All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes: An Autobiography

by Maya Angelou

They would have been surprised to learn that we were no less annoyed with them than they with us. They were just two more people in an unceasing parade of naïve travelers who thought that an airline ticket to Africa would erase the past and open wide the gates to a perfect future.

All people use food for more reasons than mere nutrition,

It is through the eyes of strangers that a parent can see their children as people.”

The African marchers said they could have forewarned us. They knew that a driving rain always followed the death of a great soul. I asked, “God weeps?” “Of course not. It is the way the spirits welcome a great soul to the land of the dead. They wash it first.”

“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?”

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

“I collect jokes. I believe that if you know what a person eats, how and if he prays, how he loves and what makes him laugh, you can claim to understand him, at least a little.

The SS officer and the Jew, the bird, the pile of cow dung, and the starving wolf had disappeared. The two men were like champion boxers who, having delivered smashing blows, had returned to their corners for relief. Dieter was again the solicitous host and Torvash had his normal look of bemusement. The others were calm.

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 accompanied their births, only the dying knew of their deaths. They had come and gone unrecorded save in symbolic lore, and unclaimed save by the soil which turned them into earth again.