What Maya Angelou taught our students

I was afraid to pick up the phone and call Maya Angelou. It was 1997, and my friend David Domenici and I had just started a school in Washington, D.C. for kids who had been arrested. The school was less than a year old, but one thing was already clear: We needed a new name, a real name. We had been calling ourselves the See Forever School, and while the phrase had some resonance (we told kids that they were learning to see beyond tomorrow, to “see forever”), our students didn’t love it.

“We need a school with a real name,” said an 11th grader named Dante. “When we go to college or look for a job, we don’t want to say we went to the ‘See Forever School.’ It just doesn’t sound like any school anybody has heard of.”

It was a fair point, and since we were committed to building a community where students helped make decisions, we decided to have a school-naming contest.  Students wrote essays making the case for different names, and the finalists gave speeches before an audience of family, teachers and peers. A 10th grader named Sherti spoke in favor of choosing Maya Angelou, and, after deliberating, the judges agreed. (Malcolm X was a close second.)

Which brings me to the phone call I was avoiding. Now it was my job to ask Angelou for her permission. We had a relationship — she was a close friend of my grandmother, the writer Jessica Mitford, and eventually she adopted the rest of our family and became my unofficial godmother. (If only our mother had been Christian, she once told my brother and me, Angelou would have been our godmother for real.)

But however strong our ties were, this would be a big ask. I wanted her to lend her name to a brand-new school, one whose only admission requirement was a past arrest. David and I had good intentions but no track record, and there was no guarantee that our school would bring glory to her name. As I dialed, I told myself that she would likely let me down easily; she would say that she needed to think about it, to talk to her people, and that she would get back to me. But then she wouldn’t, and her silence would be the answer.

Instead she responded: “Of course, dear. I would be honored.” That was all — seven words, each resonant and measured. And with those words, by saying yes, she told our students she thought they were worthy.

Her name was more than I had the right to ask for, but it was only the beginning. A few months later she came to our first fundraiser, where we unveiled the school’s new name. Sherti, who was invited to speak, told the crowd that Angelou had suffered terribly as a child, that she had experienced violence and rejection. Yet she hadn’t been defeated by anything, and neither would Sherti or her classmates.

“See Forever students have had a lot of problems too,” Sherti said. “We have problems in our neighborhoods, our homes and inside of ourselves. But like Dr. Angelou, the students of See Forever are using hard work and education to create a new future.”

Angelou kept coming back after that first fundraiser. For 17 years, even when her health was failing and she needed an oxygen tank nearby, she would get on the bus and log the miles from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to D.C. There were no inaugural throngs at our events. No television cameras, no glamour. Just a few kids whom most of the world had abandoned.

Teachers like to say, “Character is who you are when nobody is looking.” Maya Angelou was there when nobody was looking.

Before every fundraiser, she would meet privately with the students. Some years, she lectured them: I remember her saying that women were not b-----s and blacks were not n-----s (Angelou herself would never speak these words). She explained how she had persuaded Richard Pryor to stop using such words (for a while).

“I believe words are things,” she said, “and the N word is a thing that was created to strip people of their humanity.” Think of a bottle, a bottle labeled “poison,” she told them. You would never put that into your body. Words can go into your body, too, she said. “Those words, they go into the upholstery, into the rugs, and then into my hair. They go into my clothes. Even into my body.”  She looked into their eyes, one by one. And under her gaze, in her presence, our students were still. Her words were most certainly entering them.