Thoughts on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

A Controversial, Honest Essay

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I think I bought my used, dog-eared paperback copy of Maya Angelou’s brilliant memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Ballantine Mass Market version, 2015, the one with the intro by Oprah) at some now-forgotten bookstore in New York City. Which means it must have been sometime between spring of 2019 and early summer of 2021, which was the brief crack of time in which I inhabited the Big Apple.

I’d heard a lot about the book before reading it, and about Angelou. It turned out to be one of those books which, for whatever strange reason, I tried multiple times before it finally became readable. (I blame myself, not the book.) This happens to me with certain books, for example it happened also with the novel Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. I didn’t read I Know why the Caged Bird Sings in New York; I read it just now, over the past week, randomly opening the book seven days ago, being instantly hooked in (intriguing since the three or four previous tries had left me somewhat cold) and just plowed right on through, highlighting and writing marginalia as I went.  

Here’s the basic premise of the memoir. It starts when she’s a very young child, having been dropped off by her recently-divorced parents in Long Beach to her grandmother’s in Stamps, Arkansas. This is where the book begins. Grandma teaches a young Maya the ropes, and Maya goes to school and works in the family general grocery store. This is where Maya and her older brother Bailey bond, start reading books, learn how to work, develop their own secret language, and face the brutality of white racism in the 1930s American South. Maya Angelou lived from 1928 to 2014 and died at age 86. Therefore her childhood story is backdropped by the Great Depression and World War II.

Around age 8, Maya’s biological father shows up in Stamps, seemingly out of the blue, and takes her to St. Louis, dropping her off at her biological mother’s house. She ends up staying here for a year, which is disastrous. Besides attempting to understand her unnaturally beautiful and confusing mother, Maya is brutally and callously raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. This is one of the most famous scenes in American memoir. It’s an unforgettable and haunting one. After the rape Maya struggles to cope and has a breakdown and ends up in the hospital. Despite Mr. Freeman’s threat of killing her and her brother if she tells, Maya breaks the news to her family. There is a very public trial wherein Maya is forced to take the stand and is filled with fear and shame. Not long after the trial—after Mr. Freeman got off on bail—the rapist is found dead behind a store, likely “kicked to death.”

Needless to say: Maya is sent back to Stamps on the train. After her return she escapes once more through school, work and reading. She is wary of boys and sex. An older woman who comes to the store takes her under her wing and gives her “life lessons.” All through these pages Angelou is giving us her thoughts on race, racism, sexism, society, etc.

Eventually she goes to her biological mother again, this time in San Francisco. Grandma and Maya take the train and meet Mom. Bailey comes a month later. Things seem new and exciting this time. They’re in the “big city.” They live in the Fillmore District which has seen a walloping influx of Black Southerners who’re displacing the Japanese and Chinese locals. (A complex racial dynamic.) She takes drama and dance classes.

At a certain point—she’s 15 now—she goes down to LA to see her father. She stays with him for some amount of months. She discovers a wild man, probably an alcoholic, with a girlfriend who is selfish, judgmental, resentful and who can’t stand Maya. Dad is a Navy Dietician. He takes Maya down to Mexico one time and they end up at a random bar, dancing, Dad drunk with abandon. Never having driven a car, she drives the two of them most of the way home before getting into a minor car crash. Eventually, they make it home. Later, she gets into a physical altercation with Dad’s girlfriend; after this she is homeless for a month, wherein she lives in a junkyard with other runaway teens.

Finally she makes it back to Mom and San Francisco. Bailey and Mom fight often and at last her older brother, at 16, moves out on his own. Confused, worried she might be a lesbian, distrustful of men and her own body, she has random, meaningless sex with an attractive local guy one night and gets pregnant. The last scene is of Maya looking into the eyes of her newborn baby.

As far as the writing goes: This is an excellent book. A serious piece of nonfiction literature. She reminds me of Dostoevsky in her ability to perfectly wed plot and depth. In other words: She is a master at both entertaining and exploring deep themes, asking the fundamental questions about what it means to be human. She gives us gorgeous paragraphs such as this:

 “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.” (Page 271)

One thing I love about Angelou’s writing is that she pulls no punches; she’s as real, honest and open as it gets. She tells the—or “her”—Truth. She delivers her short, clipped chapters in the form of action scenes, and always keeps readers on their toes, needing to find out what’ll happen next, and she drops in gorgeous, slick lines along the way, as if whispering in your ear, Here’s some protein with your salad. She’s really good at starting a chapter at a certain point in time, while holding a mystery, then dipping for several pages into a second backstory scene, and then slowly bringing us back to the first page of the chapter; we’re intrigued with both parts. There were a few fluff chapters that didn’t exactly seem relevant to the story, but only a few. Besides those almost every single chapter chugged like a fast-moving freight train and kept the overarching story aloft.

