This book is inspiring and reminds you that no matter what you are going through that it can be overcome. Maya Angelou's writing is honest, poetic and REAL. I find her style to be full of poetic imagery as is seen in this quote p. 52 "His features had the immutability of a Benin mask...his teeth like flags of truce. His skin the color of rich black dirt along the Arkansas river."

The following lucid and eloquent quotes remind one to persevere in the face of all things opposing:

"If I ended in defeat, at least I would be trying. Trying to overcome was black people's honorable tradition"(43).

"...We the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by miracle of love, turn loathing into love..take fear and by love change it into hope...take death and turn it into life"(46).

"The size and power of our adversaries were not greater that our capabilities"(74).

The writing of the venerable Maya Angelou is forever an inspiration.

loved book

Coup de cœur pour cette autobiographie, moi qui n'ai pas l'habitude d'en lire. En plus, l'auteur m'était totalement inconnue mais j'ai adoré le contexte dans lequel est ancré son récit : années 50/60, en pleine lutte pour l'affirmation des droits des Noirs aux Etats-Unis, un incessant va-et-vient entre avancées majeures en ce sens et reculs. Un très beau portrait de femme militante mais pas seulement, on entrevoit aussi beaucoup la femme, celle qui n'a pas renoncé à sa vie amoureuse et qui cherche l'amour et la mère célibataire d'un enfant puis d'un adolescent, en proie aux problèmes de cet âge. J'aurais vraiment adoré pouvoir le lire d'une traite (sans être interrompue par une saleté de rhume persistant) ! En tout cas, je vous incite fortement à la lire ! Une superbe découverte !

It is a quick and a fun memoir from Maya Angelou. The timeline makes the story that much more interesting. Despite the differences in our time and cultural background, I found myself resonating with her experiences as a young adult often throughout the book.

The details mentioned in the memoir helps put the pieces of information gathered from other black artists, writers, activists together. For example, she shares personal stories about Malcolm X and Billie Holiday, which are two other important figures in history. But that is not all of it.
Her involvement in black movement in the 60's and her personal journey during this period brings so much colour and spice to this book that makes me happy that I read it.

Angelou is bold, funny, vulnerable, and human. The way she opens up and tells her story, including triumphs and failures, makes me trust every word she says. The way she built community wherever she went makes me miss a time I wasn't apart of. I appreciate this book for the lessons I gleaned from it. Be bold, try, fall in in love, say when you've had enough, look out for folks, and know the folks who will look out for you.
The writing is smooth, easy to glide through. Angelou's writing is a rich history of names, dates, and times.

This is the final book in this series. In this book her son is 15 years old. The have moved a lot for work on various jobs. They move to NYC so she can work on becoming a writer. She gets very involved in the civil rights movement, including running SCLC office in NY for Martin Luther King. At one point her son's life is threatened by a gang (who had killed before.) She talked about how black boys grow up thinking that they, and therefore, other black youth, had no worth. You could feel her fear as a mother for her son. She meets a freedom fighter from Africa, who fought against apartheid and other racism in South Africa. It was interesting to learn more about that, especially the cultural differences between and African vs. a black American. They have a verbal marriage agreement after barely knowing each other. The amazing part about this relationship was how a strong, independent, self-reliant woman could stand such a male dominant relationship. She quit her job, quit acting, etc. She was not allowed to know about their money situation until they were evicted from their apartment. They moved to Cairo and she had to fight for her right to get a job. He cheated on her constantly and she finally left him. She moved to Ghana with her son so he could attend college in Africa. It amazed me that at the end of the book, after all she had fought for and endured, the most important thing was her son and being a mother. Another thing I appreciated was that she shared her mistakes.

When I think her life can't get crazier, she marries a freedom fighter and moves to Egypt. Maya, you amaze me. <3

Love it, love her. Although I really love Vivian Baxter - she is iconic, somehow. Will try a method of WWVBD for the next few months (should be epic).

Most satisfying volume after the 1st. It’s also nice to have the other cast members feel like people rather than props.

