Moyers & Company; 332; Maya Angelou on Facing Evil

Help right now. You This week of Warriors and Company facing evil with Maya Angelou. They laughed to shield their cry.

They shuffled through their dreams. They stepped in fetch to country and wrote the blues in screens. I understand their meaning. It could and did derive from living on the ledge of death. They kept my race alive by wearing the band. Funding is provided by Anne Gummowicz encouraging the renewal of democracy. Carnegie Corporation of New York supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement and the advancement of international peace and security at Carnegie.org. The Ford Foundation working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. The Herbalpert Foundation supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound.org. Microsoft Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues.

The Colbert Foundation, Barbara G. Fleischman, and by our sole corporate sponsor Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. Welcome. Once again we're remembering the author and poet Maya Angelou who died three months ago at the age of 86. At the time of her death, one of the cable news websites proclaimed that a literary voice revered globally for her poetic command and her commitment to civil rights has fallen silent. Well, not exactly, because we'll be hearing Maya Angelou's voice for a long time to come. She left seven autobiographies, three books of essays, volumes of poetry, and many recorded appearances on stage, television, and at public readings of her work. Here she is in 1993, reading her poem on the Pulse of Morning written for Bill Clinton's first inauguration as president.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if faced with courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon this day breaking for you. Give birth again to the dream. Men, children, men, take it into the palms of your hands, mold it into the shape of your most private need, sculpt it into the image of your most public self. Here on the Pulse of this new day, you may have the grace to look up and out, and enter your sister's eyes, and enter your brother's face, your country, and say simply, very simply, if hope, good morning. We also have her readings of many other poems, and the interview she did over her long life, several of them with me.

Last week you heard her as we walked together along the streets of the small, deeply segregated town in southwest Arkansas, where she had lived with her grandmother on the black side of the railroad tracks. Because if you were black, you never felt really safe when you simply crossed the railroad tracks. You still had to go all this way, it's like an international tarmac where anybody could get you. You were really in the black part of town when you crossed that little bridge and the pond. Then you were safe. And if you didn't know everybody, at least everybody knew who you were, you know. And as a child, it was the chance to have some protection. And I used to have to walk over here. Oh, gosh, I hated it. Houseing those railroad tracks. Real, I tell you, to show you how much things don't change.

I'm not even going to cross it with you now. I don't really, I'm not doing it for any reason, and I really do not want to go across that. I really don't understand. So what are you thinking about? You're still my son. We both be safe. Elias' experience with racism and rape was one reason we would meet again a few years later. It was in the beautiful hill country of central Texan, the subject was anything but beautiful. Some people were trying to understand the horrors of our time, genocide, war, atrocities, violence, next door, and abuse at home. So they held a conference called Facing Evil. These participants were men and women like Maya, grappling with the ugly graffiti left on the walls of the psyche. It's hard to expunge as Maya knew from experience.

Here's the next excerpt. What happens when we, a group of very highly energized and reasonably intelligent human beings come together to talk about evil? What on earth do we unleash? Is this a Pandora's box? Once we open it and it comes out, are we sort of letting out an evil gin? I had trepidation about this conference. I don't know what we evoke by invoking the word evil. I don't know. Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed periodic towers of evil, of times in the name of good. Our greed, fear, and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets who are ourselves

to castigate our priests who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody torturous inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon fashion in the filthy hatches of slave ships and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our head and bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not, we spend incredible energy

trying to forget what we've just been reminded of. When I was seven and a half, I was raped. I won't say severely raped, all rapists severe. The rapist was a person very well known to my family, I was hospitalized. The rapist was let out of jail and was found dead that night, and the police suggested that the rapist had been kicked to death. I was seven and a half. I thought that I had caused the man's death because I had spoken his name.

That was my seven and a half year old logic, so I stopped talking for five years. Now to show you again how out of evil there can come good. In those five years, I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Wellen Johnson, Paul Langston, Bar County, Cullen, and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets. I memorized Ed Grail and Poe, all the poetry. Never having heard it, I memorized it.

I had Longfellow, I had Guida Mopason, I had Bozac, Rudyard Kipling. I mean, there was Catholic kind of reading and Catholic kind of story. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say, and many ways in which to say what I had to say, I listened to the black minister, I listened to the melody of the preachers, and I could tell when they would start up on that kind of thing, when we didn't know they mean to take our soul straight to heaven, or whether they meant to dash a straight to hell. I understood it. So out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person, more often than not, introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

In my case, I was saved in that muteness, you see, in the Suradha, I was saved, and I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs enough to triumph myself. I'm obliged to tell you about an uncle of mine, Uncle Willie, in a little Arkansas town not far from this site, about as large as this side of the room. My uncle raised me. I was sent to him when I was three from California, and he and my grandmother owned the only black home store in the town, and he was obliged to work in the store, but he was severely crippled. So he needed me to help, and my brother. So at about four, he started us to learn to read and write, and do our times tables.

And he used to, in order to get me to do my times tables, he would take me behind my neck, my clothes, and stand me in front of a pot-bellied stove. And he would say, now, do your sixes. I did my sixes. I did sevensies, even now, after an evening of copious libation, I can be awakened at eleven o'clock at night, and as will you do your elevensies, I do my elevensies with a lakritu. A few years ago my uncle died, and I went to Little Rock, and was met by Miss Daisy Bates. She told me, girl, there's somebody who wants to meet you. I said, I'd be glad to meet whoever. She said, good-looking man, I said, indeed, yes, certainly. So that evening she brought a man over to the hotel, and he said, I don't want to shake your hand.

