42 pages • 1 hour read
Letter to My Daughter
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Chapters 26-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary: “Poetry”
Angelou opens this chapter with a short poem depicting a protagonist dancing freely in the “face of the sun” (54). Then the sky turns into a “pale evening,” giving way to a night “black like me” (54). Angelou writes that many Black poets “revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry” (54). Black poets focus on questions such as, “How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?” (54). Angelou quotes famous Black poets such as Aimé Césaire, who writes that the Earth would not be the Earth without Africans. Césaire states that his “negritude” is not a speck or even a tower but that “it perforates opaque dejection with its upright patience” (55). Angelou goes on to quote other poets’ conceptions of Blackness, such as Mari Evans, who famously wrote, “I Am a Black Woman” (55).
Angelou then considers the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’s poem “I’ve Known Rivers,” which spread from Harlem to the French and British colonies. Poets like Hughes, along with Sterling A. Brown, worked to expose the horrors of slavery in their work. Claude McKay’s “White Houses” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” were “guiding lights” to the colonized African poets, who, like Black people in the Caribbean, had much in common with their American counterparts. She concludes with a quote from Hughes’s poem, “I, too, Sing America,” which portrays the Black individual as the “darker brother” who says, “I, too, am America” (57).
Chapter 27 Summary: “Mt. Zion”
Angelou concedes that, while living in San Francisco, she became agnostic. She did not stop believing in God, but He “didn’t seem to be around [her] neighborhoods” (). One day, her voice teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, invited her to join his book club discussion on Lessons in Truth. He asked Angelou to read “God loves me” over and over again. With each proclamation, she felt the truth of the statement and began to cry under the gravity of the realization. She writes, “I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me, since one person, with God, constitutes the majority” (58). Angelou equates this realization to a universal unity with everyone. She highlights her relationship with nature, saying that she is the “big bird” and the “ripples of waves” (58).
Chapter 28 Summary: “Keep the Faith”
Angelou recounts times when younger people have told her they are Christian. She replied, “Already?” (59). For Angelou, being a Christian is a lifelong endeavor, and this holds true for all religions. The joy in following God is in the continuous cultivation of one’s relationship with Him.
Angelou describes her first memory of her grandmother: “One of my earliest memories of my grandmother, who was called ‘Mamma,’ is a glimpse of that tall, cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air with nothing visible beneath her” (59). Whenever she was confronted with a challenge, “Mamma” would say, “I don’t know how to find the things we need, but I will step out on the word of God. I am trying to be a Christian and I will just step out on the word of God” (59). In Angelou’s eyes, she would then fly up into the cosmos. Angelou writes that it wasn’t at all difficult to see her “Mamma” as a powerful being, “because she had the word of God beneath her feet” (59). Thinking of her grandmother years later, Angelou wrote and dedicated a gospel song to her that The Mississippi Mass Choir performed.
Whenever Angelou begins to question God’s existence, she looks to the heavens and sees her grandmother singing her hymn and standing tall between the sun and the moon.
Chapters 26-28 Analysis
Angelou mentions many different Black poets, each with their own conception of Blackness and what it means to be Black in America (or elsewhere). She moves through history, from the time of slavery and colonization, to the Harlem Renaissance, and finally to modern poets. Likewise, she constructs a globally inclusive image of the Black experience, finding commonalities between people in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in America. Angelou also touches on gender and its intersectional relationship with race through her discussion of Mari Evans. Evans writes that Black women defy all description, all labels, and all ties. They transcend space and circumstance—an idea that echoes Aimé Césaire’s conception of Blackness as breaking through moments of despair and anguish and thus being defined by patience and perseverance. At the core of these poets’ fight for liberation, an eclectic image of Black identity emerges in which all Black experience is validated. As such, Angelou ends this chapter with the assertion that the Black individual is America.
Angelou ends her work with her return to Christianity. She writes that she felt abandoned by God, feeling as though he no longer loved her. Upon joining a book club with her voice teacher, she relearned the gravity of the statement “God loves me.” This relearning, or the continued cultivation of one’s relationship with God, is an integral aspect of religion. Angelou therefore suggests that it is normal to struggle with one’s faith and that maintaining a pure, unaltered belief is impossible. As we age and change, so too does our relationship with our religion. For Angelou, one aspect of religion is the sense of connection with the universe—e.g., her realization that she is one with the tides. Angelou’s depiction of her grandmother uses similar imagery. Her grandmother “steps out on God” whenever she needs reassurance and guidance in her life (59). As such, Angelou remembers her as standing tall among the sun and the moon. Now, after her death, whenever she begins to question the existence of God, she looks to the sky and knows her grandmother is with her. The purpose of religion, Angelou argues, is the journey, which not only improves our relationship with God but makes us better people. Angelou concludes that all she must do “is continue trying to be a Christian” (60).
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