eating Maya’s fried chicken and singing Guy to sleep with a repertoire of jazz standards. Though Holiday plays the role of spoiled diva and rants in a string of freestyle curses during her stay, Angelou chooses to look beyond the rough image and instead appreciate the tenderness Holiday displays in her interactions with Guy.

New York City offered new opportunities and challenges for Angelou, including the production of Cabaret for Freedom that she staged with Godfrey Cambridge. This fund-raising venture brings her to the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who recruits her to succeed Bayard Rustin as the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a post she holds for six months. Meanwhile, Angelou attends weekly meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild and suffers through the initial critical comments of her fellow members. As an activist, Angelou helps organize a demonstration at the United Nations, protesting the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Republic of the Congo.

New York City not only provides the background for Angelou’s creative endeavors and civil rights work but also plays an important role in her love life. Thomas Allen, a bail bondsman, strikes her fancy. He also suits her fantasies, as Angelou imagines herself as a domestic goddess, preparing delicious, wholesome meals in her kitchen while waiting for her man to come home. As her teenage son grows older, Angelou dreams of a steady male influence in the home, and this dream may be the impetus for her unlikely love affair with a man who gives her confiscated luggage as a wedding gift.

Fate steps in to deliver Angelou from her engagement to Allen. At a party one night, Angelou meets Vusumzi (Vus) Make, an African freedom fighter. A rotund, well-dressed, patriarchal man of Africa, Make utilizes his considerable charms to woo Angelou. Though they never actually have a wedding ceremony, the two live as husband and wife. Vus takes Guy under his wing and begins to teach him what it mean to be an African man. All seems to be going well, but little by little telltale signs of Make’s infidelity arise. To make matters worse, the bills are not being paid. Angelou confronts Vus with both of these problems, and her solution is for the family to move to Cairo.

Once in Egypt, Angelou falls in love with Africa but finds herself to be a stranger in a strange land. Her ignorance of the language and Islamic traditions puts her at the mercy of a male-dominated society. Not surprisingly, the problems she and Vus experienced in New York follow them to Cairo, and Angelou decides that she must somehow find work and pay her own way. This determination leads her to accept an associate editorship on the staff of the Arab Observer, becoming the only woman editor in an office of men.

Ultimately, Angelou’s upbringing as an African American woman is revealed to have made her too strong to bow down to an African man’s ego. While Make continues chasing other women, Angelou begins to plan an exit strategy. She leaves Vus and is vindicated by the community, recognized as a woman wronged. She and her son move to Ghana in order to enroll Guy at the university there. While in Ghana, Guy is seriously injured in an automobile accident. The Heart of a Woman concludes with Guy leaving his mother’s home in Ghana to attend college.

Angelou's autobiographical work is extraordinary for its blending of the highly personal and the epic. The Heart of a Woman is as much about a single woman as it is about the tumultuous events of the 1950s and 1960s. By thus weaving the domestic and public dramas of her life into a single narrative, Angelou creates a document that is at once historically important and emotionally touching. Interestingly, however, Angelou links the public and private arenas to argue that both are necessary for fostering a more just society. This technique elevates the rhetoric of her entire narrative for it destroys the boundaries typically placed between the home and the professional sphere.

Another technique Angelou employs involves the vividness of her descriptions. She brings to life an exciting era in American history by paying close attention to the smallest details of the scenes she recounts. She gives the reader a sense of the crowds at her performances and of the sounds that permeate the street when she leads a march on the United Nations. Her descriptions become more enchanting when she turns her attention to Africa, where she moves near the book's conclusion. Her first view of the continent strikes her as a very exciting experience:

Our plane landed at Cairo on a clear afternoon, and just beyond the windows, the Sahara was a rippling beige sea which had no shore . . . . Barefoot men in long soiled nightdresses walked beside us, talking Arabic, asking questions . . . . When we entered the city of Cairo, the avenues burst wide open with such a force of color, people, action and smells I was stripped of cool composure.

Angelou provides not only an acute description of her landing but also recounts her subjective experience. She writes of the shock she felt at the juxtaposition of desert and cosmopolitan life, at the overwhelming foreignness of the scene. The reader is therefore able to imagine more than the scene's objective appearance; he or she can also consider how that appearance might affect one's emotional state.

Stylistically, Angelou's work is a masterpiece of conversational literature. Her tone is so free and easy that it gives the reader a strong sense of the author's personality and feeling. Though the narrative begins somewhat abruptly, the easy, informal sense of the work diverts attention from such structural concerns. The poetic equivalent of The Heart of a Woman could only be free verse, where no strictures of form or meter restrict the author's expression of personal insights, observations, and feelings.

