A Phenomenal Woman

In 1999, former PLAYBOY editor Murray Fisher flew to the East Coast to speak with legendary American poet Maya Angelou. Their conversation, intended to be a Playboy Interview, never ran, the copy at some point misfiled and forgotten. Nearly 20 years after it took place, the dialogue was discovered by our archivists. Covering everything from religion to racism and, of course, writing, this remarkable piece of history is as relevant today as it was two decades ago.

Novelist Edwidge Danticat introduces Fisher’s once lost, and thankfully now found, Playboy Interview with Maya Angelou.

I first met Maya Angelou in print. I arrived in the United States from Haiti at the age of 12 and, after reading all the books by Haitian and French writers I could find at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, resolved to start reading in English. One afternoon, on a display table at the library entrance, I came across I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first book in Angelou’s multivolume autobiography. On its cover, a barefoot little black girl stood, completely lost in reading, in front of a modest wooden cabin that looked like the one where I had spent my childhood summers. Even before I cracked it open, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit in the author.

Maya Angelou and I were born and raised in different countries during different eras, but we had much in common. She too had been left as a young girl in the care of relatives, in her case her grandmother in tiny Stamps, Arkansas, and in my case my aunt and uncle in Port-au-Prince. She too survived sexual abuse as a child, though her abuser was punished in a way that made her feel she should punish herself by not speaking from the ages of seven to 13. In Angelou’s silence, however, were planted the seeds of a powerful writing voice. She devoured great works of literature, from Thomas Wolfe to Gustave Flaubert to Charles Dickens and many others. When Angelou was 17 (having returned to her mother’s care a few years earlier), she had a baby, left home with her infant son and undertook an eclectic and extraordinary breadth of pursuits — dancer, madam, actor, civic organizer, playwright. She eventually flourished, blossoming not just as a nuanced and commanding writer but also an extraordinary orator.