For the remainder of the 1940s, to support her child, Angelou moved about California and took a variety of jobs—dancing in night clubs, cooking at a Creole cafe, removing paint at a dent and body shop, and serving as madam and sometime prostitute at a San Diego brothel. Terrified of arrest for her illegal activities, she hastily returned to Stamps, then Louisville, where the army accepted, then ousted her because of her connection with the California Labor School, which was sponsored by the Communist Party. In the interim, she eased the pain of rejection with marijuana and a new career hoofing to "Blue Flame" and "Caravan" as one half of the exotic dance duo of "Poole and Rita."
More short-term jobs followed, including fry cook in Stockton and a second short stint in prostitution. However, when Angelou became aware of Bailey's deep despair over the death of his young wife, Eunice, she returned her attention to family matters, and, in spite of his great sorrow, Bailey, concerned for the company his sister was immersed in, forced her to give up her dissolute life. A yearning to support herself drove Angelou to sell stolen clothes for a junkie, but on his advice, she stayed free of drugs, escaped the seamy life, and again sought a legitimate job.
While clerking in a record shop at the age of twenty-two, Maya met and married Tosh Angelos, a Greek-American sailor, and settled into domesticity in Los Angeles. However, beset by family and neighborhood disapproval of their mixed-race marriage, the relationship lasted only a few years, crumbling about the time of Momma's death. From 1954 to 1955, after a stint as exotic dancer at the Garden of Allah, Angelou left Guy in Vivian's care and toured Europe and Africa with a U.S. Department of State production of Porgy and Bess. Compelled by maternal unrest, she returned to California and settled in a houseboat commune in Sausalito to mother her son.
Career
Because petty instances of neighborhood racism continued to plague her, the respite was shortlived. Within the year, with impetus from black poet John Oliver Killens, Angelou, eager to polish her writing skills, pushed on to New York and allied herself with the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 50s. Years of private music and drama training and dance classes with Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Ann Halprin prepared her well for a career. Searching for outlets for her talents in the 1950s, she danced and sang calypso and blues at San Francisco's Purple Onion, New York's Village Vanguard, and Chicago's Mr. Kelly's. In the 1960s, she sang at Harlem's Apollo Theatre and appeared in off-Broadway New York theatrical productions, including Heatwave and Jean Genet's The Blacks. Spurred by civil rights gains, she joined talents with comedian Godfrey Cambridge and wrote and produced Cabaret for Freedom, which epitomized a time of change when black performers and writers were receiving salaries and notoriety equivalent to their talents.
Sharing a common-law marriage with Vusumzi Make [mah' kay], a suave South African anti-apartheid leader from Johannesburg, in 1961, Angelou transported her interest and enthusiasm to a colony of black American expatriates in Egypt. As Madame Make, she lived in a milieu where her chocolate brown skin and nappy hair were accepted as "correct and normal." Although the relationship dissolved after she grew tired of her mate's patriarchal attitudes, mismanagement of money, and infidelities, she remained in Africa and for two years served as the first female editor of the Arab Observer, a Cairo news weekly. Moving on to Accra, she settled Guy into college, then remained to nurse him after an automobile accident broke his neck, an arm, and a leg. While administering the School of Music and Drama, she starred in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage at the University of Ghana. To supplement her meager salary, she also wrote for the Ghanaian Times and the African Review, a political journal.
The African phase of Angelou's life ended with a growing sense of her American-ness. About the time of her father's death, she returned to Los Angeles, where in 1970 black spokesman Bayard Rustin sought leadership initiatives from her, including a post as Northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Two presidents—Ford and Carter—appointed her to honorary positions: the Bicentennial Commission and the National Commission on the Observance of the International Women's Year. Subsequently, groups such as the Family Service Convention, Michigan State Celebrity Lecture series, Tennessee Humanities Council, Coalition of 100 Black Women, and Johns Hopkins University's Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium clamored for her rollicking, emotional speeches. Her humanistic topics, spiked with recitation and impromptu songs, tended toward a universal acceptance of human differences and a celebration of similarities. As she professed to one audience, "as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike. That was one of the greatest lessons I learned."