The Heart of a Woman is a fascinating book, useful for students of both history and the human heart. While bringing some of the era's greatest luminaries to life, the book also gives the reader an intensely personal look at a single figure. This individual is touched by both the radical political upheavals of the time and the small trials and tragedies of modern life. Even while Angelou juggles the most pressing social issues of her day in her public and professional life, she is faced with the pedestrian tasks of feeding and raising her son. Rather than degrade the private realm, Angelou elevates her private concerns. The task of raising a mature and responsible son is, Angelou argues, as important a task to the African-American community as securing rights in the public realm.

While it captures the social movement of the time, The Heart of a Woman, in its lush descriptions, communicates the sights and sounds of America and Africa in a bygone era. Angelou's arrival in Egypt is particularly interesting. In Africa she and her son find a new world, free from the racial strife of the United States. At the same time, however, Angelou finds African society to be sexist and corrupt. Clearly, Angelou's book demonstrates the complexity of social strife, both here and abroad.

1. What is Maya Angelou the character's greatest concern through the course of events related in The Heart of a Woman? Is she primarily concerned with the maturation of her son, or does the political struggle in which she is engaged occupy the greatest share of her energy? How would you characterize Angelou as a mother, and what does that characterization reveal about the burdens of modern motherhood?

2. How do the men in Angelou's life figure in her narrative? Clearly, some are better models for her son than others, but does she ever find a truly inspiring example to hold up to her growing boy?

3. Explain the significance of Vus, Angelou's husband. What does he reveal about the triumphs and setbacks of the cause for African autonomy? In what ways is he a laudable figure? In what ways does Angelou condemn his actions?

4. What is the role of Africa in Angelou's story? Why, in other words, is much of the political activism of Angelou and her cohorts aimed toward African states rather than American society itself?

5. How did you react to the appearance of Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, and other historical figures in Angelou's text? Did the personalities Angelou assigned them match the expectations you formed by reading or hearing about these historical figures? Do you believe that Angelou portrayed the figures accurately and fairly?

6. When Angelou and her friends organize a protest at the United Nations, the leaders lose control of the action. Instead of a peaceful protest, the march becomes something akin to a riot. Malcolm X castigates Angelou and her fellow organizers for their plan, asserting that it was ill-conceived. What do you think? Is the brand of protest Angelou advocates in The Heart of a Woman the best, most effective form?

7. Read one of the other volumes in Angelou's autobiography. Are the tone, style, and thematic concerns the same? If you read an earlier volume, can you recognize a refinement of her style?

Set in the 1950s and '60s, Maya Angelou's autobiographical works are heavily influenced by the dynamics of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. The political struggle becomes an undeniable presence in The Heart of a Woman, and Angelou's primary social concern is with the need for enacting social reform. The America described by Angelou is still a racist one. As a black woman angered by this persistent racism, Angelou infuses her autobiography with her thoughts on the nation's racial strife.

Oddly, much of the racism described by Angelou is observed from a distance. With the exception of a handful of interactions (most notably with a room full of administrators at her son's school), Angelou is not personally touched by the sickening hand of prejudice. Instead, The Heart of a Woman dwells on large, institutional racism. The most sustained protest against the white power brokers comes with the death of an African revolutionary, Patrice Lumumba. Because of his death, radical African-Americans rallied to oppose the United Nation's unwillingness to end the European influence over and corruption of African society. Rather than the atrocities committed in the United States, such as discrimination and the segregation of neighborhoods such as Harlem into "the largest plantation in this country," Angelou and her politically active friends seem most concerned with ending the intrusion of Anglo-American values into their native land.

The corrupting power of the American and European presence in Africa is explored in a variety of ways. First, Angelou stars in a production of French author Jean Genet's drama The Blacks (1960). At first, Angelou refuses to appear in the play because she believes that it misrepresents the effects of the emancipation of African people. In Genet's play, black characters oppressed and degraded throughout the majority of the action eventually overcome their white oppressors. Then, the black characters ascend to a position of dominance and lord over the now degraded whites.

Initially, Angelou reacts to this denouement with undisguised horror: "Black people are not going to become like whites. Never." Soon, however, she recognizes the ways in which the play functions as an important caution: "that is a real possibility and one we most vigilantly guard against . . . most black revolutionaries don't want change. They want exchange. This play points to that likelihood. And our people need to face the temptation."

These words, spoken by Vus, Angelou's husband, himself an African revolutionary, say perhaps even more than he realizes. Given the colonial incursion by Europeans into Africa, a connection to ancient traditions and an egalitarian social structure are lost to Africans. Instead of change manifest in breaking free of white influence and transforming governments from corrupt modern forms into more pure civilizations based on old values, some African leaders, Vus warns, desire the decadent luxuries and violent power held by their white counterparts.

