115. I KNOW WHY the CAGED BIRD SINGS

Maya Angelou 1969

This book is truly a poet's autobiography: a memoir written in vivid, luscious and descriptive language that reads like a remarkable work of fiction. The first of a five-series memoir, this particular book recounts her childhood in an extra-ordinary and startling coming of age story. Marguerite (Maya) grew up with her brother Bailey and was raised by her grandmother Momma in the highly segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, a town where their only dentist's policy is never to touch a black person's mouth. To escape racism, they were later sent like a baggage on a train to their mother in California, only for Maya to suffer a different sort of despicable act . It is hard to fathom the author's inner strength to overcome all these hardships and emerge the inspiring living legend that she is now.

'"What are you looking at me for?
I didn't come to stay.
I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember. Other things were more important... Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and the air would cool my palms.'(opening lines)

'If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.'(3)

'What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of the childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in the early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.'(16)

'My mother's beauty literally assailed me. Her red lips... split to show even white teeth and her fresh-butter color looked see-through clean. Her smile widened her mouth beyond her cheeks beyond her ears and seemingly through the walls to the street outside. I was struck dumb.'(49)

'The resignation of its inhabitants encouraged me to relax. They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due. Their decision to be satisfied with life's inequities was a lesson for me. Entering Stamps, I had the feeling that I was stepping over the border lines of the map and would fall, without fear, right off the end of the world. Nothing more could happen, for in Stamps, nothing happened... Into this cocoon I crept.'(74)

'As I ate she began the first of what we later called "my lessons in living." She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.'(83)

'Childhoods' logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute).(85)

'The sounds of tag beat through the trees while the top branches waved in contrapuntal rhythms. I lay on a moment of green grass and telescoped the children's game to my vision. The girls ran about wild, now here, now there, never here, never was, they seemed to have no more direction than a splattered egg. But it was shared if seldom voiced knowledge that all movements fitted, and worked according to a larger plan.'(115)

'But my head continued to throb with the measured insistence of a bass drum, and how could a toothache pass the calaboose, hear the songs of the prisoners, their blues and laughter, and not be changed? How could one or two or even a mouthful of angry tooth roots meet a wagonload of powhitetrash children, endure their idiotic snobbery and not feel less important?(158)

'My picture of Mother and Momma embracing on the train platform has been darkly retained through the coating of the then embarrassment and the now maturity. Mother was a blithe chick nuzzling around the large, solid dark hen. The sounds they made had a rich inner harmony. Momma's deep, slow voice lay under my mother's rapid peeps and chirps like stones under rushing water.'(171)

'To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.'(231)

a Bantam Book edition, 1993
246 pages
Book owned