Inspirational Articles from Making It!

Be a Rainbow

By Maya Angelou

How good are you? What good do you do? Are you “good enough” yet? Have you done enough? Where do your responsibilities end? I can’t answer those questions for you, but I can tell you this:

People you may never know are depending on you—because they have paid for you. Yes, you have been paid for. Your ancestors have paid for you already. And you owe something to them. Whether your ancestors came from Ireland or Germany in the 1840s and 1850s, after those two areas had been assaulted by the potato blight; or if your ancestors came from Eastern Europe, trying to escape the problems and murders, arriving at Ellis Island, having their names changed; or if your ancestors came from Scandinavia or Malta or Italy or South America or Mexico, trying to find a place that would give them fresh opportunity; or if your ancestors came from Asia in the 1850s to build the railroads, to build the country, unable legally to bring their mates for decades; or if your ancestors came from Africa unwillingly, bound, tied, and lashed, and put in the filthy hatches of slave ships, they have paid for you already.

"So, your responsibility is to prepare yourself to pay for someone else who has just come, or who is yet to come." Isn’t it wonderful to realize that you’ve been paid for by people who had no chance of even knowing what your name would be? Somehow they paid for you—or you wouldn’t be here. So, your responsibility is to prepare yourself to pay for someone else who has just come, or who is yet to come. It is liberating to realize that you’ve been paid for.

Sometimes when you hear terrible news, you feel so embarrassed that you forget who you really are and forget how much you do. It’s important to remember how much you do, not so that you can stop, but so that you are encouraged to do more. So, look at all that you do. Take into account what you give to your family, the Salvation Army, Red Cross, American Cancer Association, American Heart Society, American Jewish Society, or your church. You must see all these things so that you can say, “I’m not too bad; however, my work is still cut out for me. I can give more.” It is in our nature to give.

We take being “rainbows in the clouds” naturally. It is no surprise to see people, who not only understand that they have already been paid for but also that they have the responsibility of paying for those who are yet to come or who are here and looking to them for help.

In the course of staying alive, I love to hear people laugh. I never trust people who don’t laugh or who act as if they put airplane glue on the back of their hands and stuck them to their forehead. They have not come to stay and to make a difference and to be a rainbow in somebody’s cloud. I also like people who love themselves. I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, “I love you.” It’s like the African saying: “Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

In the course of preparing yourself to be a rainbow in the clouds, you need to have everything going for you because the person, who needs you, will come asking for things you may not even know about.

Each one of us has the incredible ability, as members of organizations and families, to be a rainbow in somebody’s cloud. Let me tell you about Uncle Willie.

I came at the age of three to Grandma and my Uncle Willie in this little town in Arkansas. Uncle Willie was paralyzed on the right side. My grandmother and Uncle Willie owned a little store in town, and they needed me and my brother to work in the store. So Momma taught me to read and write, and my Uncle Willie taught me to do my times tables. He used to grab me by my clothes and hold me in front of a potbelly stove, and with a slur attendant to his condition, he’d say, “Now, Sister, I want you to do your foursies, your sevensies, your ninesies.” I learned my times tables so exquisitely even now, 60 years later, if I’m awakened after an evening of copious libation and told, “Do your twelvsies,” I’ve got my twelvsies.

I was so sure that if I didn’t learn, my Uncle Willie would grab me, open the potbelly stove, throw me in, and close the door. Of course, I found that he was so tenderhearted he wouldn’t kill a fly. One day my Uncle Willie died, and I went to Little Rock where I was met by one of America’s great rainbows in the clouds, the black lady who led the children into the high school in the late fifties in Little Rock.

She met me and said, “There is somebody who is dying to meet you.” She introduced me to this handsome black man in a three-piece suit.

When I met him, he said, “I don’t want to shake your hand. I want to hug you.”

He then said, “You know, Maya, the State of Arkansas has lost a great man in losing Willie. In the 1920s, I was the only child of a blind mother. Your Uncle Willie gave me a job in his store, paid me 10 cents a week, and taught me to do my times tables.”

I asked him, “How would he do it?”

He said, “He used to grab me like this...”

Then I knew he was talking about Uncle Willie.

He said, “Because of him, I am who I am today, the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, first black mayor in the South.”

I look back at Uncle Willie, that crippled, black man in the South where lynching was the disorder of the day, I have no idea the range of his influence. But I know that when it looked for me like the sun wasn’t going to shine anymore, God put “a rainbow in the clouds” in the form of Uncle Willie.

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