Maya Angelou's New Title Is a Mother’s Day Ode

Maya Angelou’s latest book, “Mom & Me & Mom,” is a Mother’s Day Tribute to the larger-than-life presence of the mother she loved and resented and ultimately forgives without bitterness.

“My mother was irresistible,” Angelou says. Her mother, Vivian Baxter, was a large presence, but had an unhappy marriage and was so unsuited to be a mom that she sent Maya and her brother Bailey to live with her paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Ark., when Maya was 3. Her mother didn’t call her back to San Francisco until Maya was 13 and the young writer was filled with resentment. Her brother had en even harder time re-entering his mother’s world and later would escape into drugs.

Vivian was remarried to a man the children called Daddy Clidell when she was reunited with her children. She was living comfortably and had servants. Vivian owned pool halls, gambling clubs and ran a boardinghouse. She had been a nurse, a shipfitter and a barber. She also knew her way around jail cells. She waved around a .38 and helped Maya through childbirth by distracting her with dirty jokes. When Vivian Baxter died, the city of Stockton, Calif., recognized her for her civic work by naming a park after her.

Maya Angelou has written seven autobiographies but is best known “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” for her harrowing account of how she became mute after she was raped as a child. Her accounts of growing up black in the segregated world of Jim Crow America are not aimed at a highbrow literary audience but are widely taught in school.

“Mom & Me & Mom” has all of Angelou’s trademark humor and optimism. The resentments seem to be buried and the bitterness appears to be forgiven.