Gods Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya

¶ … Gods Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes an Analysis in Cultural Experiences and Their Impact on Healthcare in the United States

Unfortunately, we still do not live in an entirely colorblind society. Despite all of the progress we would like to think that we have made, there are still clear racial divides that separate the cultural experiences of Americans based on their race and ethnicity. Maya Angelou expresses this strange tension in her work All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, where she is allowed to reflect on her isolated stance in American society based on her cultural heritage from the outside perspective of living in Ghana, West Africa.

Being an African-American is difficult in this country, especially in the time period that Maya Angelou is writing her classic All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. The story is set in the early to mid 1960s, and so the atmosphere in the United States was heated over cultural matters at the time. In the United States, there seems to be an unfortunate situation where many African-Americans experience an identity crisis. On the one hand, mainstream society demands them to assimilate into the majority culture. Yet, on the other, there is a longing to reconnect with their African heritage that was so violently taken from the African-American population during the generations of slavery and the extreme racism that continued to isolate the African-American population in the generations after slavery was finally abolished. This identity crisis often leads to negative personal experiences of life here in the United States, which Angelou expresses as she compares it to the revived sense of her heritage she experiences while living in Ghana. Angelou also describes a very peculiar cultural experience that many within the African-American community have experienced while living here in the United States. She speaks of what is known as double consciousness. Essentially, the African-American individual is aware of the fact that they have two selves. They have the self that they are forced to put on in order to survive in American society, and then they have the self that is actually born from their cultural heritage that is often tucked away in fear of being isolated or ostracized. This does have a negative impact on the feeling of identity experienced by many African-Americans here in this country.

After being so used to a certain cultural perspective that excluded herself and her son here in the United States, the narrator has a much different personal experience in West Africa. Here, "We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal" (Angelou 3). This allows her to look back at her experiences in the United States reflectively, in order to understand them in a more intricate and complicated manner. She is allowed to properly mix her identities outside of the demanding nature of American society. In Africa, she can be proud to revel in her African heritage, where she was restricted as to how much she could embrace her African cultural elements back home in the United States. She begins to experience the world around her in a much more mature fashion. The racism she encounters is handled in a different way then when she was in the United States, partly because of the fact that she has a new personal perspective of her own culture and heritage that was lacking in her life before living in Africa. She seems to have a strength about her that is often missing in other autobiographical accounts written by African-American writers, most likely because they were only working from the limited cultural and personal perspectives of living and experiencing life here in the United States. The personal experiences she witnesses in Africa allows her to revamp her outlook on her own identity and culture, thus allowing her to find a renewed strength in her culture and ethnicity.

There is also an account of Maya's tragic personal experience of being a mother of a son who was in a horrible car accident. This begins to open up the concept that the cultural differences experienced by African-Americans do have an impact on their healthcare here in the United States and abroad. Maya's son, Guy, was in a terrible accident just after arriving in Ghana. Alone and scared, Maya felt even more helpless than ever before, even back when she was in the United States. She was worried about the type of healthcare that her son would receive and how she would be able to cope with such a tragedy all alone thousands of miles from home. Essentially, her fears were driven by the tainted sense of isolation that she generated while living here in the United States. She thought she would receive the same type of treatment by African doctors, meaning that they would be cold and authoritative to her in her position of need. In the United States, many white doctors had a sense of superiority, and thus only seemed to care the bare minimum for African-American patients at the time Angelou was writing her work in the 1960s. There were also very little black doctors present within the majority of hospitals, especially ones that were in more rural communities, even if these communities had high populations of African-Americans. The feelings that she brought with her to Africa had challenged my own view of the American healthcare system. I want to believe so bad that in healthcare, race is not a determining factor, and that all patients are seen and treated equally no matter their cultural or ethnic identity. However, listening to Maya's fears, I did not find them unfounded. She had reasons for her feelings. I believed her especially because of the time setting of the work, and hope that the situation has changed drastically here in the United States since then.