You may think this undertaking
Should be left to younger hearts
But love has given us the courage to venture
boldly into the sacred country of
marriage, admitting our wrinkles,
we allow them to
show themselves bravely
and our bones know the weight
of the years.
Yet we dare
face down loneliness
and embrace the
uplifting communion
found in a good marriage.
We dare and we hope.”
They are blessed by love, and each of us on whom their love light beams is enriched.
Thank you, Lovers.
Commencement Address
And now the work begins
And now the joy begins
Now the years of preparation
Of tedious study and
Exciting learning
are explained.
The jumble of words and
Tangle of great and small ideas
Begin to take order and
This morning you can see
A small portion of the large
Plan of your futures.
Your hours of application,
The hopes of your parents,
And the labor of your instructors
Have all brought this moment
Into your hands.
Today, you are princesses and princes
Of the morning.
Ladies and Lords of the summer
You have shown the most
Remarkable of all virtues
For today as you sit
Wrapped in earned robes,
Literally or figuratively,
I see you filled with courage.
For although you might all
Be bright, intellectually astute,
You have had to use courage
To arrive at this moment.
You may be,
As you are often described,
Privileged, which of course means
Wealthy, or you have been born into an ongoing struggle with need.
In either case, you have had to develop
An outstanding courage to
Invent this moment.
Of all your attributes, youth,
Beauty, wit, kindness, mercy,
Courage is your greatest
Achievement,
For you, without it, can practice no other
Virtue with consistency.
And now that you have shown
That you are capable of manufacturing
That most wondrous virtue,
You must be asking yourselves,
What you will do with it.
Be assured that question
Is in the minds of your
Elders, your parents, and strangers
Who do not know your names,
Your fellow students who
Next year, or in the years to come
Will sit, robed and capped
And will ask the question
What will you do?
There is an African adage
Which fits your situation.
It is, “The trouble for the
Thief is not how to steal the Chief ’s
Bugle, but where to play it.”
Are you prepared to work
To make this country, our country
More than it is today?
For that is the job to be done.
That is the reason you have
Worked hard, your sacrifices
Of energy and time,
The monies of your parents
Or of government have been paid
So that you can transform your
Country and your world.
Look beyond your tasseled caps
And you will see injustice.
At the end of your fingertips
You will find cruelties,
Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow
And terrifying loneliness.
There is your work.
Make a difference
Use this degree which you
Have earned to increase
Virtue in your world.
Your people, all people,
Are hoping that you are
The ones to do so.
The order is large,
The need immense.
But you can take heart.
For you know that you
Have already shown courage.
And keep in mind
One person, with good purpose,
can, constitute the majority.
Since life is our most precious gift
And since it is given to us to live but once,
Let us so live that we will not regret
Years of uselessness and inertia
You will be surprised that in time
The days of single-minded research
And the nights of crippling, cramming
Will be forgotten.
You will be surprised that these years of
Sleepless nights and months of uneasy
Days will be rolled into
An altering event called the
“Good old days.” And you will not
Be able to visit them even with an invitation
Since that is so you must face your presence.
You are prepared
Go out and transform your world
Welcome to your graduation.
Congratulations
Poetry
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Til the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
(Published in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Alfred A. Knopf & Vintage Press)
If African and many African American poets have one theme it most assuredly is “Wouldn’t everyone like to be…Black Like Me?” Black poets revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry.
There is a flourish of pride in works which must stupefy the European reader. How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?
Aimé Césaire, speaking of the African, wrote:
Those who never knew how to conquer steam or
electricity
Those who explore neither seas nor sky
But those without whom the earth would not be
earth….
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled
against
The clamor of the day;
My negritude is not a speck of dead water on the
earth’s dead eye,
My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral….
It perforates opaque dejection with its upright
patience.
(Published in Return to My Native Land by Bloodaxe Books)
Césaire was writing in the same spirit as that which inspired the black American poet Melvin B. Tolson. When he wrote:
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You dupe the poor with rags-to-riches tales,
And leave the workers empty dinner pails.
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You send flame gutting tanks,
Like swarms of flies
And pump a hell from dynamiting skies.
You fill machine-gunned towns with rotting dead–
A No Man’s Land where children cry for bread.
(Published in The Negro Caravan by Citadel Press)
Mari Evans gave he
art to African Americans in general and women in particular in her poem, “I Am a Black Woman”:
I
am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed
(Published in I Am a Black Woman by William Morrow & Co.)
The negritude poets’ exposition of oppression, in fact, was inspired earlier by the Harlem Renaissance writers. The American black poets heralded their blackness carrying their color like banners into the white literary world. When Langston Hughes’ poem, “I’ve Known Rivers,” became the rallying cry for black Americans to take pride in their color, the reverberations of that attitude reached the Africans in the then French and British colonies.
