No Excuses

IN STORMY WEATHER, the distinguished actor and dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson wandered down a cinematic memory lane to reacquaint himself and the audience with the many talented musicians, dancers and singers who shared his past. To the tune of its sultry title song by Lena Horne, the film successfully paraded the talents of famous Black entertainers and provided a classic history of Black images in American movies. But Stormy Weather never attempted to present the realities faced by Black entertainers in American show business; rather, it presented a mature Black actor, held dear by white and Black audiences, strolling down a maudlin Hall of Fame for racial stereotypes.

Maya Angelou cannot use the same excuse. She has not been forced, by the threat of Hollywood unemployment, to reduce her past to sentimental and glib reminiscences. For she too has become observer of her own past in bringing her audience closer to famous Black men and women in American social history. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Angelou's first major work, told a complicated, autobiographical tale of the author's childhood and expressed the voice of a timid and surprised child in mature prose. Her stepfather introduced her to sex by raping her, her mother abandoned her, and she and her younger brother lived as derided, sometimes ridiculous, children. Angelou's distance from the child gave the novel its power, allowed her to comfort her young self and to use the book to hush the frightened baby still left inside the creative adult.

But age and that contagious Hollywood sentimentality have changed the power and the subtle prose. The closer in age Maya Angelou-the-writer comes to Maya Angelou-the-heroince, the more difficult it is for her to maintain an insightful distance and the more her emotions obscure her vision of the past. The Heart of a Woman proves that Angelou has not had time to situate her remembered self into a story which transcends mere social history. She is still too carried away by the names she became involved with, and like the aritificial reminiscences of Bill Bojangles' narrative, she writes out a tawdry, almost boring torch song to the 1960s and the new Black awareness.

As if to catch herself from losing the artist's connection with the past, Angelou begins her latest work with a slave spiritual--a calling to an emotional memory--that sings, "The ole ark's a-moverin', a-moverin', a-moverin', the ole ark's a-moverin' along." The ole ark is Black people, now moving to realize the goals of the Civil Rights Movement and Malcolm X. The heroine is again Maya Angelou, no longer a little girl but now a single mother trying to raise her only son. The book tries to illustrate how closely allied the political lives of Angelou and other activists and artists were to their personal and creative lives.

This is a difficult, complex relationship to explain, and if Angelou does explain it, she does not do so nearly as effectively as she portrayed the relationship between the South's social code and Black children in the 30s and 40s. She writes very well, however, of the challenging intimacy between herself and her son, Guy. The rest of Maya's life pales in comparison to the poignancy of the mother-son bond. She ends up a loving and concerned mother but a boring social observer.

Angelou described the tightrope on which the Black mother must walk and emphasizes the traumatic implications of the mother's sexuality. Angelou writes that the Black single mother..

...questions whether she loves her children enough--or more terribly, does she love them too much? Do her looks cause embarrassment--or even more terrifying, is she so attractive her sons begin to desire her and her daughters begin to hate her?

Her children question her sexuality as they struggle to realize their own in a society which has grossly exaggerated the size of Black libido. And so, Angelou says, the Black mother must offer a strong self to her children that will successfully counter the stereotypes society will offer them.

The author must create a character out of a woman who has devoted her whole life to forging a character out of artificial roles. Angelou sets an awesome task for herself. She must fill her book with all the negative roles of white American society and Black American culture and then illustrate how these roles conflict with the real woman underneath. Sadly for her, she cannot. Her increased socialization drained the soul from most of her prose; the people she does portray seem like stilted mannequins.

At one point, Maya Angelou enjoys the unique experience of meeting Billie Holiday and even singing for Lady Day. Billie invites herself to Angelou's nightclub act and in the middle of the set begins to scream. "Stop that bitch. Stop her, goddamit. Stop that bitch. She sounds just like my goddam Mamma." When Angelou confronts Billie for interrupting her song, she is told that all Black women sing alike--a mold Billie tried to break. But there is no exploration of why the connection between Black women, particularly mothers, would incite such rage in Billie Holiday. Once the anguish is presented, Angelou neglectfully allows it to recede, never explaining its harshness.

Perhaps she figured that the images of the famous Blacks of the 60s and the historical eruptions of that time would be dramatic enough by themselves. They are not strong enough, however, to hold the drama; Angelou's writing style becomes more a chain of name-dropping and weird metaphors than a story. For instance, she walks into her office at SCLC to find Dr. Martin Luther King sitting at her desk. But even with the opportunity to enlarge our concept of this human monument, Angelou fails to present Dr. King in more than a bizarre cameo: "Looking at him, in my office, alone, was like seeing a lion sitting down at my dining room table eating a plate of mustard greens." Somehow the lion strength of the man related to his down-to-earth appearance in such a description does not expand our portrait of Dr. King. Angelou writes even worse sentences when she describes meeting, with relief, a Black American man during her long stay in Egypt: "He was of one piece. His eyes were almond-shaped, his face long and gently molded into an oval, his smile was long and thin, and he was the color of a slightly toasted almond." Apparently, Angelou could not forget the man's texture, so she runs the almond image into the ground.

Ultimately, as all autobiographies do, The Heart of a Woman aspires to evoke the reality of a life. Angelou tries to concentrate the vulnerability in the sexuality of Black women and how others, perceive this power. Her son makes Angelou into an earth god feeble enough for him to strike if she disappoints him. Her lovers use her to embellish their own self-images. Her Black audience focuses on her clairvoyance as an entertainer; she must penetrate the collective Black identity and sing it back, correctly. Her white audience follows her militant roles and allows her to "curse and berate" them, which is their contribution "to our struggle."

We wait and wait through the 272 pages of the book, for Maya Angelou to bare the real emotion she feels when looking at her past and all of the roles society forced her to play, but the real person never appears. At best, Angelou describes her own superficiality, the lack of depth in her own exploration, when she writes:

Years before, Hollywood musicals had shown how young talented unknowns put on gloriously successful shows with no money, and although I was over thirty years old, I still believed in the youthful fantasy.

She resembles Lena Horne draped across a window singing Stormy Weather and paying tribute to a special era in Black history. Lena Horne is a lovely monument, but her affected pain was sometimes unconvincing, her song a false anthem to Black achievement. Unfortunately, Maya Angelou inherited Hollywood's trick vision. Her prose gets as misty as the camera did with Bill Bojangle's memories. Not much heart shows through in this book, despite all the tears