It physically pains me that this is my decided final rating for this book. I adore ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ and was excited to see this in stock at my local library. I will admit that I assumed it was the direct sequel to Angelou’s first autobiography, but ‘The Heart of a Woman’ actually details the events of her life from 1958-1962, starting in San Francisco after the failed marriage to her first husband and ending with her settling in Africa and her only son just starting college in Ghana; though a majority of the book chronicles her time living in New York City and partaking the civil rights movement.

I was prepared to absolutely love this book, and the first few chapters set in San Francisco were phenomenal. One thing that’s consistent throughout the book is Angelou’s lyricism and wit, and I truly feel it shines best when she’s describing her life with Guy in California.

It’s when she makes the decision to move to New York City to join the Harlem Writer’s Guild, and the events that soon follow, that things began falling apart for me.

Angelou comes across as less of a down-to-earth wise woman by then and more like a sanctimonious, self-indulgent champagne liberal who’s desperate to let us know how much of a good person she is whilst constantly bragging about all her celebrity friends; ranting against the oppressor of herself and her people whilst she sips scotch on first-class flights from her Manhattan penthouse to London and Cairo. She extolls blacks as virtuous freedom-fighters whilst lambasting whites at every opportunity, even though there are many white characters in the book who treat Angelou kindly and offered her a prestigious position as the office manager for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, leading to her meeting Martin Luther King and her future husband, amongst others. Angelou makes evident that she has a chip on her shoulder towards whites, though comes across as tone-deaf when she contrasts her life of privilege with the average, working-class African American (she attempts to unite herself to them as them being ‘enslaved’, even though Maya herself, nor her parents, were slaves and had very successful careers) and even most whites at the time, who were certainly not travelling to Europe and Egypt and living in luxury apartments (which Maya waxes about incessantly, even making excuses that she deserves to be spoiled because white people tried to devoid blacks from that privilege). The second half of this book felt so disingenuous, though perhaps Angelou’s (very unconvincing-sounding) interactions with Billie Holliday in the second chapter of this book should have probably warned me for what was to come.

Not to mention, she becomes aware of her second husband’s infidelities in New York City and laments how she feels isolated at their apartment because he doesn’t allow her to work a traditional job, and yet she follows him all the way back to Africa, where he continues to cheat and be openly misogynistic towards her, only for her to keep shifting blame towards white people (she also turns a blind eye to the sexism exhibited by the African men she’s friends with). She and other African women are also hostile to a woman they’re acquainted with who is also a philanderer, and yet they do not offer her the same flexibility they give to Angelou’s husband, instead vilifying her and doing everything they can to turn her away from their group. This same woman later admits to Angelou that she’s having an affair with her husband, and it is then that Angelou puts her foot down and stands up to her spouse (though not before calling the woman a whore in front of her friends). The whole thing ultimately left an acrid taste in my mouth and made me question Angelou’s character.

Even though I love ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, this book turned me off completely from reading her other autobiographies. I’m going back to reading Richard Wright’s ‘Black Boy’.

4.5 stars
This is the fourth volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, the title comes from a poem by Georgia Johnson:

“The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.”

This volume follows from Angelou from 1957 to 1962, starting in San Francisco and covering Angelou’s time in New York working for Martin Luther King’s organization. After meeting freedom fighter Vusumi Make she moves with him to London, then Cairo. The book ends when Angelou is living in Accra (Ghana). The list of people she meets and works with is impressive and she is very involved with the Civil Rights movement. The book starts with a meeting with Billie Holiday. Her civil rights work in New York leads her to meet and work with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, James Earl Jones, Paule Marshal and Cecily Tyson to name but a few. Malcolm X’s oratorical power comes across;

“Malcolm stood at the microphone. ‘Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else’s freedom.’ His voice, deep and textured, reached through the crowd, across the street to the tenement windows where listeners leaned half their bodies out into the spring air. ‘The black man has been programmed to die. To die either by his own hand, the hand of his brother or at the hand of a blue-eyed devil trained to do one thing: take the black man’s life.’ ”

Angelou consciously writes in the slave narrative tradition, speaking in the first person singular, talking about the first person plural. As you would expect the issue of race is central as Angelou is involved in active political protest. As always Angelou has a focus on relationships; with her son, with lovers and friends. She wrestles with how to bring up her son and on the nature of motherhood for a single black woman;