Sterling A. Brown’s “Strong Men” must have had a salutary effect on the African poets:
They Stole you from Homeland
They brought you in shackles
They sold you
They scourged you
They branded you
They made your women breeders
They swelled your numbers with bastards.
You sang, ‘Keep a inching along like a po inch worm’
You sang, ‘Walk together children…don’t you get weary’
The strong men keep coming on
The strong men get stronger.
(Published in The Negro Caravan by Citadel Press)
That poem, and Claude McKay’s “White Houses” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” were guiding lights to the colonized African poets. The African in the Caribbean and on the African continent had much in common with their black American counterparts. They had the onerous task of writing in the colonial language, poetry which opposed colonialism. That is to say, they had to take the artillery of the foe to diminish the power of the foe. They meant to go farther; they hoped to with eloquence and passion to win the foe to their side.
The hope still lives. It can be heard in Langston Hughes’ poem, “I, too, Sing America.”
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
(Published in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Alfred A. Knopf &Vintage Press)
Mt. Zion
Once in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and an acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Practical Christianity.
Frederick Wilkerson, the voice teacher, numbered opera singers, nightclub singers, recording artists, and cabaret entertainers among his students. Once a month he invited all of us to gather and read from Lessons in Truth.
At one reading, the other students, who were all white, the teacher, and I sat in a circle. Mr. Wilkerson asked me to read a section, which ended with the words “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book. The teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and a bit sarcastically read, “God loves me.” Mr. Wilkerson said, “Again.” I wondered if I was being set up to be laughed at by the professional, older, all-white company? After about the seventh repetition I became nervous and thought that there might be a little truth in the statement. There was a possibility that God really did love me, me Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the gravity and grandeur of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me, since one person, with God, constitutes the majority?
That knowledge humbles me today, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in my gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation of full growth.
Gratefully I am a member in good standing of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I am under watch care at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and I am a present member of Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco, California.
In all the institutions I try to be present and accountable for all I do and leave undone. I know that eventually I shall have to be present and accountable in the presence of God. I do not wish to be found wanting.
Keep the Faith
Many things continue to amaze me, even well into my seventh decade. I’m startled or at least taken aback when people walk up to me and without being questioned inform me that they are Christians. My first response is the question “Already?”
It seems to me that becoming a Christian is a lifelong endeavor. I believe that is also true for one wanting to become a Buddhist, or a Muslim, a Jew, Jainist, or a Taoist. The persons striving to live their religious beliefs know that the idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.
The Depression, which was difficult for everyone to survive, was especially so for a single black woman in the Southern states tending her crippled adult son and raising two small grandchildren.
One of my earliest memories of my grandmother, who was called “Mamma,” is a glimpse of that tall, cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air with nothing visible beneath her.
Whenever she confronted a challenge, Mamma would clasp her hands behind her back, look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and draw herself up to her full six-foot height. She would tell her family in particular, and the world in general, “I don’t know how to find the things we need, but I will step out on the word of God. I am trying to be a Christian and I will just step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her shoulders. Naturally, since she was over six feet tall, and stood out on the word of God, she was a giant in heaven. It wasn’t difficult for me to see Mamma as powerful, because she had the word of God beneath her feet.
Thinking of my grandmother years later, I wrote a gospel song that has been sung rousingly by The Mississippi Mass choir.
“You said to lean on your arm
And I am leaning
You said to trust in your love
And I am trusting
You said to call on your name
And I am calling
I’m stepping out on your word.”
Whenever I began to question whether God exists, I looked up to the sky and surely there, right there, between the sun and moon, stands my grandmother, singing a long meter hymn, a song somewhere between a moan and a lullaby and I know faith is the evidence of things unseen.
And all I have to do is continue trying to be a Christian.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Poet, writer, performer, teacher, and director, MAYA ANGELOU was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, then moved to San Francisco. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written a cookbook, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, and five poetry collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved and Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?
ALSO BY MAYA ANGELOU
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
The Heart of a Woman
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
ESSAYS
Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
POETRY
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
And Still I Rise
Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?
I Shall Not Be Moved
On the Pulse of Morning
Phenomenal Woman
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
A Brave and Startling Truth
Amazing Peace
Mother
Celebrations
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me
Kofi and His Magic
PICTURE BOOKS
Now Sheba Sings the Song
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me
COOKBOOK
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table
Copyright © 2008 by Maya Angelou
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Mari Evans: Excerpt from “I Am a Black Woman” from I Am a Black Woman by Mari Evans (New York: William Morrow, 1970). Reprinted by permission of Mari Evans.
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. and Harold Ober Associates:
“I, Too” and “Dream Variations” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Russell, associate editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Rights in the United Kingdom are controlled by Harold Ober Associates. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates.