Angelou, Maya

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    ‘Down in the Delta’ at 25: When Maya Angelou Considered Reverse Migration

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    The memoirist’s sentimental film speaks to Black Americans returning to the South.Consumed by fears of inner-city violence and the traumatic effects of the crack epidemic, “Down in the Delta” didn’t lead to a career in filmmaking for the writer Maya Angelou. Instead, 25 years later, the inspiring yet uniquely flawed film remains her lone directorial feature.Though a Black fantasy unbound by a specific place and time, it’s a film whose conversations with the socioeconomic realities of the 1990s, the proliferation of hood movies, and the strategy for Black resistance, now, would appear dated. But the script’s idyllic return to the South has newfound resonance for the contemporary reverse-migration taking place in many northern Black neighborhoods affected by the consequences of decades of redlining, deindustrialization and divestment.“Down in the Delta” opens on the South Side of Chicago, where the sound of blaring sirens and hovering helicopters pierce apartment windows, such as the one belonging to Rosa Lynn Sinclair (Mary Alice), the steady mother of Loretta (a perceptive Alfre Woodard), an unemployed single mother who feeds her autistic daughter, Tracy (Kulani Hassen), soda in lieu of milk and, through her drug use, persistently disappoints her only son, the artistically inclined Thomas (Mpho Koaho). To save her family, a vexed Rosa Lynn pawns “Nathan,” a silver-plated candelabra dating to the antebellum period, for bus tickets, sending Loretta and her children to Mississippi to live under the care of their Uncle Earl (Al Freeman Jr.). The sojourn isn’t a cakewalk for Loretta. Not only is she there to sober up, but she must also earn enough money working at Earl’s chicken joint to buy Nathan back, or else permanently lose the heirloom.Considering Angelou’s autobiographies — particularly, “Gather Together in My Name” — you can see why Myron Goble’s script about the power of family appealed to her. Cinematically, kin as a restorative force for Black folks was covered in George Tillman Jr.’s “Soul Food” (1997). And since “Down in the Delta,” “Kingdom Come,” “The Secret Life of Bees” and Tyler Perry’s Madea character have walked similar paths.From the moment Loretta arrives in the Delta, Angelou broadly juxtaposes the opportunities lost and gained between North and South. In the South there’s no crime, poverty, squabbles or gossip. Unlike the young Black men of Chicago, flatly depicted as predators, the people of this genteel town emit rural warmth: The cinematographer William Wages’s honeyed lens captures inviting dirt country roads and lush beds of grass; the composer Stanley Clarke’s tender score further beckons repose.In this town, crack houses, a staple of urban angst cinematically depicted in “New Jack City” and “Jungle Fever,” are replaced with manicured family plots and quaint Queen Anne-style homes. This community longs for the past, whether it’s Earl yearning for Nathan or Earl’s wife, Annie (Esther Rolle), who has Alzheimer’s and pines for her mother. The area’s lone worry is the impending closing of the chicken plant, a threat quietly swept away almost as quickly as it appears.Maya Angelou in the director’s seat on the set of “Down in the Delta.” A quarter of a century later, it remains an inspiring film that is not without its flaws.Ben Mark Holzberg/Miramax Films The importance of the South as a site for restorative justice resides in Nathan, whose frame, in a film prizing trees as markers of time and lineage, carries obvious symbolism. The candle holder’s back story, the bounty for the selling of an enslaved Sinclair, ultimately repossessed by another descendant for recompense, bears in mind the fracturing of Black families during bondage. Earl believes the return of Nathan to Mississippi might revitalize the town, reuniting the family while metaphorically mending the rift between North and South. It’s a wish that inspires the film’s desire for a reverse Great Migration.As early as the 1970s, Black people were already returning South. Though millions of African Americans arrived North to escape Jim Crow violence, in their new communities they discovered some of the same prejudices. The era’s hope and optimism felt by those first migrators, recorded in the painter Jacob Lawrence’s indelible “Migration” series, has been replaced. For instance, in Llewellyn M. Smith and Sam Pollard’s documentary “South to Black Power,” Charles M. Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, hopes by reclaiming the South, political weight can be consolidated on a state level by Black people.In Angelou’s hands, however, reverse migration isn’t a subversive strategy. Rather it’s an uncomplicated balm. Loretta’s return to loving arms in Mississippi ends her drug habit, gives Tracy her first words, and helps this single mother, who just learned how to add and subtract, envision a future totally unencumbered by institutional racism.Because in “Down in the Delta,” the road to racial uplift is a youth movement cleanly paved by economic self-reliance. When the town’s chicken plant closes, the entrepreneurial Will hopes to acquire it for his dad’s chicken restaurant, a Black-owned small business, to revitalize the area. When Loretta learns how Will helps Black businesses, she dreams of running the factory herself.Financial independence becomes a method for memorializing a storybook past for future generations while imagining newfound prosperity; a dream that has reverberated since 40 acres and a mule were first promised, and then became a nightmare when Tulsa, Okla., burned in 1921. Angelou’s “Down in the Delta” is a retelling of a broken contract that still speaks to migrators today. 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      ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ Review: A Life Too Simplified

