Maya Angelou Speaks of Race and Rainbows
October 20, 2000
[Norton, Mass.] -- She sang and swayed, recited and incited, roared and whispered.
Invoking the ghosts of the past to proclaim the promise of the future, Dr. Maya Angelou challenged a rapt AutumnFest audience of nearly 2,000 to find their places in posterity and become "rainbows in the clouds."
"When it looked like the sun wasn't gonna shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds," Angelou sang before offering Waring Cuney's "No Images," one of several poignant African-American poems she performed throughout the evening. "She does not know her beauty, she thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the water, she would know. But there are no palm trees on the street, and dishwater gives back no images. Uh-uh."
Speaking at the Beard Field House as part of the Jane E. Ruby Humanities Lecture Series, Angelou threaded the rainbow theme throughout her remarks. In the words of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, she said, students can discover the "rainbows" of the great African-American poets. "I understand they wrote for me." Angelou, perhaps best known for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, also read from her own acclaimed work, including "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman." Through poetry, she connected injustices of the past to humanity's present obligation to rise and move forward.
"There have been people-your parents, your guardians, your teachers, your beloveds, your professors, people who didn't even know your name-who have been rainbows for you," Angelou said. "This is the truth of it: Everyone here today has already been paid for. Whether her or his ancestors came from Ireland in the 1840s trying to escape the potato blight; or if they came from Eastern Europe trying to escape the little and large murders, the pogroms, arriving at Ellis Island, having their names changed to something utterly unpronounceable; or if they came from Asia to build this country, to build the railroads, unable legally to bring their mates for eight decades; or if they came from Africa, unwillingly, bound, lying spoon fashion, back-to-belly in the filthy holds of slave ships and in their own and in each other's excrement and urine, they have paid for each of us already."
"She showed us that we all can succeed," said Mark DeSouza '03, the political science major who was instrumental in bringing Angelou to Wheaton and who was one of nine Tree House students to meet with the poet before the lecture. "I read her work in high school and it touched my life. I decided I wanted to invite a speaker to campus who would touch the greatest number of students. It was unbelievable."
"Go to your library and ask the librarian for help," she exhorted the crowd. "Tell Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. that you are looking for some poets from the 18th and 19th century because Maya Angelou said you needed them," she laughed.
"I suggest that in the poetry there is the answer of how people stay alive and how the starch gets in your spine. In the poetry, you can see how people stay alive, what becomes their rainbow in the clouds."