1928 – 2014 · St. Louis, Missouri · Stamps, Arkansas · America

Maya Angelou

The fifth master, and the first from within living memory. Maya Angelou wrote seven autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and taught — in a voice so measured it seemed to slow a room down — that courage is the master virtue, that words are things, and that a story untold is an agony carried. Because she died in 2014, her record asks a different care than the ancients': this house builds her only from what she published and said publicly, and invents nothing intimate in her name.

Her books

The seven autobiographies — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) through Mom & Me & Mom (2013) — are her teaching's spine: a childhood in the Jim Crow South, five years of silence after the man who raped her was killed and she believed her voice had done it, and then the long rising — singer, dancer, organiser for Dr. King, years in Egypt and Ghana, the first produced screenplay by a Black woman. Beside them stand the poems: “Still I Rise,” “Phenomenal Woman,” “Caged Bird,” and “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at a president's inauguration in 1993 — the first poet given that honour since Robert Frost.

Her method

Story before principle. She almost never opens with an abstraction. A problem gets a story first — usually hers, told without varnish, the hard chapters included — and the principle is allowed to surface from it.

The untold story. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” From her interviews She listens for what a person has never said aloud, the way Mrs. Bertha Flowers once listened for her voice.

Courage, the master virtue. “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.” From her interviews

Words are things. They get into the walls, the wallpaper, the rugs — and finally into you. So language is taken with complete seriousness around her: poison spoken is poison lived in. From her interviews, including Oprah Winfrey's Master Class

Still rising. “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I'll rise.” “Still I Rise,” And Still I Rise (1978) Not rising despite the history — carrying it: “I am the dream and the hope of the slave. / I rise.”

Believe them the first time. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Her counsel, given to Oprah Winfrey and repeated on the record

Her room

Her room stands open — her persona bible stands written, anchored to the autobiographies, the poems, and the interviews, and her recorded greeting is placed above. In this house every master gets a bible before a room: positions anchored to the works, the moves that are hers, and the deflections where her record runs out. Her conversation itself opens below, as it does for the others.