The Heart of a Storyteller

Maya Angelou is singing.

A jazz band plays not 30 feet from her table, a pretty good band, too. Good enough to fill this Santa Monica hotel lounge and keep the customers coming. Few of them notice the older woman sitting in the rear with her back to the stage, swaying in her seat, singing. Angelou is sheathed regally this evening in a purple velvet dress with matching purple shawl, her neck and wrists bedecked with gold. And right now, even though she is singing, what she is really doing is telling me a story.

That is the way Angelou talks, in leisurely paced stories, the points of which sometimes must be tweezed out of their snug shells. Her story-song has nothing to do with the jazz swelling behind her. It began as a recitation. She had been quoting a lecture she gives in a class she teaches on the “Philosophy of Liberation.” Her cadence grew more and more musical until her voice took wing, and now, finally, I recognize the words.

You got to know when to hold them,

know when to fold them . . .

Then suddenly she stops.

In class she would complete the song, she says, and follow it with a verse of Shakespeare: “To be or not to be . . .” This all is leading somewhere, but before she makes her point, a middle-aged couple slink over and ask for an autograph.

Frustrating, isn’t it? But what’s a story without suspense?

Angelou graciously signs her name but not before playing the schoolmarm, chiding the two for neglecting the nicety of a proper greeting.

Then it’s back to her story. Her point, when she finally makes it, turns out to be simply this: At heart she is a teacher. Stories are her mode of discourse.

“If I had taught before I had written a book,” she says, “I might never have written a book, I love teaching so. I am a teacher.”

And it is so.

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At Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where Angelou holds a lifetime chair, she teaches philosophy, French and Spanish. Sensing surprise at the last two subjects, she elaborates a bit: “I teach the impossibility of translating French poetry but the necessity to try.”

She lets that sink in, her Louis Armstrong smile on bright, before she comes clean. “What I do in class,” she says, “is I tell stories.” It was how her grandmother taught her lessons about life as a child back in Stamps, Ark. And it is how she imparts her wisdom now, interpersonally and professionally.

“I am a Southern lady,” she says by way of explanation, carefully enunciating each word, allowing her trademark pauses to draw the sentence out. “A Southern black lady.”

Over the course of 40 years in public life, Angelou has told her stories in many different forms--the 70-year-old poet-actress-singer-songwriter-playwright-teacher-author-presence is perhaps the ultimate hyphenate. Now she is employing a different form. At an age when most directors have retired, she’s just made her first feature film, “Down in the Delta,” which opens Christmas Day.

Filmmaking isn’t so much a departure for Angelou as another stage in the continuum of her life, says Wesley Snipes, who is one of the producers of “Down in the Delta” and appears in it. “Directing is just another way for her to teach and to share her wisdom,” he says.

Angelou first emerged as a major national cultural figure in 1970 with publication of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” the first installment of her autobiography, which dealt with her childhood, including a rape and the five years of silence that followed. The book, like most of her almost 20 other books of poetry and prose, has never gone out of print.

Her celebrity burgeoned in 1993 when she became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration since Robert Frost 32 years earlier. Many of those moved by her reading of the poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration did not know that she had been an acclaimed entertainer since the 1950s when she performed with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and toured internationally with a production of “Porgy and Bess.” (As an actress she’s been nominated for a Tony Award and an Emmy for, respectively, the 1973 Broadway play “Look Away” and for “Roots” in 1977.)

“Her life has been a hodgepodge of everything,” Snipes says. “She is a true maverick.”

Who knew that all the while Angelou was blazing trails, what shereally wanted to do was direct?

“Down in the Delta” stars Alfre Woodard and Al Freeman Jr. and features performances by Loretta Devine, Mary Alice and the late Esther Rolle as well as Snipes. Like all of Angelou’s work, the film is both instructive and simple.

Woodard portrays a dissolute Chicago mother who reluctantly goes with her children to live with relatives down South, and to her surprise she reconnects with her roots. The movie’s surface seems transparent. But if Angelou has achieved her goal, this simplicity is deceptive: Strong currents swirl underneath.

Snipes compares the film to “Soul Food,” another African American family drama, but he declares it more compassionate. A more apt comparison may be the works of Alex Haley. “Delta” operates as a compressed “Roots” saga for ordinary people, the vast majority of African Americans who can’t trace their ancestry back past the snarl of slavery. The South, then, is their ancestral home. While down South, Woodard is made whole, her autistic daughter speaks for the first time, and her dissatisfied big-city cousin starts to discover purpose.

At the center of the story is a totemic object--a candelabra stolen from the mantel of the white family who owned Woodard’s ancestors as slaves, the masters who broke up the family by swapping one of her ancestors for the silver heirloom. Called “Nathan” after the slave it was used to pay for, the treasured candelabra has been passed down through the generations.

It would seem to be a symbol of the ancestor’s spirit and of slavery’s pain while representing the family’s triumph over that pain--similar to the way the piano functioned in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Piano Lesson.” But Angelou says it’s wrong to think of the heirloom as mere symbol.

“As far as I was concerned, the candelabra became the man,” she says. “His descendants thought of the candelabra as the man himself. Did you see the way [a character in the movie] held it?” Angelou cradles an invisible figure, a man, in her arms. “It wasn’t a symbol.”

