65 pages • 2 hours read
Maya AngelouThe Heart of a Woman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Angelou and Guy stay in the Westlake district for another year and a half. During this time, Angelou moves from writing song lyrics to short stories. She shows her work to her friend, the author John Killens, and he encourages her to pursue her ambitions in New York and join the Harlem Writers Guild. Angelou finds the idea attractive, in part because of her increasing worry about her rebellious teenage son.
Angelou contacts her mother to discuss her plans. Her mother insists on meeting in a hotel in the highly segregated town of Fresno, despite her daughter’s desire to avoid “trouble.” Mother and daughter are met with stunned silence in the lobby of the hotel. Angelou is extremely nervous while her mother handles the situation with aloof composure. Later, Angelou’s mother says she should never show fear because people will sense and take advantage of it. She acknowledges that the threat crowds of white people pose and shows her daughter that she has a pistol hidden in her handbag. She has news of her own: She will be going to sea as a merchant marine. She describes it primarily as an act of defiance, “because they told me Negro women couldn’t get into the Union” (28).
In choosing to have her son share in her nomadic lifestyle, Angelou rejects the advice of the “white, obviously educated and [...] well-to-do” school psychologist (29). Angelou notes that such an individual could not “know what a young negro boy needed in a racist world” (29). Before leaving Los Angeles, Angelou abruptly but amicably breaks up with her partner, Ray, who agrees to look after Guy for a few weeks while she gets settled.
Chapter 2 Summary
Angelou moves to New York and lives with John and Grace Killens and their children while she finds and decorates her own apartment. She is disconcerted at how often the family discusses their resentment of the white community. She argues with John Killens, suggesting that Black people in California and New York have far less cause for complaint than those in the segregated South. Killens retorts that the power dynamics have not really changed since the times of slavery and that, “If you’re black in this country, you’re on a plantation” (33).
Angelou’s plans to explore New York for herself are interrupted by the arrival of Guy, who is hurt from being left behind. Angelou is remorseful and recalls her own sense of abandonment after being left with her grandmother from the age of four to 13. When Guy reveals Ray moved out of the apartment, leaving him alone after just one week, Angelou is horrified, and it is her son who ends up reassuring and comforting her. Angelou reflects on African American Motherhood, how external authorities undermine the aura of authority the mother must project. Black mothers must simultaneously shield their children from white power and prepare them to challenge it.
Angelou presents a play entitled One Love, One Life to the Harlem Writers Guild. The writer John Henrik Clarke harshly criticizes her work, and Angelou feels humiliated and discouraged and resolves not to return. However, after the reading, Clarke is more encouraging. He argues that, as a Black writer, Angelou should be prepared to work harder and face tougher criticism in the white-dominated publishing market. The group discusses the situation in Cuba and the FBI’s files on anti-American activities. Killens recounts the story of an enslaved man called Tom (an allusion to the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin) who works hard and saves to buy his freedom. However, when he asks his enslaver for a price, he decides that it is too high, and he will keep the money instead. In the shadow of McCarthyism, the group acknowledges the temptation to hang on to hard-won comforts and freedoms rather than risk losing them by pushing further against oppression. Angelou commits to reading a new work every two months and resolves to bring a short story (which Killens has told her is the most difficult literary form of all) to the next meeting.
Chapter 3 Summary
Financial pressures oblige Angelou to accept what she is determined will be her last show-business job, singing at the Apollo theater in Harlem. Comparing her singing career to the accomplishments of her Black peers frustrates her; she feels others making a greater contribution to the civil rights movement and resolves to “demonstrate [her] own seriousness” (45).
Angelou usually includes an audience participation song entitled “Uhuru” (“freedom” in Swahili) as an encore to her act. She learned the song from the famous Nigerian drummer, Babatunde Olatunji. The manager of the theater, Frank Schiffman, strongly advises her against including the number, as he believes the audience will refuse to participate and Angelou will be humiliated. Angelou insists feels that the white manager does not fully appreciate the growing pride among the Black American community: “Black people in Harlem were changing, and the Apollo audience was Black. The echo of African drums was less different in 1959 than it has been for over a century” (46).
The song is a huge success and on subsequent nights, Angelou realizes that her audience has already heard about the song and is eagerly anticipating this part of the performance. On the last night, in response to a heckler, audience members begin to sing the song before Angelou joins in. Their version no longer bears much resemblance to the African original, but the crowd as a whole “sang loudly and gloriously, as if the thing we sang about was already in our hands” (52).
Chapter 4 Summary
Angelou describes her attraction to the actor Godfrey Cambridge and her disappointment at his disinterest in a romantic relationship.
