Maya Angelou by Mary; Lupton Page A

importance as poets. The essay, a fairly sophomoric appreciation of black poetry, does not convey the perspective of a woman who had been greatly admired for her achievements in that genre. Given that Angelou by 2008 was an established poet, her omission of a critical viewpoint is disconcerting.
    Letter to My Daughter ends with the book’s most touching portrait, a recollection about her paternal grandmother called “Keep the Faith.” The two-page musing reintroduces the Momma of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , with her soft voice, her colossal presence, and her Christian devotion. In a brilliant periodic sentence near the end of the vignette, Angelou describes Annie Henderson in terms of gospel music: “Whenever I began to question whether God exists, I looked up to the sky, and surely there, rightthere, 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” (166).
    Mom & Me & Mom , an autobiographical account of her relationship with her mother, was published the year before Angelou’s death. The musing begins with Vivian Baxter’s birth in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Trinidadian father and to a mother of Irish descent. It ends with the dedication of the Vivian B. Baxter State Park in Stockton, California, in 1995, four years after her mother’s death from lung cancer. The memoir presents a different view of Vivian Baxter than the one the reader encounters in the six-book autobiographical series. It is more critical, more severe, and more ambivalent. While it extolls “Lady B” for being founder and president of the Stockton Black Women of Humanity and a board member for United Way and several other civic organizations, it presents a more violent side, probably provoked by Vivian’s being raised in a rough family known as the “Bad Baxters” (4).
    Angelou reveals that when she was two years old, Vivian hit her child with such violence that she fell off the porch. In another recollection Vivian confesses to having struck her then teenage daughter with a heavy ring of keys because Maya had come home late one night. The facial swelling was so severe that Bailey, usually overwhelmingly fond of his mother, threatens to leave the house: “Nobody, but nobody, beats up my baby sister” (57). In yet another episode Bailey, convinced that his mother is cheating on her husband, is so appalled that he joins the merchant marines.
    The reader also learns that Vivian Baxter packs a pistol. When she and her daughter reserve a room in a recently integrated Fresno, California, hotel, Maya sees her mother’s .38 revolver in the suitcase. Vivian remarks: “If they were not ready for integration, I was ready to show it to them. Baby, you try to be ready for every situation you run into” (141).
    Angelou frequently contrasts Vivian’s delicate stature to her own awkward size, Vivian’s beautiful face to her own solemn countenance, Vivian’s bravado to her own reticence. As Guy had been the center of Angelou’s early autobiographies, so is Vivian Baxter the focus in Mom & Me & Mom . Much of the story of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is retold—the abandonment, the train trip to Arkansas, the muteness, the rape. But the mother-daughter narrative essentially begins when Maya is thirteen. In a reversal of the earlier train trip, Maya and Momma Henderson travel from Arkansas to the Baxter boardinghouse in California. Maya’s initial refusal to call Vivian “Mother” is further traumatized after Bailey’s arrival. Her brother, enamored by his long-lost mother, comes close to rejecting his sister.
    The musing moves back and forth in time as Angelou recalls her teenage pregnancy, her European tour, her brother Bailey’s addiction to heroin, and her California visit with her father and his wife, Loretta. The most bizarre