The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, April 4, 2013

The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, April 4, 2013

"Up-Hill" by Christina Rossetti, from Poems. © Everyman's Library, 1993.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013

It was on this day in 1818 that Congress decided the U.S. flag would consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state.

It's the birthday of novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, born near in a small village in French Indochina near what is now Saigon, Vietnam in 1914. Her parents were teachers, but her dad became ill there and died. Dumas had an impoverished miserable childhood in which she was abused by her mother and brother.

When she was a teenager, she became lovers with a wealthy, older Chinese man, whom she met on a ferry boat between Sa Dec and Saigon. She wrote about him in her books The Sea Wall (1953), North China Lover (1991), and The Lover published in 1984.

Marguerite Duras said, "When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life."

It's the birthday of Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis in 1928, whose 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was a big best-seller. It begins:

"When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed — "To Whom It May Concern" — that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson. Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother."

It was on this day in 1968 that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated standing on the balcony of his room on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis at 6:01 in the evening. He'd gone to Memphis to support a strike by 1,300 black sanitation workers, and the night before he'd given a speech at the Masonic Temple in Memphis in which he said:

"We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop ... I just want to do God's will ... I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

It's the birthday of blues great Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi (1915), who taught himself to play harmonica and guitar, played on the south side of Chicago in bars, and in 1950, he made the first recording for Chess Records, a tune called "Rolling Stone."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

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