My Mother asked me, “Do you know who the Father is?” I said “Of course, I only had sex with him once” She said “And do you love him?” I said “No” She asked “Does he love you?” I said “No.” So she said “Then we’re not going to ruin three lives. We’re going to have a fine baby. That’s all there is to it.” And she never once made me feel I had brought shame on the family.
Dr. Maya Angelou, has an impressive body of work. From singing in the opera Porgy and Bess, and dancing with the Alvin Ailey dance troupe, to the iconic 1993 Inauguration Day poem On the Pulse of Morning, and her years of activism, Angelou typifies a renaissance woman.
With seven award-winning autobiographies, you would think she might run out of tales to tell. But Angelou now explores another angle of her life and the complex people who have made her who she is. The book Mom & Me & Mom is an engaging story of Maya Angelou’s relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, a woman who came in and out of Maya’s life and was so uniquely beautiful, Maya simply called her “Lady.”
Read an excerpt from Mom & Me & Mom through NPR Books.
