WHEN she was eight, Maya Angelou stopped speaking. That was the year her mother’s boyfriend raped her. But worse than that, worse than the terrible pain in her stomach, worse than the blood or the feeling that her thin hips were coming out of their sockets, was the knowledge that her voice had killed him. After she cried out against him in court, he was found kicked to death. She did not speak again, except to her brother, for five years.

To be voiceless was not unusual for blacks in America then. They would plough, hoe and pick cotton uncomplainingly till they flopped like emptied sacks. Do what they were told, and shrug off the insults. Stay dumb as the dumb animals they were taken for, or else be an uppity nigger and hanged from a tree.

As a black girl in the South, sent away at three by her parents to Stamps, Arkansas, she had even less right to speak. She was bound to end up laundering or kneading bread for some cut-glass white mistress. She had watched her grandmother, Momma, mocked by white-trash children and saying nothing back, just humming a little through her fear. There seemed no more a black woman could do. Even much later in life, trapped in a run of bad marriages, she could still fall back into silent mode. Whatever a husband wanted, just agree. Lower your eyes, bite your tongue. And especially never expect that any whitefolks would want to hear the story of a black woman.

Yet inside that tall, gawky, gap-toothed body was somebody quite different. In girlhood she dreamed she was a white princess, long blonde hair replacing that tight frizz. As a nightclub dancer in her late teens she was Sheba or Scheherazade, or the daughter of an African chief. She would not speak slang at school, or let people say “nigger” in her own house. Raising her son Guy single-handed, she refused to take welfare. Independence and pride were starched into her. “Sister, change everything you don’t like about your life,” Momma told her. Improbably, she did.

In her silent years, a neighbour called Mrs Flowers encouraged her to recite poetry aloud to the mirror. She fell in love with Shakespeare’s sonnet, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”. Disgraced and lowly, maybe, but she too, like the lark, could “sing hymns at heaven’s gate”. Even Momma, who spoke so softly, could make the church windows shake when she sang:

Deep River

My home is over Jordan

And so would she.

Back with her mother in California, she found what jobs she could. In San Francisco she was a strip-dancer, a fry-cook and the first black “conductorette” on the streetcars. From the stage of the Purple Onion nightclub she sang taunting, elegant calypso. She appeared in “Porgy and Bess” as a dancer-singer, and when she toured Europe she was moved to find the sad spirituals of her race taken up by the downtrodden everywhere. Full-throated now, she led their singing, just as she did at political meetings in New York in the 1960s, where the song was simply “Freedom”.

Like air, I’ll rise

She worked for both Malcolm X, who railed against the blue-eyed devils, and Martin Luther King, who preached non-violence. The first Brother appealed to her righteous indignation, the second to her lovingkindness. When both men were murdered, she poured her emotion into seven books of memoirs, beginning in 1969 with “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. White America sat up and noticed, as if it had never heard a black woman raise her voice before.

She wrote poems. They sprang from the same struggles: finding a voice, falling in love unwisely, carrying on her back with broad, controlled, resounding anger the long, bloody history of the middle passage and the auction block. And the more she spoke, on stage, on television, at universities, increasingly magnificent in reds, blues and African headgear, the more she became—as both Malcolm and Martin had considered her—beautiful and challenging, indispensable and wise.

When she was asked what words most brought her comfort, she said, “Love”. And, after love, “forgiveness”. Forgiveness did not mean you would seat your enemy at your table and feed him cornbread and fried chicken (though cooking food, and sharing it, often made peace). But it meant you could move on. In the words of “On the Pulse of Morning”, which she read in 1993 at Bill Clinton’s inauguration,

Do not be wedded forever

To fear, yoked eternally

To brutishness.

Whether in public or private she spoke, deeply and calmly, out of all the wrong ever done to blacks generally, and to her personally; out of all the wrong done to women generally, and to her personally. And then she soared above it.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

There was sorrow in her, strong and deep and mighty as that river Momma had sung about; but also the girlish, unconstrained laughter of a woman who, in her pristine inner self, could not be hurt at all.