I interviewed Maya Angelou for the Greensboro News & Record’s Go Triad arts section in the fall of 2010. She lived in the next town over, Winston-Salem, NC, and was releasing a cookbook for the holidays. I was nervous meeting an icon whose work I had admired greatly for decades, especially after being instructed to only refer to her as Dr. Angelou.
18 months before, a mutual friend had hand-delivered a copy of my memoir When I Married My Mother to her. I was never able to get a reaction. It would have been unprofessional and awkward to bring it up when I met her and I vowed to put it out of my mind. Upon arrival, I handed my business card to the man who answered the door, along with a box of homemade cookies and a thank you card. As a freelancer, I had no idea if such a thing was proper for a newspaper reporter, but she deserved the royal treatment and I was going to give it to her.
After a few minutes I was brought back to meet her at a dining table adjacent to her large kitchen. My business card was in her hand. Her first words were: “I had no idea it was you coming today. I loved your book.”
My eyes filled with tears and I somehow kept it together. I said “Thank you” of course, and that I missed my mother every day. “I don’t know why it took me so long to love her. I’ll always regret that.”
She smiled at me with the utmost compassion. “I miss my mother, too.”
We talked about my cookies. “I think they’re called hermits,” she said. “Where’s that cookbook Gail Sheehy gave me?”
She soon had it in front of her and was looking up the recipe. I noticed that the book had two inscriptions on the title page. One from someone giving it to Ms. Sheehy, and another from Gail to Maya.
I now had permission to re-gift any signed books in my possession.
She was tethered to an oxygen tank and moved slowly with a walker, but I barely noticed. She’d been beautifully styled by a make-up artist and radiated glamour. Her voice for the hour that we spoke was mesmerizing, like a warm blanket you could stay curled up in all day. She was full of wisdom and humor too, as evidenced in the story that ran. She kept sunglasses on when the News & Record’s photographer began to snap pictures. It not only hid that she had a wandering eye that “if I’m not careful will go clear around the back of my head,” but it added just the right Hollywood star touch. Her self-deprecating comment only made me love her more.
A week later, she gave me a quote for my book for promotional use. I really did lose it then. Her generosity was thoroughly unexpected and like a huge hug from above. What did she have to gain from doing that? I had asked authors of far less stature for a quote and been turned down. One, who I had known most of my life, had said “I only blurb dead people.”
Here’s her quote: “This book is important to every mother and daughter, and to every woman who wants to be one.”
I have no doubt her words have prompted many to read my book. I am forever indebted to her. In 2011, I started a community event that promoted reading. She graciously gave a quote endorsing it as well.
“It is easier for me to trust people who read than those who talk, and even those who talk about reading. Writers need readers desperately and whether they know it or not, readers need writers desperately. One hand washes the other. The aspect of one hand trying to wash itself is pitiful. But, when the two get together, Ah! There’s a possibility of success. I support The BookUP and let us all say, ‘Here’s to The BookUP’!”
When I added recipes to my recent novel and discovered how much work it was, I again thought of Maya Angelou. She had said she wasn’t going to write another cookbook after the one in 2010 because they were much harder to do than you would think. “The recipes have to be exact,” she said, and told me about a cookbook written by someone else that instructed to add a can of tomatoes into a pressure cooker and someone added the can itself.
I was delighted when two personally inscribed copies of her 2013 memoir Mom & Me & Mom showed up in the mail. I can’t bring myself to re-gift both of them, but I will give one away on my Facebook page.
I was deeply saddened when I heard the news that she passed. She was an angel to me and millions of others she never met. Her contributions to literature and life are staggering. We have lost a singular voice and spirit.