Evening Magazine - Dr. Maya Angelou (2004)

Extract from KPIX-TV's Evening Magazine show in 2004 with Marla Tellez featuring an interview with Dr. Maya Angelou, who has just published her first cook book: 'Hallelujah! The Welcome Table'. Includes views of Dr. Angelou speaking to a group of children and signing books with older patrons in a book store. Angelou describes how she was raped at the age of 7 and stopped talking afterwards for 6 years. The perpetrator was jailed for one day only and then beaten to death shortly afterwards. As Dr. Angelou puts it: 'My 7 year old logic told me that my voice had killed him." Later, after several years as a "volunteer mute", a woman in her town of St Louis MO told her: "You don't like poetry ... You'll never like it, until you speak it." Dr. Angelou then describes how: "I went under the house, where the soft dirt is. Where the chickens scratch. And I tried to speak. And I found I had left my voice. My voice had not left me." When Tellez asks Dr. Angelou: "What do you enjoy the most?" she replies: "I'm a writer. That's what I do. When I describe myself to God, I say Lord you remember me. Tall, black female. You remember. American. The writer, you remember!" Note that Dr. Angelou published another cook book in 2010: 'Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart'. Opening graphic designed by Carrie Hawks.