Letter to My Daughter

Angelou writes of her mother, “In California my mother wore lipstick and rouge and played loud blues and jazz music on a record player” (8). Free-spirited and progressive, Vivian Baxter first had a somewhat estranged relationship with her daughter. Yet her kind and charitable nature shines through in Angelou’s account of their budding relationship, as she fully supported Angelou through her pregnancy and in raising her son, Guy. Vivian went to great lengths to keep Angelou safe, such as when she rescued her from Mark, yet she also respected her daughter’s independence. Ultimately, Vivian instilled within Angelou a sense of courage—a virtue that Angelou shows much respect for over the course of Letter. It was also Vivian’s remark about Angelou’s beauty and intelligence that inspired Angelou to change her life for the better, setting her on the path to becoming a writer. 

Annie Henderson, or “Mamma,” was Angelou’s grandmother and raised Angelou in Stamps, Arkansas. The two were so attached that the “neighbors called [Angelou] her shadow” (8). Her grandmother’s old-fashioned lifestyle influenced Angelou’s conception of charity as being simple and meek in nature.

The imagery Angelou associates with “Mamma” in “Keep the Faith” is rife with religious imagery. Like Angelou, her grandmother stood at six-feet tall. “Going out on the word of God,” she floats through the heavens with power and grace. Angelou consequently continues to find refuge in her grandmother, who now lives in the cosmos, protected by the word of God; whenever she looks to the sky, she knows that God exists and that He loves her. Her grandmother’s celestial image also influences her description of the reciprocal relationship one retains with their past loved ones. Both the beloved and the living sustain the existence of the other: “We are always loving you. You are not alone” (37). In recounting these memories of her grandmother, Angelou sustains her existence for eternity.