Everyone is eulogizing Maya Angelou. And they’re doing so as if she were more a living saint than a poet laureate.

Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend, and a truly phenomenal woman.

(President Obama, whitehouse.gov, May 28, 2014)

But ask people what made Angelou a poet laureate or a living saint, and they spew word salad. I experienced this firsthand when I asked a putatively intelligent and literate friend.

She parroted vague allusions to Angelou’s best-selling 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But she had little else to say.

I blame Twitter. Tweets parody everything but explain nothing. And far too many twits think parroting viral tweets conveys cultural awareness. But I digress…

Legendary poet and author

As it happens, her literary works are not what made Angelou so interesting to me. They are mediocre at best, after all.

I am not surprised, for example, that Angelou never won a Pulitzer Prize. But many of her peers did, namely Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, and Toni Morrison. Morrison even won a Nobel Prize.

It’s telling that Angelou even borrowed the title of her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It’s from a poem by one of America’s many unsung Black poets, Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The poem “Sympathy” (1899) laments life in Jim Crow America.

In fact, Angelou herself would have remained unsung. But Oprah adopted and promoted her as a literary genius. You know, the way Oprah promoted now discredited James Frey. Sorry…

Indeed, Oprah and Angelou had a lot in common. No doubt they bonded over their similar backgrounds. Notably, both endured eerily similar childhood traumas stemming from rape.

Then, Bill Clinton invited her to read “On Pulse of Morning” at his first inauguration ceremony in 1993. That was the highest literary honor of her career. And, but for her relationship with Oprah, Clinton would never have invited her. Angelou was endearingly honest. So I suspect even she would concede that.

Yet I’d bet my life savings that neither you nor anyone you know could cite a single stanza of “On Pulse….” that 13-stanza epic.

That’s why I have always had more praise for her life than her poems. Unspeakable sexual abuse marked her childhood. And constant threats to her life punctuated that abuse.

Imagine her shame, fear, and guilt, especially after her uncles exacted revenge. They killed her abuser – who happened to be her mother’s live-in boyfriend. That traumatized her so much that Angelou became mute for five years.

But her early years also included

profound self-loathing (“What are you looking at me for?”),
teenage pregnancy,
itinerancy, and
prostitution (as a sex worker and madam).

And she experienced all that in the context of the developing Black struggle for civil rights.

And Still I Rise

Angelous displayed “intellectual growth while still in the junkyard.” That manifested in a sassy combination of riveting intellect and street smarts. Both helped her navigate the worlds of entertainment, politics (including Pan-Africanism), and letters.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Those four lines from “Still I Rise” only hint at her vaunted “sassiness.”

That sassiness helped her woo many high-profile friends. Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X were among them. So were Bill Clinton, Oprah, and Barack Obama. Obama awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, at a White House ceremony in February 2011.

But her voice did it for me. Even her prose had a beguiling cadence and titillating timbre that were to die for. This world traveler could whisper sweet nothings in seven languages. I get excited just thinking about that. Those languages include French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Fanti, and Serbo-Croatian.

Her mesmerizing voice might explain why she won three Grammys for reading her poetry. But she never won one Pulitzer for writing it. Still, those Grammys marked an astounding and ironic achievement. After all, she spent many of her formative years as a traumatized mute.

Angelou was a living embodiment of “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. She dismissed modesty as nothing more than “learned affectation.” So, she accepted her acclaim with unbridled pride.

Angelou died at her home in North Carolina last Wednesday. She was 86.

Farewell, Maya.