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      This New York City Children’s Theater adaptation of Maya Angelou’s celebrated memoir faces the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain.They were such tiny little kids to put on a train by themselves from Southern California to rural Arkansas — Maya Angelou only 3, her big brother, Bailey, all of 4. Each wore a wrist tag spelling out who they were, where they were headed and who would take care of them there.It was the early 1930s, their parents were splitting up and the children were off to live with their grandmother Annie Henderson in a town called Stamps, where she owned a general store.“The store was my favorite place to be,” the grown-up Maya says in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a new play adapted by Idris Goodwin and Janna Segal from Angelou’s memoir of the same name.For most of a decade in her young life — long before she became a famous poet or received a Tony Award nomination for acting in a Broadway show that ran for one performance — it was a place where she was safe, and loved. And in Khalia Davis’s production for New York City Children’s Theater, it is the place to which she returns, stepping back into that empty store and unfurling her memories as monologue.The Maya (Cherrye J. Davis) of this oversimplified play is in her 40s, just as Angelou was when the book came out in 1969 and became a best seller. In the decades since then, it has been a frequent target for book banners — because of its visceral depictions of everyday hatred and brutal violence in the virulently racist Jim Crow South, and for its frank discussion of rape and sexual abuse.With those elements in mind, New York City Children’s Theater recommends its production, at Theater Row, for ages 16 and up. Still, it is a difficult piece to translate to the stage; while a book can be read in private and put down at any point, the audience at a play can’t stop the action if it becomes too intense. There is also the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain — along with humor and joy and tender affection — without reducing it to a Black trauma narrative.In both script and staging, this 55-minute show feels foiled by all of that, its characters and incidents too briefly sketched to gather the necessary force and weight.There are moments of vividness in Maya’s recollections, like crowding around the radio to hear the boxer Joe Louis fight for a championship — the thrill of his victory for Black listeners, and the danger underneath: “It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.”But the production, and Davis’s performance, have an insistently perky gloss that reads as condescending, while the script sometimes trims details to the point of dumbing down.When Maya speaks of the vitalizing effect of books on her young self, she likens the escape they offered to “a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead or a hot cup of tea and milk.” In the memoir, Angelou’s words are “a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.” Can that really be too sophisticated for a teenage audience, especially in talking about the awakening of a writer’s mind?The play is gentle yet unambiguous in recalling Maya’s rape at age 8 by her mother’s boyfriend. There, too, though, the editing feels off, condensing discrete episodes of sexual abuse in a way that acknowledges the child’s pleasure at being held by this man yet elides mention of the physical pain he caused, which Angelou describes in the memoir as a “breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart.”From the cheerful outfit (by Rodrigo Hernandez Martinez) that the grown-up Maya wears and the ease she has in her body, we are reassured from the very start of the show that she came through even the worst of her childhood ultimately OK. But in paring her story down rather than distilling it, this play never manages to convey a sense of the whole of her.I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsThrough June 5 at Theater Row, Manhattan; nycchildrenstheater.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More