[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9339-9341]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              MAYA ANGELOU

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. 
Norton) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this afternoon to say a 
few words in tribute to the great Maya Angelou, who just this week died 
at 86 years of age. Mine will be one of, truly, millions of tributes 
that have begun.
  President Obama said of Maya that she helped generations of Americans 
``find their rainbows amidst the clouds and that she inspired the rest 
of us to be our best selves.'' I think many would agree with that.
  Attorney General Holder named one of his daughters ``Maya'' after 
Maya Angelou. We have a charter school here in the District of Columbia 
named for her. She visited that school. That is the kind of woman she 
was.
  It is almost impossible to describe this life, all 86 years of it. 
She drew from it all that you can draw from one life.
  Yes, we know her, perhaps, best as a poet and as a writer and as, 
some would say, an autobiographer because most of her writing comes 
from her own life in successive memoirs, in successive autobiographies, 
but much of her fame came when she was middle age and beyond.
  Until that time, she embarked on a far-flung career wherever it would 
take her, dancer--yes, dancer--singer, composer, actress. She was 
Hollywood's first Black female director, but she was most devoted to 
the printed word as an essayist, as a playwright, as a poet; and that 
came out of her own love of books, of words.
  Maya Angelou was active until the end of those 86 years. When she 
died, she was the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest 
University in North Carolina.
  I will have some words later in these remarks to say about that, 
since I visited her there, and it was a most memorable time for me.
  Carol Neubauer of Southern Women Writers writes, I think, 
intelligently, of Maya, saying:

       Angelou has been recognized not only as a spokesperson for 
     Blacks and women, but also for all people who are committed 
     to raising the moral standards of living in the United 
     States.

  That is just how broad was Maya's mission. I am very grateful that 
she was recognized as I believe she should have been.
  Well before she died, President Clinton gave Maya Angelou the 
National Medal of Arts, and then, President Obama gave her the 
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Some of us in the House are trying to 
give her, posthumously, the Congressional Gold Medal.
  It seems as if there are not enough honors that one can come forward 
with for a woman with so many talents and with so great a love for 
humanity, who kept pouring it out, so that we could partake as well, 
but I think we learn most from her life by understanding how hard was 
her early life and how she rose.
  It is interesting that, at President Clinton's inauguration, those 
lines ``And Still I Rise,'' which are from the poem she wrote for his 
inauguration, are best remembered--perhaps most remembered--than 
President Clinton's words themselves at his own inauguration.
  Yes, she rose. She rose from the bottom of society. She worked in 
places many of us couldn't conceive of. She was a shake dancer in 
nightclubs. She was a fry cook. She worked in hamburger joints. She 
worked as a dinner cook in a creole restaurant.
  Let me say, as someone who tasted Maya Angelou's cooking, she was a 
master cook. She once worked in a mechanic's shop, taking the paint off 
of cars with her hands, not with an instrument.
  She was married, and she had a son. Through all of the traditional 
phases of a woman's life, she managed to do many things.
  In San Francisco, she sang at the Purple Onion Cabaret. She toured 
with ``Porgy and Bess.'' In the 1950s, Maya Angelou was in the Harlem 
Writers Guild. That is where she first met Jimmy Baldwin, the great 
African American writer.
  That friendship was very important for the inspiration it gave her to 
write her own first autobiography. Don't think there could have been a 
civil rights struggle without Maya Angelou.
  Indeed, she worked directly with Dr. King, and she was the northern 
coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

[[Page 9340]]

  This woman who wrote about Black people, even as she wrote about all 
people, would, of course, find her way to Africa, to Cairo--with her 
son--and to Ghana and, indeed, to working in Africa as a freelance 
writer, but it all began, perhaps, out of the experience at that time 
in her life that she had a life to write about.
  It took her a long time to decide to put all of these first memories 
into an autobiography, but when she did, it became the most memorable 
of her books. ``I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' is one of six 
memoirs. It was very controversial.
  Even though it is read to this very day and taught in schools, it was 
controversial because she told the truth about her early life when she 
was raped by her mother's boyfriend when she was about 7 years of age, 
about the trauma that that induced, about the 5 years when she was mute 
and couldn't speak--wouldn't speak--perhaps could speak, but wouldn't 
speak.
  During that time, she immersed herself in books of every variety--in 
the great classics and Black authors. She read. She did not speak. She 
took words in from great authors. She did not give her own words until 
she was ready to speak. A teacher brought words out of her, and not 
until then did she speak.
  ``I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.'' That is the memoir that is most 
remembered and most praised. ``Gather Together in My Name'' is a memoir 
that begins when she is 17 and, at 17, a new mother.
  ``Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas'' is another 
of her memoirs, which tells of her tour in Europe and in Africa with 
``Porgy and Bess.''
  Then there was ``The Heart of a Woman.'' That was the description of 
Maya's acting and writing career in New York and of her work in civil 
rights.
  Then there was her book ``All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes,'' 
which told of her travels to west Africa and of her decision to return, 
this time, without the son who had gone with her to Africa.
  Do you notice the theme in these books? The material, every bit of 
it, is taken from Maya's own life and personal experiences. It has been 
said that a writer writes best when she writes what she knows, and Maya 
Angelou knew she knew best about her own rich life.
  This woman, who as a child spent years mute, unable to speak, became 
prolific and widely read. Her poetry, much of it, was substantive and 
about social justice. There were poems about love. There were poems 
about Black people. There were poems about rebellions and about the 
1960s--the modern civil rights rebellion.
  She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a book of poems titled 
``Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Die.''
  She was the first Black woman to have a screenplay. It was called 
``Georgia, Georgia.'' It was produced in 1972, and she was honored with 
an Emmy because of her, as it was said, ``search of clear messages with 
easily digested meanings.''
  She even adapted that first biography, ``I Know Why the Caged Bird 
Sings,'' for a television movie that had the same name. She wrote 
poetry for a film called ``Poetic Justice,'' and she played a role in 
that film. She played a role in another television film.
  What a life.
  As you read of this life, much of which we may not have known about, 
you see that it is not her life as a famous woman, but her life as a 
woman that Maya is able to write about and get us to want to read.
  I had an unusual experience, oh, about 15 years ago. Essence magazine 
took me to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Maya's home, for Maya and 
me to have what they called a fly-on-the-wall conversation. They wanted 
us to talk about Black women embracing their own power.
  Now, how do you talk about that? With a great woman like Maya 
Angelou, you find a way to talk about that. Let me quote from some of 
what Maya Angelou said during that fly-on-the-wall conversation.
  Remember, this is about finding power from within, and that was the 
theme throughout this conversation.
  Maya Angelou said:

