The Heart of a Woman

Billy Holiday (1915-1959), born Eleanora Fagan, was an American jazz singer. Her parents were an unwed teenage couple, and her mother, Sadie Fagan, struggled to look after her after being disowned by her parents and abandoned by Holiday’s father, the jazz banjoist Clarence Halliday. Holiday grew up in Baltimore and like Angelou, Holiday spent much of her early life in the care of her grandmother. She suffered a great deal due to her mother’s prolonged absences. At the age of nine, Holiday was taken to juvenile court for truancy and sent to a Catholic reform school for nine months. She dropped out of school at the age of 11 to help in her mother’s restaurant. Later that year, her mother walked in on a neighbor trying to rape Holiday. The young girl was sent back to reform school as a protective custody measure during the trial.

Holiday began singing in Harlem jazz clubs as a young teenager and made her recording debut at the age of 18. From 1937 to 1938, she toured as a singer with Count Basie’s orchestra. She was fired by Basie in 1938 and began working for the white band leader, Artie Shaw. It was highly unusual for a Black woman to sing with a white orchestra, and Holiday made history by touring the segregated South with Shaw’s ensemble. While singing for Shaw, Holiday repeatedly suffered due to racism. She left the band after a stay at the Lincoln Hotel in New York in 1939, during which she was obliged to use the service elevator and enter through the kitchen due to complaints from white guests.

Holiday first performed “Strange Fruit” at an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1939. In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, she wrote that the song first attracted her because it reminded her of the death of her father. Clarence Halliday died of a lung disorder while touring Texas, having been refused treatment at a local hospital due to his race. During her first performance of the number, Holiday insisted that the lights be turned low and the audience absolutely silent. All of the lights were turned off upon the last note. She recorded the song for Commodore records later that year, and it became the highest selling record of her career.

Throughout the 1940s, Holiday enjoyed considerable commercial success but was beset with personal problems. She had a heroin addiction and entered into a series of abusive relationships. Her burgeoning career was continually blighted by racial discrimination. For example, her only major film role was in the 1947 musical romance, New Orleans, a fictionalized narrative of the origins of jazz in which she starred with Louis Armstrong. Due to McCarthyism, the film’s producers were pressured to limit the roles of its Black protagonists, and the writer, Herbert Biberman, was jailed and banned.

In 1947, Holiday was arrested for possession of narcotics and jailed for a year. The arrest meant that she lost her New York City Cabaret Card and could no longer work anywhere that served alcohol. This led to a significant drop in her income when she resumed work. She was arrested again in 1949. In the 1950s, Holiday gave a number of legendary performances, although her physical decline was clear, and her experience with addiction was common knowledge. In 1959, she was admitted into the hospital with cirrhosis of the liver. She died under police guard, awaiting arraignment by a grand jury, after narcotics police burst into her hospital room and handcuffed her to her bed, claiming they had found heroin in her bedroom. Holiday was posthumously inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Jazz Hall of Fale, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the ASCAP Jazz Hall of Fame. Numerous monuments have been erected in her honor, and she remains one of the most celebrated singers of the big-band jazz era.

The Harlem Writers Guild was set up in 1950 by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore, and Walter Christmas. As part of the Black Arts Movement, it provided a venue where aspiring African American authors could present their new works and critique and discuss those of their peers. As well as countering the marginalization of African American authors by the literary mainstream, the group also sought to encourage and promote works treating of themes of racism and oppression. The group was also actively involved in political campaigning. During the 1960s, they supported Malcolm X, campaigned against Apartheid in South Africa, and supported the struggles for independence in Angola and Mozambique.

In The Heart of a Woman, Angelou is introduced to the Harlem Writers Guild by the novelist and playwright, John Oliver Killens and his wife Grace Ward Jones. It is Killens who first encourages Angelou to move to New York, and he is presented as a close friend and something of a literary mentor to the author. As the happily married father of two children, Killens also doubles as a mentor in parenting and navigating the specific difficulties which arise from raising African American children in a racist society.

The first time she reads at the Guild, Angelou is mortified and discouraged by the harsh criticism she receives from John Henrik Clarke, an essayist, historian, and pioneer of African studies. After the meeting Clarke takes her aside and encourages her to continue, pointing out that Black American writers have to work to a much higher standard because the literary industry is so prejudiced against them (40). Angelou credits this mixture of stringent criticism and encouragement with shaping and nurturing her burgeoning literary talent. When Angelou’s first story is published, the Trinidad-born author Rosa Guy hosts a party at her house for the whole group.

