Maya Angelou, the groundbreaking
poet and author who inspired millions of Americans with her moving memoirs and
works of fiction, is dead at 86.
A caretaker found Angelou dead at
her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Wednesday morning when she
arrived to check on the ailing poet.
A hearse with a police escort pulled
away from her home about 9am Wednesday after medics and detectives investigated
the scene.
Her son Gary B. Johnson, her only
child, issued a statement about the author's death: 'Dr. Maya Angelou passed
quietly in her home before 8:00 a.m. EST. Her family is extremely grateful that
her ascension was not belabored by a loss of acuity or comprehension.
Angelou had been struggling with
health problems in recent weeks and had canceled a May 30 appearance at the
2014 MLB Beacon Award Luncheon in Houston, where she was to be honored with the
'Beacon Life Award.'
The civil rights icon blamed her
failing health for missing the event.
She remained active, even as her
health began to deteriorate. On May 23, five days before her death, she
tweeted, 'Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of
God.'
Her very name as an adult was a
reinvention. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis and raised in
Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents
and her grandmother.
She was smart and fresh to the point
of danger, packed off by her family to California after sassing a white store
clerk in Arkansas. Other times, she didn't speak at all: At age 7, she was
raped by her mother's boyfriend and didn't speak for years. She learned by
reading, and listening.
'I loved the poetry that was sung in
the black church: "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt's land,"; she
told the AP.
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