A soaring voice, larger than life

Orlando R. Barone

is a writer in Doylestown

My daughter Marisa was about 21, a deaf-education student, when Maya Angelou came to the University of Pittsburgh to deliver one of her sublime presentations. Assigned to interpret, the frightened undergraduate took her position a few feet away from the legendary singer, poet, author, speaker, raconteuse.

"What do you remember?" I asked of the event, which took place not long after Angelou delivered a poem at the Clinton inauguration.

"She made fun of me," Marisa replied. "She used the word rake to describe combing her natural hair. I, of course, did the sign for a garden rake, and she noticed. When she made clear that she was not talking about dragging a garden rake through her hair, the audience got a good laugh."

She added: "I was too young and inexperienced to interpret for someone who spoke and sang and recited poetry and shifted without warning from one to the other."

We're all too young to fully interpret what Maya Angelou brought to us during her 86 wonderful - by which she would mean wonder-filled - years.

For five of those years, after being raped and learning of the murder of her rapist, she did not speak. She told WHYY's Terry Gross that she became a "giant ear" during that time. That ear picked up the resonances of song; the echoes of love, grief, joy, and hate; the whispers of anger, fear, ambition, and finally, courage.

The courage to speak again was aroused by a wise teacher who told her she could not love poetry if it did not pass over her tongue, through her teeth, and past her lips. The voice she found was a singular accounting of what that giant ear gleaned about me and my fellow citizens. Her favorite poem, the one she rejoiced in sending past her lips in every imaginable form, is America.

America the beautiful, the ugly, the fiercely good, the ferociously bad, America. New York, she wrote, is the city that "drags itself awake on subway straps." So different from "the Grand Canyon / Kindled into delicious color / By Western sunsets." She saw, felt, and heard the impact of each extreme and drew lessons that only America can teach a brilliant black woman.

We, this people on this mote of matter

In whose mouths abide cankerous words

Which challenge our very existence

Yet out of those same mouths

Come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falters in its labor

And the body is quieted into awe

In her life she experienced the worst of our proclivity for violence and bigotry; in her work she evoked our songs of exquisite sweetness. "She stood in the middle of a very large stage," Marisa recalled. "And she dominated it. She was larger than life."

In the end, it is her largeness that will endure, her victories over smallness and meanness, her expansiveness of spirit, her unslakable need to grow. On that stage she stood 6 feet tall. In life, she stretched to skyscraping heights. She knew why the caged bird sings, this clear-voiced calypso girl whose rhythmic cadence would not be confined by cages of mindless hate or fruitless rage.

That cage is empty now, its door open. But her song will resonate as uniquely American, uniquely feminine, uniquely hers.

When we come to it

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body

Created on this earth, of this earth

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely without sanctimonious piety

Without crippling fear.

That is exactly how Maya Angelou lived.