The Harlem Writers Guild continues to operate and is located in the Schomberg Center at the New York Public Library.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was an American Baptist minister and one of the leading figures in the civil rights movement. He was one of the founders of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) organization, of which Maya Angelou became the Northern coordinator in 1959. King oversaw the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which led to the desegregation of public buses. He was also a leading figure in the peaceful protest movements in Atlanta and Albany.

King’s approach to political protest was inspired by his own Christian beliefs and by the non-violent activism of Indian lawyer and activist Mahatma Gandhi. He hoped that acts of civil disobedience would draw extensive media coverage to the cause and shift public opinion toward integration. The limited success of the campaigns in Atlanta and Albany led many in the civil rights movement to become frustrated in King and lose faith in his peaceful approach. King was arrested and imprisoned on several occasions due to his political activities. King was assassinated in 1968 on the balcony of his room at the Loraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to lead a march for Memphis’s striking sanitation workers.

In The Heart of a Woman, King emerges as an inspirational and uniquely sympathetic figure. Angelou expresses a certain amount of skepticism regarding his pacifist, optimistic vision, but she is never overtly critical of him. Instead, she sees him as a brother.

Malcolm X (1925-1965) was a civil rights activist and Muslim leader. He was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam until 1964, when he broke away from the movement. He was an advocate for the promotion of Islam within the Black American community and for Black empowerment.

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little. After his father’s death and his mother’s hospitalization, he lived in various foster homes and fell into petty crime. In 1946, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for burglary. He joined the Nation of Islam while he was in prison and adopted the surname “X” in rejection of the white enslaver name which he had inherited, in order to denote his now-lost African ancestral name.

Malcolm X was critical of the SCLC and Martin Luther King Jr. because he disagreed with their belief in racial integration and non-violent protest. He taught that Black people were the original inhabitants of the world and white people were a race of devils, created by an evil scientist named Yakub. He argued that the Black race was inherently superior and the demise of white civilization was imminent. Like King, he was under surveillance by the FBI from the 1950s onward.

In Chapter 11 of The Heart of a Woman, Angelou is inspired when she hears Malcolm X speak at a rally shortly after the execution of Patrice Lumumba. After the protest turns violent, Angelou and her associates meet Malcolm X to ask for support and guidance, but he turns them away, criticizing their approach to political activism by involving the United Nations. Angelou is disappointed but nonetheless admires X’s integrity.

Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam in 1965, a year after he left that organization to found the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Vusumzi Make (1931-2006) was a South African civil rights activist. He was in a relationship with Maya Angelou between 1961 and 1962. He was a member of the presidential council of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Angelou continues to respect Make’s political activities, even as her romantic love for him fades. Make was accused of treason after being one of the organizers of protests and boycotts following an increase in bus fares by the Evaton Passenger Service. He was banished to the remote area of Sibasa and from there undertook an arduous and perilous journey across Africa on foot. He became a representative of the PAC and addressed the United Nations on behalf of that organization in 1961.

Angelou’s erotic love for Make is inextricably linked to her interest in Pan-African ideologies. She falls in and out of love with him, as she first wholeheartedly endorses then comes to question the ideas he espouses.  Make emerges as an inspirational but ultimately flawed figure in Angelou’s autobiography. He cynically manipulates Pan-Africanist rhetoric, attributing his infidelity and his patriarchal assumptions to his African identity and suggesting that Angelou’s difficulty in accepting them is a failing on her part due to her immersion in American culture. Angelou ultimately rejects him because she feels that he is deliberately using cultural relativism and the history of racial oppression to condone sexist patriarchy.

Abbey Lincoln (1930-2012) was a jazz singer, songwriter, and political activist. She was married to the jazz drummer and composer Max Roach (1924-2007) from 1962 to 1970. In 1960, the two collaborated on the civil rights-themed album We Insist!, subtitled Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, one of the first attempts to use jazz music to address political issues. The five tracks from the album dwell on the Emancipation Proclamation in American and the growing African independence movements of the 1950s.

Abbey Lincoln was profoundly committed to the civil rights movement and a close personal friend and confidante of Angelou. She is the first person to whom Angelou turns when she decides to abandon Thomas Allen and marry Make. Together with Angelou and Rosa Guy, Lincoln established the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage. Roach was originally commissioned to write the music for Genet’s The Blacks, although he pulled out of the project when he was not paid for his work. Both Roach and Lincoln are very approving and supportive of Angelou’s relationship with Make.