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Did you know that Maya Angelou — renowned poet, author of the best-selling memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and one of the most memorable voices at President Clinton’s inauguration — was a fervent fan of San Antonio?
Angelou, the focus of a compelling documentary on PBS next week, was a frequent visitor to the Alamo City. For several months in 1988, she lived in a condo on the River Walk.
“Maya loved people, and she saw in San Antonio the promise of what cultural diversity could become,” said Aaronetta Pierce, a local arts advocate and activist and longtime friend of Angelou.
“She was fluent in Spanish, and she appreciated both the African American and Hispanic culture that she was able to enjoy in San Antonio, including the arts and the cuisine,” Pierce added. “Every time she came, we went to La Margarita and she sang with the mariachis. And it was amazing to see this 6-foot-tall black woman surrounded by the other diners, who were thrilled to see her singing these songs in Spanish.”
That delightful local connection may be reason enough to tune in this first full-length documentary feature about Angelou. “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise” debuts at 7 p.m. Feb. 21 on PBS.
What will keep viewers glued, however, is how widely diverse her interests and experiences were. At moments, you may find yourself not only surprised, but shocked, at what Angelou, a rather regal persona in her older years, went through to get there.
Pierce, who saw a screening in San Antonio, summed the doc up this way: “It introduces the audience to her varied experiences in life. We often hear that saying, ‘All of our experiences brought us where we are today,’ and you can really see where her love of the arts and her civil rights activism were not new to her, but were part of seeds planted along her journey.”
As you’ll see in its multitude of black-and-white photos and 29 minutes of priceless videotape, Angelou not only was a prolific writer but an actress, a dancer and enthusiastic singer, who performed both on stage and in a variety of movies.
As a young single mother who had to put food on the table, she took all sorts of jobs — from fry cook to a dancer in a strip club — before getting the chance to spread her wings and travel the world as an actress in “Porgy and Bess.”
“I think that’s one of the things that people enjoy about the film is they find out the earlier part of her life, which was not well documented or well known,” Bob Hercules, the film’s co-producer and co-director, said at at a recent press session.
Also not as known is her fiery political activism, Hercules said, which is depicted powerfully in the film: “She worked for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and she was very close to Malcolm X.”
It also was important, said co-producer and co-writer Ruth Coburn Whack, to transport viewers back to the different decades and moments of history that formed Angelou.
“We needed to set you in a place and a time,” Whack said. “(We wanted) to take a very current society back to 1928 and the Jim Crow South, when she was born, and archivally allow you to see that. Allow you to see her go in 1935 to St. Louis … an area where it was pretty much a lot of lawlessness. And then take you to 1954, when the State Department traveled her all around the world with ‘Porgy and Bess,’ which for African Americans, who had not seen the outside of this country, was a very heady thrill.”
Throughout, we hear Angelou’s distinctive voice speak the wisdom she was famous for.
“It may be necessary to encounter defeat,” she says at the start, “so we can know who the hell we are, what can we overcome, what makes us stumble and fall and somehow miraculously rise, and go on.”
As the film so movingly shows, she overcame much. It covers her life from birth to her death in 2014. Her childhood was tumultuous, at times tragic. Her parents’ marriage was stormy, “and neither of them wanted the problems of having two toddlers,” Angelou recalls in the film.
She was shuffled from her birthplace of St. Louis to Stamps, Arkansas. She and her brother lived for a time with their grandmother before being sent back home to their mom.
She was raped at the age of 7 by her mother’s boyfriend
“I told the name of the rapist to my brother, who was 9,” she says in the film “The man was put in jail for one day and night and released. A few days later, the police came …and said the man had been found dead. It seemed that he had been kicked to death.
“My 7-year-old logic told me that my voice had killed a man, so I stopped speaking — for five years.”
To show how “out of evil can come good,” she talks of reading every book that she could get her hands on during her silence — from Langston Hughes to Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe to Balzac.
At 16, she became pregnant with her son, Guy Johnson. After divorcing her first husband, she supported the youngster by getting jobs in strip joints.
“I didn’t strip, but I didn’t have to. I had a costume that was big enough to fit in the palm of my hand,” she jokes.
She graduated to singing, then acting, which opened all sorts of worlds to her.
As we see in the film, her encounters with notables and celebrities were numerous — from author James Baldwin to actresses Cicely Tyson and Alfre Woodard to Oprah Winfrey to Louis Gossett Jr., with whom she co-starred onstage in Jean Genet’s provocative play “The Blacks,” and who was inspired, he says, to explore his roots.
Her humor-tinged recollection of her bold encounter with Tupac Shakur over his rampant use of expletives is one you won’t soon forget.
Perhaps the best reason to watch, though, is the film’s positive, inspirational message.
“My grandma’s life is a call to action,” Angelou’s grandson Colin Johnson told television critics. “I think that the documentary itself tells a story about someone that hasn’t given up on themselves or humanity. And I think that much like most artists, it’s for your interpretation and your own actions after you’ve consumed it, how you process it.
“I think that we’ve heard many different comments after the screenings. And some people have felt healed and some have felt renewed and rejuvenated. And I think that when you have such a feeling you should probably do something with that and maybe try to find a way to give it to somebody else.”
jjakle@express-news.net
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