“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1969) by Maya Angelou is her coming of age story. It is probably the single best book about what it was like to grow up black in the American South in the days of Jim Crow.
It covers her first 17 years. It is the first of six books about her life. It is not like Tolkien where you feel like you are there in the moment, but more like your own memories and dreams, feeling more like something you once lived.
There is no plot because life has no plot. Each chapter tells about some event from her early life. Some of her language seems a bit much, but if you go with it it works beautifully.
She grew up in the small country town of Stamps, Arkansas in the 1930s and in the big city of San Francisco, California in the early 1940s. At age eight (1936) she lived for six months in St Louis, Missouri, which she rightly compares to hell.
I first read this book ages ago. Reading it again I see that I remembered little of the action beyond the sex parts, but plenty of its images remained in my head:
- Her two years of silence after she was raped at age eight because of her fear of the power of words
- Her three uncles as dangerous characters who defend the family’s honour
- People listening to the Joe Louis fight on the radio
- The bridge that separates the white part of town from the black part
- How poor whites, despite their lack of money, education and even good manners, thought they were better than blacks
I was surprised to find that some images, which I thought were from some forgotten film, came from this book. But come to think of it, they are not the sort of images Hollywood puts out:
- A high school with no grass
- The radio being turned up while a young girl is raped
- Driving her drunk father back from Mexico
- San Francisco during the early 1940s, with shops and apartments left empty by the Japanese American internment
The segregation in Stamps was so profound that as a child she had little first-hand experience of whites, most of it not good:
- A white woman she worked for briefly as a maid shortens her name from Marguerite (her birth name) to Mary without even asking.
- A white dentist, whom her grandmother saved from ruin during the darkest days of the Depression, turns her away saying , “I’d rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s.”
- Some poor white girls come up to her grandmother and start mocking her in public. They call her by her first name. To top it off one of them stands on her hands, letting her dress fall to show her pubic hair. Her grandmother stands there saying nothing. When they leave she says her goodbye to each one respectfully.
See also:
I too have read this and the majority from this series of books. I recall her brother Bailey and how they are ‘shipped’ of to live with their ‘Momma’ (their Grandmother) sent down on the train like lost luggage.
I also recall her mother (who may come later in the series) as there are aspects of her that remind me of my own mother and how she ‘dealt’ with things. A formidable woman indeed.
The bit about Joe Louis and his fight with Max Schmeling made me revisit my surprising interest in boxing and discover more about the boxers of that era too and how courageous these and many of the black professional sports stars were amongst so much adversity.
I strongly recommend anyone who hasnt reading to pick up the book or if you’re ‘hi-tech’ download it on Kindle
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That dentist was a total jerk. It baffles me that anyone could be so unkind.
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Excellent book review.
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‘I know why the caged bird sings’, and Alice Walker’s, ‘The bluest eyes’, and Richard Wrights, ‘Black Boy’, were staples of my 11 year old self. Powerful reading.
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Excellent review… makes me want to re-read this classic.
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did hollywood make a movie about this book?…and did Gregory Peck & Brock Peters star in it?…or was the To Kill a Mocking Bird?
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That was “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
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A film version was made in 1979.
Caged Bird Trailer
Toni Morrison authored The Bluest Eye.
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I love this book. Powerful…but then everything Maya Angelou writes is.
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I love Maya Angelou work. I remember I watch a movie about her in high school, the was one of the reason I started reading her book I want to know more about her.
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I first read this book when I was 10. It made a great impression on me then, and it still resonates with me to this day.
I need to read it again…it’s been years since I picked it up last.
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A fantastic book and well worth a read. Maya Angelou is an America treasure. She holds for me a special place in my heart. When I was child there was a show on PBS called Humanities through the Arts. She was the host and each show she would highlight an artistic style such as painting or sculpture and she would speak so beautifully and so artfully that her voice would carry me away, away from the dreary poor world I inhabited to another place, a rarefied realm of imagination and creation.
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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