Meet Maya Angelou: The Five Silent Years

Silence

After being raped at seven by her mother's boyfriend, Angelou named him in court. He was released and was killed shortly afterwards. Believing her voice had killed a man, she stopped speaking — for roughly five years.

In that silence, encouraged by a teacher and family friend named Bertha Flowers, she read her way through literature and memorised poetry. She has said the years of listening are what made her a writer.

The many careers before the writing

The résumé is genuinely improbable: San Francisco's first Black female streetcar conductor as a teenager; dancer and calypso performer; a touring production of Porgy and Bess; years in Ghana as a journalist, where she knew Malcolm X; coordinator work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Martin Luther King Jr.'s request.

King was assassinated on her birthday, 4 April, in 1968. She did not celebrate it for years afterwards.

Caged Bird

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) came out of a dare from an editor who told her an autobiography written as literature was nearly impossible. It made her internationally famous, and it has spent decades on both required-reading lists and banned-book lists — often for the assault it describes plainly.

She read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, the first poet to read at one since Robert Frost in 1961.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when you are carrying something you have never said out loud. She is the most direct voice here on what silence costs, and she has been on both sides of it.