Memoirs

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story in you,” Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”

 

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” became an instant classic when published in 1969. Raised by paternal grandmother Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas after her parents divorced when she was just three, Maya Angelou grew up insecure about her self-worth and believing she was ugly. Sexually abused as a young girl, Maya began to gain self-confidence after an educated woman introduced her to books of poetry.  At age 13 her mother took her to California, and at one point the troubled home life resulted in her running away and living in a junkyard with other homeless waifs.  During World War II 15-year-old Maya found work as a streetcar conductor, and she managed to graduate from high school despite being eight months pregnant, a fact she hid from authorities. Angelou wrote: The black female is assaulted by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogic hate and Black lack of power.”  Nonetheless, she came of age with her spirit unbroken.

 

Despite their shortcomings, I have long recognized that memoirs are vital primary sources of particular use to social historians.  In Steel Shavings magazine I’ve published the memoirs of African-American Darnell Lee, Mexican-American Louis Vasquez, and Oldies music promoter Henry Farag, plus edited published memoirs of matriarch Maria Arredondo and former Lake County sheriff Roy Dominguez.  My forthcoming Shavings issue will include reminiscences of Calumet Region residents Anne Koehler and Eleanor Bailey, one a German immigrant and the other a descendent of a pioneer family.

 

Politicians and celebrities often publish memoirs as a chance to cash in on their fame and with a view toward posterity; it is refreshing when authors are truly candid about insecurities they’ve grappled with.  In “Dreams of My Father” Barack Obama discussed undergoing a racial identity crisis; in “Bossy Pants” comedienne Tina Fey believed herself to be impossible nerdish and remained a virgin until age 24. Favorite memoirs include Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life,” about growing up in a dysfunctional family with an abusive stepfather; Tara Westover’s “Educated,” about breaking away from Mormon survivalists who forbade her to attend school or go to a doctor; and Bakari Sellers’ “Our Vanishing Country,” about a young Black South Carolinian (son of SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers) dealing with panic attacks despite outward success. On my to-do reading list is the just released “Let Love Rule” by rock star Lennie Kravitz, reared in New York City by a Russian Jew and Bahamian mother, actress Roxie Roker, who on “The Jeffersons” sitcom was married to a white actor.  Once, when Roxie and her real-life husband went to check into a hotel, the desk clerk said, “No prostitutes allowed.” For a decade Kravitz tried to emulate the image of others, even calling himself Romeo Blue, but he finally found success when he began being himself.

 

Roxie Roker and Lenny Kravitz

I have frequently written about my life in the pages of Steel Shavings but remained mostly reticent about past insecurities.  I reached puberty late and remained quite short until experiencing a growth spurt in college accompanied by a bad complexion. Public speaking was initially difficult, and as a first-year teacher, I was quite nervous prior to each class. I’d often have nightmares of arriving to class and finding the room empty or totally forgetting what I had prepared to say.  Throughout my career a residue of that nervous energy remained and motivated me to be extra-prepared.  Where I once was uncomfortable at social events among mostly strangers, now I look forward to them and am good at intermingling. Where once my insecurities had to do with coming of age, now in my late-70s they have to do with incipient old age, especially in this plague year.

 

In the October 8 issue of New York Review Dayna Tortorici wrote about radical feminist Vivian Gornick’s memoir “Unfinished Business.”  A Red Diaper baby born in 1935, Vivian described her father as a kind soul “who stood upright on the floor of a dress factory on New York City’s West 35th Street with a steam iron in his hand” who died suddenly of a heart seizure when she was 13, an experience from which her mother never recovered (“her depression leaked into the air like a steady escape of gas when the pilot light is extinguished”).  Though a brilliant student with an imaginative mind, Gornick suffered writer’s block for almost 20 years until liberated by feminism. In the late 1960s she set out to “squeeze the slave out of herself,” to achieve a revolution in consciousness.  Dayna Tortoci wrote:

    Women had lived a half-life so that men “might gain the courage to pursue a whole one.” To set the record straight – to describe the world as it really was – required seeing everything anew.  Gornick stood at the threshold of this enterprise and felt she had arrived – “as though light and music were bursting across the top of my skull . . . Life felt good then.”