Gather Together in My Name (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #2)

by Maya Angelou

Thus we lived through a major war. The question in the ghettos was, Can we make it through a minor peace?

She took great joy in her beautiful grandchild, and as with most egocentric people, saw his every virtue as a mirror for her own.

It's awful to think that the devil gave me that lie, but it came unexpectedly and worked like dollar bills.

They sat on the long backless stools and exchanged gossip or shared the patient philosophy of the black South.

I was also proud of them. I congratulated myself on having absolutely the meanest, coldest, craziest family in the world.

He yelled louder, splitting the air with screams. She contrived a wordless song. His screams were lightning, piercing the dark cloud of her music. I closed the door.

They laid open their bodies and threw away their dignity upon a heap of come-filled rubbers. But they had men.

The fact that the pimps and panderers didn't harass them, bespoke the tolerance in the black community for people who chose to lead lives different from the norm.

I hated their stupidity, but more than that I hated being underestimated.

The heavy opulence of Dostoevsky's world was where I had lived forever. The gloomy, lightless interiors, the complex ratiocinations of the characters, and their burdensome humors, were as familiar to me as loneliness.

was surrounded, as I had been all my life, by strangers. The world of waitress, dreamer, madam and mother might have continued indefinitely, except for another of life's unexpected surprises.

Values among Southern rural blacks are not quite the same as those existing elsewhere. Age has more worth than wealth, and religious piety more value than beauty.

I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?

Though I prided myself on tender sensitivity, I have never known when a great love affair was beginning. Some barricade lies midway in my mind, and I'm usually on my back scrutinizing a ceiling before it is borne in on me that this is the man I fantasized in my late night fingering.