Singin’ & Swingin’ & Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas – Maya Angelou (1976)

August is of course Women in Translation month – but for some of us it is also All Virago All August, a month in which we read vmc books and books from similar publishers like Dean Street Press and Persephone. I have only managed one Virago book so far, the third volume in Maya Angelou’s seven volume autobiography. I have been reading this alongside Liz and our friend Meg, as ever, I am a bit behind as Liz has already managed to review this one. Singin’ & Swingin’ & Getting Merry Like Christmas focuses on Maya Angelous’s first marriage, her relationship with her young son and the start of her life in showbusiness. 

“Ivonne said, “You know white people are strange. I don’t even know if they know why they do things.” Ivonne had grown up in a small Mississippi town, and I, in a smaller town in Arkansas. Whites were as constant in our history as the seasons and as unfamiliar as affluence.”

Race plays a part in this part of her story too, as for perhaps the first time in her life Maya must learn to build relationships with white people. White people have only featured in her life quite negatively at this point, she spent a lot of her youth growing up in small town Arkansas – definitely a place where white and black didn’t mix. It’s understandable that she is wary of people’s motivations, can she trust them? will they really understand her? So, when a young white woman offers Maya a job in her favourite record shop she is at first rather taken aback.

“Early mornings were given over to Bartok and Schoenberg. Midmorning I treated myself to the vocals of Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Bull Moose Jackson. A piroshki from the Russian delicatessen next door was lunch and then the giants of bebop flipped through the air. Charlie Parker and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Al Haig and Howard McGhee. Blues belonged to late afternoons and the singers’ lyrics of lost love spoke to my solitude.”

Maya loves music, it is the perfect job and it allows her to take her son out of weekly childcare and move him back in with her full time. It is here that she meets the man she will marry – a white man of Greek heritage. At first everything seems great. Her son gets on well with his step-father – quickly thinking of him as daddy. However, Maya’s husband is clearly a controlling presence in her life – and soon things are not as happy as they were. Maya has the spirit to get out before things escalate – a single mother again, she needs well paid work quickly.

Maya gets a job dancing in a club – it all sounds a little sleazy, and there is quite a racket going on with drinks. Customers are supposed to buy the dancers drinks, and Maya works out how the customers are being conned and explains the racket to the customers when they offer her a drink.  Her honesty makes her very popular with the customers but not with the other women, who jealously conspire to have her kicked out. Maya is always astonishingly resilient, and it’s not long before she is back on her feet – dancing again. This time she is dancing in proper shows, and it is at this time that she adopts the name Maya Angelou – Maya the name her brother called her and Angelou a corruption of her married name.

When Maya goes to see a performance of Porgy and Bess she is utterly blown away. This all black cast of talented singers, actors and dancers – she feels like she has come home. So, when the chance comes for her to take a small part in the touring production of Porgy and Bess, she jumps at it. It means leaving her son in the care of her mother for months – but she feels it is a chance she can’t pass up. It certainly is an incredible opportunity for the company will be touring Europe and North Africa – places Maya could have probably only dreamed of visiting at this time in her life.

In Maya’s company we travel across Europe seeing these places with Maya’s wide eyed wonder and intelligent curiosity. She naturally wants to experience as much as she can.  Starting out in Canada and then on to Paris, Verona, Rome, Venice, Zagreb, Alexandria, and Cairo – with the company of Porgy and Bess Maya really gets to see something of the world, have adventures and make friends.

“I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood. I was so excited at the incredible turn of events which had brought me from a past of rejection, of slammed doors and blind alleys, of dead-end streets and culs-de-sac, into the bright sun of Italy, into a town made famous by one of the world’s greatest writers.”

 She discovers that in lots of places black people are treated differently than in North America, in fact it seems that black Americans are rather preferred to white Americans. However, she has been away from her son for a long time, and so the time comes when she realises she must leave the company and go home.

On her arrival home, we see how her young son has been affected by her long absence, nervous and hating her to be out of his sight – Maya knows she won’t be able to leave him again. She re-builds her relationship with her son with love and understanding and some guilt over what she has done to him by leaving.

We finally leave Maya and her son – who has now changed his name from Clyde to Guy together in Hawaii as Maya undertakes another performance job, this time though, insisting that her son travels with her.

I had to remind myself that at this point in her life Maya is still a young woman, she has done so much. Her continuing determination and resilience shines as brightly as in the first two volumes – and I am really looking forward to seeing where she goes next.