I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings discussion

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

One of the most prominent role models of our time, Maya Angelou, has inspired many people with the stories of her childhood in her autobiography: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The book’s many characters help to explain the life of an African American girl growing up in the South during the depression. Angelou and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their Grandmother in Stamps Arkansas for most of their lives, and much of what they knew came from that town. Her grandmother works tirelessly to ensure their hearts are full of nothing but Jesus. She later moves to Missouri for a year and meets terrible misfortune, and she visits her father one summer and learns more than desired about life’s hardships. Each person in her life teaches her something new about who she is, and the kind of world that she has been born in to.
Angelou, who is formally known as Marguerite Johnson was shipped to Stamps with her brother Bailey when she was just two. She lives with her Grandmother and Uncle Willie. The community that she has come to know is extremely religious, and through multiple encounters with the people around her, she learns its place in the world. At one point in her childhood, she sees a group of African American cotton pickers so tired and worn down by work, but are born again at a religious service. But she wonders how this could be possible because she knows that pain shapes their existence. She says: “I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standards and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.” Instances like this in addition to her grandmother’s effort to bring them to church every Sunday shaped her views on religion and its place in social class. It was something very close to her heart, but she was never able to see why only the poorest were giving thanks.
One day, Angelou’s father came to Stamps for the first time since his children had been living there. He came and took the children to live with their mother in St. Louis. There she meets her uncles, grandfather, and Grandmother Baxter. In the duration of their year-long stay, they try to adjust to the vast differences from the rural south. While there, Angelou’s mother had a boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. At only eight, Angelou is both molested and raped by Mr. Freeman and she stops talking to everyone but Bailey. This tragic event in young Angelou’s life was far from over. Her St. Louis family couldn’t understand why she became withdrawn and they were fed up. She said: “When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness.” As her life continues, the tragic memory surfaces and she wonders if she can bear the pain of having the people in her life feeling sorry for her. As Angelou reflects back on her childhood, it is very clear that this moment contributed to how she saw herself, and the world around her.
Another important part of Angelou’s childhood is when she goes to visit her father who is living in Southern California. At this time, Angelou is about sixteen, and stay for an entire summer. She learns that her father has a girlfriend, Dolores; she’s beyond unimpressed with Angelou and full of contempt. Maya accompanies her father on a day trip to Mexico to get some food. While there, her father offers her as a bride to a guard, gets drunk at a bar, and Angelou is forced to drive up a mountain in the dark when she has never even operated a car before. They arrive home and Dolores’ jealousy for Angelou boils and she gashes a hole in her side. She runs away from her father, but also from her way home. She asks: “How could I bear their contempt or their pity? If I disappeared Dad would be relieved not to mention Dolores.” She decides to spend a month living in a junkyard. This encounter taught Angelou even at a young age, we face horrible truths in life, but we should have someone there to help us through them.
This book is full of twists and turns; some wonderful, while others heartbreaking. I really liked it because Maya Angelou tells a story from a unique perspective of pain and hardship not shared by many others. She manages to turn her past into something that says the future is influenced by our past, but not dictated by it. I would recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with things in their past because this book will teach you that those things don’t define you. I would also recommend this book to people who maybe just struggle with non-fiction because this story is so engaging that it can keep anyone glued to the pages. To close, Maya Angelou said something that I think really captures why people need this book: “Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”

The book also tells us how books shaped Maya Angelo. She & her brother were hardcore bookworms

Inspiring, when you read her subsequent writings in light of all she had to overcome!