the book bum

     I just realized that I'm reading Maya Angelou's autobiographies WAY out of order.  I read the first one, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , last summer, and this summer I read the fifth one.  I am not reading them out of order on purpose.  I happened upon both books by chance (I found Traveling Shoes at a secondhand bookstore in Cincinnati) and bought them with no knowledge of the series' sequence.  Luckily, I was able to enjoy this book despite my ignorance.      This book was most interesting for its exploration of the yearning of some African-Americans to return to Africa in the 60s'.  Over the course of the book, Angelou creates a life in Ghana and struggles with her suspicion that slavery has left African-Americans without a home country: they are oppressed in the United States and out of place in Africa.  She desperately wants to feel at home in Ghana, but because of the centuries of separation and abuse that he...

Maya Angelou died this past May, leaving a treasure trove of writing for us to read and remember her by.            It all started with the discovery of a bookstore.  I found it because I had eaten breakfast in a cafe down the street.  I shot inside and read the first chapters of a couple of different books in a state of hyperactive delirium before focusing on a small robin's-egg-blue paperback book sitting by the cash register.  I'd heard of the book before - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - and I knew that I would have to buy it.  I read about Marguerite's (that was her given name) silk Sunday dress made out of a rich woman's worn-out gown and the three-line poem she was meant to recite to her church and the "space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil" before I paid and left.            I thought about the book on the bike ride home, and when I had finished yank...