Personal
Born
| Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. She was raised in segregated rural Arkansas. |
Family
|
Father Bailey was a doorman and a naval dietician, and mother Vivian Baxter Johnson worked variously as a card dealer, boardinghouse manager and registered nurse. After living for three years in Long Beach, Calif., her parents divorced and sent Maya and her brother, Bailey Jr., to their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Ark. Annie Henderson, whom Maya called "Momma," was a religious woman who owned a general store. Angelou's son, Claude "Guy" Johnson, was born out of wedlock from a single encounter she writes about in her best-selling autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." |
Nicknames
| As a child, she was called Rita in public, but she later adopted the nickname her brother gave her: Maya. He had been calling her "My" or "Mine." The surname she chose is a variation on the last name of her first husband, Tosh Angelos, a former sailor of Greek descent. |
Early Trauma
| When Maya was 7, she and her brother moved to their mother's home in St. Louis, where several months later she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. Several days after his trial, at which Maya had been forced to testify, the rapist was found beaten to death. Shocked by the seeming connection between her words at the trial and the death of the man, Maya resolved to stop talking in public. "... I thought if I spoke, anybody might die," she has said. Her mother sent her back to Arkansas, where she spoke to no one for nearly six years. |
Literary Influences
 A
Stamps, Ark., woman named Bertha Flowers took a special interest
in the silent girl and encouraged her to read. She developed an
early fondness for the Bible and the works of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles
Dickens. |
Failed Marriages
| She has been married several times since her divorce from Angelos, but she won't say how many husbands she has had and generally declines to talk about her private life. |
