MAYA’S SONG

A loving tribute in free verse to a writer who found her home, and herself, in her words.

“Once you start speaking again, / ain’t nobody gonna be able to shut you up.” Filling out a biographical framework that begins in 1928 with the birth of Marguerite Annie Johnson into a loving family and ends in 1993 with her reading at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, Watson chronicles poet Maya Angelou’s travels from St. Louis to California, Ghana to Harlem and links with friends like “Jimmy” Baldwin, as well as the way she gathered “word-seeds” even through the years of silence after “her mother’s boyfriend / hurt her body, hurt her soul.” In his painted collages, Collier alludes to that silence with a broad, striped ribbon across closed lips in the course of portraying his subject with the same look of dignified reserve throughout her growth from infancy to adulthood. Using a slowly brightening palette, he surrounds her throughout with similarly brown faces until closing with a final bright, smiling solo close-up: “No holding her head down, no hiding. No more silence. / She didn’t have the pitch-perfect voice others had, / but she had her songs, her stories.” In their notes, Watson and Collier both speak to the inspirational power of Angelou’s persistence and courage. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A soaring portrait of a “Black girl whose voice / chased away darkness, ushered in light.”