Breaking Out of Cages (Commemorating Maya Angelou)
She died and for a moment my life stood still. As a member of Generation X, I am not supposed to be paralyzed by death. Death is splattered on television as often as laundry detergent commercials. The “dying” are talked about as flippantly as nail polish is discussed at a fancy salon. Things come fast, and they go so fast in my life and in this race, I barely have time to mourn. So, I don’t. I accept (and expect) that I am always supposed to feel numb. But with her death, I don’t feel the numbness. I feel surges of sadness charging my body like volts of electricity. My spirit is burned to a crisp. It is like the loss of a parent or perhaps a part of my self. The Phenomenal Woman’s legacy was as intimate and foreign as my own. Her story was mine just as it was in a random stranger. And her death reminded me of the struggle and triumph, I have had in my life and how at different stages of my maturing, she was there through her writing encouraging me to be the woman I am. She was my Hegai.
Yes, Hegai was a man; however, the Persian eunuch taught Esther how to be accepted by another social class, gain self-confidence, and accept that her inner and outer beauty is power. Maya also taught me about womanhood. When I was introduced to Maya Angelou through her work, her embodiment of the Hegai spirit helped me navigate some pretty difficult times when I needed to know that it was ok to walk sassily as though there was oil pumping in my living room and even that the curl of my lips was phenomenal. Through her literature, I accepted those things as my personal truths. When I consider Esther, I think that she probably felt like a caged bird in the palace of the King. But Hegai gave her sound counsel. I, too, understood what it felt like to be a caged bird, desiring to sing and fly unapologetically in my truth. And Maya, in the Spirit of Hegai, used her writing to counsel several generations of people wanting to break free. The name Hegai means: meditation, word, separation, and groaning (Hitchcock Bible Names). Maya offered a meditation on what she wanted to say to help someone else. There was a writing so poetic that it could teach readers how to sing with passion, joy, or the blues. She represented the blessing of being the qadash (Heb: set apart) of God in a nation that implies that you are a curse and cannot be righteous because you are Black and Woman. Maya for me and so many others took the groanings and made them expressions of sacred prayer in the deepest parts of our souls.
In her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she says: “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.” Unnecessary indeed! I can scoff now. With the new sensation of deep feeling taking over me, my mind goes back 25 plus years to when I was that little insecure girl suffocating in my own skin. Sitting in a corner in the church I grew up in, crying silent tears about sitting in the deacon’s chair during Youth Sunday. Deacon Moore told me that only the boys can pretend to be deacons, and I would have to sit in the choir pew. This deacon spoke prophetically over my life and always told me I was anointed to change the world and be a blessing in God’s Kingdom. God had called me even back then, but even the Lord’s mandate on my life could not legitimize me in the eyes of that deacon or the church. I buried that pain in deep in my gut. I caged it up. That rust poisoned me as I cut myself with the razor of Afro-misogyny; the spiritual mutilation of being told as a girl that I had no right to walk in my spiritual call (even as it was manifested through my childhood desire to sit in a chair of authority) left scars of insecurity and not-enoughness that have plagued me until today. But Maya told me that I was not a victim, but I could be a victor. I found freedom. I started writing. She taught me that language and words are holy, cleansing, have value, and should be used to lift and love.
She helped me shape who I wanted to be and how to draw my own pictures. With those pictures, she invited me to color outside of the lines. Recently, African American actress Phylicia Rashaad said that when Maya Angelou picked up a pen, the world changed shape and color. That is what she did for me. She reshaped my world and painted it with Technicolored possibility.
In 1991, I was a freshman at Spelman College. I was the first in my household to go to college, and it felt good that I was going to one of the most celebrated institutions in the African-American community. I was no longer the broken little girl that carried a dog-eared paperback of Caged Bird in her pocket in middle school. Oh no, I had plowed through those hardships with the zeal of an eagle. From Caged Bird, I had read her other two books, Gather Together in My Name and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting Merry like Christmas. Learning about her life story helped me to understand that the world was my creation. Either I was going to make it beautiful and expansive or ugly and constricting. To me there was no option; whichever one allowed me to run free, I took. Specifically, In My Name impacted me at 18. I related to how she made a way, despite the mantra of “You can’t do it” around her. And then it happened.
She came to speak to the young ladies at our school during convocation. She was surreal. I was affirmed and the movement of God in my life was confirmed by her lecture. I have not looked back since. She prepared me, through her own healing, by always feeling what was going on. She expressed it and spoke truth to me as a Black woman, beautiful and fascinating, beloved and honorable. Yet somehow, in my adulthood, I indulged in the emotional Novocain of busyness. As a minister, the constant pouring into other people leaves me depleted, and I sometimes forget to stop and reflect on those things that edify me and fill me up. Hearing of her death did not shock me but reminded me that I am still rising. It reminded me to stop and to hear my own teenage daughter’s voice, carefully listening to learn if she feels caged and if she is longing to sing a song that has not yet vibrated through her intellectual or emotional vocal chords. It reminded me that my little one will have those Black girl moments that I had, that Maya had, that my mother had, and her mother had. There is a preparation to be made that my Jesus-talk can’t speak to. They drip from the pen of Mother Maya and must write on the ready journals of her heart. It will be those salvific scriptures written by a Black woman for other Black women that will point to God in the night of her experiences, as they did for me.
I can hear the words of Maya now, “In a world of confusion and noise, I look for the moments that help me understand who I am, where I come from, and what I want to be.” She was talking about the bible, but I could say this and be talking about her.
Rest in Paradise.