“The black mother perceives destruction at every door, ruination at each window, and even she herself is not beyond her own suspicion. She questions whether she loves her children enough- or more terribly, does she love them too much? Do her looks cause embarrassment- or even terrifying, is she so attractive her sons begin to desire her and her daughters begin to hate her. If she is unmarried, the challenges are increased. Her singleness indicates she has rejected or has been rejected by her mate. Yet she is raising children who will become mates. Beyond her door, all authority is in the hands of people who do not look or think or act like her children. Teachers, doctors, sales, clerks, policemen, welfare workers who are white and exert control over her family’s moods, conditions and personality, yet within the home, she must display a right to rule which at any moment, by a knock at the door, or a ring in the telephone, can be exposed as false. In the face of this contradictions she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.”

One of the things I like about Angelou is her honesty about herself, her actions and motives. She admits mistakes freely and openly. It has been noted that there is also a sense of journey about the book and comparisons are made by Angelou to On the Road by Kerouac. Angelou emphasizes the sense of journey by quoting a line from spiritual that refers to Noah’s Ark; “The ole ark’s a-moverin.” The journey includes time in Africa and Angelou makes some pointed comparisons with the US. This on landing in Ghana:

“Three black men walked past us wearing airline uniforms, visored caps, white pants and jackets whose shoulders bristled with epaulettes. Black pilots? Black captains? It was 1962. In our country, the cradle of democracy, whose anthem boasted ‘the land of the free, the home of the brave,’ the only black men in our airports fueled planes, cleaned cabins, loaded food or were skycaps, racing the pavement for tips.”

Angelou never loses her sense of humour:
“If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape”
I always find Angelou inspiring and am continuing to enjoy her autobiographical excursions.

reading still i rise in 7th grade actually changed my life and i absolutely adore maya angelou with my whole heart. her writing pulls me in and this was no different!!

I ended up listening to this book on audio. Generally I am not a fan of audio books, mainly because I find that I don't engage in a book the same as if I am reading it, and also I don't always like the sound of the reader as I prefer the voice in my head, but this audio was read by Maya Angelou herself. There is something so powerful, and soothing and compelling in Ms. Angelou's voice that no matter the setting in which I am listening, I am rarely distracted, and always with her. I was very lucky to see her speak live once a few months before she died.
The Heart of a Woman begins with Maya Angelou's meeting of Billie Holiday. As the reader or listener you have that same thrill and nervousness as Maya about meeting the legendary singer, and then we share in her shock, disappointment and sadness at Ms. Holiday's state of mind and presence. Run down and worn down from drug and alcohol abuse and the abuses of the world on her body and soul, Ms. Holiday is bitter, raged, rude and inebriated, and through Maya Angelou we see what the end of her life brought her. This is only a small start of the book where we meet Guy, Maya's son, and his impression and love of Ms. Holiday and how he is able, ever so briefly, to bring out the Lady Day. Before Billie leaves the book she tells Maya, "You'll be famous, but not for singing." The period with Billie Holiday is short and the book takes us on the journey of Maya and Guy's lives as they move from California to New York and eventually to Africa where she lives in Egypt and Ghana. During this period, she meets Rev. Martin Luther King jr., James Baldwin and Malcom X. She meets and marries Vusumzi Make, a South African freedom fighter. It is with him that she and Guy move to London and eventually Cairo. Maya Angelou has written seven autobiographies and this one is the fourth in her writings. I've read, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Singing and Swinging and Gettin Merry Like Christmas. I'd like to one day read all seven in sequence. I absolutely love Maya Angelou. She has guided me with her wisdom since I discovered her at the age of 13. Her words, have supported me through tough times, and the example of her life has always inspired and strengthened me. She was a beautiful woman with a beautiful soul, and the world was blessed to have had her. I enjoy reading her work, as much as I love hearing her read her work. I always think of her as a mother to me, and when I listen to her book at night I can close my eyes and imagine her sitting on the bed telling me stories as I drift off to sleep.