BOOK REPORT: "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

by Maya Angelou

I never read “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, as I believe I was supposed to in high school. I’m glad I got back to it.

Angelou, one of America’s foremost Black poets and memoirists, wrote the book at age 39 describing her very dramatic childhood. She and her brother were passed around like a hot potato between family members living in Arkansas, California, and—in a spell that does not reflect well on our beloved hometown—St. Louis. Despite the trauma of being raped as a young girl, the confusion of being Black in the south, the complicated relationship she had with her parents, and the experience of growing up dirt poor, she never abandons her belief that life is beautiful and worth living, and writing about. (Although she did contemplate suicide as a teen, following an ugly incident with her dad. In one of my favorite but most sparingly written chapters, she is rescued by a multi-ethnic group of junkyard orphans who find her sleeping in an abandoned vehicle.) Despite everything that transpires in her little life, there is a persistent seed of goodness inside her that keeps growing, even as the sky rains down sulfur. It seems that her tree is watered by a well that lies too deep for the poison to find.

What I most enjoyed about “Caged Bird” isn’t necessarily the window it opened for me into her experience as, by some measures, the lowest-ranking sort of person on the totem pole of American hierarchy: a young black girl in rural America in the pre-Civil Rights south. That impacted me, but what most enthralled was the childhood voice in which she writes. She recounts her childhood as a child. The effect is at times hilarious—as when she stands guard, confused, outside the tent where her brother is “playing family” with a neighbor girl. But it is also heart-breaking as she, among other things, describes sexual abuse at the hands of her negligent mother’s boyfriend that she couldn’t even comprehend. Courageously summoning her memories and perspective from decades prior, she details the events leading up to the act. Then she interprets them as the famed adult poet she became: “The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.”

Among other things, I finished this book more resolved to try to understand what my 13yo daughter is seeing when she looks at me and at the world. Am I adding confusion or clarity to her perspective? Am I watering or dousing the seed of hope that wants to grow in her, even as she slowly realizes—as she will—how absolutely hateful the world can be? And I emerged more determined than ever to provide the love and protection that all little girls—indeed, all people—should expect from their loved ones. Just because Dr. Angelou became one of America’s most celebrated poets doesn’t mean that she didn’t deserve better from us.

-MRH