I have only ever given 5 stars to two autobiographies. One was written by a white English man; the other by a black American woman. On the surface you would think they could have very little in common, yet they do. They both have insight and compassion, which comes through in every sentence. They have both shown enormous courage in almost intolerable situations. In short, they have a common humanity. The white man is Terry Waite. The black woman, Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is a book which will play on your emotions. It is not a manipulative book; it is a raw and honest account, eloquently expressed. But if you did not take a deep breath sometimes before starting another page, you would not be human. It is galling to think that this description of poverty and unreasoning prejudice is within living memory, in a so-called “free” country. In the United States, the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity was set up in 1961, prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It precedes the Race Relations Act of 1965, which was the first legislation in the United Kingdom to address racial discrimination. Yet the differences of perception and attitudes between the two countries for the early and middle parts of the 20th Century are enormous. Perhaps it is the sheer size of the US, but the racial segregation which was ever-present - at least in the Southern States - was never a feature of English life, or life in Great Britain. There was prejudice certainly, and when there was an influx of black people in the 1960's to fulfil specific job vacancies, such as nursing or bus drivers and conductors, some black people suffered much abuse and humiliation from some members of the indigenous white public, such as landladies putting cards saying “no coloureds” in their windows. But the discrimination was never institutionalised. Unlike South Africa and the Southern States of America, there were no separate schools, townships or public toilets. The UK was not a racist society as such, although some individual members of it certainly were. What comes across in this book, especially to a non-American, is that the racial segregation was condoned. It was the norm at all points. It seems so entrenched that it is startling that any progress could be made from such a point. For this appalling account of ignorance and prejudice is surprisingly recent. Maya Angelou was born in 1928, and was therefore slightly younger than my own mother. And she was describing events which were closer in time to when she was writing them, than we now are ahead in time. It ends in 1944, before the end of World War II. This is the first part of her autobiography, which finally ran to seven volumes, the final volume being published in 2013. I knew of Maya Angelou's works of course, but somehow had never got around to reading them. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had been sitting on my bookshelf for 20 years unread. Perhaps part of me suspected it would be a harrowing read, but I had not anticipated its wry humour. Maya Angelou died last year, in 2014. There’s a sort of poignancy in discovering a writer after they have just died. Sometimes it happens because for a short time they achieve more prominence generally. When the reaction is so positive, the experience is tinged with slight regret, nonsensical though it is. For so many long-dead classic authors that opportunity is not open to us from the start. It would have been nice to appreciate them more during their lifetime. Will I carry on reading the continuing parts? Certainly. The five stars are not awarded solely to the person. They are awarded to the work, as they should be. It is an extraordinary first book, especially considering that the author is someone who feels the voice is essential for meaning, someone who was always recognised as a passionate performance poet. From this book alone, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.” Here is her memory of an inspired natural teacher, Sister Flowers, “I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life ... her voice slid in and curved down through and over the words. She was nearly singing.” “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 ... I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the same that I had read? Or were there notes, music, lined on pages”
Perhaps then it is not so surprising to find a poetic turn of phrase, such lyrical prose as,
“in the dying sunlight the people dragged rather than their empty sacks”
or a beautifully evocative description. But be warned. Not everything which is graphic here is beautiful imagery,
“I remember the sense of fear which filled my mouth with hot, dry air, and made my body light”
“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.
It is an unnecessary insult.”
The blurb itself, should you read it, will tell the reader of some very disturbing events which are described, but those parts will prompt a deep emotional reaction. The work also puts much of her poetry in context; the anger and prominent themes in her poetry become all of a piece with the unfolding account of her life. And in this, the staggered telling of her tale is also very effective. She alternated a book of poetry with a book of autobiography, and these memoirs are far more expressive and revealing than one static book of past autobiography could be. The gradual telling of her tale feels more in the present, than it does reflection.
