Art for the Sake of the Soul

By Maya Angelou

The strength of the black American to withstand the slings and arrows and lynch mobs and malignant neglect can be traced directly to the arts of literature, music, dance and philosophy that, despite significant attempts to eradicate them, remain in our communities today.

The first Africans were brought to America in 1619. We have experienced every indignity the sadistic mind of man could devise. We have been lynched and drowned and beleaguered and belittled and begrudged and befuddled. And yet, here we are. Still here. Upward of forty million, and that’s an underestimate. How, then, have we survived?

Because we create art and use our art immediately. We have even concealed ourselves and our pain in our art. Langston Hughes wrote:

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long.

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
You do not hear
My inner cry
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing
You do not know
I die.

When a larger society would have us believe that we have made no contribution of consequence to the Western world – other than manual labor, of course – the healing, the sustaining and the supporting roles of art were alive and well in the black community.

Great art belongs to all people, all the time – indeed it is made for the people for the people.

I have written of the black American experience, which I know intimately. I am always talking about the human condition in general and about society in particular. What it is like to be human, and American, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on form darkness into darkness – that darkness carpeted with figures of fear and the hounds behind and the hunters behind and one more vier to cross, and oh, my God, will I ever reach that somewhere, safe getting-up morning. I submit to you that it is art that allows is to stand erect.

In that little town in Arkansas, whenever my grandmother saw me reading poetry she would say, “Sister, Mama loves to see you read the poetry because that will put starch in your backbone.” When people who were enslaved, whose wrists were bound and whose ankles were tied, sang,

I’m gonna run on,
See what the end is gonna be…
I’m gonna run on,
See what the end is gonna be…

the singer and the audience were made to understand that, however we had arrived here, under whatever bludgeoning of chance, we were the stuff out of which nations and dreams were made and that we had come here to stay.

I’m gonna run on,
See what the end is gonna be…

Had the blues been censored, we might have had no way of knowing that our looks were not only acceptable but even desirable. The larger society informed us all the time – and still does – that its idea of beauty can be contained in the cruel, limiting, ignorant and still current statement that suggests you can’t be too thin, or too rich, or too white. But we had the nineteenth-century blues in which a black man informed us, talking about the woman that he loved,

The woman I love is fat
And chocolate to the bone,
And every time she shakes,
Some skinny woman loses her home.

Some white people actually stand looking out of windows at serious snow falling like cotton rain, covering the tops of cars and streets and fire hydrants and say, “My God, it sure is a black day.”

So black people had to find ways in which to assert their own beauty. In this song the black woman sang:

He’s blacker than midnight,
Teeth like flags of truth.

He’s the finest thing in the whole St. Louis,
They say the blacker the berry,
Sweeter is the juice…

That is living art, created to encourage people to hang on, stand up, forbear, continue.

We must infuse our lives with art. Our singers, composers and musicians must be encouraged to sing the song of struggle, the song of resistance, resistance to degradation, resistance to our humiliation, resistance to eradication of all our values that would keep us going as a country. Our actors and sculptors and painters and writers and poets must be made to know that we appreciate them, that in fact it is their work that puts starch in our backbones.

We need art to live fully and to grow healthy. Without it we are dry husks drifting aimlessly on every ill wind, our futures are without promise and our present without grace.