Cambridge and Angelou attend a meeting in a Harlem church where Martin Luther King Jr. is due to speak. King is the last of three speakers. The first preacher, Fred Shuttlesworth, deploys angry, warlike language, accusing the assembled New Yorkers of betraying their brothers and sisters in the segregated South and exhorting them to “pick up the gauntlet, flung down in hate” and “carry it through the bloody battlefield” (54). His speech is met with a standing ovation. The second speaker, Ralph Abernathy, is much less fiery. He argues that Jesus Christ was “the greatest changer in history,” teaching forgiveness of one’s enemies (54). Abernathy’s speech receives a more reflective reaction, although Angelou feels that it also had a powerful effect on the audience. It is Martin Luther King Jr. who really electrifies the crowd. He presents Black people as being tasked not only with defending their own rights, but also with redeeming the United States as a whole.
Both Angelou and Cambridge are deeply stirred by King’s speech, and they are determined to make a contribution to the movement. They resolve to produce a play, with a cast of Black actors, designed to benefit and promote the cause. Angelou is supposed to write the script, but experiences complete writer’s block. After tearfully admitting her difficulty to Cambridge, the two decide to produce a cabaret instead, the “Cabaret for Freedom,” showcasing the talents of the various performers they have recruited.
The chapter closes on a more private, personal note, as Angelou expresses loneliness and longing for a romantic relationship.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Angelou’s autobiographical narrative is marked by a constant back-and-forth between the personal and the political. On the one hand, we see the civil rights movement gaining momentum from chapter to chapter. Details of the struggle across the country and across every walk of life constantly permeate the narrative and the dialogue, leaving readers with a strong sense of history unfolding. On the other, we follow Angelou through her day-to-day practical and emotional vicissitudes as a single mother raising a teenage boy. Ultimately, Angelou’s narrative shows us how the personal shapes the political and vice-versa. Angelou’s personal development as a politically engaged African American mother and artist reflects the historical moment in which she is living. At the same time, Angelou, her peer group, and the children they are raising play an active role in defining that historical moment.
Angelou’s description of her encounter with her mother in Chapter 1, and her recollections on her own childhood in Chapter 2 point to an intergenerational shift in the conception of African American Motherhood. Angelou is somewhat in awe of her mother’s life as a courageous, beautiful, emancipated Black woman. However, in order to live that life, her mother felt obliged to effectively abandon her children for much of their childhood, with emotionally devastating consequences for Angelou and her brother, Bailey. Angelou, instead, is seeking to be both a mother and a free woman, refusing to leave her son behind. The difficulty of balancing these two roles will be a recurrent theme throughout the book. For example, in Chapter 2, Angelou is guilt-stricken when she learns that Guy has been left alone in Los Angeles while she is trying to set herself up in New York. Reflecting on African American Motherhood at the end of Chapter 2, Angelou remarks that the mother’s authority and agency in the home are constantly compromised as a result of her impotence in the racially prejudiced outside world.
Angelou’s mother challenges racial prejudice to the extent to which she deliberately seeks out confrontation, placing herself and her daughter in danger, at the hotel in Fresno. She seeks employment in the merchant navy simply to prove a point, despite the fact that, in Angelou’s opinion, the lifestyle will not suit her or make her happy. Angelou is inclined to resist this tendency to allow resentment of white privilege to dominate and compromise Black lives. This is why she finds the conversation at the Killens’s household rather frustrating. At the same time, she herself has some reservations regarding the universalizing principles espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. and is initially suspicious of the white activists running the SCLC in New York. The three speeches given at the rally in Chapter 4 illustrate the divergent approaches to the civil rights struggle that were emerging in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The angry, divisive rhetoric of Shuttlesworth compares starkly to Abernathy’s rhetoric of Christian sacrifice and pacifism. King’s universalizing idealism wins over the crowd and leaves Angelou and Cambridge profoundly moved, but the reader is left to wonder to what extent this optimism derives from King’s remarkable charisma.
One of the core concerns of the civil rights movement at the time was the relationship between Pan-Africanism and African American Identity, and the potential points of intersection between the emancipation of Black Americans and that of colonized peoples. Angelou’s account of singing “Uhuru” at the Apollo provides her readers with a first insight into this theme. Apart from a few dissenting voices on the last night, her Black American audience adores the song partly because they identify their own freedom struggle with that of their African counterparts. However, as they join in and sing with Angelou, the song no longer bears much resemblance to the original: hey are singing but are singing a different melody and a different song: “We didn’t sing the song that Olatunji had taught me, but we sang loudly and gloriously” (52).
In these opening chapters, Angelou repeatedly expresses frustration with her work as a professional singer, emphasizing the theme of Finding an Authentic Voice. She feels that her peers at the Harlem Writers Guild and elsewhere are “doing important things” (44), while she herself continues to “lack seriousness” as long as she is working on stage. The audience’s highly politicized reaction at the Apollo suggests that these misgivings are unfounded. As she makes the transition from a musical to a literary career, Angelou will carry a great deal of what she has learned on stage with her. Indeed, much of her published poetry and prose is clearly influenced by musical and oral traditions.
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