Letter to My Daughter

Angelou opens this chapter with a short poem depicting a protagonist dancing freely in the “face of the sun” (54). Then the sky turns into a “pale evening,” giving way to a night “black like me” (54). Angelou writes that many Black poets “revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry” (54). Black poets focus on questions such as, “How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?” (54). Angelou quotes famous Black poets such as Aimé Césaire, who writes that the Earth would not be the Earth without Africans. Césaire states that his “negritude” is not a speck or even a tower but that “it perforates opaque dejection with its upright patience” (55). Angelou goes on to quote other poets’ conceptions of Blackness, such as Mari Evans, who famously wrote, “I Am a Black Woman” (55).

Angelou then considers the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’s poem “I’ve Known Rivers,” which spread from Harlem to the French and British colonies. Poets like Hughes, along with Sterling A.