Maya Angelou

A memoir about home and belonging, from the author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Maya Angelou's five volumes of autobiography, beginning with I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In the fifth volume, Maya Angelou emigrates to Ghana only to discover that 'you can't go home again' but she comes to a new awareness of love and friendship, civil rights and slavery - and the myth of mother Africa. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON

All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes

Marion

 In Ghana, one unclaimed corpse merited prin- cipal news coverage, and Efua's emotional response, while in America, black bodies still quick with life demanded no such concern. Too often among ourselves, since lives were cheap, dying was cheaper. Since the end of slavery, black Americans running or walking, hitchhiking or hoboing from untenable place to unsupportable place, had died in fields, in prisons, hospitals, on battlegrounds, in beds and barns, and if pain ccOmpanied their births, only the dying knew of their deaths. Ihey had come and gone unrecorded save in symbolic lore, and unclaimed save by the soil which turned them into earth again.

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