Wordly Wise

• avid


  Enthusiastic and eager
• demean


  To treat in a way that shows a lack of respect
• Brusque


  Curt
• despicable


  Deserving hatred and contempt
• emulate


  To try to equal or excel, often by imitation
• evoke


  To bring or recall to the conscious mind
• excruciating


  Extremely painful
• inaugurate


  To induct into office with formal ceremonies
• pervade


  To spread or flow throughout
• proprietor


  The owner of a business
• pseudonym


  A fictitious name used by an author
• Maya Angelou was honored by William Jefferson Clinton when he invited her to read a poem she had written to celebrate his inauguration as the forty-second president of the United States
• This was a fitting tribute to the woman whose early life had seemed so empty of promise when she was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, sixty-four years before
• She sums up that life concisely in these lines from one of her poems: "... birthing is hard/and dying is mean/and living's a trial in between"
• When she was still a small child, her parents divorced; she and her older brother Bailey were raised by their grandmother Annie Henderson affectionately known as Momma
• Mrs. Henderson was the proprietor of the only general store in Stamps, Arkansas, owned by an African American
• In her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bind Sings, Angelou evokes Momma's powerful presence as she lovingly describes the way her grandmother coped with the bigotry and racial hatred that was widespread in the country in the 1930
• It was this resilience that most impressed Angelou and which she herself tried to emulate throughout her life
• One example of such bigotry involved a visit to the dentist. Angelou was suffering from an excruciating toothache. Momma had no choice but to take her granddaughter to the town's only dentist, who was white
• When she asked him to treat the little girl's toothache, he rebuffed her, using extremely demeaning language
• He told her that he would rather put his hand in a dog's mouth than treat a black person
• Momma reminded him that she had helped him in the past by making him interest-free loans, now she was asking a favor in return. But he brusquely asserted that his debts had been paid
• He ordered her to leave. After taking her grandchild out of the office, Momma returned and stood her ground. She demanded that the dentist pay her a fair rate of interest on the loans she had made him
• Finally, he handed over ten dollars, a large sum in those days. Only then did she depart, her dignity intact
• She traveled over thirty miles with her granddaughter to Texarkana, where the nearest African-American dentist practiced
• When Angelou was eight years old, she and her brother went to live with their mother in St. Louis. There her mother's boyfriend abused her
• He threatened to harm Bailey if she told anyone. When Angelou became ill, her mother discovered the despicable abuse
• The boyfriend was brought to trial and convicted. But the shock of the experience left Angelou unable to speak for several years
• In spite of her troubled and turbulent childhood, a spirit of optimism pervades I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• In it, Angelou pays tribute to those who helped and encouraged her. Among them was a neighbor named Bertha Flowers
• She gave Angelou books and introduced her to the pleasures of reading poetry, drama, and great novels
• As a result of Flowers's influence, Angelou became an avid reader. This led later to her dream of becoming a writer
• Four more volumes of autobiography and many collections of poetry followed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. All appeared under her pseudonym, Maya Angelou, a name she began using in the 1950s
• It was a long and difficult road that she had traveled, but it led to the presidential platform where she read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" to an audience of millions on that cold January day
• Angelou had triumphed over many difficulties, strengthened by the deep faith expressed in these lines from the poem, "Lift up your hearts/Each new hour holds new chances / For a new beginning"
• She died peacefully in her sleep in 2014. A year later the U.S. Postal Service issued a special Maya Angelou stamp to honor her memory