The houseboat
Maya Angelou's life on the houseboat with her teenage son is deeply symbolic, although it was her real life. It symbolizes her creativity, for one thing, but it also shows that she is at home resting on the waters in life. She is a voyager, one might say, and as the waters can be deep below her, so can she. As the waters come in currents, so also does she come and go in seasons, taken sometimes a very long distance by fate. Water can be seen as a pool of chaos, and she resides on its face.
Gang life versus civil rights
She does her best to prevent her son from involving himself in gang life, but to no avail. The social pressure and narrative around him lure him into the criminal element, and in response to this, she decides to become an advocate in the opposite direction. She pushes herself into the Civil Rights movement to show her son that community can be constructive instead of destructive. The Civil Rights movement is shown as the symbolic opposite of gang life, solving many of the same problems with self-sacrifice instead of selfish crime.
Inspiration and influence
Angelou's life crosses paths with Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and many more important influences, but those two are particularly important in her life. This memoir explores the way she became inspired by being around influential people. In a way, these people taught her what she could become, paving the way in her own life for Maya herself to follow in their footsteps. This is poignant, because clearly Angelou has become such a figure in many of the lives of her readers, so she is using this discussion to encourage her fans, as if to say, "I am the same as you."
The insubordinate wife
The passages about Angelou's marriage seem to harken to the title, The Heart of a Woman. What sort of a heart is it? It is insubordinate. Although Angelou loves her husband, Vusumzi Make, she cannot abide his opinions of gender roles, because she doesn't have it in her essence to submit herself so lowly to his service. He believes women should be servants to men, and she believes women are equal. Her insubordination is a symbol for her power as a person and for the need for feminism.
The travel to Africa
The memoir ends by exploring the way that travel broadened Angelou's mind. Her son was also changed by their time in Liberia. Life is very different in different parts of the world, and it is refreshing, no doubt, to take a step away from America, gaining a more objective opinion about the real dynamics and economics of America. Racism is part of this discussion, because in Africa, being Black does not mean the same things that it means in America.
