I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an account of Maya Angelou's childhood and adolescence, which begins with her earliest memories in Arkansas and ends in her seventeenth year in San Francisco. At the age of three, when her parents separate, Marguerite is put on a segregated cross-country train with her four-year-old brother Bailey. Together, they travel from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas. At "the Store," owned by her paternal grandmother, Marguerite--whose name is shortened to Maya because it is easier for Bailey to pronounce--begins to store the memories that construct her life in the black America of the 1930s.

In the rural cotton-farming environment of Stamps, not far from Texarkana, Maya's life is something of an anomaly. although her moral and social upbringing is more or less conventionally determined, by the combination of Momma's devout Christian fundamentalist attitudes on one hand and the received wisdom and ghost-story superstitions of blacks of the rural South on the other (140). While most rural blacks are poor sharecroppers, domestic servants, or seasonal farm laborers, Maya's grandmother (Momma), owns the bui

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era Negro rural South of their paternal family. There, Maya and Bailey are for a time seen as exotic creatures: Momma beamed and Uncle Willie was proud when Bailey regaled the customers with our exploits. We were drawing cards fro the Store and objects of the town's adoration. Our journey to magical places alone was a spot of color on the town's drab canvas, and our return made us even more the most enviable of people. High spots in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynchings and death (76). All this does little to bring Maya out of her traumatic silence, and the rape is never spoken of. That changes only when she meets a local woman who is exotic all on her own: Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps" (78) who "appealed to me because she was like people I had never met personally. . . . It would be safe to say that she made me proud to be Negro, just by being herself" (79). Mrs. Flowers encourages Maya to read aloud and helps refine her social skills. Still, Stamps limits Maya's horizons. Negro girls are encouraged to adopt Victorian values and homemaking but lack the money to indulge them as white girls do. Indeed, though academically inclined, Maya anticipates life as a domestic--that is, until a
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Approximate Word count = 2407
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)