All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes by Maya Angelou (May 2017)
A couple years ago, I requested Maya Angelou's collected autobiographies using the inter-library loan system. I am generally a big fan of the system but this specific exercise revealed one of its few flaws. It turns out requesting a book over The Good Ol' Interwebs sometimes obscures facts like 'this book weighs as much as a brick', a condition entirely obvious whenever I pull a book off a dusty shelf.
So, I returned the shoebox-sized collection and requested each edition separately. Off the top of my head, I think there were eight in total. This book is somewhere around fifth or sixth in the sequence. As always, I enjoyed her writing thoroughly.
At the time of writing, Angelou's son was college-aged and she was seeking a new direction with her life in Ghana. The return to her ancestral home coincided with this important transitional moment. The collision of life events created a poignant undercurrent throughout; she was returning home, so to speak, just as her definition of home in America was undergoing its biggest adjustment in two decades. Though her writing specifically addressed the experience of returning to Africa as a black American, I found much in her words spoke to universal themes of defining community, struggling to bear the burden of history, and the deep-seated longing for discovering one's truest roots.
