"Good things come to those who wait." It's as common a phrase as "when pigs fly." Yet, some disregard its meaning and importance altogether - with the exception of the congregation that settled into the gym at Green River on March 10.
Their patience had first been tested back in November, when the promise of witnessing Dr. Maya Angelou was postponed until February due to health problems, and then once more from February to this last March when she finally graced Green River Community College with her presence - but she's well worth the wait.
To put it humbly, Dr. Angelou is one of the most prominent poets and writers of the last half century: she was one of the first African-American women whose memoir became public domain, she has received over 30 honorary degrees, she spoke at President Clinton's 1993 inauguration, and she recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama (the reason for the event's second postponement).
As she is escorted onto the stage, the medal hangs around her neck, securely placed against the purple colors of her simple clothes as if it were a part of her. She sits in a chair whose only intention appears to be to provide a foundation for wisdom and brutal, poetic honesty. It's her chair and she will use its powers.
The moment the crowd simmers down from their uproarious applause at her presence, Dr. Angelou dives headfirst into a folk song from the 1950s: "The woman I love is fat and chocolate to the bone, and every time she shakes some skinny woman loses her home."
Despite her frail appearance, there is no escaping her humor (aside from the amusing folk song, she mispronounces "Google" as "goo-goo"). Between half singing and half reciting her poetry, she looks out to the crowd and begins to tell of her son: "I have a bunch of children who call me auntie… but I only gave birth to one." She is giving the crowd exactly what they want: to hear of her life as told from her first book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Published in 1969, it is a profoundly essential novel. It is a story of the difficult journey of identity and the harsh love of family, complete with an undertow of racial discrimination. The memoir tells of the first seventeen years of her life, from the moment she got off a train in Stamps, Nebraska, with her brother Bailey at the age of three, to being raised by her grandmother and her Uncle Willy, to the sexual abuse she endured at the age of eight, to the birth of her son at 17.
Green River's One Book program - where a group of people read the same book together – chose Dr. Angelou's book for this year's program. In collaboration with the Artist & Speakers Series, the One Book program worked to bring Dr. Angelou to Green River, and many in the crowd were beyond thrilled.
Basic education teacher Anne Dolan cited, "it was really powerful for me to hear her talk about Uncle Willie differently than how she talks about Uncle Willie in the book. I imagine that, when she wrote the book and later after he died, she must have been older then. Her perspective of his gift to her changed and to hear from that perspective was pretty powerful."
Throughout the rest of the evening, she tells of her beloved brother ("my family came closest to building a genius when they made my brother"), her love for Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe ("I loved Poe so much I called him EAP") and finally to one of the most preeminent features of her novel: when she was raped.
She recalls telling her brother that the man would kill her brother if she told anyone who he was: "I said, ‘I can't. He will kill you.' My brother said, ‘I won't let him.' So I told him, of course."
She continues on that after the man was released from jail, he was beaten to death within a few days: "I thought my voice had killed the man. And so I refused to speak. I thought if I spoke, my voice might just go out and kill people." She didn't speak again for five years.
Fortunately, Dr. Angelou's voice couldn't be silenced forever. Aside from narrating passages of her book, she also offered important words of wisdom to the hungry crowd. She advocated for the librarian by instructing each person in the room to go to the library and ask the librarian to "liberate somebody from their ignorance" and, nearly weeping, pleads with the audience to look at themselves and know that they are something, each and everyone one of them. She knows the importance of identity and self-loving and she wants everyone else in the room to know it too: "We are more alike than we are unalike," she concludes.
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