The South, in general, and Stamps, Arkansas, in particular had had hundreds of years’ experience in demoting even large adult blacks to psychological dwarfs. He came to that decision when he was nine years old. I knew I was smart, but I also knew that Bailey was smarter, maybe because he reminded me often and even suggested that maybe he was the smartest person in the world. Without knowing why exactly, I did not believe that I was inferior to anyone except maybe my brother. Then submission to the idea that black people were inferior to white people, who I saw rarely. Surrender first to the grown up human beings who I saw every day, all black and all very, very large. My real growing up world, in Stamps, was a continual struggle against a condition of surrender. My address is 220 Center Street.” All facts, which have little to do with the child’s truth. Those are facts, but facts, to a child, are merely words to memorize, “My name is Johnny Thomas. Throughout the years I have lived in Paris, Cairo, West Africa, and all over the United States. Louis, Missouri, but from the age of three I grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, with my paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, and my father’s brother, Uncle Willie, and my only sibling, my brother, Bailey.Īt thirteen I joined my mother in San Francisco. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Here is my offering to you.”-from Letter to My Daughter You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all.
You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. “I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.
Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.
0 kommentar(er)
