Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou in her heavily restored Harlem
house.
Poet, educator, author, playwright,
activist,historian, producer, actress, director Dr. Maya Angelou is
one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time.
Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St.
Louis, Missouri and raised in Stamps, Arkansas. Here Maya Angelou
experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also
absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional
African-American family, community, and culture.
As
a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship
to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14,
she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American
female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving
birth to her son,Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single
mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook,
however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would
soon take center stage.
Maya Angelou's five-volume autobiography
commenced with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1970. The
memoirs chronicle different eras of her life and were met with
critical and popular success. Later books include All God's
Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) and My Painted House, My
Friendly Chicken and Me (1994). She has published several volumes
of verse, including And Still I Rise (1987) and Complete
Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1995). Her volume of poetry, Just
Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die (1971), was nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize.
Maya
Angelou currently owns three homes. One in Winston-Salem, the other
two are townhouses in Harlem New York. Maya Angelou has lived in
New York many times. She has had apartments in Brooklyn and on
Central Park West and Riverside Drive. But in 2003 she decided it was
time to buy a brownstone in Harlem. It was to be
a retreat from her full-time residence, an 12-room house in
Winston-Salem, N.C. This is a neighborhood where ravaged brownstones
bought for $67,000 in 1996 sold for $500,000 in 2004. Maya Angelou's
property is worth well over $3.4 million today.
Maya Angelou wanted a space in which to
entertain her legions of friends in New York. Unlike most
second-home owners, she was looking for a getaway to the city, not
from it. And she soon found it. This was the first and only house she
looked at in Harlem. A four-story brownstone Built in 1881, the
house is nearly 4,000 square feet and sits on a historic block of
120th Street in the Mount Morris Park neighborhood, the
most-sought-after area in Harlem. It took a gut renovation to turn
the shell into the stunning, high-ceilinged home it is today, with
five bedrooms, three full bathrooms and two half bathrooms. Her
Harlem home is largely
decorated with objects of art from Africa and works that reflect the
experiences of African-Americans.
Her front parlor is vivid and a little
larger than life. Oversize armchairs and couches are upholstered in
raw silk in shades of lime, tangerine, cherry, grape and bright
yellow. The grouping gives new meaning to the phrase eye candy. It
is said that Maya Angelou wanted this room to look like a bowl of
summer fruit. The dining room is behind the parlor, dominated by a
round glass-topped table that seats 10 in bright red lacquered
chairs. Painted clouds drift overhead on the light blue ceiling.
At the back of the house is the breakfast nook. It is sunlit and
painted marigold with terra cotta-colored trim. An
elegant stairway arises from the front entryway that carries you
directly to Maya Angelou's blue master bedroom. On
the top floor are a laundry room and the two other bedrooms.
Inside, eye-catching artifacts of rarer quality are on display
everywhere. They vary from luminous paintings of African women
ferrying babies in slings to charming drawings of little
African-American girls wearing yarn ribbons in their hair, resembling
illustrations from the 1950s. African masks, quilts, photographs and
sculpture sit on tables, hang on walls, line stairways. Collages by
Phoebe Beasley are scattered through the rooms.
Her Harlem house is much more than a vacation place or a simple
change of scenery. It’s a true second home. In a article written
about Maya Angelou's Harlem home she states, “I never agreed with
Thomas Wolfe. I never thought you can’t go home again. I’ve been
coming home to Harlem for 50 years.”
Maya Angelou’s words and actions continue to
stir our souls, energize our bodies, liberate our minds, and heal our
hearts.
I
long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find
myself.
-Maya Angelou
sabrina