The first volume starts with the author, then called “Marguerite Johnson" at 3 years old, being sent on a train journey with her 4 year old brother. Neither had any idea why they were being sent South to live with their grandmother, “Momma" in the tiny town of “Stamps", Arkansas. Most of this first part is about her life there; her strict upbringing by the poor, but proud and upright, religious woman, who devoted herself to making as good a life as she could for her disabled son and grandchildren,
“I was liked, and what a difference it made.”
The store served the needs of all those in Stamps, mostly workers in the cotton fields. The recent history of slavery is virtually palpable. The conditions at times seemed little better than the past. Each day the workers started with optimism, but they were trapped in a life from which realistically they could never escape; never being paid enough for their work to get out of debt. Yet nearly all these people were hard-working and honest,
“Although there was always generosity in the Negro neighborhood, it was indulged on pain of sacrifice. Whatever was given by Black people to other Blacks was most probably needed as desperately by the donor as by the receiver. A fact which made the giving or receiving a rich exchange.”
There are wonderful descriptions of her grandmother’s store. It is a hub for the community, a working business, but for young Marguerite it is a cornucopia of smells and sights,
“the store was my favorite place to be. Alone and empty in the mornings, it looked like an unopened present from a stranger”
She remembers the days here, the pride of her handicapped Uncle Willy, the immensely strict regime she and her brother Bailey Junior were expected to cope with. Her grandmother, a businesswoman, was much respected in the exclusively black area of Stamps,
“I remember never believing that whites were really real ... These others, the strong pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren't considered folks. They were white-folks.”
“People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream"
She escaped whenever possible into her fantasy world of books,
“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love ... ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.’ It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar"
“Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.”
As the author grew older, her perception of bigotry, her indignation at the racial unfairness which pervaded everything in her experience, grew. She accepted without understanding the submissive attitudes she was expected to make, and subservience she had to show, observing of Momma,
“She didn’t cotton to the idea that white folks could be talked to at all without risking one’s life. And certainly they couldn't be spoken to insolently”
But her grandmother wanted the best for the two children,
“I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.”
There is much about loneliness and alienation in this first novel. Maya Angelou tried to cultivate a philosophical attitude to her experiences,
“Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between”
“Like most children, I thought if I could face the worst danger voluntarily, and triumph, I would forever have power over it”
But the instances piled one on top of another. Even the wild, neglected and dirty “powhitetrash” children jeered, made fun of, and looked down on all the people in the the black neighbourhood. A doctor, a dentist - people who should have been literally indebted to her grandmother because of the financial help she had afforded them in the past - showed truly shocking insulting behaviour when appealed to for help. The white people almost exclusively treated the black people worse than they would treat their animals. It is difficult to convey without telling the story how each tiny instance was compounded. During a court case,
“The judge had really made a gaffe calling a Negro woman ‘Mrs’”
because, of course, a white person’s perception was that a black person did not deserve the status of respect.
The book seems to escalate until the reader feels that something has to give.
The author reflects that it was perhaps one instance of profound prejudice, which severely affected her brother emotionally, which led to their being sent away from Arkansas. They had only lived there a couple of years, when the two children were collected by their father, a cultured giant of a man, and taken back to live with their mother - “Mother Dear” as Bailey called her - in St. Louis. Their lives from this point take a sudden turn, living with this impulsive beautiful butterfly of a woman with her film-star looks. A crime is committed when Maya is just eight years old. This is brutal; an appalling account to read, both a physically and psychologically raw and graphic description. The child is the victim, but as so often happens, the victim is convinced that she is somehow guilty. Circ*mstances force her to tell a small lie, and for this too, she cannot forgive herself. The children return to Momma.
The next few years are chronicled in the book with much movement between the adults in the family. They have to cope with extremes in moral codes. From the earliest chapters the reader has been stunned by the extremist Christian doctrine of their grandmother. Beating a child for saying “by the way”, because - never mind whether the child understands or not - it was considered to be blasphemy. Another small incident which haunts the reader, is Bailey Junior being beaten for yearning so much for his mum, that he watched a similar-looking film star, and was late home. There are countless such examples. These are very hard to accept, because these two things were perpetrated by the good people - the ones with a sense of duty and responsibility. The ignorant prejudice in the wider community, outside the town of Stamps, was oddly easier to read about than this, which felt like a betrayal by the adults whom the children trusted.
