Shine on, dear Maya

Maya Angelou
April 4, 1928—May 28, 2014

Photograph by John Loengard

She was one of our brightest lights, a woman who despite her great stature was gracious enough to invite me to sit at her dining table in Winston-Salem one afternoon in July, engaging in a wide ranging conversation for the Preface to my book, Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers. When my editors and I first pitched the book, getting Maya to write the Preface was a reach-for-the-sun kind of dream, and yet it came to be.

Oh, Maya. I sat across from you that afternoon and was schooled by you, your voice reverberating with lessons about women and art, about writing, about family and racial bona fides and love—it always came back to love. You took me into your library, the walls lined floor to ceiling with beloved books, and you challenged me to be faithful to the lover I had chosen, literature. You sat with me in your garden, and laughed your deep rumbling drumbeat of a laugh, and I could hardly believe I should be so blessed as to be there with you in this familial way, you sharing your life with me as if I were a niece or younger cousin who mattered, for whom you felt a wry and gentle affection. That was your secret, though. We all mattered to you. You bathed us in compassion. You let us know our worth to you through your dancing eyes and waves of laughter, through your piercing, perfectly turned sentences, through the way you crashed all the boundaries life had set up to hold you, dragging us with you into the sun.

I feel such grief this morning at the news of your passing, but I feel such unbound gratitude, too, for all that you shared with us during your 86 years on this earth, for answering a letter written by a questing writer at the moment the Twin Towers fell. Yes, that is what I was doing on the morning of 9/11 as the news came across the airwaves that the world had forever changed. I was writing to Dr. Angelou to ask her to contribute to my book. And in her great and winning grace, she said yes.

Thank you for everything, Dr. Angelou. Shine on.