When her marriage ended she sent the children away, and when they came back to her a decade of growing up apart meant that a lot of healing still had to take place, a lot of trust and acceptance be earned.

Vivian had grown up beautiful, met and fallen in love with Maya’s father and moved to California. Vivian Baxter Johnson, Maya’s mother had been born into a tough family, her brothers would beat you up soon as look at you, and Vivian had learned to fight even as a child. ‘Oh baby, you’re so beautiful and so tall. ‘Maya, Marguerite, my baby.’ Suddenly I was wrapped in her arms and in her perfume. I knew it and was sure she would know it as soon as she saw me. That woman who looked like a movie star deserved a better looking daughter than me. Maya remembers her nervousness that she wouldn’t be good enough for this beautiful little mother. It wasn’t until Maya was thirteen that she went to California to live permanently with her mother – who was at that time little more than a stranger. A short visit to her mother when she was eight ended in Maya’s rape by her mother’s partner, and a trauma that took years to undo. It’s well known that Maya and her brother were sent to their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas to live when Maya was three. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.” So, while this volume is still about Maya Angelou, it is mostly about a tiny, fierce little woman called Vivian Baxter. However, this volume is still a satisfying conclusion to the series of autobiographies – for this book is about Maya’s mother, and Maya’s relationship with her mother. The previous volume A Song Flung up to Heaven finishes when Maya is a little over forty, and in a sense that’s where these autobiographies leave her – as this volume never really takes us beyond that point, at least not in any great detail. This final volume is a little different to the previous six – published only a year before Maya died at the age of eighty six. Having now completed the seven volumes of autobiography I may go on to read some of the essays – as I know Liz is planning on doing. It was back in April last year that I started by reading (actually rereading) that first volume, and a mini reading project with two good friends Liz and Meg was born. Mom & Me & Mom is the seventh and final book in the sequence of autobiographies by Maya Angelou which begin with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Maya angelou my mom and me