A Chance Encounter

“Is that who I think it is at the next table?” my husband asked as we were seated at La Margarita Mexican Restaurant in San Antonio.

“If not, it is her look alike,” I responded. When she spoke in that deep, resonant voice of a singer, I knew exactly in whose presence I sat. I stared.

One gentleman went to her table and spoke to her and her companions, two women and two men. As much as I wanted to greet her, I would not invade her space. Yet, I continued to watch every moment. When she conversed with the waiter in Spanish, I was convinced of her identity. After all, she is fluent in six languages.

Before our food was served, she rose to leave. Standing close to six feet tall, she was dressed in black slacks and blouse, with a gold and black silk print band around her head. She carried a large black cane with a silver bird’s head handle.

As she left, she said, “Good afternoon,” to the man at another table. Then she stopped at our table.

Bob said, “We heard you speak in Georgia.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Georgia Southern.”

She nodded. “I live in North Carolina now.”

“Yes, I know,” I responded. “I taught I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and I’ve read all of your books.”

“That’s good,” she smiled, then added, “I love Texas, don’t you?”

I agreed.

“I don’t know if I can go back to North Carolina and tell the people there how much I love Texas.”

“Yes, YOU can,” I said.

She smiled again. She shook our hands and wished us a good day.

Although she said, “Good afternoon” to several other patrons and thanked one who said, “We heard you speak at the University of Texas,” she did not stop at any other table. After she was gone, several asked us who she was.

“Dr. Maya Angelou,” I said. “The author, poet, singer, dancer,” I added.

Bob asked me why I thought she chose our table to stop. I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe she wanted to know who that crazy woman was that kept staring at her.”

Through my careers as a journalist and a teacher, I have met many authors and have even become friends with several. However, this was the first time that I have ever spoken to any author of any book or story that I had ever taught. Of course, since I have always taught classics, books which have stood the test of time, most of the authors, like Homer, had died long before I even knew they had lived.

As I have mulled over this experience many times, I keep replaying the series of coincidences which brought the two of us to the same place at the same time. I still don’t know what speaking engagements led her to Texas. Perhaps, she was there because the state was hosting it annual Book Authors Festival the next weekend in its capitol about 60 miles north of San Antonio.

We had come to San Antonio primarily to visit friends and family. We had allotted one day to visit the River Walk and El Mercado, a Mexican market in the heart of the city, but our original plans were to make this tour on Monday. However, my brother’s busy schedule left only Monday open for a visit with him. Therefore, we changed our plans and went the next day.

Since our meeting, I’ve also reflected on the many lessons taught by I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first book of six in Dr. Angelou’s autobiography. In reading this book, we first looked at the poetic prose, the music of words, with which she wrote about her life from age four to 16. One observer says she has the cadence of both a poet and a preacher.

This woman who danced and sang the role of Ruby on the first European tour of the American opera, Porgy and Bess, credits the six years of self imposed muteness as a time when she really learned to listen, an ability of the utmost importance to the craft of writing. During that time as a child, she, on her own, found refuge in reading the poetic words of Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible.

Likewise, we studied how the author structured this work of nonfiction in novel format and how, like all good authors, she showed, rather than told, her story. The book title itself, a line from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” teaches symbolism. We specifically looked at the situations in her life that created “the bars” of her cage. What were they? What songs did she learn to sing?

For me, one of literature’s tangents teaches history indirectly. Thus, without history books or research, we looked at the facts about 20th century America that the students encountered incidentally from this reading.

Sandwiched between Anne Frank, the Diary of a Young Girl, the true story of a Jewish family hiding from the Nazis and To Kill a Mockingbird, a realistic novel about judging people based on outward appearances, the nonfiction selection I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings reflects the curriculum objective requiring students to recognize that literature mirrors life. Prior to the addition of this book about the author’s life during both the Depression and the Jim Crow years to the curriculum, some of my students challenged the validity of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, set during the same time period. My young charges could not believe that human beings could be so cruel to others. In reading this nonfiction selection, the doubts about the novel ceased. When Dr. Angelou was as young as these students, she survived overt discrimination. Thus, my students began their studies of comparative literature.

We also addressed why this book has become a classic. Since its publication first in 1969, it has remained in print. The many lessons that the author learned in her own growing up years continues to speak to the heart of many people. In a recent television interview, Dr. Angelou explains that “To grow up means that one takes responsibility for the time and space he takes up.”

In reading this book, a couple of my students wrote about their own experiences of being abused. One said, “I’ve never told anyone before because I thought I was the only one who ever went through this.” I referred this student to a counselor who not only worked with her but also found additional assistance for her and her parents whom the teenager also told for the first time.

Dr. Angelou, only the second American poet invited to write and deliver a poem at a president’s inauguration (Robert Frost was the first), also says, “I, as a human being, can speak for human beings.”

In 1981, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, North Carolina, bestowed upon her a lifetime position as the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies. For that reason, she now resides in North Carolina instead of Arkansas, Missouri or California, her childhood homes. Today, she holds over two dozen honorary doctorate degrees from colleges and universities across the country. Her work as an author has received countless awards.

From my brief encounter and the numerous television and radio interviews I’ve heard, Dr. Angelou reminds me of my mentor, the late Elizabeth Bowne, author of A Gift from the African Heart and writer for UNICEF. Both women are tall and stately, both successful in their fields of endeavor, and both are gracious - generous of heart and spirit.

This chance encounter occurred in 2002; Dr. Angelou died in 2014.