Maya Angelou Background
Maya Angelou is a remarkable Renaissance woman who is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary literature. She's an accomplished poet, an award winning writer, a journalist, an activist, a performer, a dancer, an actress, a Grammy Award winner for her autobiographical spoken- word recordings. She was born in St. louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928 to Bailey Johnson( a doorman and naval dietian) and Vivian Baxter Johnson (real estate agent, trained surgical nurse, and later merchant marine. When she was about three years old, her parents divorced and she was went to livw with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Growing up in Stamps , Maya learned what it was like to be a black girl in a world whose boundaries were set by whites. She learned what it meant to wear old hand me downs from a white woman. As a child she always dreamed of waking to find her "nappy black hair" metamorphosed to a long blond bob because she felt life was better for a white girl than for a white girl.
At the age of five she was sent back to her mother in St. Louis. This was the worst dicision that her grandmother ever made, she was being raped by her mother boyfriend. Because of the violence that happened it called her to become mute for almost five years. With the constant help of a woman named Mrs. Flowers, Maya began to evolve into a young girl who had possessed the pride and confidence she once had. After awhile she was then sent to live with her mother. Angelou's dysfunctional childhood spent moving back and forth between her mother and grandmother caused her to struggle with maturity. She became determined to prove she was a woman and began to rush toward maturity. Angelou soon found herself pregnant, and at the age of sixteen she delivered her son, Guy.
