Gather Together in My Name

The title of Gather Together is inspired by Matthew 18:19–20: "Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (King James Version). While Angelou acknowledged the title's biblical origin, she also stated that the title counteracted the tendency of many adults to lie to their children about their pasts.[7] Scholar Sondra O'Neale states that the title is "a New Testament injunction for the traveling soul to pray and commune while waiting patiently for deliverance".[8] Critic Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees: "The incidents in the book appear merely gathered together in the name of Maya Angelou"[9]

Critic Hilton Als believes that the title of Gather Together may relect its theme of how one Black woman was able to survive in the wider context of post-war America while also speaking for all Black women, and how they survived in a white-dominated society.[10]

Beginning in Gather Together, motherhood and family issues are important themes throughout Angelou's autobiographies.[5] The book describes the change and the importance of Rita's relationship with her own mother, the woman who had abandoned her and her brother as children, demonstrated by Rita's return to her mother at the end of the book, "after she realizes how close to the edge she has come, as a woman and as a mother".[15] Vivian Baxter cares for Rita's young son as Rita attempts to make a living. Critic Mary Jane Lupton states that "one gets a strong sense throughout Gather Together of [Rita's] dependence on her mother".[16] Angelou's relationship with her mother becomes more important in Gather Together and Vivian is now more influential in the development of Angelou's attitudes.[17] Lupton calls Clyde's kidnapping a "powerful sequence of mother-loss"[18] and connects it to the kidnapping of Clyde's son in the 1980s.[19][lower-alpha 1] Like many authors, Angelou viewed the creative writing process and its results as her children and compared the production of this book to giving birth, an apt metaphor given the birth of her son at the end of Caged Bird.[1]

Angelou's goal, beginning with her first autobiographical work, was to "tell the truth about the lives of black women",[10] but her goal evolved, in her later volumes, to document the ups and downs of her own life. Angelou's autobiographies have the same structure: they give a historical overview of the places she was living in at the time, how she coped within the context of a larger white society, and the ways that her story played out within that context. Critic Selwyn Cudjoe stated that in Gather Together, Angelou is still concerned with the questions of what it means to be a Black female in the U.S., but focuses upon herself at a certain point in history, in the years immediately following World War II. The book begins with a prolog describing the confusion and disillusionment of the African-American community during that time, which matched the alienated and fragmented nature of the main character's life. According to McPherson, African Americans were promised a new racial order that never materialized.[20]

Halfway through Gather Together, an incident occurs that demonstrates the different ways in which Rita and her grandmother handle racism. Rita, when she is insulted by white clerk during a visit to Stamps, reacts with defiance, but when Momma hears about the confrontation, she slaps Rita and sends her back to California. Rita feels that her personhood was being violated, but Momma feels that her granddaughter's behavior was dangerous. Rita's grandmother ceases being an important influence on her life, and Angelou demonstrates that she had to move on in the fight against racism.[21]

Jocelyn A. Glazier, who specializes in teacher education.at George Washington University, used Caged Bird and Gather Together in narrative and multicultural approaches to pedagogy and to train teachers how to discuss race in their classrooms. According to Glazier, Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony, readers of Gather Together and the rest of Angelou's autobiographies cause readers to wonder what she left out and unsure about how to respond to the events Angelou describes. Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their privileged status. Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography and on her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".[22]

Gather Together retains the freshness of Caged Bird, but has a self-consciousness absent from the first volume. Author Hilton Als states that Angelou "replaces the language of social history with the language of therapy".[10] The book exhibits the narcissism and self-involvement of young adults. It is Rita who is the focus, and all other characters are secondary, and they are often presented "with the deft superficiality of a stage description"[10] who pay the price for Rita's self-involvement. Much of Angelou's writing in this volume, as Als states, is "reactive, not reflective".[10] Angelou chooses to demonstrate Rita's narcissism in Gather Together by dropping the conventional forms of autobiography, which has a beginning, middle, and end. For example, there is no central experience in her second volume, as there is in Caged Bird with Angelou's account of her rape at the age of eight. Lupton believes that this central experience is relocated "to some luminous place in a volume yet to be".[23]

Gather Together, like much of African-American literature, depicts Rita's search for self-discovery, identity, and dignity in the difficult environment of racism, and how she, like other African Americans, were able to rise above it.[24] Rita's search is expressed both outwardly, through her material needs, and inwardly, through love and family relationships. In Caged Bird, despite trauma and parental rejection, Rita's world is relatively secure, but the adolescent young woman in Gather Together experiences the dissolution of her relationships many times. The loneliness that ensues for her is "a loneliness that becomes, at times, suicidal and contributes to her unanchored self".[25] Rita is unsure of who she is or what she would become, so she tries several roles in a restless and frustrated way, as adolescents often do during this period of their lives. Her experimentation was part of her self-education that would successfully bring her into maturity and adulthood.[26] Lupton agrees, stating that Rita survived through trial and error while defining herself as a Black woman.[27] Angelou recognizes that the mistakes she depicts are part of "the fumblings of youth and to be forgiven as such",[28] but young Rita insists that she take responsibility for herself and her child.[29]

Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the formation of female cultural identity is woven into Angelou's narrative, setting her up as "a role model for Black women".[30] Lauret agrees with other scholars that Angelou reconstructs the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and that Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities in her books to "signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history".[30] Angelou begins this technique in her first book, and continues it in Gather Together, especially her demonstration of the "racist habit" of renaming African Americans. Lauret also sees Angelou's themes of the individual's strength and ability to overcome throughout Angelou's autobiographies.[31] Cudjoe states that Angelou is still concerned with what it means to be Black and female in America, but she now describes "a particular type of Black woman at a specific moment in history and subjected to certain social forces which assault the Black woman with unusual intensity".[32] When Angelou was concerned about what her readers would think when she disclosed that she had been a prostitute, her husband Paul Du Feu encouraged her to be honest and "tell the truth as a writer".[33] Cudjoe recognizes Angelou's reluctance to disclose these events in the text, stating that although they are important in her social development, Angelou does not seem "particularly proud of her activity during those 'few tense years'".[34]

All of Angelou's autobiographies, especially this volume and its predecessor, is "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it".[35] Lupton compares Angelou's informal education described in this book with the education of other Black writers of the 20th century. Like writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin, Angelou did not earn a college degree and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms".[35] As Hagen points out, since Angelou was encouraged to appreciate literature as a young child, she continued to read into her adulthood, exposing herself to a wide variety of authors, ranging from Countee Cullen's poetry to Leo Tolstoy and other Russian authors.[36] Angelou stated, during her stint as a madame, "when my life hinged melodramatically on intrigue and deceit, I discovered the Russian writers".[37]