The news of Maya Angelou’s death arrived with the abruptness of a great twister — violent, without warning, tearing things up and flipping things over.So begins a magnificent column which describes the ability of Angelou to speak to and inflame the souls of others, and which demonstrates the power of beauty of the writing of Blow.I ached the way the soul aches in the world when a great soul is lost from it.
You need to read Maya & Me & Maya, subtitled "What Maya Angelou Meant to Me" from which I have just shared the opening.
Blow will explain connections - how part of his youth was spent one county over from where Angelou was raised.
He places her in a pantheon of writers whom he calls his literary fathers and mothers, people like Alice Walker and Langston Hughes, and others, and says of them
They helped me to see myself and love myself when I felt least seen and least loved.By now you have a sense of the power - and yes, beauty - of this column.They saved me.
You should read it.
Let me add a few observations if I may.
Like too many Americans I was woefully unaware of Angelou's work until January 20, 1993, when Bill Clinton, emulating John F. Kennedy's having had Robert Frost read a poem at his own inaugural some 32 years earlier, had Angelou read a poem for the occasion.
That led me to read more of her work.
Later her life would intersect mine in a different way, when as a teacher I spent several months teaching at a non-profit charter middle school part of a complex dedicated to Maya Angelou, Charles M. Blow offers a tribute to Maya Angelou: