I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography describing the young and early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 16. In the course of Caged Bird, Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.
Angelou was challenged by her friend, author James Baldwin, and her editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature. Reviewers often categorize Caged Bird as autobiographical fiction because Angelou uses thematic development and other techniques common to fiction, but the prevailing critical view characterizes it as an autobiography, a genre she attempts to critique, change, and expand. The book covers topics common to autobiographies written by black American women in the years following the Civil Rights Movement: a celebration of black motherhood; a critique of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition.
Angelou uses her autobiography to explore subjects such as identity, rape, racism, and literacy. She also writes in new ways about women's lives in a male-dominated society. Maya, the younger version of Angelou and the book's central character, has been called "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America". Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the book, although it is presented briefly in the text. Another metaphor, that of a bird struggling to escape its cage, is a central image throughout the work, which consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". Angelou's treatment of racism provides a thematic unity to the book. Literacy and the power of words help young Maya cope with her bewildering world; books become her refuge as she works through her trauma.
Caged Bird was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 and remained on The New York Times paperback bestseller list for two years. It has been used in educational settings from high schools to universities, and the book has been celebrated for creating new literary avenues for the American memoir. However, the book's graphic depiction of childhood rape, racism, and sexuality has caused it to be challenged or banned in some schools and libraries.
Background
Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Maya Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as a composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated on April 4, which was also her birthday. For many years, Angelou responded to King's murder by not celebrating her birthday, instead choosing to meet with, call, or send flowers to his widow, Coretta Scott King.thumb|Angelou, 1969Angelou was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968. The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day Judy Feiffer called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". Angelou later reported that Loomis told her: "It's just as well, because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible".
Beginning with Caged Bird, Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years. She would get up at 5 am and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening. Critic Mary Jane Lupton states that this ritual indicated "a firmness of purpose and an inflexible use of time". Angelou went through this process to give herself time to turn the events of her life into art, and to "enchant" herself; as she said in a 1989 interview with the BBC, to "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang". She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even during traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, to "tell the human truth" about her life. Angelou stated that she played cards to reach that place of enchantment, to access her memories more effectively. She has stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!" She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".</poem></blockquote>
Plot summary
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen and the struggles she faces—particularly with racism and self-affirmation—in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother (Momma) and disabled uncle (Uncle Willie) in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book: they travel alone and are labeled like baggage.
thumb|right|The community of [[Stamps, Arkansas, is the setting for a large portion of the book.]]
Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the overt racism of her white neighbors and the subliminal awareness of race relations weaved in society. Although Momma is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' Black community, the white children of their town, in an "almost ritual insult", hassle Maya's family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls, for example, reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident which leaves Maya, watching from a distance, indignant and furious. Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders, where he moans and groans under the potatoes throughout the night. Maya has to endure the insult of her name being changed to Mary by a racist employer. A white speaker at her eighth-grade graduation ceremony disparages the Black audience by suggesting that they have limited job opportunities. A white dentist refuses to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him that she had loaned him money during the Depression. The Black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of racial victory when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis's championship fight, but generally, they feel the heavy weight of racist oppression.
A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps. He takes the two children with him when he departs, but leaves them with their mother in St. Louis. Eight-year-old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, 'Mr. Freeman'. He is found guilty during the trial, but escapes jail time and gets murdered, presumably by Maya's uncles. Maya feels guilty and withdraws from everyone but her brother. Even after returning to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps," who encourages her through books to regain her voice. This coaxes Maya out of her shell.
Later, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California, to protect them from the dangers of racism in Stamps. Maya attends George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she becomes the first Black female cable car conductor in San Francisco. While still in high school, Maya visits her father in southern California one summer and has some experiences pivotal to her development. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico. She experiences homelessness for a short time after a fight with her father's girlfriend.
During Maya's final year of high school, she worries that she might be a lesbian (which she confuses due to her sexual inexperience with the belief that lesbians are also hermaphrodites). She ultimately initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy. She becomes pregnant, which, on the advice of her brother, she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school. Maya gives birth to her son at the end of the book.
Style and genre
Angelou's prose works, while presenting a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form, can be placed in the long tradition of African-American autobiography. Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development, however, often lead reviewers to categorize her books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as autobiographical fiction. Other critics, like Mary Jane Lupton, insist that Angelou's books should be categorized as autobiographies because they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies. Dolly McPherson states that Angelou's work demonstrates how a writer can use the autobiography to define her quest for human individuality, identify her struggle with "the general condition of Black Americans", and claim a representative role not only for Black Americans, but for "the idea of America". McPherson goes on to say that "through a study of her work, one gains a closer access to American cultural history".
