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• African American Literature Book Club
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Tavis: I am always pleased and honored when Dr. Maya Angelou finds time to pay me a visit here in our studio. The renowned poet, civil rights activist and author has penned more than a dozen books including classics, of course, like "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and "A Song Flung Up to Heaven". Her latest project is a holiday special premiering next month featuring song-writing legends, Ashford & Simpson. The show premiers December 9 on the Hallmark Channel. Here now a sneak preview of "Celebrate Christmas with Maya Angelou".

[A film clip is shown]

Tavis: (Laughter) Doc, it's nice to see you.

Maya Angelou: (Laughter) It's lovely.

Tavis: You all did better than me because I usually lose that at about six.

Angelou: I'm good to four. You can count on me for four.

Tavis: Well, I think everybody whoever sang that song, including the songwriter, I suspect, lost it at some point, but it's nice to see you.

Angelou: It's wonderful to be here.

Tavis: We should all be so fortunate, so blessed, to have people like Ashford & Simpson hanging out at our house at the holiday season.

Angelou: That's right.

Tavis: Is that what it's like? Is that the Angelou house on the holidays?

Angelou: Yes, yes, it's like that throughout the year. I live in North Carolina. I have a home in New York, but I live in North Carolina and the door is open and the people come in and my family comes. Some years ago, there was a family reunion in Arkansas and 157 people came, but we were only 13 related by blood. So we're a very small blood family. I told that to my grandson once. He said, "Grandmother, I'm going to try to do something about that." (Laughter)

Tavis: (Laughter) Is he working on it yet?

Angelou: Yes, he has. I've got two great-grands now.

Tavis: All right.

Angelou: But our family is black largely, but we are also white and we're Asian and we're Spanish Latinos and we are gay and straight. We're pretty and plain. We look like human beings. Fat and thin. Some brilliant and some, well now...(laughter)

Tavis: (Laughter) What do you enjoy so much after all these years -- and those who've watched this show and listened to me over the years know my special friendship with you down through the years -- what do you enjoy all these many years later about hosting, about holidaying, because that can be tedious to have that many negroes in your house at one time?

Angelou: Well, yes. Well, if you call everybody that many negroes because some of them hardly speak English. They speak Japanese or something. But there is nothing so blessed as to give. We're told that in every religious tract.

Tavis: Better to give than to receive.

Angelou: That's right. In the Christian Judeo bible. The Buddhists say so. The Muslims say so. So to have the chance to give and to give food and drink, which we must have, but when you put in a little more than just the necessities, really put your stuff in it, you know, and present it beautifully and you know that everything there is not only clean, but done at the top of the form, when the family sits down to eat, if the family happens to be five people or fifty, everybody starts to eat and knows that they have been considered long before this food was prepared and that draws you closer and it is at once an assurance. It is an assurance that somebody cares for you.

Tavis: What do you say to people who are watching this program and maybe even looking at some of these clips and seeing the wonder, the splendor, the love that flows in your home? As you well know, though, this is not the case in every home across the country. What's the old adage? "We can choose our friends, but not our family."

Angelou: That's true.

Tavis: How do you speak to people who really want to have that kind of love and warmth in their home and in their family, but they struggle in trying to make that happen?

Angelou: Well, sometimes the people who are in your family are not quite acceptable and you have to be courageous enough to say, "I don't like you. I mean, you do things to people that I don't support and I don't like you. If you were no kin to me, I wouldn't like you. It's not my fault that you're kin to me, so I don't like you. I don't intend to spend one day with you."

Tavis: And that accomplishes what, Doc?

Angelou: Well, it cleans you. It makes the person to whom that is said think about herself or himself, "What am I really doing wrong?", if he or she wants to make a change. But what it does for you is it takes that burden of pretension off that, "Well, I don't like him and I don't want him in my house, but you know, he is my cousin's uncle's brother's friend." Well, no, I won't. No, no, no.

Tavis: (Laughter) But, Doc, you're not suggesting doing this at the dinner table, are you?

Angelou: No, I just don't invite them.

Tavis: Okay.

Angelou: And if they come to me uninvited and I'm at the door, I say -- I'm never rude. I try not to be rude -- but I say, "You're not invited. You're not a nice person. I don't want to inflict my friends and family with the disease which is you."

Tavis: Do you get away with that because you are chronologically gifted, because of your wisdom, because of your age? I'm not sure that, if I were twenty-five saying that at the door of my house, or forty even, that I could get away with what Dr. Angelou can get away with saying at the front door of the house.

Angelou: Well, my mother said, "The only thing I change is last week's socks." Really, really. The truth is a stubborn fact. If you can tell the truth, you don't have to tell everything you know, but make sure what you say is the truth, that you will back it up. Again, my mother said, "Make sure that what you say in the closet, you'll be able to say on the steps of the City Hall and give anybody twenty minutes to draw a crowd." So what I'm saying is just what I believe to be so.

