Maya Angelou by Mary; Lupton

concerned with art and the preservation of culture, “Rural Museums” is a grim recounting of Angelou’s journey to a slave museum in Louisiana, not far from Baton Rouge. The artifacts included a depressing statue of a bent figure, “Uncle Jack,” the exemplary Negro slave; an overseer’s house; a slave collar; nineteenth-century carriages being buffed by an African American male; and some still-standing slave cabins, very neatly furnished. In Angelou’s view, the museum captured in its orderly presentations “the romance of slavery” while eliminating any real sense of the brutality, the beatings, the cramped hovels, the exhaustion, the hunger. Missing from the reconstructed scene was “our historical truth” (94), truth being just what a museum should uphold. Having visited this same historical site in 2012, I strongly agree with her conclusions.
    Although both of these wise books make use of the travel motif, that theme is more central to Even the Stars Look Lonesome than to its earlier, journey-titled companion piece. Angelou gives the reader some priceless glimpses of her iconic self in each of the collections, although the frequent citations of poetry seem out of proportion if what the reader anticipates is an updated array of insights from the woman whose autobiographies have set the standard for length, breadth, and historical relevance.
    In assessing Angelou’s two early books of reflections, one must be cautious in not confusing genres. The reader should be continually aware that both Journey and Stars contain a great deal of quoted secondary material. Above all, the reader should know that they are not autobiographies. Journalist Sandra Crockett, in a September 1997 article in the Baltimore Sun , identifies Even the Stars Look Lonesome as part of Angelou’s “continuing series of autobiographical books” (E1, 8). Although both texts clearly haveautobiographical moments, they are in no way a continuation of the solid, book-length journeys into the self that Angelou has been conducting since the 1970 appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings . Neither Journey nor Stars , collections of short, informal essays, should be mistaken for autobiography.
    Two later publications, Letter to My Daughter (2008) and Mom & Me & Mom (2013), can also be classified as musings. The first of these is not actually a “letter” but rather a collection of short chapters about “growing up, unexpected emergencies, a few poems, some light stories to make you laugh and some to make you meditate” (xi). The hypothetical “daughter” of the title refers to the long list of women to whom the book is dedicated, women who mothered her or allowed themselves to be mothered: Vivian Baxter, Berdis Baldwin, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle B. King, Annie Henderson, and thirteen other women. Implied in this list of daughters is an imagined second person, the reader.
    Letter to My Daughter is a pastiche of stories, aphorisms, recollections, revelations, and vignettes. Here one finds a number of tributes to women, among them Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party; Coretta Scott King (1927–2006), Angelou’s close friend, civil rights activist, and the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Cuban singer Celia Cruz (1925–2003). The slim volume contains as well a commencement address; an essay on vulgarity; a remembrance of being beaten by a ferocious lover named Two Fingers Mark; an essay on poetry; an essay on violence; an essay on the national spirit; a poem, “Surviving”; a concluding essay on Momma Henderson.
    Perhaps the single most disappointing essay is “Poetry” (153–57), in which Angelou quotes fragments of poems by black writers—from Langston Hughes to Mari Evans, from Sterling A. Brown to Aime¯´ Ce¯´saire—praising their “negritude” but making almost no comment on their