All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes – Maya Angelou (1986)

I am a bit behind my two reading buddies – Liz and our friend Meg – in our Maya Angelou read-a-long. All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes is the fifth volume in her remarkable autobiography – so just two to go.

In a month thick with reading challenges – this one fitted nicely into nonfiction November – a challenge I don’t usually do so well at – but have managed two this month.

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

This volume takes up the story where the last one left off – Maya is in Ghana with her son Guy who has just been involved in a terrible car crash leaving him with serious injuries. Maya is finding it hard to rid herself of the anger she feels toward the young man who caused the accident – Guy on the other hand is much more laid back about the whole thing, despite being almost totally encased in plaster.

Being in Africa is an incredible experience for Maya – and she begins to settle down to life in Ghana – thinking perhaps she may never go back to America. While Guy recovers from his injuries, and then begins to settle happily into Ghanaian student life Maya shelves her plans to go to Liberia and begins to put feelers out for jobs in Ghana. Wherever she goes Maya makes friends and connections, and here it is no different. Most of those she is surrounded by are black Americans who have moved to Ghana.

Like many other black Americans at the time, Maya saw emigrating to an African country as a kind of homecoming, in time she realised it was nothing of the sort – that the mother Africa idea was a myth. The relationship between people emigrating to African countries and the people of those countries proving to be more complex. The Ghanaians aren’t always that welcoming toward the black Americans – some of whom almost expected a welcoming committee at the airport. It is easy to see though how for people coming from sixties America with its myriad prejudices and history of slavery – arriving in an African country must have felt incredible. However, while working in the university Maya also encounters some racism toward black Americans from members of the European community. How depressing that must have been to encounter the same kind of commentary on African soil.

There is a visit to Ghana by Malcolm X – who Maya had met before when she was working for Martin Luther King – since when Maya had become disillusioned by King’s message of peace and nonviolence. Now she is attracted by Malcom X’s message – and by the time the book ends she is thinking of going to work for him on her eventual return to the States.

“My policy was to keep quiet when Reverend King’s name was mentioned. I didn’t want to remind my radical friends of my association with the peacemaker. It was difficult, but I managed to dispose of the idea that my silence was a betrayal. After all, when I worked for him, I had been deluded into agreeing with Reverend King that love would cure America of its pathological illnesses, that indeed our struggle for equal rights would redeem the country’s baleful history. But all the prayers, sit-ins, sacrifices, jail sentences, humiliation, insults and jibes had not borne out Reverend King’s vision. When maddened White citizens and elected political leaders vowed to die before they would see segregation come to an end, I became more resolute in rejecting nonviolence and more adamant in denying Martin Luther King.”

During her time in Ghana Maya gets the chance to travel a little outside of the city into the countryside. It was a fascinating for me to learn something about Ghana a country I know very little about, Angelou writes so beautifully and recounts her experiences so vividly. Here she sees the places where slaves were held before the were shipped out of the country – it is a poignant and stirring reminder of that terrible history.

Maya has finally matured by her experience with men in the past – when she meets yet another large, man who she finds attractive and fascinating, the reader might be forgiven for shaking their head. However, Maya has learned something, and when the man offers to buy her a fridge(!) and tells her he wants her to move to another county with him, she sensibly doesn’t allow her head to be turned completley. She is an older (though still only in her thirties) woman, and her son is also growing away from her. She faced the possibility of losing him when he had his accident – but in the end she sees Guy is merely growing up and away from her – it is a sad thought for her that he may not need her anymore. They have been so much to one another in the past.

“we had been each other’s home and centre for seventeen years. He could die if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home.”

 Africa it seems doesn’t hold all the answers for Maya – though it has clearly had a profound effect on her. So we leave Maya preparing to return soon to America. What ever lies ahead for Maya I know it will be incredible – reading these books has shown me how very little I knew about Maya Angelou’s life. No wonder she had to write seven volumes of her autobiography.