If I have a group of family friends in and we're laughing at ourselves and not at anybody else and not putting anybody down and we're enjoying ourselves and lifting people up, if you will, and I know somebody's coming in there to curse them and besmirch the whole evening and put somebody down and threaten people, oh, no, no. On one of Oprah's shows some years ago, she said, "You know, Dr. Maya Angelou will ask you out of her house." (Laughter) She's been there when I said to somebody, "Excuse me, is this your purse?"

Tavis: (Laughter) You ain't got to go home, but you got to get the heck up out of here, yeah.

Angelou: That's right, that's right. Because the people who've come and brought their best, brought all their charm and joy and intelligence and wit, are they supposed to be besmirched or insulted because I don't have the courage to tell somebody to leave? Oh, no. That would not be mine. They can't say that.

Tavis: You hit on something a moment ago, as you always do in these conversations, which is why I love having you on this program. You know this officially makes you the most recurring guest on this program. You have the title now of the guest that I've talked to the most on this program. That said, you said something a moment ago that got my attention when you talked about truth.

Let me ask you, if I can, to expand and expound upon that notion. It seems to me -- not just me. I think that anyone could argue with good sense these days -- that, whether you're looking at government, whether you're looking at corporate America or beyond, there is a sacrificing of truth these days, a lack of truth-telling. But let me shut up and ask you if you agree or disagree.

Angelou: Okay. I do agree, but not just corporate and government. It seeps down so that people are not telling the truth in the family, you see. And even in the stores and in the beauty shops. The beautician does a woman's hair and knows she's burnt something. Instead of saying, "I'll make good on that", she says, "Oh, no, that's not burnt. See, you came in here with broken ends." It's unfortunate, but all virtues and vices begin at home and spread abroad. So if the vice begins high up, it does seep down. But if the virtue began high up, it also would seep down into smaller aggregates of society.

There's a difference, you know, between facts and the truth. You can tell so many facts you never get to the truth. The places where the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how, blah, blah. The truth may just be absolutely blinded over by all that. What does it mean to the human being? How did the human being survive that? What happens to his soul? What happens to her heart? That's what you want. So that's the truth and I think that, if we try telling the truth to the children, see, a number of people lie to children and think they are making it over because children have not been exposed.

So there are whites who say, "Oh, we're not prejudiced. Oh, no, we'll have no racial prejudices in this house. No, you can't do it. We're not prejudiced against anybody." He says that to the children; but the children see at every dinner party, every cocktail party, every holiday, that all the people look just like him and like his family. Then the child sooner or later has to say, "Do they think I'm a fool? Or they do, and maybe I am, so I'm going to act just as they act." That means they haven't had enough courage to say, "I like you and I hope you like me. Would you come over and have a glass of apple juice with me? We might make a friendship here."

Tavis: To that point, then, I wonder at the precarious and propitious time in America's history whether or not you think that, as human beings, we are going to hell in a hand-basket. When you look around, there's all kinds of evidence that suggests that somehow as human beings, as God's creation, we got off the track somewhere.

Angelou: Do I think what?

Tavis: Do you think that human beings are going to hell in a hand-basket?

Angelou: No, I do not.

Tavis: All right. Tell me why.

Angelou: Because you asked that question. The very fact that you asked the question means that it's okay. They have a struggle to do. They have a lot to do. But I would be fearful, if not outright terrorized, if the question wasn't asked, you see, if people didn't wonder and openly ask the question. Where are we going? How does it fit? What does it cost? I mean, not in money, not commercially, but what does it cost in my soul? What is happening to me? If you didn't ask that question, I would really be terrorized.

Tavis: Since you were last here, something has happened that you are now part and parcel of. I speak mainly of the passing of Ms. Rosa Parks. A little birdie has told me -- I hope I'm not speaking out of school here, so if I am, you can tell me -- but a little birdie has told me that you are working on a piece right now that you may be delivering in December in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of Ms. Parks sitting down on the bus.

Angelou: Well, I'm working on a piece which I will deliver in December. It's not directly about Mrs. Parks. It is directly about that which we hope for, human beings hope for deep in their hearts, and the piece is on peace.

Tavis: Piece is on peace. Without talking more about the piece, which you're still working on, what's your sense of what we are missing where the notion of peace is concerned?

Angelou: Well, I don't mean -- when I say peace, I don't just mean the absence of war. I mean real peace, a sense of security, a comfort of courtesies. I mean kind words spoken to strangers. That to me is peace. When we take for granted road rage, then we have no peace. When you get into your car in the morning and start off and know that any nit whose patience may have been tried too much might pull out an illegal or legal gun and shoot you if you go too fast or too slowly, if you turn too fast against the light, that to me is a condition where peace does not exist.

