Resettlement in the South returned Angelou to home territory, where life had, at one time, seemed inequitable and discouraging to blacks. For personal reasons, she had avoided confronting Southern bigotry for twenty-two years. As she perceived the danger, "I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts." To questions about her choice of roosting places, she has replied that America must embrace the people it has rejected, whose contributions might have made a considerable difference in the nation's history. Content in her twelve-room house in Old Town and with the congregation of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, she has come to grips with the reality of the days of lynching, Jim Crow, Mr. Charley, and the Ku Klux Klan. In an optimistic mood, she noted in an interview with Michele Howe of the Newark Star-Ledger, "It is significant and a statement of intent to give a lifetime appointment to a black and to a woman. . . . The South has changed for both blacks and whites. People are returning to their roots or moving there for the first time, and they bring new and progressive ideas with them."
Angelou's life revolves around her son, Guy, a California personnel analyst, her grandson, Colin Ashanti Murphy-Johnson, her close friend and colleague, Dolly McPherson, her long-time secretary, Mrs. Mildred Garris, and a close circle of friends and admirers, including authors Jessica Mitford, Shana Alexander, and Rosa Parks. A restless, mellow-voiced, dynamic beauty who often dresses in the bright colors and styles of Ghana, she makes herself at home in a variety of settings, both intimate and public. To interviewer Greg Hitt of the Winston-Salem Journal, Angelou, with her usual playful humor, remarked on a future goal: "I want to know more — not intellectually — to know more so I can be a better human being, to be an honest, courageous, funny, and loving human being. That's what I want to be — and I blow it about eighty-six times a day. My hope is to cut that to seventy."