One intriguing angle, for me, was the discussion of race and racism in the book. A week ago, while I was early in the book, I posted a Substack “Note” about how I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings would be cancelled today. Immediately I got a couple of radical progressives claiming that I was a typical white man trying to denigrate a woman of color and that cancelling Angelou wouldn’t help anything.

These people, of course, completely misunderstood my point. My point wasn’t that Angelou should be cancelled. In fact: Angelou should, in my opinion, be read by every American in the country. My point was that if even Angelou—a sacred cow of the Left—wrote things in her 1969 memoir debut that would get her cancelled today, then we have to face the fact that no one should ever be cancelled because cancelling is fucking ridiculous, antidemocratic, illiberal and ignorant as Hell. All books should be allowed to be published and to flourish; yes, even Mein Kampf. Why? Because if you ban, censor or cancel books or authors, it only gives energy to the darkness of the underground. We need Mein Kampf to be published if for no other reason than to be able to study righteous evil and how it came to be.

Here's the line I felt was cancellable from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

“ ‘My daddy must of been a Chinaman’” ‘(I thought they meant made out of china, like a cup because my eyes were so small and squinty.’ (Page 2)

Here’s another one (I added the bracket):

(Re Fillmore District, S.F.): “Who could expect this [Black] man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race he had never known to exist?...The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn’t have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.” (Page 210)

And while Angelou uses a lot of language which later would be used by the Woke Left (essentially arguing for the notion of “systemic racism” but not using that exact language), she would not fit neatly in today’s Woke Identity Politics category.

Check this out: “My grandmother had more money than all the powhitetrash. We owned land and houses, but each day Bailey and I were cautioned, ‘Waste not, want not.’” (Page 50) This contradicts the idea that all Black people always have less money than all white people. Again and again in the memoir, she acknowledges—just like MLK did—that poor whites suffered very similarly to poor Blacks.

Page 50: “The Depression must have hit the white section of Stamps with cyclonic impact, but it seeped into the Black area slowly, like a thief with misgivings.”

This one tickles me to the bone and reminds me of contemporary leftist academia: “She was stimulating instead of intimidating. Where some of the other teachers went out of their way to be nice to me—to be a ‘liberal’ with me—and others ignored me completely, Miss Kirwin never seemed to notice that I was Black and therefore different. I was Miss Johnson and if I had the answer to a question she posed I was never given any more than the word ‘Correct,’ which was what she said to every other student with the correct answer.” (Page 216) Angelou makes it clear which teacher she respected: The one who neither ignored her nor condescendingly pandered to her but, rather (what a shocking thought!) treated her as an equal.

Another one: “For eons, it seemed, I had accepted my plight as the hapless, put-upon victim of fate and the Furies, but this time I had to face the fact that I had brought my new catastrophe upon myself.” (Page 284)

And my favorite, and this one speaks directly to the scourge of Identity Politics and the never-ending cycle of racism against whites and Blacks and the unceasing division which young Leftists seem to advocate for today. The context is this: A 15-year-old Maya, in San Francisco, walks into the trolley car administration building trying to get a job running the S.F. trolley car up and down the steep hills. They’ve never hired a Black person to do this job before. (This is 1943.) Maya walks into the building and asks the clerk (a white woman) to see the boss. The white clerk gives her the runaround. They have a strained, uncomfortable moment, and then Maya leaves.

