My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 7

Maya Angelou & the Invention of a FriendShip, 1970’s-Style

A Hook Up Haiku
Nineteen Seventy:
“Brother be, I’ll sister thee,”
Maya sang to me.

She was 41. I was 32. It was the fall of
1970. Sacramento (ca) City College.
(We’d exchanged glances and nods at
“cause”-inflected rallies, arts events
and sundry moments in the late Sixties.
But whether in New York or Los
Angeles, no other “moment” would be
like this one.)

6

Her exact words were:
“Eugene, be my brother forever!”
A tall order from a tall woman, it came
during our first full contact. Right after
Maya Angelou had slung her songified
language at — and plie’d to — an sro
throng for more than an hour. Initially
I was smacked aback by this uncaged
bird, this leggy goddess, this poet,
actress, dancer, and former cast member
of Porgy and Bess and — with James
Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely
Tyson, et al — the New York production
of Genet’s The Blacks. But I quickly
readied for her request-into-perpetuity,
thinking, “brother?” “forever?” …
Shiddddd … nuttin but sumpn to do.
After all, hadn’t I just done time —
60’s-style — in East St. Louis (aka
“East Boogie”), Illinois? Followed by a

EUGENE B.
REDMOND

So our Ship of Friends set sail in the
Soular System in a state named after a
fictional Black Amazon and warrior
queen, Califia. (According to Spanish
writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
who first introduced her in his popular
novel Las sergas de Esplandián [circa
1500], Califia and her army of amazons
inhabited a namesake island off the
southwest coast of California.) During
the Seventies, Maya and I frequently
and vigorously traversed the near-90miles of Northern California, from
Sacramento, where I lived, to the San
Francisco Bay Area, where she resided.

p
Maya Angelou

(The Loss is Huge, Huger than the
Leap of Fate she took to co-invent her
place on the planet. But that’s a whole
nother chapter for a whole nother tome.
It suffices to say, simply & Hugely:
Maya’s gone.)

By

year’s stop-off at Oberlin College
(Ohio) as writer-in-residence, where I’d
met poets Russell Atkins, Norman
Jordan and James Kilgore in nearby
Cleveland? And Calvin Hernton —
who would replace me at Oberlin, and
later date Angelou in the 1980s? Hadn’t
I, among other Black Arts Movement
(bam) self-assignments, spent the last
years of the ‘60s frequently delivering
elegiac/eulogistic poems and polemics
for fallen warriors, many felled under
questionable circumstances? (And
when there was even a fraction of an
iota of a suspicion about causes of the
“fall” of one of our comrades — e.g.,
Henry Dumas (1934-1968) — hadn’t we
chalked it up to “healthy paranoia”?)
Hadn’t I — as a faculty member at
Southern Illinois University’s Experiment
in Higher Education in East St. Louis —
worked with colleagues, artist s
and students like Dumas, Katherine
Dunham, Edward Crosby, Julius
Hemphill, Oliver Jackson, Joyce
Ladner and Sherman Fowler to help
conceptualize and implement the
new Black/African American Studies
Movement? (And wouldn’t this same
Sacramento City College — the one
where Maya had just delivered her
mixed-genre, high/low art jeremiad —
elect a student senate that voted a
jailed Angela Davis in as honorary
homecoming queen?
Hadn’t … ? Didn’t … ? Wouldn’t … ?

This swath of flatland, mountains,
factories, farms, cities, people and sea
was like many other u.s. and other
world “stages” in the Sixties and
Seventies: used both for celebrating
human-natural wonders and for
“revolutionary” problem-solving of
human-natural warts. Be these wonders
and warts artistic, cultural, ecological,
ethnic, gender, sexual, political or
social. For example, we discussed and
supported African/Third World
liberation movements and witnessed
the Independence of dozens of countries.
Between 1972 and 1979, the SF Bay
Area had one of the most vigorous
Africa Liberation (Day) Support
Committees in America. Central to
our discussions and debates — which
were augmented by innumerable rallies,
conferences and workshops — were
dinners upon parties upon dinners
upon book signings at Marcus Books
in SF, Maryann Pollar’s Rainbow Sign
in Berkeley and Elroy Littlefield’s
Campus Bookstore at California State
University-Sacramento (csus). At the
latter, I was a professor of English
and poet-in-residence in Pan African/
Ethnic Studies, an appointment that
lasted nearly 15 years, beginning in
1970. Maya spoke frequently in my
classes and writing workshops and to
gatherings at my home and in the community. She also keynoted several of
csus’ Annual Third World Writers and
Thinkers Symposiums which featured
Jose Montoya, Clyde Taylor,

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“Be My Brother Forever”: