All the time I have lived here in North Carolina I felt a tingle every time I passed through Winston-Salem. I had hoped in the hoping kind of way that makes your nose crinkle and eyelids squish into your forehead and heart patter more as a thump than a beat that I might run into Maya Angelou. To have seen her would have been serendipity defined.
And now she is gone.
Maya Angelou was just down the road from me in Winston-Salem all this time. She was a fixture in North Carolina, and such a shining gem among the muck that drags us down as a state right now, quite literally and figureatively. We could all heed her words to turn our state around. Let her words, her voice, her conviction, her compassion be our beacon.
“If you’re for the right thing, you do it without thinking.”
“People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”
”Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.”
”You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
On the 4th of June, in 1982, I graduated from college. She was the most perfect speaker, ever. http://www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1982commencement/commencementaddress