The Life Lessons Maya Angelou Taught Oprah

The Oprah Podcast

Oprah Winfrey honors her late mentor, Maya Angelou, in a heartfelt episode of The Oprah Podcast, reflecting on Angelou’s profound life lessons drawn from their decades-long bond. She shares specific teachings—like 'when

Key takeaways

• Maya Angelou taught Oprah: 'When people show you who they are, believe them'—a lesson rooted in her own experience with betrayal.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I've said this many times before that my greatest lessons have been articulated by you. I had to learn them myself, but they were articulated by you. What you can do is approve of yourself for living. Approve of yourself. For being alive. My belief is you never can leave home. You take it with you. Everywhere you go. So my past is my present. And everything that's happened in your past is what makes you who you are. One of the most important lessons I ever learned from you. And that is when people show you who they are, believe them. Yes. Absolutely. Well, you know, when you know better, you do better. That's the ticket. That's the ticket. I recited that to myself many times. I come as one, but I stand is 10,000. And that's it. Yeah. The force of that. That's it. The force of that. Yes, ma'am. A happy hello to you. I thank you for taking the time to be with me here on the Oprah podcast. one of my greatest mentors, mother's sister friend in my life, Dr. Maya Angelou, passed 12 years ago. And I know you all feel this sometimes too for people who are close to you. It's still hard to believe it's been that long. Maya taught me more, I believe, than any other single human being that I knew on the planet. I learned so many life lessons from her, things that she actually said, but also how she, lived and moved through the world. I think she is one of the reasons why I have embraced aging with such enthusiasm because she would say to me, girl, I'm telling you the 80s are hot. So I'm still waiting to experience that. I learned so many lessons from her. I could write a book about it. And I know she had the same impact on so many of you. I first met her in my early 20s. I was working in Baltimore, and I had convinced my station news director that she was worthy of being on the evening news. They didn't even know who she was. She was speaking at Morgan State University, and I asked them if I could go and cover her and create a story from it. And I met her backstage, and I said, Ms. Angelou, if you would just give me five minutes of your time, five minutes of your time. I would really appreciate it for this interview. And she agreed, and I was held my hand out. I had a little timer watch, and I watched that clock to make sure I didn't go one second over the five minutes that she gave me. And when we were done, she turned to me and she said, Who are you, girl? And I was forever taken by her. Our bond was immediate. It was profound. And I would go on to interview her countless times throughout the years. And when all of the craziness and disruption of life sometimes would creep in, I would call her. And I often go back to the lessons I learned from Maya Angelou to remind myself, to get centered and remember who I truly am. And many times when things still occur, I think, oh, what would Maya do? What would Maya be doing in this time? It's a blessing to me that I have so many of those conversations on camera. So for this podcast, I want to share some of those great lessons with you because my intention right now is to do what Maya said in her poem to grandmother. She said, when you learn, teach, when you get give. So my intention is to share the wisdom I've learned over the years to offer you a breathing space, a thoughtful place, beneath all the noise of the world, starting with Maya's belief in the power of words. I got this lesson many times from her. Words are things. I'm convinced. You must be careful about the words you use. Are the words you allow to be used in your house? In the Old Testament, we are told in Genesis that in the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was with God. That's in Genesis. Words are things. You must be careful. Careful about calling people out of their names using racial pejoratives and sexual pejorities and all that ignorance. Don't do that. Someday we'll be able to measure the power of words. I think there are things. I think they get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, in your clothes, and finally, into you. When I was three and my brother five, my mother and father separated and divorced, and neither of them wanted me and my brother. But my grandmother, my father's mother, said, send them to me. And so they sent us without adult supervision on a train with tags on our arms. saying these children are to be given to Mrs. Annie Henderson, my grandma. We actually arrived in the town. Dining car waiters and Pullman car porters took us off trains, put us on other trains. We really arrived in this village about the size of a studio, the stamp sock and something. My grandmother owned the only black-owned store in the little village in which we lived. She was an amazing woman. She lent money to the white businessmen in the town during the Depression. So she taught me so much. And I look like her, and I sound like her. When I was seven, we were picked up and taken from my grandmother to my mother's people in St. Louis. My mother's people were foreign to me. All of her brothers were highfalutin. You know, we're so this and that. My brother, Bailey and I tried to learn and become city kids. But my mother's boyfriend raped me when I was seven. I told Bailey the name of the rapist. I wouldn't tell the adults, but I told Bailey. I said, I can't tell you because he said he will kill you. He was nine years old. He said, I won't let him. So I told him, of course, I believed anything. He was my black kingdom come, Bailey. So he told the family, the man was put in jail for one day and night and released. And two huge white policemen came into my mother's mother's house. Bailey and I were on the floor playing a game in her