I want to hug you, and I agreed. He said, you know, Willie has died in stamps. Well, my stamps is very near to Texas. And Little Rock, when I was growing up, was as exotic as Cairo Egypt, Buddha, and Pest. I mean, I couldn't, this man knew where stamps was, and my crippled uncle. He said, because of your uncle, Willie, I'm who I am today. He said, in the 20s, I was the only child of a blind mother. Your uncle gave me a job in your store, made me love to learn, and taught me my time's tables. I asked him, how did he do that? He said, he used to grab me, right? He said, I guess you want to know who I am today. I said, yes, sir. He said, I'm Bussey. I'm the vice mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas. He went on to become the first black mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas. He said, now, when you get down to stamps, look up, and he gave me the name of a lawyer.

He said, he's a good old boy. He will look after your property. I went down expecting a middle-aged black man, a young white man, leapt to his feet. He said, Miss Angelo, I'm just delighted to meet you. You, why don't you understand, Mr. Bussey called me today. Mr. Bussey is the most powerful black man in the state of Arkansas, but more important than that, he's a noble man, because of Mr. Bussey, I'm who I am today. I said, let me sit down first. He said, I was an only child of a blind mother, and when I was 11 years old, Mr. Bussey got hold to me and made me love to learn, and I'm now in the state legislature. That which lives after us, I look back at Uncle Willie, crippled, black, poor, unexposed, to the world's great ideas, who left for our generation and generations to come, a legacy

so rich, so I wrote a song for Mr. Roberta Flack, you may have heard it, it says, Willie was a man without fame, hardly anybody knew his name, crippled and limping and always walking lame, he said, but I keep on moving, and moving just the same, solitude was the climate in his head, emptiness was the partner in his bed, pain echoed in the steps of his tread, he said, but I keep on following, where the others led, I may cry and I will die, but my spirit is the soul of every spring, watch for me and you will see that I'm present in the songs that children say. People called him Uncle, Boy, and Hey said, you can't live through this another day, and then they waited to hear what he would say, he said, but I'm living in the games that children play. You may enter my sleep, people my dreams, threaten my early mornings the ease, but I keep

coming, I'm following, I'm laughing, I'm crying, I'm certain as a summer breeze, look for me, ask for me, my spirit is the surge of open seas, call for me, sing for me, I'm the rustle in the autumn leaves, when the sun rises I am the time, when the children play I am the rhyme, just look for me. We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough, to create ourselves daily, as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by the dent of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution individually and collectively is exciting, honorable.

I have written a poem for a woman who rides a bus in New York City, she's a maid, she has two shopping bags, when the bus stops abruptly she laughs, if the bus stops slowly she laughs, if the bus picks up someone she laughs, if the bus misses someone, so I watched her for about nine months, I thought, now if you don't know black features you may think she's laughing, but she wasn't laughing, she was simply extending her lips and making a sound. I said, oh I see, that's that survival apparatus, now let me write about that, to honor this woman who helps us to survive, by her very survival, Ms. Rosie, through your destruction and I stand up, so I used the poem with Mr. Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem Masks and my

own poem for old black men, Mr. Dunbar wrote Masks in 1892. We wear the mask that grins and lies, it shades our cheeks and hides our eyes. It's death we pay to human God, with torn and bleeding hearts, we smile and mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be overwise in counting all our tears and sighs, and they let them only see us, why we wear the mask, we smile, but oh my God, our tears to thee from torture souls arise, and we sing, hey baby, we sing, hey, the clay is viled beneath our feet and long the mile, but let the world think otherwise, we wear the mask.

When I think about myself, I almost laugh myself to death. My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked, a song was spoke, I laugh so hard, I almost choke when I think about myself, 70 years in these folks' world, the child I works for calls me girl, I say, yes ma'am, for work and sake, I'm too proud to be in, then too poor to break, so I laugh until my stomach ache when I think about myself. My folks can make me split my side, I laugh so hard, I nearly died, the tales they tell sound just like lying, they grow the fruit, but eat the rind, I laugh.

Until I start to cry, when I think about myself, and my folks, and the little children, my fathers sit on benches, their flesh count every plank, the slats leave dents of darkness deep in their willed flank, and they nod, like broken candles, all waxed and burnt, profound. They say, but sugar, it was our submission, that major world go round. There in those pleated faces I see the auction block, the chains and slavery's coffles, the whip and lash and stock. My father's speaking voices that shred my fat and sound, they say, but sugar, it was our submission, and that major world go round. They laugh to shield their crying, they shuffled through their dreams, they step and fetch

to country and wrote the blues in screams. I understand that meaning, it could and did derive from living on the ledge of death, they kept my race alive by wearing the mask. Next week on Morgan's and Company, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglet's own tax reform is a key to American prosperity.

We already have a tax system that has contributed to making America the most unequal society of the advanced countries. That doesn't have to be. We can have a tax system that can help create a fairer society, only ask the people at the top to pay their fair share. At our website, billmoyers.com, you'll find more excerpts from my conversations with Maya Angelou, that's at billmoyers.com. I'll see you there and I'll see you here next time. Don't wait a week to get more moyers, visit billmoyers.com for exclusive blogs, essays and video features. Funding is provided by Ann Gummowicz, encouraging the renewal of democracy, Carnegie Corporation

of New York, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement, and the advancement of international peace and security at Carnegie.org. The Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. The Herbalpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information at macfound.org. Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, Barbara G. Fleischmann, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company.