Confronted with poverty very early on, Maya Angelou never let fate take over, and each disillusion was conducive to reinventing herself. Her paternal grandmother, a fighter with a strong character to whom she was sent with her brother, in a still very racist Arkansas, left a lasting mark on her life. Her memory reminds her of her lost friends like Coretta Scott King, her peers like James Baldwin or Aimé Césaire. Relentlessly, she will praise honesty, and decry vulgarity. A feminist ahead of her time, Maya Angelou writes with the hearts of millions of women whom she considers her fighting sisters. Literature will save her and lead her to be the first black student in a private school. Then, she will frequent the black American intellectual milieu, and will become a great activist for the condition of black women. It is thanks to the writer James Baldwin that she will start writing after the death of Martin Luther King and become the author we know today. Composed of 28 short chapters, including a few poems, this book is a compendium of his best writings.