Angie Windheim

Maya Angelou is an inspiration in many ways to me. She has accomplished so much in her life and the way she writes about it is insightful and engrossing. It makes me want to take a step back and observe my life  and my life’s lessons more.  I had already read The Heart of a Woman and A Song Flung up to Heaven before just now finishing her most acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I’ve loved each autobiography and am actually glad to have read them out of order, first knowing Angelou as an accomplished woman doing great things. Now, after reading of her early years, I have a new appreciation for her strength and determination.  With all of that said, the lessons for a suburban white girl are not so much that this is a great lady. It’s more to have an in-your-face reality of what it has and can still be like for a black woman in America.  As we enter this new era, led by Barack Obama, I hope that racial prejudices continue to subside.  But we need to recognize the history and the mistakes if we are to move beyond it. One passage in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings really stuck with me. It was as Angelou was battling to be the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco at the age of 15, “The miserable little encounter had nothing to do with me, the me of me, any more than it had to do with that silly clerk. The incident was a recurring dream, concocted years before by stupid whites and it eternally came back to haunt us all. The secretary and I were like Hamlet and Laertes in the final scene, where, because of the harm done by one ancestor to another, we were bound to duel to the death. Also. Because the play must end somewhere.  I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer.”