Maya Angelou by Mary; Lupton Page B

recollection involves being severely beaten by a lover, Two Fingers Mark. Maya is saved from near death by Vivian, who comes to Mark’s room with “three huge men” (87). These strong-armed rescuers clearly recall and most likely are Vivian Baxter’s brothers, who intervened in Maya’s childhood rape by kicking Mr. Freeman to death.
    A later episode covers Angelou’s tenure in Sweden, where a screenplay she had written was being filmed. After several clashes with the leading actors, Maya is banned from the movie set except to dress the female star’s hair. Distraught, she calls her “smart, glamorous, sophisticated mother” (167), who flies immediately to Stockholm to smooth things over. Throughout these and other recollections Maya places her mother at her side, in the center of the action. She praises her mother for her spunk. Simultaneously, Vivian applauds her daughter, claiming that Maya Angelou will someday be famous.
    This open and ambivalent portrait of Vivian Baxter is not without its flaws. One is that the structure, since it focusses on a single basic relationship, lacks a clearly developed plot line. Its main weakness, however, is Angelou’s tendency to repeat whole segments of previously published material, especially from the 2008 musing, Letter to My Daughter but also at times from the autobiographies. Chapter 22 of Mom & Me & Mom (133–37) is a slight revision of her unsuccessful visit to a psychiatric clinic, followed by a helpful session with her friend Frederick Wilkerson (cf. Letter , 64–67). The riffs on philanthropy (16) and on her landlady Mrs. Jefferson’s mysterious spaghetti (77) are repeated from the 2008 musing as well ( Letter , 11–12; 51). The episode involving Two Fingers Mark is laboriously retold.
    The problem in these instances is most likely a lack of careful editing. It is also possible that Angelou, so accustomed to telling stories, was by this stage in her life running out of fresh material or had become careless with her notes. In any event, she was well aware of the tendency toward repetition when she writes about Two Fingers Mark: “It is a story indelibly seared into my mind, and I’ve told part of it before” ( Mom & Me & Mom , 83).
    Maya’s description of the death of her mother had also appeared in other texts but never so eloquently as in Mom & Me & Mom . Vivian, diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema, was given only three months to live. Thinking that only she could give her mother the best care, Maya initiated another train ride, from San Francisco to North Carolina, from the west tothe south. Under the care of Maya and Bailey’s daughter Rosa, Vivian began to improve. When Angelou was offered a three-week visiting professorship at England’s University of Exeter, she at first declined but then accepted when Vivian insisted that she go. On her return she found Vivian in a coma. Maya’s parting words to her were an expression of ambivalence: “You were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult” (197). The final line of the musing is a tribute to both mother and daughter, to love and to memory: “I knew she deserved a daughter who loved her and had a good memory, and she got one.” (197)
    After Angelou’s death in 2014, Random House released Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou . Like Amazing Peace and Mom & Me & Mom , this collection of sayings and aphorisms is a short book—a compilation of many of its author’s well-known and lesser-known comments on parenting, childhood, diversity, God, black identity, laughter, independence, and other matters. Customer reviews on Amazon.com , Google.com , and goodreads.com tend to praise the content of this posthumous musing rather than to offer critical evaluation. Monique, for example, wrote on the Amazon website: “Words of