All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes: An Autobiography

by Maya Angelou

The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned, pricks most deeply and draws more blood.

because I had nothing to offer company save a long face and a self-pitying heart, and

I had no intention of changing either. Black Americans of my generation didn’t look kindly on public mournings except during or immediately after funerals. We were expected by others and by ourselves to lighten the burden by smiling, to deflect possible new assaults by laughter. Hadn’t it worked for us for centuries? Hadn’t it?

Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress.

We had come home, and if home was not what we had expected, never mind,

our need for belonging allowed us to ignore the obvious and to create real places or even illusory places, befitting our imagination.

had long known that there were worlds of difference between males and men as there were between females and women.

Genitalia indicated sex, but work, discipline, courage and love were needed for the creation of men and women.

Years before I memorized a George Eliot quote, “I never feel sorry for conceited people, supposing they carry their comfort around with them.”

For the first time since my arrival, I was very nearly home. Not a Ghanaian, but at least accepted as an African. The sensation was worth a lie.

We could physically return to Africa, find jobs, learn languages, even marry

and remain on African soil all our lives, but we were born in the United States and it was the United States which had rejected, enslaved, exploited, then denied us. It was the United States which held the

Our merry response was totally lacking in merriment. We laughed, as usual, because of the truth in the incident and because there

“If you want to know how important you are to the world, stick your finger in a pond and pull it out. Will the hole remain?”

Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”

When a nineteen-year-old decides to clothe himself in dignity, nothing but pity or abject fear can penetrate his armor.

The Black child must learn early to allow laughter to fill his mouth or the million small cruelties he encounters will congeal and clog his throat.

Prejudice is a burden which confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.

How could one suggest in one’s own secret heart that Whites were not gods, descending from heaven, and like gods, bringing bounty on one hand and brutality on the other? That was the way of the gods.

They’re like the young here in this tragic country. They will never forgive their parents for what they did to the Jews, and they can’t forgive the Jews for surviving and being a living testament to human bestiality.”

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.