But later, the moral code is turned on its head. Both Maya’s mother and father were city folk working in a very different world. Her father in Mexico had friends who were almost gangsters, with a completely different sense of morality, although in itself the ethical code was just as strong,
“The needs of a society determine its ethics”.
These parts are very entertaining to read, and must have been an eye-opener to a young teenager from such a narrow background.
The book ends when Maya Angelou is 17. Although her given name was “Marguerite”, she was always called “Maya” because her brother called her “My-a”, trying to say the words “my sister”. To the little girl, that felt like her true identity, not what others called her. There is one episode in the book, where a white woman tried to call her “Mary” for her own personal convenience - “because it was shorter”. That is a hugely emotional part of the book. The reader can sense the profound insult; the hidden history of “ownership”. I gave a mental cheer when Maya managed to turn this around.
At 12 Maya had had her graduation from Lafayette County Training School. I personally found this almost the most affecting part of the book. Maya was a supremely talented and hard-working child. The reader senses her feelings bubbling over - her well-earned pride in her achievements. But yet again, because of an incident involving an ignorant white person, her whole world comes crashing down around her ears,
“Graduation, the hush-hush magic time of frills and gifts and congratulations and diplomas, was finished for me before my name was called. The accomplishment was nothing. The meticulous maps, drawn in three colors of ink, learning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing. Donleavy had exposed us. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.”
Maya Angelou had somehow recovered from the terrible crime against her at 8 years old. How could she possibly recover from this one? How can one person continue to have courage, strength and fight? Isn't it easier just to give up and say, “Yes Ma’am”?
“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time. She is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.”
This is a book that will sometimes make you ashamed to be a member of the human race. It is in part a catalogue of Man’s inhumanity to man, woman’s inhumanity to woman. It will also, however, make you proud of what can be achieved. One hopes it was cathartic to write, but it is far more than the plague of misery sagas which have descended onto our bookshelves in recent years. It is nonfiction, but it is as entertaining as a novel; parts of it reading like lyrical prose. It has some devastating descriptions of brutality, yes, but there is much to smile over too, often in her wry little asides,
“The custom of letting obedient children be seen but not heard was so agreeable to me that I went one step further: Obedient children should not see or hear if they chose not to do so”
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an important, defining, incredibly brave work for its time of 1969. From a relatively unknown author, a world was firmly introduced to the reality of racial tensions and prejudice in the Southern United States. It was a book which would have been very hard to read without the author’s strength and humour coming through, and it remains so, over 45 years later.
The book grips you from its start. Maya Angelou has a unique ability to make any reader identify with a poor black child, to experience what they experience, from whatever point the reader is in their own life. There is much talk nowadays of the “Black Voice”. Maya Angelou does not alienate. She does not seek to select her audience; she speaks to us all. Her book is self-evidently from a black perspective, but she skilfully makes it the reader’s own, putting us all firmly in the mind of herself as a child. She conveys her various feelings of confusion, pride, hatred, despair, guilt and rage, expressing so well the reasoning behind them at the time.
Her use of dialect is perfectly balanced for a general reader. It is authentic and essential, yet at no point is the reader likely to have to pause, reread and try to interpret. I personally have had far more difficulty with my experience of classic books which attempt to include a written representation of my own native, regional Yorkshire speech. This is part of her great skill as a writer - it flows. She concentrates on our common humanity. This is a book which can, perhaps should, be read by everyone at least once in their lifetime. It shows how far both an individual and a society can progress within one person’s lifetime.
“The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.”
As tiny Marguerite Johnson might have said - although she would have “corrected” her own grammar, as all people have different vernaculars for different situations, and black people of that time had one “language” for school and academic pursuits, another for their community, and a third to reinforce white people’s expectations of them ...
“We all doin’ well.”
“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase, while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.”I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill for the caged bird
sings of freedom
