Letter to My Daughter Read online

  You may think this undertaking

  Should be left to younger hearts

  But love has given us the courage to venture

  boldly into the sacred country of

  marriage, admitting our wrinkles,

  we allow them to

  show themselves bravely

  and our bones know the weight

  of the years.

  Yet we dare

  face down loneliness

  and embrace the

  uplifting communion

  found in a good marriage.

  We dare and we hope.”

  They are blessed by love, and each of us on whom their love light beams is enriched.

  Thank you, Lovers.

  Commencement Address

  And now the work begins

  And now the joy begins

  Now the years of preparation

  Of tedious study and

  Exciting learning

  are explained.

  The jumble of words and

  Tangle of great and small ideas

  Begin to take order and

  This morning you can see

  A small portion of the large

  Plan of your futures.

  Your hours of application,

  The hopes of your parents,

  And the labor of your instructors

  Have all brought this moment

  Into your hands.

  Today, you are princesses and princes

  Of the morning.

  Ladies and Lords of the summer

  You have shown the most

  Remarkable of all virtues

  For today as you sit

  Wrapped in earned robes,

  Literally or figuratively,

  I see you filled with courage.

  For although you might all

  Be bright, intellectually astute,

  You have had to use courage

  To arrive at this moment.

  You may be,

  As you are often described,

  Privileged, which of course means

  Wealthy, or you have been born into an ongoing struggle with need.

  In either case, you have had to develop

  An outstanding courage to

  Invent this moment.

  Of all your attributes, youth,

  Beauty, wit, kindness, mercy,

  Courage is your greatest

  Achievement,

  For you, without it, can practice no other

  Virtue with consistency.

  And now that you have shown

  That you are capable of manufacturing

  That most wondrous virtue,

  You must be asking yourselves,

  What you will do with it.

  Be assured that question

  Is in the minds of your

  Elders, your parents, and strangers

  Who do not know your names,

  Your fellow students who

  Next year, or in the years to come

  Will sit, robed and capped

  Where you sit today,

  And will ask the question

  What will you do?

  There is an African adage

  Which fits your situation.

  It is, “The trouble for the

  Thief is not how to steal the Chief ’s

  Bugle, but where to play it.”

  Are you prepared to work

  To make this country, our country

  More than it is today?

  For that is the job to be done.

  That is the reason you have

  Worked hard, your sacrifices

  Of energy and time,

  The monies of your parents

  Or of government have been paid

  So that you can transform your

  Country and your world.

  Look beyond your tasseled caps

  And you will see injustice.

  At the end of your fingertips

  You will find cruelties,

  Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow

  And terrifying loneliness.

  There is your work.

  Make a difference

  Use this degree which you

  Have earned to increase

  Virtue in your world.

  Your people, all people,

  Are hoping that you are

  The ones to do so.

  The order is large,

  The need immense.

  But you can take heart.

  For you know that you

  Have already shown courage.

  And keep in mind

  One person, with good purpose,

  can, constitute the majority.

  Since life is our most precious gift

  And since it is given to us to live but once,

  Let us so live that we will not regret

  Years of uselessness and inertia

  You will be surprised that in time

  The days of single-minded research

  And the nights of crippling, cramming

  Will be forgotten.

  You will be surprised that these years of

  Sleepless nights and months of uneasy

  Days will be rolled into

  An altering event called the

  “Good old days.” And you will not

  Be able to visit them even with an invitation

  Since that is so you must face your presence.

  You are prepared

  Go out and transform your world

  Welcome to your graduation.

  Congratulations

  Poetry

  To fling my arms wide

  In the face of the sun,

  Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

  Til the quick day is done.

  Rest at pale evening…

  A tall, slim tree…

  Night coming tenderly

  Black like me.

  (Published in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Alfred A. Knopf & Vintage Press)

  If African and many African American poets have one theme it most assuredly is “Wouldn’t everyone like to be…Black Like Me?” Black poets revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry.

  There is a flourish of pride in works which must stupefy the European reader. How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?

  Aimé Césaire, speaking of the African, wrote:

  Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass

  Those who never knew how to conquer steam or

  electricity

  Those who explore neither seas nor sky

  But those without whom the earth would not be

  earth….

  My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled

  against

  The clamor of the day;

  My negritude is not a speck of dead water on the

  earth’s dead eye,

  My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral….

  It perforates opaque dejection with its upright

  patience.

  (Published in Return to My Native Land by Bloodaxe Books)

  Césaire was writing in the same spirit as that which inspired the black American poet Melvin B. Tolson. When he wrote:

  None in the Land can say

  To us black men Today:

  You dupe the poor with rags-to-riches tales,

  And leave the workers empty dinner pails.

  None in the Land can say

  To us black men Today:

  You send flame gutting tanks,

  Like swarms of flies

  And pump a hell from dynamiting skies.

  You fill machine-gunned towns with rotting dead–

  A No Man’s Land where children cry for bread.

  (Published in The Negro Caravan by Citadel Press)

  Mari Evans gave he
art to African Americans in general and women in particular in her poem, “I Am a Black Woman”:

  I

  am a black woman

  tall as a cypress

  strong

  beyond all definition still

  defying place

  and time

  and circumstance

  assailed

  impervious

  indestructible

  Look

  on me and be

  renewed

  (Published in I Am a Black Woman by William Morrow & Co.)

  The negritude poets’ exposition of oppression, in fact, was inspired earlier by the Harlem Renaissance writers. The American black poets heralded their blackness carrying their color like banners into the white literary world. When Langston Hughes’ poem, “I’ve Known Rivers,” became the rallying cry for black Americans to take pride in their color, the reverberations of that attitude reached the Africans in the then French and British colonies.

