![]() ![]() ![]() (…) Just as the elder opened his mouth, pink tongue waving, and said, ‘Great God of Mount Nebo,’ Sister Monroe hit him on the back of his head with her purse. (…) Sister Monroe broke through the cloud of people trying to hem her in, and flooded up to the pulpit (…) crying ‘I say, preach it.’īailey said out loud, ‘Hot dog’ and ‘Damn’ and ‘She’s going to beat his butt.’ Thus, we learn through Maya’s experiences that religion is at once fundamental to the survival, dignity and recovery of the Black community, terrifying when wielded blindly and without compassion, and, at times, utterly ridiculous: Momma thinks this is a way of taking the lord’s name in vain and beats Maya horribly without warning and explanation. The dark side of Momma’s extreme religiosity is revealed, however, one innocent day when Maya unwittingly utters the words “By the way”. Something had happened out there, which I couldn’t completely understand, but I could see that she was happy (…) Whatever the contest had been out front, I knew Momma had won. She stood another whole song through and then opened the screen door to look down on me crying in rage (…) Her face was a brown moon that shone on me. One such example is when some local “powhitetrash” children exert their power over Momma by mimicking and mocking her, whilst she stands solid, singing hymn after hymn: Momma tries to live and raise her grandchildren unimpeachably in the “eyes of God”, and her religiosity has helped her be a rock for both community and family despite the many harrowing and humiliating experiences she faces at the hands of the “whitefolks”. Momma is painted as a tower of quiet strength and pride, a self-made woman who is known and respected even by some of the White community in an otherwise racially segregated town full of mistrust and fear on both sides. The religious fanaticism/zeal apparent in Maya’s local community of Stamps, embodied by Momma in particular, was fascinating to some of us and off-putting for others. We questioned why Maya’s story started in church with her suffering humiliation, and pondered the role of religion as both a means of bringing hope to a community trying to recover from slavery, as well as a tool to keep the status quo of Black subservience, as seemed to be the case in the revival meeting:Įven if they were society’s pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus (…) All the Negroes had to do generally, and those at the revival especially, was bear up under this life of toil and cares, because a blessed home awaited them in the far-off bye and bye. Our conversation opened with us wondering whether the text was ever on a school reading list, as so many of us had read it when we were (much!) younger. ![]() As a Black woman she has known discrimination, violence and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. In this first volume of her seven books of autobiography, Maya Angelou evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. ![]()
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