after eating tacos and tamales in San Francisco's Mission District with friends, and Baxter bloodied her face with a fistful of keys. Angelou and her mother often locked horns - one night, Angelou came home at 1 a.m. Angelou couldn't bring herself to call Baxter 'Mother' and referred to her as 'Lady' instead, a name Baxter adopted, calling herself 'Lady B' the rest of her life. The siblings stayed in Stamps until their grandparents realized they weren't equipped to raise teenagers, and sent Angelou, then 13, and Bailey back to live with their mother in California. Baxter was a woman who knocked down doors, both literal and figurative, whether breaking into an apartment to rescue a gravely beaten Angelou from an abusive boyfriend or becoming a seaman late in life to force the union to let in women of color.Īngelou was raised by her mother and father until she was 3, when, during a period of personal upheaval, they sent her and her older brother, Bailey, to live with their paternal grandparents in Stamps, Ark. 'Mom & Me & Mom' chronicles Angelou's relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, who truly was a force of nature. 'To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power,' Maya Angelou wrote in her 1969 memoir, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.' Now, six memoirs later, Angelou takes us straight into the eye of the storm.

Mom and me and mom maya angelou