Maya Angelou was the indigent child who reached the White House, the mute little girl whose indelible voice will echo through the centuries.
The 86-year-old renaissance woman, an award-winning writer, poet, actress and witness to history, died quietly Wednesday morning at her home on the North Carolina campus of Wake Forest University.
Praise for the influential Angelou poured in Wednesday from two Presidents, a legion of her literary peers and generations of admirers from Harlem to Hollywood who quoted her works from memory.
“Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend, and a truly phenomenal woman,” President Obama said in a statement.
“While Maya’s day may be done, we take comfort in knowing that her song will continue, ‘flung up to heaven’ — and we celebrate the dawn that Maya Angelou helped bring.”
Angelou was a prominent presence in Harlem through the decades, contributing to local charities, visiting jazz clubs and hosting her many friends at her home on W. 120th St.
“Harlem’s very own Maya Angelou will live in our hearts and memories forever,” said longtime Harlem Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel.
The increasingly frail Angelou was battling heart problems and recently canceled a scheduled appearance for this Friday at an event in her honor.
The oft-lauded writer was set to receive the Beacon of Life Award as part of Major League Baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game.
Her final tweet last Friday said, “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”
Angelou was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and repeat White House guest, reading her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration.
The composition sold more than 1 million copies.
She also read the poem “Amazing Peace” at the White House for a 2005 Christmas tree lighting during President George W. Bush’s administration.
Obama honored her in February 2011 with a Medal of Freedom — planting a kiss on her cheek inside the White House.
Clinton on Wednesday praised Angelou as “a national treasure” and “beloved friend.”
“The poems and stories she wrote and read us in her commanding voice were gifts of wisdom and wit, courage and grace,” Clinton said.
The best-selling St. Louis native, during her remarkable lifetime, published more than 30 titles and received more than 50 honorary degrees.
Angelou’s breakthrough book was her best-selling 1969 memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a work encouraged by her novelist friend James Baldwin.
The book made literary history as the first nonfiction best seller by an African-American woman, and became the first of six autobiographical works.
She continued to break down barriers with her writing, penning the screenplay and the score for the 1972 film “Georgia, Georgia.”
She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize that same year for her poetry collection “Just Give Me a Drink of Cool Water ‘fore I Diiie.”
During her extraordinary eight-plus decades of life, Angelou was often on the front lines of history and pop culture.
She was mentored by Baldwin and was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey.
Angelou “was there for me always, guiding me through some of the most important years of my life,” said Winfrey. “She moved through the world with unshakable calm, confidence and a fierce grace. She will always be the rainbow in my clouds.”
She worked for both Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and befriended South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.
She earned an Emmy nomination for her work in “Roots,” and studied modern dance with Martha Graham. Rappers like Kanye West name-dropped her in their lyrics.
The 1968 assassination of King fell on Angelou’s April 4 birthday. She stopped celebrating her birthday for years, instead opting to send flowers to King’s widow, Coretta.
Until her death in 2006, Coretta Scott King would in turn send a bouquet to Angelou.
Born Marguerite Annie Johnson, the future writer grew up amid poverty and racism after her parents’ divorce relocated the child to small-town Stamps, Ark., where she lived with her brother and grandma.
Despite the hard times, Angelou long maintained that living in the Deep South also imbued her with the faith and values of the African-American family and culture.
As she wrote in her memoir, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was just 7. Her uncles then murdered the man in retribution.
The small girl, convinced she was to blame for the killing, stopped speaking for five years.
During that time, she became a voracious reader of writers from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe to W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.
The precocious talent began writing her earliest poems at age 9 and graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.
The name she adopted combined her brother’s mispronunciation of her given first name and the slightly altered surname of ex-husband Tosh Angelos.
Angelou wrote about Bertha Flowers, the woman who persuaded her to speak again, in the 1986 children’s book “Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship.”
Her early adulthood was tumultuous: A single mother at 17, working in a strip club as a waitress and a cook; running a brothel; marriage, and divorce.
She was also San Francisco’s first female African-American cable car conductor.
But Angelou’s artistic side soon emerged, and she landed a gig singing in San Francisco’s Purple Onion cabaret. Billie Holiday once sang a sweet lullaby to Angelou’s son Guy, and gave his mom a backhanded compliment.
“You’re going to be famous,” she said. “But it won’t be for singing.”
She was right. There were three spoken word Grammys, a National Book Award in 2013, and a Tony nomination for a 1973 role in Broadway’s “Look Away.”
