These passages from Maya Angelou’s book[1] reveal two strong, good teachers—Sister Flowers and the author herself when she was a very young victim. In the depressed, Jim Crow town of Stamps, Sister Flowers was the black folks’ answer to the rich white women. She wasn’t rich, but she carried herself with such dignity that all the neighbors looked up to her proudly. It was Sister Flowers who taught Maya that she could talk again after years of self-imposed silence. Maya thought if she said a single word that another man might die. Her step-father was beaten to death after Maya reluctantly identified him as her rapist. Maya was eight. She didn’t know about rape. There was no man in her life, no loving father or any role model, to teach her what a father’s love should be like—let alone what the difference was between love and brutal assault. The child blamed herself for her step-father’s fate. So, she retreated into silence.


As told by Maya, this is how the one-sided conversation went when one good teacher started another on her young way:


She said, without turning her head, to me, “I hear you’re doing very good school work, Marguerite, but that it’s all written. The teachers report that they have trouble getting you to talk in class.” We passed the triangular farm on our left and the path widened to allow us to walk together. I hung back in the separate unasked and unanswerable questions.

“Come and walk along with me, Marguerite.” I couldn’t have refused even if I wanted to. She pronounced my name so nicely. Or more correctly, she spoke each word with such clarity that I was certain a foreigner who didn’t understand English could have understood her.

“Now no one is going to make you talk—possibly no one can. But bear in mind, language is man’s way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.” That was a totally new idea to me, and I would need time to think about it.

“Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That’s good, but not good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”

I memorized the part about the human voice infusing words. It seemed so valid and poetic.

She said she was going to give me some books and that I not only must read them, I must read them aloud. She suggested that I try to make a sentence sound in as many different ways as possible.


Image: Maya Angelou[2] reads “On the Pulse of Morning”[3]

[1] For the poem, see: http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/maya_angelou/poems/494 and for the book, see: http://www.amazon.com/Know-Why-Caged-Bird-Sings/dp/0345514408

[2] See: http://www.biography.com/people/maya-angelou-9185388

[3] President Clinton's inauguration January 20, 1993