“The miserable little encounter had nothing to do with me, the me of me, any more than it had to do with that silly clerk. The incident was a recurring dream, concocted years before by stupid whites and it eternally came back to haunt us all. The secretary and I were like Hamlet and Laertes in the final scene, where, because of harm done by one ancestor to another, we were bound to duel to the death. Also because the play must end somewhere. I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer.” (Page 267)

To be fair Angelou has some ideas about race which I cannot fully concur with, and which certainly do meld well with Woke Identity Politics (WIP). Here’s a good example, and this one is salient because unfortunately we’re seeing this happening now in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. The idea seems to be this: Black people, due to being eternal victims, might commit crimes, but they should never really be held accountable. They (Black people) are the ultimate true victims and therefore should not be judged as being criminals when they commit crimes. It’s not entirely clear whether Angelou is defending this idea, or only proposing it as the view of *some* Black people, but regardless she understands it to be a viable perspective for some:

 “Stories of law violations are weighed on a different set of scales in the Black mind than in the white. Petty crimes embarrass the community, and many people wistfully wonder why Negroes don’t rob more banks, embezzle more funds and employ graft in the unions. ‘We are the victims of the world’s most comprehensive robbery. Life demands a balance. It’s all right if we do a little robbing now.’ This belief appeals particularly to one who is unable to compete legally with his fellow citizens.” (Page 225)

The literary voice in the book is potent; very powerful. Maya’s voice is wise, an older woman reflecting back on a racist, unfair world. I agree with her—of course—that 1930s and early 1940s America, especially the South, was terribly, ruthlessly racist, and not just culturally, like today, but sadly legally. This was before the Civil Rights Movement, of which Angelou became a part of. Angelou had lived a hectic, wild life, moving constantly, living in New York City and San Francisco and Africa doing everything from acting to music to dancing to sex work to journalism to poetry to writing seven memoirs. She never got a college degree—then again neither did Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell or George Washington—but she was awarded 50 honorary college degrees, and she taught college courses for years. She became a cultural, literary, artistic and Civil Rights figure. Famous and respected and revered. Something like Toni Morrison but more of an artistic polymath.

Her writing hits home partially because the content is important, partially because it’s a chunk of Americana, and partly because of the brute rage which glows off every sentence. And yet the rage is earned. And the voice is drenched in true sincerity. She is shocked, over and over and over again, at how callous and harsh not only White America but Black America is to themselves and others. She can’t ever fully get a grasp on this grotesque reality.

This is by far my favorite quote from the book. I love this because she mocks all people, all cultures, all races. No one is safe, not even Black people:

“We were maids and farmers, handymen and washer-women, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous. Then I wished that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all whitefolks in their beds and that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that Harriet Tubman had been killed by that blow on her head and that Christopher Columbus had drowned in the Santa Maria. 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 mopes 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 (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.” (Page 180/181)

“As a species we were an abomination. All of us.” Amen. Ain’t that the truth. Look at us: All these centuries and we’re still arguing over skin pigmentation. Pathetic. We deserve what we get.

I love, also, that she matures by the end of the memoir, still only 17 and with child. This quote shows her ultimate psychological redemption a la race/division. The context is: She’s recalling her month of homelessness living with a diverse mix of runaway teens:

 “Odd that the homeless children, the silt of war frenzy, could initiate me into the brotherhood of man. After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. The lack of criticism evidenced by our ad hoc community influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance for my life.” (Page 254)

I love the end of the quote above, especially. A “tone of tolerance.” Tolerance: Something incredibly lacking in the “inclusive” Woke Leftist culture. Irony is the sword of reality.

In conclusion: This is a big, bad beautiful book, and everyone truly should read it. It’s profound as a literary feat on its own merits, if nothing else. The style is pure, crisp and literary. Angelou has a firm grip on vocabulary. (Sometimes she overuses $50 words, but this is rare.) It exposes both the nastiness of historical white racism, while also shedding an inner light on how an individual soul can transcend division and hatred. The narrator sees her world from the perspective of the overarching—hovering above the nation, seeing things from a distance, in the abstract—and also from the very deeply specific, personal, detailed, unique and individual. Angelou uses both literary binoculars and microscope when needed.

Not only that but Angelou makes you FEEL; she, as Hemingway advised, bleeds on the page. She takes no prisoners. She calls things out as she sees them. No one gets a pass, especially herself. And that is what good memoir is all about: Deep self-awareness; opening your heart to the world; telling the truth as you honestly understand it; trying to make sense of what it means to be human, and of the frailty of the fragmented human condition.

Besides, who else could write this:

 “I thought of myself as hanging in the Store, a mote imprisoned on a shaft of sunlight. Pushed and pulled by the slightest shift of air, but never falling free into the tempting darkness.” (Page 112)