  Sterling A. Brown’s “Strong Men” must have had a salutary effect on the African poets:

  They Stole you from Homeland

  They brought you in shackles

  They sold you

  They scourged you

  They branded you

  They made your women breeders

  They swelled your numbers with bastards.

  You sang, ‘Keep a inching along like a po inch worm’

  You sang, ‘Walk together children…don’t you get weary’

  The strong men keep coming on

  The strong men get stronger.

  (Published in The Negro Caravan by Citadel Press)

  That poem, and Claude McKay’s “White Houses” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” were guiding lights to the colonized African poets. The African in the Caribbean and on the African continent had much in common with their black American counterparts. They had the onerous task of writing in the colonial language, poetry which opposed colonialism. That is to say, they had to take the artillery of the foe to diminish the power of the foe. They meant to go farther; they hoped to with eloquence and passion to win the foe to their side.

  The hope still lives. It can be heard in Langston Hughes’ poem, “I, too, Sing America.”

  I, too, sing America.

  I am the darker brother.

  They send me to eat in the kitchen

  When company comes,

  But I laugh,

  And eat well,

  And grow strong.

  Tomorrow,

  I’ll be at the table

  When company comes.

  Nobody’ll dare

  Say to me,

  “Eat in the kitchen,”

  Then.

  Besides,

  They’ll see how beautiful I am

  And be ashamed—

  I, too, am America.

  (Published in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Alfred A. Knopf &Vintage Press)

  Mt. Zion

  Once in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and an acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Practical Christianity.

  Frederick Wilkerson, the voice teacher, numbered opera singers, nightclub singers, recording artists, and cabaret entertainers among his students. Once a month he invited all of us to gather and read from Lessons in Truth.

  At one reading, the other students, who were all white, the teacher, and I sat in a circle. Mr. Wilkerson asked me to read a section, which ended with the words “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book. The teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and a bit sarcastically read, “God loves me.” Mr. Wilkerson said, “Again.” I wondered if I was being set up to be laughed at by the professional, older, all-white company? After about the seventh repetition I became nervous and thought that there might be a little truth in the statement. There was a possibility that God really did love me, me Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the gravity and grandeur of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me, since one person, with God, constitutes the majority?

  That knowledge humbles me today, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in my gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation of full growth.

  Gratefully I am a member in good standing of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I am under watch care at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and I am a present member of Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco, California.

  In all the institutions I try to be present and accountable for all I do and leave undone. I know that eventually I shall have to be present and accountable in the presence of God. I do not wish to be found wanting.

  Keep the Faith

  Many things continue to amaze me, even well into my seventh decade. I’m startled or at least taken aback when people walk up to me and without being questioned inform me that they are Christians. My first response is the question “Already?”

  It seems to me that becoming a Christian is a lifelong endeavor. I believe that is also true for one wanting to become a Buddhist, or a Muslim, a Jew, Jainist, or a Taoist. The persons striving to live their religious beliefs know that the idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.

  The Depression, which was difficult for everyone to survive, was especially so for a single black woman in the Southern states tending her crippled adult son and raising two small grandchildren.

  One of my earliest memories of my grandmother, who was called “Mamma,” is a glimpse of that tall, cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air with nothing visible beneath her.

  Whenever she confronted a challenge, Mamma would clasp her hands behind her back, look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and draw herself up to her full six-foot height. She would tell her family in particular, and the world in general, “I don’t know how to find the things we need, but I will step out on the word of God. I am trying to be a Christian and I will just step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her shoulders. Naturally, since she was over six feet tall, and stood out on the word of God, she was a giant in heaven. It wasn’t difficult for me to see Mamma as powerful, because she had the word of God beneath her feet.

  Thinking of my grandmother years later, I wrote a gospel song that has been sung rousingly by The Mississippi Mass choir.

  “You said to lean on your arm

  And I am leaning

  You said to trust in your love

  And I am trusting

  You said to call on your name

  And I am calling

  I’m stepping out on your word.”

  Whenever I began to question whether God exists, I looked up to the sky and surely there, right there, between the sun and moon, stands my grandmother, singing a long meter hymn, a song somewhere between a moan and a lullaby and I know faith is the evidence of things unseen.

  And all I have to do is continue trying to be a Christian.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Poet, writer, performer, teacher, and director, MAYA ANGELOU was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, then moved to San Francisco. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written a cookbook, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, and five poetry collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved and Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?

  ALSO BY MAYA ANGELOU

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
/>
  Gather Together in My Name

  Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

  The Heart of a Woman

  All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes

  A Song Flung Up to Heaven

  ESSAYS

  Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

  Even the Stars Look Lonesome

  POETRY

  Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie

  Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well

  And Still I Rise

  Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?

  I Shall Not Be Moved

  On the Pulse of Morning

  Phenomenal Woman

  The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou

  A Brave and Startling Truth

  Amazing Peace

  Mother

  Celebrations

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me

  Kofi and His Magic

  PICTURE BOOKS

  Now Sheba Sings the Song

  Life Doesn’t Frighten Me

  COOKBOOK

  Hallelujah! The Welcome Table

  Copyright © 2008 by Maya Angelou

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Mari Evans: Excerpt from “I Am a Black Woman” from I Am a Black Woman by Mari Evans (New York: William Morrow, 1970). Reprinted by permission of Mari Evans.

  Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. and Harold Ober Associates:

  “I, Too” and “Dream Variations” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Russell, associate editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Rights in the United Kingdom are controlled by Harold Ober Associates. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates.