The Heart of a Woman
Oprah Book Club® Selection, May 1997:Maya Angelou has had more lives than the proverbial cat, and inThe Heart of a Womanshe continues the account of her remarkable life begun inI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In the first book of her bestselling autobiographical series, she describes her traumatic childhood in the small, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s.Gather Together in My Namepicks up the story in the postwar years, when Maya, a single teenager with an infant son becomes, in short order, a cook, a madam, a dancer, and a prostitute. Next comesSingin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas,an account of her twenties and her unsuccessful first marriage to a white man.The Heart of a Woman,the fourth in the series, takes us through one of the most exciting and formative periods of Angelou's amazing life: her beginnings as a writer and an activist in New York.Angelou has a happy knack of attracting the best and the brightest into her orbit, andThe Heart of a Womanoffers a veritable cornucopia of black luminaries in its pages. Singer Billie Holiday, writers John Ellins and Paule Marshall, jazz musicians Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and actors Godfrey Cambridge and James Earl Jones--Maya meets and learns from them all. Political activism soon follows as Ms. Angelou first organizes a theatrical benefit for the Reverend Martin Luther King and then becomes the director of the New York Southern Christian Leadership Conference office. Her involvement in the civil rights movement eventually brings her into contact with African freedom fighters Oliver Tambo and the charming Vusumzi Make, whom she marries and follows to Africa.The Heart of a Womanis as honest, painful, funny, outraged, and outrageous as Angelou herself. From her debut at the Apollo Theatre to her meeting with Malcolm X, Maya Angelou gives us something to cheer about and plenty to ponder as well.