In The Heart of a Woman, the fourth volume of her autobiography, Maya Angelou is, thirtysomething, married to a vain, fat, philandering African freedom fighter from South Africa called Vus and the mother of a bright, buddingly authoritarian 15-year-old called Gus. By then she's been a cook, a madam, a tramp, a dancer, an actress, a playwright, a fund-raiser for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she'd hung out with Billie Holiday and James Baldwin, shared a stage with the young James Earl Jones ("this-isn't-yet-CNN"), led a march at (and into) the United Nations to interrupt Adlai Stevenson in protest of an African human rights activist's murder, and suffered the abuses and autocracies of a line-up of men who preyed on her remarkably resilient innocence.

It's the late fifties, early sixties. Vus, the voluminous African, isn't paying the bills of their Central Park West apartment. They're evicted. Vus decides to move the family to Egypt--the Egypt of the early 1960s, before Gamal Abdel Nasser was done ruining the country with his mixture of fanatical pan-Arab ambitions that went nowhere and economic policies that fared even worse. Her description on arriving in Cairo is, like so much Angelou, as immediate and redolent with sensations as a rollercoasting cab ride in Manhattan:

Emaciated men in long tattered robes flailed and ranted at heavily burdened mules. Sleek limousines rode through the droppings of camels that waved their wide behinds casually as they sashayed in the shadow of skyscrapers. Well-dressed women in pairs, or accompanied by men, took no notice of their sisters, covered in head to toe in voluminous heavy black wraps. Children ran everywhere, shouting under the wheels of rickety carts, dodging the tires of careening taxis. Street vendors held up their wares, beckoning to passers-by. Young boys offered fresh fruit drinks, and on street corners, men stooped over food cooking on open grills. Scents of spices, manure, gasoline exhaust, flowers and body sweat made the air in the car nearly visible. After what seemed to be hours, we drove into a quiet, by comparison, neighborhood. Our escorts parked the car, then led us through a carefully tended front garden and into a whitewashed office building. They placed our luggage by the door of the lobby, then shook hands with Guy and me, assuring us the Vus would arrive soon, left us in the lobby.

Africans came and went, nodding to us in passing. Just as exhaustion began to claim my body, Vus entered through the open doors. He shouted when he saw us, and came rushing to hold me and Guy in his arms. He grinned freely, and he looked about ten years old. I had no doubt, for the moment, that we were going to make each other frivolously happy. Cairo was going to be the setting for two contemporary lovers.

Angelou, of course, was not to be the first or last Westerner to be at once deceived by Cairo’s shimmering promises and saved by them.

It wouldn’t be long before she would successively be hired as an editor at the newly founded Arab Observer (“Girl,” a fellow editor told her, “you realize, you and I are the only black Americans working in the news media in the Middle East?”), adding yet another conquest on her improbable résumé, then discover that she was no longer in love. Vus’s proclivity to lord it over her while parading his libido all over Africa was finally getting to her. She “spoke halting Arabic, smoked cigarettes openly, was not a Muslim, and was an American on top of that.” Her marriage failing and her Cairo experiment spent, off she went to Ghana.