As Lupton states, what makes Angelou's autobiographies different than more conventional autobiographies is her "denial of closure". Lupton says that no other serial autobiography places the mother/child theme in the center of the conflict, which made it important to the book's narrative. Lupton calls the narrative style in Caged Bird "rich, humorous, intense, engaging". The language Angelou uses can be frightening and her dialogue in the book, which is sharp and direct, conveys her characters' distinctive language and both reflects the language of her literary models and draws on the Southern speech patterns of her characters. Her use of metaphor places Angelou "within the stylistic tradition of black protest literature". She also uses precision to describe objects or places and her observations are sensual. As Lupton puts it, "Her writing resembles a series of photographs or fragments of music: snapshots taken from many angles, notes played from a variety of instruments". McPherson agrees, stating that in her autobiographies, Angelou "uses the narrative gifts of an accomplished writer". Braxton compares Angelou's style to that of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson, stating that Angelou also uses "rhythmic language, lyrically suspended moments of consciousness, and detailed portraiture". Braxton, due to Angelou's use of humor and folklore, also calls her a "tale-teller par excellence." Harold Bloom, who does not think as highly of Angelou's poetry and does not find her subsequent autobiographies as compelling as her first, compares the tone in Caged Bird with the tone Rudyard Kipling uses in Kim, stating that Angelou "provides us with a voice that we encounter very infrequently, whether in life or in literature". According to Susan Gilbert, however, while Angelou records African American cadences and speech patterns, she does not limit herself "to the tongues of black Arkansas or ghetto streets". For example, Angelou describes the codeswitching that many in her community engage in; as Gilbert also says, the language Angelou uses "moves between a strong, colloquial simplicity and a sometimes over-blown literary mannerism".
left|thumb|[[Frederick Douglass, 1840s. Angelou's autobiographies are within the tradition of the slave narrative, such as Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).]]
At first, Angelou intended to return to poetry and play-writing after completing Caged Bird and write no more autobiographies, but as she stated in an interview in 1989, she chose the genre as her primary mode of expression because of its challenge and so that she could "change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century", adding that "I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form to carry my work, my expression". McPherson agrees, stating in 1990 that no other American writer had chosen to make their "major literary and cultural contribution so predominately in autobiographical form". As Angelou told journalist George Plimpton during a 1990 interview, "Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful". As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou was reporting not one person's story, but the collective's. Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and sees Angelou as representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people. Angelou, throughout her series of autobiographies, also seeks to describe the personal, cultural, social, and historical influences that shaped her life and identity. Her experiences, as described in her books, "represent stages of her spiritual growth and awareness". As McPherson puts it, Angelou's autobiographies "creates a unique place within Black autobiographical tradition" and reveal "important insights into Black traditions and culture". Unlike other Black autobiographers like Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi, however, Angelou is less concerned with her book's place or setting, and instead focuses on her growing awareness of her environment.
Joanne Braxton sees Caged Bird as "the fully developed black female autobiographical form that began to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s". Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe states that Caged Bird was written during an important period for African American literature, when there was an influx of prose writings by African American women. The book presents themes that are common in autobiography by Black American women: a celebration of Black motherhood; a criticism of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition. Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Black female from the South, at some points a child, and other points a mother. As Gilbert puts it, "the reader of the book must deal throughout the dual perspective of the child, growing to consciousness of herself and the limits of her world, and the author, experienced, confident, and didactic". Braxton states that Caged Bird has two points of view, the child and the mature narrator/artist; while the child's point of view governs Angelou's "principle of selection", the tone of the adult narrator is personal and compelled to explore aspects of her coming of age. Keneth Kinnamon states that like other Black female writers and unlike many male writers, Angelou was concerned with themes such as community, sexism, sexual exploitation, and relationships with family friends.
George E. Kent states that due to "its special stance toward the self, the community, and the universe", Caged Bird has a unique place within Black autobiography. McPherson says about Angelou: "I know of no other autobiographer in American letters who celebrates and sings her life with as much verve and display of vulnerability", adding that Angelou has demonstrated how the genre of the autobiography "can be transformed into a strong evocation of the human spirit". Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. For example, Angelou was worried about her readers' reactions to her disclosure in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, that she was a prostitute. She went through with it, anyway, after her husband Paul Du Feu advised her to be honest about it.thumb|288x288px|In addition to being classified as an [[autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has also been called a Bildungsroman, like George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.]]
