What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

As Gillespie states "If 1968 was a year of great pain loss and sadness it was also the year when America first witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius". As of 2008 Maya Angelou owned two homes in Winston-Salem North Carolina and one in Harlem full of her "growing library" of books Maya Angelou has collected throughout her life artwork collected over the span of many decades and well-stocked kitchens. Angelou has one son Guy whose birth was described in her first autobiography one grandson and two young great-grandchildren and according to Gillespie a large group of friends and extended family.

She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. : /ˈmaɪ. Maya Angelou (pron.