Before a sold-out crowd, Angelou spent the evening telling stories, laughing and reciting poetry. She played up her love for country music to the Nashville audience, beginning with lyrics to an old Kitty Wells country song — “When it looked like the sun wasn’t going to shine any more, God put a rainbow in the clouds.”
And Angelou knows about the days of clouds. As a child, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She fell silent for six years, instead choosing to read poetry and listen to it in her head.
She recalled seeing a famous actor give a reading of “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe — “Eep,” as she called him — and being sorely disappointed by his delivery.
“That’s not how it sounds! I know how it goes,” she said, surprising the audience by rapping the first few stanzas.
But even that wasn’t enough to give Angelou her voice back. It took some convincing from one of her personal “rainbows” to nudge her back into the light.
“You will never love poetry until you speak it,” Angelou’s mentor told her just before she turned 13. And the little girl who would grow up to be the voice of a generation spoke again for the first time.
“Be a rainbow,” Angelou urged the audience. “Don’t just live in one and be grateful to be in one, but be one yourself.”