Studies at Wake Forest University (1981); inau-
gural poet for President Bill Clinton (1993); the
United States of America, Congressional Record,
104th Congress, House of Representatives, Tribute
to Maya Angelou by the Honorable Kweisi Mfume,
Maryland Congressman (1996); the Board of Gov-
ernors, University of North Carolina, “Maya An-
gelou Institute for the Improvement of Child &
Family Education” at Winston-Salem State Uni-
versity, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1998);
lifetime membership to the National Women’s Hall
of Fame (2002); a Grammy for Best Spoken Word
Album (1994); the Spingarn Award, NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED
PEOPLE (1994); the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference of Los Angeles & Martin Luther King,
Jr. Legacy Association National Award (1996); The
New York Black 100, Schomburg Center & The
Black New Yorkers (1996); the Black Caucus of
American Library Association, Cultural Keepers
Award (1997); a Lifetime Achievement Award for
Literature (1999), and the Presidential Medal of
Arts (2000).
Angelou currently maintains a rigorous writ-
ing, teaching, lecturing, performing, consulting,
and media appearance schedule.
Gloria L. CroninAnnie John Jamaica Kincaid (1983)
At the end of JAMAICA KINCAID’s short novel, Annie
John, the heroine, Annie, whose coming-of-age
story the novel records, explains, while describ-
ing her parents, “I suppose I should say that the
two of them made me with their own hands. For
most of my life, when the three of us went any-
where together I stood between the two of them
or sat between the two of them. But then I got too
big.... And so now they are together and here I
am apart. I don’t see them now the way I used to,
and I don’t love them now the way I used to....
[I]t is I who have changed” (133). Metamorpho-
sis, growth, change, independence, and rebirth are
the central themes of this bildungsroman, which
begins with the heroine’s concern and curiosity
about death and ends with her emergence as a 17-
year-old who embarks on a journey from Antigua,
her island home, to England, the motherland of
British subjects like Annie.
Annie is the love (and only) child of Annie, her
mother, and Alexander John, who is 35 years older
than his wife. Through age 12, Annie is the apple
of her parents’ eyes, and her mother particularly
dotes on her, attempting literally to shape and
mold her, gently caressing and kissing her daily
when she returns home from school. “I was ever in
her wake,” Annie states. “When my eyes rested on
my father, I didn’t think very much of the way he
looked. But when my eyes rested on my mother, I
found her beautiful” (18), Annie confesses. Annie
sleeps in a bed her carpenter father made for her,
and she wears clothes her mother, a seamstress,
had sewn just for her.
Throughout her childhood and early teenage
years, Annie is thoroughly baptized in the dual
cultures that form her legacy. She eats breadfruit,
banana fritters, pepper pot, salt fish, and porridge;
she celebrates Queen Victoria’s birthday and reads
the works of John Milton. She develops special
friendships with Gweneth and The Red Girl, while
navigating through and mastering with ease the
established colonial educational system imposed
on the Antiguan natives, literally sitting at the
head of her class as prefect, winning the respect
and envy of her uniform-clad peers in her all-girl
school. She observes her parents making love and
learns about her own sexuality. She observes, but
does not quite understand, obeah, the traditional
African religion practiced by her parents and par-
ticularly by her maternal grandmother, who comes
to their home when Annie is sick to heal her with
traditional folk medicine.
As in the stories in Kincaid’s At the Bottom of
the River (1983) and her autobiographical novel,
The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), ever
present in Annie John is the heroine’s alienation
from her community, parents, and particularly
her mother. The tension in their mother-daugh-
ter relationship becomes tangible by Annie’s 12th
birthday, when her previously doting mother
(“when I gave her herbs, she might stoop downAnnie John 15