Angelou has recognized that there are fictional aspects to her books, and that she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth". Angelou discussed her writing process with Plimpton, and when asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she admitted that she had. She stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about". Scholar Ernece B. Kelley calls Caged Bird a "gentle indictment of white American womanhood"; Hagen expands it further, stating that the book is "a dismaying story of white dominance". In the Stamps of Caged Bird, although "segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what Whites looked like" and Blacks rarely interacted with them, the white world was a constant threat and Blacks were expected to behave in a certain way in order to survive. As Keneth Kinnamon states, Angelou does not de-emphasize the effects of racism on her community, but "shows with respect if not always agreement the defensive and compensatory patterns needed to survive in such an environment". Lupton, who sees the themes of racism and slavery as separate from imprisonment in Caged Bird, states that Maya constantly feels caged, "unable to escape the reality of her blackness". Imprisonment is also expressed in the book's title.
Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird, contain a sequence of lessons about resisting oppression. The sequence she describes leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest". Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives her autobiographies their thematic unity and underscores one of their central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. In Angelou's depiction of the "powhitetrash" incident, Maya reacts with rage, indignation, humiliation, and helplessness. Angelou portrays Momma as a realist whose patience, courage, and silence ensured the survival and success of those who came after her. As Braxton put it, the white and female children "deliberately exploit their protected status to intimidate and humiliate" Maya's family. Braxton also considers the incident an implied threat towards the men in the family. Momma teaches Maya how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism, and that it is an effective basis for actively protesting and combating racism. Walker calls Momma's way a "strategy of subtle resistance"; Dolly McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance" and "a pivotal experience in her initiation" of Maya's awareness about her place in the racist world. McPherson, who considers the incident "a dramatic re-enactment of the kind of spiritual death and regeneration Angelou experienced during the shaping of her development", also states that the incident taught Maya how her grandmother was able to survive and triumph psychologically in a hostile environment. Not only was it a depiction of the tensions between Blacks and whites during the period, it also depicted how Momma was able to protest, transcend the children's behavior towards her, and preserve her own dignity. Braxton states that the incident demonstrates Momma's courage, a virtue Angelou learns to use and develop from her; Angelou praises Momma's courage in the book and praises it in later writings. Courage in the face of racism is also shown in Angelou's treatment of lynching. Early in the book, Momma helps a man trying to escape lynching by hiding him and giving him supplies for his journey, thus endangering her own security. Later, the family has to conceal Uncle Willy from a potential lynch mob in their store's potato and onion bin. Braxton states that it demonstrates the absurdity of lynching and that in this incident, Momma "fulfills the archetypical role of the outraged mother by concealing her innocent child".
left|thumb|Angelou's treatment of racism has been compared to the writings of [[Richard Wright (author)|Richard Wright (shown here in 1939).]]
Angelou later said that her years living in Africa and her relationship to South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make in the early 1960s taught her "to see the survival of distinctly African ways" among African Americans, which affect her portrayal of character, both collectively and individually. For example, as Susan Gilbert puts it, Angelou "relates the habits of address...to a heritage of tribal belonging". Angelou's description of the strong and cohesive black community of Stamps also demonstrates how African Americans subvert repressive institutions. Angelou demonstrates how religion, which "was designed to keep the Afro-American in an oppressed condition", has been subverted and used by her community to help them withstand the cruelty of racism. McPherson states that Angelou's depiction of the economic displacement of Black cotton field workers, who gather at Momma's store before and after work and could never get ahead despite their hard work, demonstrates how the Black community nurtures its members and helps them survive in an antagonistic environment. Angelou's depiction of the Joe Lewis fight demonstrates how her community has subverted the American institution of sports. As Selwyn R. Cudjoe puts it, the fight was supposed to "act as a pacifier, as entertainment for Blacks, and to help demonstrate how far they had progressed in the society". Instead, it became a recreation of the struggle between white and Black America. Later in the book, Maya responds assertively when subjected to demeaning treatment by Mrs. Cullinan and breaks the race barrier when she becomes the first Black streetcar operator in San Francisco.