I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
“The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.”
A few years ago I bought the complete works of Maya Angelou, a compendium of her poetry, from Target. This was really out of curiosity as I was only really familiar with Phenomenal Woman from its countless readings at Women’s Month events. I began to read her poetry and realized how multi-faceted of a writer she was, poems about being the other woman (“They Went Home”, defiantly aging (“On Aging”), and love/friendship (“Many and More”) being some of my favorites. With this knowledge I thought it was only right that I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The autobiographical telling of the early life of one of the most significant Black voices ever. Th book has long been held in high esteem by anybody who read it. I mean the forward is written by Oprah, come on.
What had happened was…
The novel opens with a pair of 3 and 4 year old unaccompanied Black babies on a train to Arkansas. Marguerite, later shortened to Maya, and her older brother Bailey had been sent to their grandmother’s house following their parents divorce. When they get to rural Stamps, Arkansas they find that their grandmother, affectionately called Mama, and her disabled son run the only general store in the town. Mama and running the store provide Maya with stability in her life, yet she deals with issues of abandonment by her parents. That is until her father, Big Bailey, whom she does not remember at all, appears in Stamps without warning and brings with him an heir of sophistication and worldliness. Big Bailey takes his children up to St. Louis to live with their mom, Vivian. While Maya is heartbroken to leave Mama, her brother Bailey is excited to meet the woman of his dreams in his mother. Upon arrival in St. Louis Maya realizes that her mother is a well-liked, beautiful and alluring woman, which contrasts with Maya’s thoughts about herself. One day Vivian’s live in boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, molests Maya. As a child, Maya is confused by his actions, but due to her low self-esteem and want for love, she fondly remembers the initial embrace. Mr. Freeman’s second embrace is violent and his rape of Maya leaves her severely injured. Her injuries lead to Mr. Freeman’s conviction and subsequent release. During this release Mr. Freeman is murdered, likely committed by Vivian’s family as a form of justice not carried out by the courts. Maya and Bailey return to Stamps, escaping the traumas of St. Louis, but these same traumas leave Maya mute to all but Bailey. Mama connects Maya with Mrs. Flowers who gets Maya to talk again by having her read poetry aloud. After Bailey has a frightening encounter with a white police officer, Mama sends the kids to live with their mother again, this time in California. With the rapid social change of San Francisco at the time, Maya begins to feel comfortable living with her mother and her loving step-father Daddy Clidell. Until she spends a summer with Big Bailey and his girlfriend Dolores who intentionally cuts Maya in a physical altercation. Maya runs away and finds sanctuary in a junk yard inhabited by other homeless teens. Maya returns to her mother changed from her solace in the junkyard and becomes the first Black female streetcar operator. However, she is slowly growing apart from her brother. In a panic about her sexuality, Maya has uneventful sex with a boy that leads to her teenage pregnancy. The novel ends with Maya’s high school graduation, the birth of her son and her transition in to womanhood. The 3 year old Black baby we first met on the train, now has a baby of her own and commits to raising him as best as she can.
Aiight so boom…
Ms. Angelou’s framing of her limited interactions with white folks can only be understood from a pre-integration era view point. Especially when seen through the white women she encounters: (i) the “powhites” who are children of lesser means but a higher caste and are rude to Mama, (ii) the woman of waning means who Maya works for whilst the woman attempts to change Maya’s name to Mary in a failed attempt dehumanize her, and (iii) the front desk woman in San Francisco who repeatedly turns Maya away from the job that Maya is eventually given by a higher up. Ms. Angelou writes about white people as though they are foreign/alien. Which makes sense in a segregated society, the great majority of Maya’s time was spent in a Black world, encountering Black issues which only spoke of white people as a bump in the night or a thing to fear at the periphery of who she was. In the novel white folks are a strange bunch with backwards ways that she does not understand. This is incredibly different than the respectability politics of the post-integration world I was raised in. Whiteness was no longer at the periphery, but rather was a direct comparison that I made to my Blackness daily. I was instructed to study them, to learn their ways and mimic them in order to climb a corporate ladder or bootstrap myself out of my largely Black and Brown community. With this viewpoint comes an implicit and underlying sense that whiteness is better as it is something you are trying to achieve in order to make it out the hood. However, Ms. Angelou’s version of whiteness never held that connotation. In fact the white women she encountered were all lacking a key piece of the humanity found in every Black person in Stamps. The piece of humanity that Ms. Angelou was in communion with. Maya lived a community kept unequally separate yet somehow whole. While white society clearly was missing that something that would allow one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century to not even understand, but connect with. It was them who were lacking.