This week, the United States Postal Service came in for a full news cycle’s worth of ridicule after it was pointed out, by the Washington Post, that the agency’s new Maya Angelou stamp featured a quotation that the late poet and memoirist didn’t write. The line—“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”—has been widely attributed to Angelou. And it seems like something she might have written, perhaps as a shorthand explanation for the title of her most famous book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” But the line, in a slightly different form, was originally published in a poetry collection from 1967 called “A Cup of Sun,” by Joan Walsh Anglund. The Post reported this on Monday. By Tuesday, when such luminaries as First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey stood onstage in front of a giant reproduction of the Angelou stamp at the official unveiling, everyone knew that the words behind them belonged to someone else. According to the U.S.P.S., more than eighty million Angelou stamps were produced, and there are no plans to retract them.
It seemed to many that the folks at the Postal Service had simply believed too readily what they read on the Internet. They had gone looking for a suitable quotation, and finding this one attributed to Angelou in all kinds of places online—quotation-aggregation sites, Pinterest boards, Facebook pages, Etsy ink prints—they had slapped it onto a postage stamp, forever.
But it wasn’t that simple. The stamp was created in consultation with an Angelou scholar, and Angelou’s family approved the final design. And, technically, it may not be much of a mistake at all: Angelou didn’t write the phrase, but she seems at least to have said it—a spokesperson for the Postal Service pointed to an interview that Angelou did with a Greek journalist named Michalis Limnios, which was posted in 2013. Years after the quotation started being falsely attributed to her, Angelou herself was using it to describe her work.
In an e-mail this week, Limnios told me that he conducted the interview with Angelou by telephone in May of 2013, and that he showed the final transcript to Angelou’s assistant before it was posted. Limnios said that speaking to Angelou had been a dream of his since he was a teen-ager, and added that he was a bit surprised by all the uproar over the quote’s origin. “Who has the copyright of ‘bird,’ ‘sing,’ and ‘answer’?” he asked. “You know, ‘love and peace’—who said it first, the gods or Hendrix?”
The first reference to the line that I could find with a Google Books search was in a Christian self-help book from 1985, which credits the quote to Anglund. There is another attribution to Anglund in a reference book for children’s-choir directors, published in 1993. But around the same time, the line was also being cited as a Chinese proverb. The earliest attribution I found to Angelou comes in 2002, from a business book called, of all things, “Mind Your Own BizNiche!” (The saying, under Angelou’s name, has become a popular epigram in books about birding, business, crafting, Christmas shopping, parenting, video blogging, and nearly any imaginable form of self-help.) From that point on, more and more books credit it to Angelou, with none pointing back to the original source.
The practice of misattribution has a long history, but it has thrived in recent years thanks to the Internet, where minor falsehoods metastasize at an alarming speed. The scourge of false quotations has even produced a counter-industry of investigative sites and finger-wagging skeptics dedicated to setting the record straight. But, for now, in the battle between historical accuracy and every single clever observation ever uttered being credited to either Mark Twain or Winston Churchill, the misattributors are winning. In the case of Angelou, who became associated with the quote largely thanks to quotation-aggregation sites and through social sharing online, the misattribution made the leap from the Web and to the world stage: Slate points out that Angelou was incorrectly credited as the author of the phrase during an introduction to her remarks at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Ten years later, President Obama attributed the quotation to Angelou during his presentation of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. “The late, great Maya Angelou once said . . . ” Obama began, and by then, it seems, he wasn’t wrong.
The Anglund line is still cited in places as being either an old Chinese proverb or else, improbably, a motivational quote by the former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz. Somehow, according to the weight of things online, each of these things is true somewhere. Among these competing misattributions, Angelou’s won out over the years, perhaps in part because of her prominence—popular quotations are frequently attributed to people more famous than those who actually said them—but also, presumably, because it seemed the most plausible. In her later public appearances and writings, which Hilton Als described as “collections of homilies strung together with autobiographical texts,” Angelou came to be seen less as a working writer than a kind of human oracle to be visited for mature, lyrical wisdom. This was sometimes knowing on her own part—she was always a performer, an entertainer—but Angelou was not merely in the business of writing the stuff of greeting cards, or motivational office posters, or corny e-mail signatures. She was always quotable, and constantly quoted, often in ways that cut context and contradiction out of her writing, rendering it all “inspirational” and uplifting. That’s another kind of misattribution.
When Angelou died, last year, the line about birds that she didn’t write became one of the most common ways that people chose to mourn her online—with many homemade digital memorials featuring the quotation alongside Angelou’s famous, smiling face. Looking at those digital artifacts now, it is remarkable to see how much they resemble Angelou’s official stamp—or how much the stamp resembles them. In an odd way, the stamp is a physical representation of digital culture: an Internet-quotation controversy captured in American postage. And with its photo-realistic portrait and contested quotation, it looks more like a meme than a monument.
