she too, like the lark, could “sing hymns at heaven’s gate”. Even Momma, who spoke so softly, could make the church windows shake when she sang:

Deep River

My home is over Jordan

And so would she.

Back with her mother in California, she found what jobs she could. In San Francisco she was a strip-dancer, a fry-cook and the first black “conductorette” on the streetcars. From the stage of the Purple Onion nightclub she sang taunting, elegant calypso. She appeared in “Porgy and Bess” as a dancer-singer, and when she toured Europe she was moved to find the sad spirituals of her race taken up by the downtrodden everywhere. Full-throated now, she led their singing, just as she did at political meetings in New York in the 1960s, where the songwas simply “Freedom”.

Like air, I’ll rise

She worked for both Malcolm X, who railed against the blue-eyed devils, and Martin Luther King, who preached non-violence. The first Brother appealed to her righteous indignation, the second to her lovingkindness. When both men were murdered, she poured her emotion into seven books of memoirs, beginning in 1969 with “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. White America sat up and noticed, as if it had never heard a black woman raise her voice before.

She wrote poems. They sprang from the same struggles: finding a voice, falling in love unwisely, carrying on her back with broad, controlled, resounding anger the long, bloody history of the middle passage and the auction block. And the more she spoke, on stage, on television, at universities,