I know that the Judeo Christian bible encourages us to be peacemakers. I agree with that. I believe, however, that what we should be is peacebringers. We have to bring it with us, bring it in our hearts, bring it in our composure, bring it in our way we enter a workplace, when we enter our homes, when we talk to the children, when we talk to our beloveds. Bring it. Don't wait until you get there to make it.

Tavis: How do you juxtapose, though, that notion, Doc, against the pressure? See, these environments that you speak of are so pressure-filled now. There are pressures all around us, so how do you juxtapose the increasing pressure that we feel with being peacebringers?

Angelou: Yes, I understand. The pressure is put on not the outside. I mean, the pressure of Katrina and Wilma and Rita and so forth, that comes from nature. That's another matter. But the real pressure is put on us by ourselves, by human beings. Well, it takes a human being to stop it and it may be stopped right now by one person saying, "That will do." Let me tell you, I spoke recently to a group of people and, to them, I posed the question, "Why do you filmmakers bring vulgarity and brutality and violence into my living room, into my bedroom, into my children's sleeping rooms? Why?" And I said, "Oh, I know, you're going to tell me that you're giving the people what they want."

The only thing is, ten years ago, no one would believe that that multi-billion dollar business which is tobacco could be broken. However, not only because the people wanted tobacco, but they were addicted to the nicotine. But a few people just thought about it and said, "That will do" and a few more people heard that and said, "You know, that's true. That will do". And then a million people said, "That will do. It's enough of that." Now the same people who say they're giving the people what they want can't smoke in this building. They can't smoke in the restaurants. The same people who own the world can't smoke in some towns. Berkeley is coming to that place where you can't smoke in the street because somebody said, "It is enough."

Tavis: And that example, that beautiful example, Dr. Angelou, notwithstanding, I think part of what freezes people is the fear of thinking that the problem is so big, whatever the problem might be, that they can't do anything with it.

Angelou: I know, but you have to at some point sit it down. See, this is the wonder of Rosa Parks. Ms. Parks was not just confronting the sheriff and the bus driver and that white man who wanted her seat. She was confronting history. History, which had said for centuries that this is right. This little woman said, "No, not here you don't; not today. Now if you catch me tomorrow, I might say yes.' (laughter)

Tavis: (Laughter) You caught me on the wrong day.

Angelou: Then Martin Luther King came along and said, "Upon this rock, I'll build my church." So upon what Ms. Parks did, Martin Luther King already he had been prepared, but he had the wherewithal, the courage, to step out and the courage to say to people who were already being beaten, "Don't strike back." I mean, now wait a minute. You know, "Don't strike back. I promise you, if you don't strike back, we can win this." And for black people, passionate as we are and full of reason for response, violent response, self-protection, self-defense, black people said, "Okay, I'll take a chance."

Tavis: Let me probe this, though. When you list names like Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and let me throw in for the purpose of this conversation, Dr. Maya Angelou -- and again, our audience knows the profound love I have for you and your contribution -- when you throw names out there like that, sometimes I wonder whether or not the folk who are watching, who are trying to get to have some courage in their own lives, are intimidated by the examples of these larger than life people. They don't think of Maya Angelou when she couldn't speak. They don't think of Dr. King as a seminarian. They don't think of Mrs. Parks as a seamstress. They think of these huge moments, I could never do that.

Angelou: I know. This is what alarms me. I'm very rarely terrorized, but I am alarmed when I hear people speak of the icons as if they're not human or write books about them that they've always been that. That's not true. Of course, we can't say that these people were larger than life. They were not. They were human beings like you and me and some terrible things happened to them and some of them failed and some triumphed.

But you have to let the young people know that these were human beings. Otherwise, they'll say, "You mean to tell me, with the lives and deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the Kennedys and Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer, you mean we haven't gotten any further?" No. You have to tell them no. These were ordinary human beings in extraordinary times and behaved extraordinarily, but they're just like you and their work remains to be done.

Tavis: Well, you see why I always love whenever she gets a chance to come out west on her beautiful bus to hang out with me for a conversation. You can celebrate Christmas with Dr. Maya Angelou on December 9 on the Hallmark Channel. You doing a little cooking on this thing too from your book?

Angelou: Um-hum. I cooked some things from my book.

Tavis: All right. So it's going to be a wonderful special. December 9, again, on the Hallmark Channel. Always an honor, Dr. Angelou, to see you.

Angelou: Thank you very much. Is the time up?

Tavis: Can you believe it? It's up.

Angelou: Goodness gracious.

Tavis: Happy holidays.

Angelou: Thank you. The same to you. God bless you.

Tavis: You know I love you. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local radio listings. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.