I know why the caged bird sings

I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou.—New York: Random House [1970, c1969]
281 p. ; 22 cm.
Autobiography.

1. African American authors --Biography. 2. African American families. 3. African American women --Biography. 4. Angelou, Maya --Childhood and youth. 5. Authors, American --20th century --Biography. 6. Entertainers --United States --Biography.

818.5409

With the remembered perceptions of a child and the skill of a mature artist Civil Rights activist, poet and performer Maya Angelou recounts her childhood in what has become a modern classic of autobiography. Its honesty and command of the language should not be missed.

“When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed—“To Whom It May Concern”—that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.”

The owner of the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store in Stamps, Annie Henderson, her grandmother, became Momma for Marguerite and her brother. It was her brother Bailey who in his toddler tongue claimed her as “Maya” (my) sister. The store was the gathering place for the African American workers on their way to and from their day’s work in the cotton fields. It was there that she learned her mathematics at the cash register and there that she and her brother learned to read and love reading, and there that they discovered that alien race with their strange and unfriendly ways that lived in the other side of town, “whitefolks.”

But her childhood in the rural South with its church revivals, community fish fries, and first friends was interrupted suddenly when their father showed up unexpectedly and told them they were going to come with him to live in California. More unexpectedly he took them and delivered them not to California, but to St. Louis. With its strange foods, doorbells, flush toilets and noisy automobiles, St. Louis was like a foreign county. It was a foreign country where their glamorous and beautiful mother lived with her family. Momma, their Johnson grandmother was a pious woman of character who feared no man but God. By contrast Grandmother Baxter was a political force in the city with influence over the police, and feared no man.

Political power, however was no protection against domestic danger. Eight-year-old Marguerite was molested by her mother’s boyfriend. The trauma sent her into silence and depression and back to Arkansas. There the regard of the educated Mrs. Flowers who encouraged her reading and plied her with tea and cooking gave her back her voice.

Her next move out of Arkansas with her brother was to California; to San Francisco where her mother now lived and one unfortunate summer visiting her father and his new girlfriend in southern California. After a falling out she spent a month homeless before returning to San Francisco. There, during the Second World War, she attended high school, through dogged perseverance became the first black conductor on the streetcars, and had a son.