parlor. These huge policemen came in Navy Blue Surge suits, and Blue Surge was about half an inch thick in the 30s with big brass buttons. They looked like giants. And they said, the man has been found dead, and it seems he was kicked to death. I thought my voice had killed him. That was my seven-year-old logic, so I stopped talking. My mother's family and my mother, did their best to woo me away from my mutism. But they didn't know what I knew. My voice could kill. So I stopped. And after a while, I think they just really got tired of the presence of this mad and sullen and silent child. So they sent me back to my grandma, to mama. The best thing that could have happened. My grandmother, she was an amazing mama. She gave me a little tablet, a five-cent tablet. And she took a pocket knife and cut a groove in the number two pencil and put a string in that groove. And then the other string, she tied to the spiral of the tablet. And I kept that on my waistband. So if anybody asked me, you know, what I thought, I would write it. Mrs. Flowers was a black lady in stamps, in my neighborhood. And she knew I didn't speak. So she took me to the black school. There was a library about one-tenth the size of my library in my home. But it seemed to me there are millions of books. And she said, I want you to read from A to C-L and make notes. I was eight years old. I read every book. I read everything. I don't say, understood that much, but I read and I found that I loved poetry. I loved it. All of it. That which I understood and that which I didn't. She would come up the hill from the White School. I don't know how she had that contact, but she'd come up with books for me to read. And I love them. I've read Paul Nonstone by James Rutherland Johnson, County Cullen. I memorized. I read Edgar Allan Poe. I loved Poe so much. I called him Eap to myself. I read Shakespeare, and at one time, I memorized like 50 sonnets or something. But I read one sonnet which made me think Shakespeare may be a black girl in the South who has been molested. How could he know when, in disgrace with fortune, and men's eyes. I all alone bemoaned my outcast state and trouble a deaf heaven with my bootless cries and look upon myself and curse my fate. Shakespeare knew what it was like to be raped and scorned, you see. So of course I thought he was a black girl, barefoot in the South. It spoke to me about Four years after Mrs. Flowers started me to read and really to read, I was about 12 and a half. Mrs. Flowers invited me to her house, and she used to make tea cookies and lemonade. And she'd give me that to drink, and she'd talk about poetry. And she'd read to me with this illifluous voice. And she said, Maya, you do not like poetry. I got my tablet. I said, yes, ma'am. She wouldn't even look at my tablet. And she pointed her finger at me. And really, black people don't like to be pointed at. And she was so elegant. She knew better. She just shook her finger in my face. I ran out of her house. I ran back to my grandma. And Mrs. Flowers came back there and pointed her finger at me in front of Mama. She said, you'll never love it until you speak it, until you feel it come across your tongue, over your teeth, through your lips. She will never love poetry, never. And she harassed me. She kept following me around and round for months. And finally, I went under the house where the chickens go. And dirty, so soft because they scratch under that. I went under that house, and I tried to recite a poem. And I found I had left my voice. My voice hadn't left me. So I started talking again. and I'm not stopped. No. I think Mrs. Flannis. And aren't we glad she didn't stop? Mm-hmm. Well, Maya Angelou is one of the world's greatest poets and authors, and she wrote more than 30 books over the course of her life. And her seminal autobiography series began with, I Know Why the Cage Word Sings. It's considered one of the best nonfiction books of all time. It's been banned for years. I've been a student of that book since I read that very first page where she says, What you're looking at me for? Didn't come to stay, only came to say, happy Easter day. Well, I was just floored by that sentence because I grew up in the church, just like Maya grew up in the church, raised by her grandmother. I was raised by my grandmother. and it was the first time of that I'd read a book, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, where a young girl's story was a mirror for my own. And I felt so validated by her story. So when you wrote I Know Why the Cage Bird sings, was that a cleansing and a proclaiming of yourself to the world? I don't think so. I've heard that that's what it was supposed to. You know, that it was supposed to be in its own way cathartic and that. I don't know about that. I didn't feel that I had doffed a particular mortal coil, you know. I felt I had tried to write the truth and write it eloquently. But I don't know, you know, that I never agreed with Thomas Wolf's statement that you can't go home again. My belief is you never can leave home. You take it with you. Everywhere you go. So my past is my present. And everything that's happened in your past is what makes you who you are right this moment. That's right. When you wrote that, did you know that it would do for me and everybody else who's ever read, particularly young black girls? I opened that book. First of all, when you open the first page, I grew up in the church, raised by my grandmother, doing speeches. When you open the first page and the first words are, what you're looking at me for? at me for. Didn't come to stay, only came to say, happy Easter Day. I thought, there is a world out there that's about me. Somebody knows about this. Right. It was what it did to me. Oh, thank you. It was just amazing. It changed my life. Because I think it was the first piece of black literature I read, and after that, I couldn't read enough. Yes. I couldn't get enough. I know. That's why I send you the books by there. Yes, from that wonderful bookstore in Denver. Yeah. Also, and have them have some books. Let it down, you do, yes. Well, when