Vus himself epitomizes this desire for the trappings of European luxury. Though he is a revolutionary committed to pulling the impoverished masses out of their squalor, Vus lives a life of extreme ease. Vus' clothes are of the finest make, his home is lavishly furnished. Once she marries him, Angelou is shocked and dismayed by Vus' careless outlay of cash. Why, she wonders, is this money not spent on the revolution? Angelou's primary social concern, then, is one without an easy solution.

Though memoirs and autobiographies are perhaps more popular in this era than any other, there is still a long tradition of self-reflexive writing from which Angelou draws. More specifically, Angelou's book fits into a long line of African-American writings that relate personal experience as a means of calling attention to the privations faced by Americans of African descent.

Two of the earliest examples of African-American autobiographical writing are The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The former narrative, written, like Angelou's, by a highly public figure, tells the highly personal story of Douglass's escape from slavery. Before orchestrating this escape, however, Douglass is heir to all the indignities and degradations of slavery. He reveals the rottenness of the system in a clear, honest voice that sounds a great deal like Angelou's consideration of the state of race relations in mid-twentieth-century America. Unlike Angelou, however, Douglass's narrative does not consider the plight of African-American families at great length. Though he was fatherless and separated from his mother at an extremely young age, Douglass's primary concern is with individual freedom as opposed to familial cohesiveness.

Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, writes as much as a mother as a slave. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl blends the conventions of Douglass's slave narrative with the norms of sentimental writing, popular in fiction at the time. Where Douglass's voice is often dispassionate and objective, Jacobs always speaks from her heart and about the effects of an unjust public system on her private life. As a woman, she is subject to a whole set of evils from which Douglass is free. Particularly, Jacobs must endure sexual abuse from her master and the constant threat of losing her children. In order to preserve her personal autonomy and her family, Jacobs, like Angelou, goes to great lengths.

In its close scrutiny of particular regions at a particular historical moment, The Heart of a Woman also recalls the work of Zora Neal Hurston, an author who functioned as both artist and anthropologist. Before writing her first and best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston published two collections of folklore, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Mules and Men (1935). These works, like The Heart of a Woman, give careful and affectionate attention to the peculiarities of particular parts of the world. Where Hurston's collection of the folktales passed on orally in the Florida town of Eatonville celebrates the traditions of an isolated corner of the world, Angelou's account concerns itself with highly public spaces in an historically crucial period.

The Heart of a Woman is the fourth in a series of five autobiographical texts that relate the events of Angelou's life from her infancy to her experiences in Africa. The first volume of this collection, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), has become a classic text, often read in college classrooms. This book chronicles Angelou's life from her arrival in Stamp, Arkansas, at age three to the birth of her only child in San Francisco. Before the birth of her son at the young age of sixteen, Angelou endured many other trials. She endured rape and witnessed murder while living in some of the nation's more blighted neighborhoods. While it recounts such moments of pain, however, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is also a joyous document that vividly relates the sounds of Blues and the smells of city life sensed by a girl coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s.

The second volume, Gather Together in My Name (1974), begins where I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings leaves off. Starting with her late teen years, Angelou recounts the events she experienced while growing up in the 1940s. World War II, not surprisingly, figures in her account. Two years after publishing this work, Angelou published the third part of her autobiography, Singin' Swingin' and Getting Merry Like Christmas (1976). This book begins with Angelou's burgeoning career in show business. Angelou's highly successful singing and acting career eventually led to her involvement in the political movements of the civil rights era. This volume also shows her private concerns, however. Most notably, it recounts the disappointment of her failed marriage to a white man. Also, it reveals her burgeoning mistrust of the white audience that cheered her talent.

The next volume in her autobiography was The Heart of a Woman, which recounts events in her middle years. Then, it moves on and, for the present, concludes with All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). This book picks up immediately after the conclusion of The Heart of a Woman and tells of Angelou's four years in Ghana, giving the reader a glimpse at the sights, sounds, and feelings of Africa. Her time on the continent is most memorable for the sense of colorlessness Angelou feels there. Finally, she asserts in this volume of her autobiography, she lives in a community where color does not matter.

In addition to these volumes of autobiography, Angelou has produced several volumes of poetry. These poems appear together in The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994). The success of these poems led to her most public recognition in 1993 when she read "On the Pulse of Morning" at the first inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton.

The Heart of a Woman is available on audiocassette. The 1997 performance by Maya Angelou is available from Random House Audio.