Maya Angelou

摘要

When she was eight, Maya Angelou stopped speaking. That was the year her mother's boyfriend raped her. But worse than that, worse than the terrible pain in her stomach, worse than the blood or the feeling that her thin hips were coming out of their sockets, was the knowledge that her voice had killed him. After she cried out against him in court, he was found kicked to death. She did not speak again, except to her brother, for five years. To be voiceless was not unusual for blacks in America then. They would plough, hoe and pick cotton uncomplainingly till they flopped like emptied sacks. Do what they were told, and shrug off the insults. Stay dumb as the dumb animals they were taken for, or else be an uppity nigger and hanged from a tree.