       A powerful sense of self involves humility, but never 
     modesty. Modesty is a learned affectation that is very 
     dangerous, but humility comes from within.

  Hear the power of those words.
  She goes on to say:

       Someone went before me, and I am here to try to make a path 
     for someone who is yet to come.

                              {time}  1230

       Somehow good attracts good and, in turn, you do get some 
     external power. If you start with the power inside you, you 
     won't abuse external power when you get it. Be prayerful that 
     your use of it will be constructive rather than destructive. 
     Be careful and diligent and watchful that you don't abuse 
     power to the detriment of others who have less.

  This is off the top of Maya Angelou's head, you understand, these 
pearls of wisdom for which she became so well known, because she was a 
deep woman and deeply wise.
  At one point in the conversation, I said that the difference between 
Maya and me is that, though she may not speak for people in some formal 
sense, my God, she speaks to them. And they listen. I believe that 
profoundly. And her life proved it profoundly.
  Later on in the conversation, when we were talking about how people 
relate to one another, Maya said:

       In some cases, people say they want change. What they 
     really want is exchange.

  Now, that is not necessarily progress. Maya believed in giving 
without asking in return.
  She said:

       Real power is like electricity. We can't see it. You can 
     plug it into an electrical outlet, those two little holes in 
     the wall, and light up this room. You can light up a surgery. 
     Or, you can electrocute a person strapped in a chair. Power 
     makes no demands. It says, ``If you're intelligent, you will 
     use me intelligently. If you're not, you will use me with 
     deception.'' It's up to you.

  Maya said:

       You use power according to how you acknowledge it inside of 
     yourself.

  She is telling us that your execution of power is a statement about 
yourself.
  That ought to make all of us stop and think: What I am saying or 
doing, in the name of what power I have, to be taken as meaning who I 
am.
  She hinted, really, as to how she got the power within herself to 
rise and to make something of herself. She said she was in San 
Francisco with her mother, and she wanted to be a conductor on one of 
those wonderful streetcars in San Francisco.
  And here I am quoting Maya:

       So I went down to the streetcar offices, and the people 
     just laughed at me. They wouldn't even give me an 
     application. I came back home crying. My mother asked me, 
     ``Why do you think they didn't give you an application?'' I 
     said, ``Because I'm a Negro.'' She asked, ``Do you want the 
     job?'' I said, ``Yes.'' She said, ``Go get it. I will give 
     you the money every morning. You get down there before the 
     secretaries are there. Take yourself a good book. Now, when 
     lunchtime comes, don't leave until they leave. But when they 
     leave, you go and give yourself a good lunch. But be back 
     before the secretaries, if you really want the job.''
       Three days later, said Maya Angelou, ``I was so sorry I had 
     made that commitment, but I couldn't take it back. Those 
     people did everything but spit on me. I took Tolstoy, I took 
     Gorky--the heavy Russian writers--and I sat there. The 
     secretaries would bump up against my legs as they were 
     leaving. They stood over me. They called me every name you 
     could imagine.
       Finally, I got an application. Within a month, I had a job. 
     I was the first Black conductor on the streetcars of San 
     Francisco. It cost me the Earth, but I got the job.''

  That is Maya Angelou, not reading, just recalling. I tell you, if you 
could tell that story to every kid in this country who has no mother or 
father, who was left in poverty and hears the television talk about the 
income gap and how miserable things are in the Congress and the world, 
if that story could be told to that kid, I know of no story that could 
inspire such a child as that story, because it was a real story. It was 
real life. It was the life of Maya Angelou.
  My friend Maya needed every single one of her 86 years to live such a 
rich life--to come from utter poverty and abuse to become the Nation's 
renaissance woman, writer, poet, actor, dancer, screenwriter, 
professor, and civil rights activist. And I am here to attest, on top 
of all that talent, a master, magnificent cook extraordinaire.

[[Page 9341]]

  Maya found her voice early in life, and then she kept singing, kept 
speaking, kept telling. She found it, to be sure, after being molested 
as a child and immersing herself in books, as if to find words, as if 
to find her voice, as if, she thought that, if she read, fertilizing 
her own mind she would find her own voice. And she did.
  When she found that voice, it was one of those voices that carried. 
Was there ever a performance like hearing Maya Angelou read her own 
poetry? That voice carried across lines that typically divide people, 
using her poetry, using her writing. And it was poetry and writing and 
essays that spoke to Presidents and to poor people alike.
  This woman had range. Maya's life experience was so full that it kept 
feeding memoirs. It took six of them to tell it all. Prolific until the 
very end, Maya Angelou lived to become a seer, the Nation's wise woman 
and, I would imagine, never to be forgotten.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________