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.