Letter to My Daughter

Paris in the opening essay

The first essay, Home, starts with a list of the places Maya Angelou lived. She was born in St. Louis, grew up in Stamps from the age of three, joined her mother in San Francisco at thirteen and later studied in New York. Then she adds Paris, Cairo, West Africa and all over the United States.

Angelou does not stay with the list. She calls those places facts, and says facts are just words a child memorizes. The rest of Home argues that people never really leave the home of their childhood. She quotes the title of Thomas Wolfe's novel You Can't Go Home Again and says she never agreed with it.

Paris comes back in an essay called Senegal. On a trip to Senegal, Angelou calls Samia, a friend she had made in Paris years before, and goes to her house for dinner. In one room the guests are pressed against the walls to keep off a rug. Angelou remembers a woman in Egypt who kept her servants off her rugs. Annoyed at her host, she walks back and forth across the rug.

The rug turns out to be the tablecloth. Servants roll it up and lay a fresh one, and everyone sits down on the floor to eat one of Senegal's best-known dishes, served in her honor. Angelou writes that she was on fire with shame. The essay ends with a lesson about not correcting a culture you do not know.

The end of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, told again

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ends in 1945 with the birth of Maya Angelou's son, Guy. Nearly forty years after that memoir, two short essays here tell the same months again in a few pages each.

In Revelations she is sixteen, six feet tall and worried that her body will never look like a woman's. She agrees to sleep with a boy from up the street who is not even her boyfriend, hoping it will change her. The encounter lasts fifteen minutes, and she walks home wanting a long bath. Nine months later she has a baby boy.

Giving Birth picks up the story. Her brother, Bailey, tells her to hide the pregnancy until she has her high school diploma. She graduates on VJ Day, eight months and one week pregnant, and leaves a note on her stepfather's pillow that night. By the next evening her mother has come home to San Francisco.

The Revelations essay ends by looking forward to the man her son became. Angelou lists him as a husband, a father, a poet and a novelist. The older writer knows how the story turned out, which the memoir of 1969 could not.

Her mother, twice

Angelou's mother is at the center of two of the first four essays. In Philanthropy, Angelou arrives in San Francisco at thirteen, still copying her grandmother. She walks slowly with her hands clasped behind her back and hums church songs. Her mother wears lipstick, plays blues and jazz on a record player, and fills the house with loud, laughing people.

After two weeks her mother sits her down. She points out that her daughter will smile at strangers at school, and asks for one smile for her own mother too. When the girl finally smiles, her mother cries and calls her beautiful. Angelou writes that nobody had ever called her beautiful or called her daughter before.

In Giving Birth the same mother, a registered nurse, takes over the delivery room before the doctor arrives. She climbs onto the table, props her shoulder against her daughter's knee and tells her dirty stories between the pains. She catches the baby herself.

Advice from someone who says she paid for it

Maya Angelou told Gary Younge why the book gives so much advice. She wanted to warn young women about the holes in the road she had fallen into herself, and she said she had paid for her own mistakes.

Victoria Brownworth, reviewing the book for the Baltimore Sun, singled out one of the hardest stories. Angelou comes home from a European tour of Porgy and Bess and nearly has herself committed, afraid she might kill herself and her eight-year-old son. The contents list includes an essay titled Porgy & Bess.

Brownworth also noted an argument that goes against a common view. Angelou, herself a survivor of rape, says that calling rape a crime of power and not of sex lets rapists off the hook. Brownworth did not find the prose erudite, and did not mean that as a complaint. She called it colloquial and from the heart, like stories heard from a grandmother or an older aunt.

Gary Younge thought parts of the book read like a long goodbye. The introduction of about five hundred words mentions death twice. When he put this to Angelou at eighty-one, she shrugged it off. She said she had no plans to stop working. She died in May 2014, four and a half years later.