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Even before I started listening to this audio book, I could hear Angelou’s voice, deep and distinctive. I remember seeing her on tv at some point in the past and notably, even though a while ago, when she read a poem she had written for President Clinton’s inauguration. This autobiography of her early years from age four through sixteen makes for a tough story at times, but an amazing telling of it. At four years old, she and her brother Bailey are sent to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother, a staunchly religious and savvy store owner and their disabled Uncle Willy. They help at the store , go to school and live through times of ugly racism. Four years later they go to live with their mother and at eight years old Maya is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. The children return to live with their grandmother, but Maya is so scarred by the attack that she stops speaking for several years.

Yet, amid the bad times in this depiction of the Jim Crow south, there are times of happiness and revelation of what life has to offer. It is back in Stamps that she develops a love of reading and she calls Shakespeare her first white love. She shares the joy of making her first friend and her unconditional love for her brother Bailey. The descriptions of the revival meeting and the church picnic and the days at her grandmother’s store are poetic and she took me there with her wonderful story telling. A few years later, they move back with their mother and it is here in California that we see the impact of the past on her and also see her come of age at sixteen, on her journey to becoming the renown activist, writer, poet. Angelou does nothing short of bare her heart and soul in this deeply personal and affecting narrative.