized I had never heard that woman—I’d never heard her voice. So she said, “If I didn’t live so far away, I would come right by.”
I said, “No, why don’t you come over to Decca and Bob’s, perhaps tomorrow at 1 for lunch.”
She said, “Alright.” She knew them.
And I asked Decca to please stay. She said, “No, I will not stay.”
I said, “Oh, please? What will we talk about?”
She said, “Talk about the quiche Lorraine you said you’re going to make. Talk about that.” So I made the quiche. The doorbell rang at 1 and the woman came in. I had never seen her in my life. And she looked at me as if she’d never seen me. But, what to do? We carried on. So we went in, and sat down. We had a glass of wine. We then had the quiche Lorraine. We talked about life, and books and people, and travel, and weather.
We were back at the dining room table when she said, “You know, you can’t guess who I saw the other day.” She gave me the name of someone and she said, “He pretended he didn’t know me. We were there in Tahoe, at a skiing lodge.”
And so I thought, Well, maybe he doesn’t know you.
She said, “As hard as you and I worked [on] his campaign in Los Angeles… So I just said to him, ‘You wait ’til I see Louise Meriwether, and I’ll tell her.’” Oh my Lord.
So I said, “Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m not Louise Meriwether.”
She said, “I didn’t think so.” She jumped up and said, “I didn’t recognize your voice on the phone last night. And then today, when you opened that door, I thought, ‘What the hell has happened to Louise?’”
Well, now, Louise Meriwether is a black, female writer, 6 foot tall. So am I—all those things. And what happened is, when Bob Treuhaft called the owner, he said, “We have the writer.” And I know he said my name, but he said, “You know, the African-American writer, female.”
The owner of the restaurant asked, “Is she tall?”
[Bob] said, “Yes, she’s 6 foot.”
Whereupon the owner said, “That’s my wife’s best friend!” Well, of course, when I did get back to New York, I found that Louise, who is a friend of mine, and the woman, were best friends. But we had just been led down the primrose path—or up it, or something—by miscalculating.
It turns out the woman is a very well-known writer. And the wife of the owner. A psychologist. She was able to help me with my brother, who’s fighting heroin for his life. She was the only psychologist who wanted to help. I also arranged with the owner of the restaurant to allow my brother to take his lunch and dinner there whenever he’d like, and he could bring one guest. And no one knew except the owners and their accountants, that my brother wasn’t paying, that I paid. But for a year, my brother was off the heroin. And was living a life with some normalcy. And that all came about because of an accidental acquaintanceship, which turned into a friendship.



OL: Should we conclude that there is a greater significance in how this sort of confused meeting was transmuted into something even more meaningful?



MA: Well, I think that we have to take into consideration that we meet friends in the strangest ways. Sometimes it’s an ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend’s mother-in-law—and it turns out to be someone who operates as a mother to you. The strangest ways.
And I think we ought to give ourselves more time. We should be more patient with ourselves and with each other, and see, Where is this going? There are few accidents in life. I think, Let me see, can I be of service? Is this person going to be of service to me or through me to someone else? I think we need to give ourselves patience.



OL: Letter to My Daughter is a beautiful story. Did you enjoy writing it?



MA: Yes, I did. It actually came about from notes to Oprah. We talk quite frequently, and when I’d said something or heard something, read something, I’d think, Oh, I wonder, did she ever think of that? And what would she think of that?
So I’ve just written notes down on all sorts of things: my own work, and the things I wanted to talk to her about, poetry that may be hidden in some of the prose… and I put it in a box called “WIP—Works in Progress.” Last year I pulled that box out. I was looking at the “Notes for Oprah,” and I thought, Hmmm, there’s an essay in there… Hmmm, I think there’s a poem in there… Hmmm. So I just started writing. And I enjoyed it so much.



OL: It does feel like a very personal letter that I, as a reader, am allowed to read. It wasn’t necessarily meant for me in the first place, but I’m so glad that I was allowed to see it. It’s easy to understand the genesis of the book as you describe it. One last question: How do you feel about the moment we’re in right now—with Obama just about ready to be our president?



MA: Well, I’m happy, of course. And proud. I’m proud of my country. I’m just so proud. A number of non-black people have no idea that when black people go abroad, we are asked to explain our madness with racism. Now, many times, the people abroad are equally racist about people they know, but they don’t know African Americans, so they have no guilt. So it’s one thing to be sitting in Paris, having people pity me because I come from the racist country. I have to either apologize, or defend, or explain, and quite often, I just go in the other direction: I attack.
I ask, “I appreciate that you’re concerned about me. But why don’t I see more Senegalese, and more Malians, and people from Cote d’Ivoire? Why don’t I see more of them in your office buildings, as chairmen and CEOs of your corporations?” And then quickly the subject changes.
But now, I can just say, “Racist? Look at my country. The majority of people who brought Obama in are white.” So, I won’t have that conversation [now]. I’m proud that we’re growing out of the ignorance of racism and sexism and ageism. I’m proud that we’re growing up.