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“Down in the Delta” was written by first-time screenwriter Myron Goble. Although it won him the prestigious Nicholls Fellowship in 1993, it was a difficult script to get made.

Amen Ra, Snipes’ production company, optioned it at one point but let the option lapse. And when the production team of Rick Richards and Bob Christiansen acquired it, they found little enthusiasm for the project in Hollywood. They deduced that the only way to get it made was to attach a marquee-name actress. But the list of bankable black actresses is short. If only a few said no, the pool would be depleted; no movie would be made.

The producers turned to Reuben Cannon for help. The veteran casting director produced Spike Lee’s “Get on the Bus,” a road movie about a group of black men headed to the Million Man March in Washington. He secured financing through “15 Black Men,” a group of friends including Snipes, Danny Glover and Will Smith. His idea for generating heat for “Down in the Delta” involved Angelou.

He had met and become friends with her in 1982 when he worked on an NBC miniseries called “Sister, Sister,” which she wrote. “I knew she’d directed theater, and I knew she’d written screenplays, and I knew she was a master storyteller,” he says. “I told Rick that her involvement would attract the actors.”

He was right. After Angelou signed on as director, Woodard agreed to star, and Snipes came back on board.

Cannon became a producer on “Delta,” which reportedly was made for $3.5 million. His company, Star Rise Entertainment, hopes to produce Angelou’s second feature, an adaptation of James Baldwin’s play “The Amen Corner.” He says he is negotiating for rights. The company has three films in development, he says, all budgeted at $1 million to $3 million and all aimed specifically at an African American audience. By keeping costs low, he says, he will eliminate the need to produce mass crossover hits.

The irony, especially of Angelou’s participation as director generating the juice to get a movie made, is that she had met resistance to her directing for decades.

She had directed documentaries and shorts for PBS and the American Film Institute, and she had studied cinematography in the 1970s. But no one would hire her to direct a movie or television feature. “I had [acted in] ‘Roots’ with the hope that I would get to direct one of the segments,” she says. “Nobody knew ‘Roots’ was going to become the phenomenon that it became.”

She also had hoped to direct the 1979 film adaptation of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” which she co-scripted. A reference book published while the film was being made said she would be the credited director. It didn’t happen, and the experience embittered her.

Angelou’s face ordinarily is the image of becalmed benevolence. This is one of the few times that her smile leaves her. She doesn’t go into detail, but she says her treatment with that movie “almost turned me off” directing.

It took little persuasion, though, to get her to direct “Delta.” She liked the script, but meeting the Georgia-born screenwriter was what cinched it.

“I thought that he was very intelligent,” she says. “I can trust someone who’s intelligent even if I don’t agree with them, because I know that he or she at least will be willing to discuss it.”

Goble is not African American, which caused concern for some. “One of the actors said to me, ‘I don’t like this white boy because he doesn’t know our culture.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it--I know our culture.’ ”

The two worked so well together that Angelou wants Goble to write “The Amen Corner.” “If he writes it, he’ll work out the structure and I’ll take the piece and add the cultural detail and flavor and elevate it,” she says.

Snipes says that Angelou complained while filming “Delta” that she was unsuited for the collaborative process required by movie-making. Imitating her distinctive voice and cadence, he says she told him, “I’ll never do this again. I’m a writer--I write. I’m used to doing it all by myself.”

But after an early preview screening when the movie received a standing ovation, he says she whispered into his ear: “Maybe I’ll do it again. It wasn’t such a bad experience after all.” He laughs at the memory.

Reluctantly, Angelou admits that she did find the process frustrating in some respects. She liked working with actors--she says she told them stories to get her points across. But sometimes she would visualize a scene that she would have had no trouble describing on the page, only to find out it was physically impossible to film. “I write books,” she says, “and I’m all of it. I don’t have to depend on somebody else fixing the lights and making sure that this is the same costume that the person had on yesterday.”

Nevertheless, she says she wants to continue directing. “I’ve got two movies, maybe three movies more, that I want to direct,” she says. “I want very badly to make them. . . .”

Cannon says that Angelou, as a writer, was deeply respectful of Goble’s work and made changes to the script only in collaboration with him. But he says she unmistakably brought her own voice to the story, bringing vision and touches of authenticity that elevated it.

“There are scenes on the screen that, as an African American male, I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” he says. He specifically mentions the way Angelou portrayed the lives of poor people living in the Chicago projects, and the way the character played by Freeman cares for his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife (Rolle).

“I’ve seen it in life with my uncles and grandparents,” he says, “but never on the screen.”

Angelou wants to approach “The Amen Corner” the same way.

“I want to use Harlem as a character,”’ she says. “The only thing we’ve seen of Harlem in the movies is the underbelly. Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s was a fount--there was W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, who was James Baldwin’s mentor, James Baldwin. There was Marcus Garvey . . . Ralph Ellison. There was genius, elegance and incredible intelligence. . . . That is the Harlem I want to show.”

The jazz band has attracted a standing-room crowd, and folks keep coming, but Angelou is starting to fade. It’s been an exhausting day. Her flight in from Atlanta arrived two hours late, and she hasn’t even checked into her hotel room.

Bidding farewell, she rises to her full 6-foot height, leaving nearly all of the bourbon she’d been nursing on the table. The teacher dismisses class and then, regally, her back impossibly straight, she marches slowly off across the lobby. *