Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  Through her experiences with the strong women of Stamps, Maya “links herself to the Southern roots and history of her people—to a succession of American Negro female survivors” (Fox-Genovese 1990, 230). Her involvement with the black community in church, at the store, and at picnics empowers Angelou, enabling her to understand the rules for survival in a racist society. Through her growing awareness, she is able to articulate her observations about racism, if not aloud then at least in her thoughts. Thus, she can witness the Joe Louis fight and fear that in his possible defeat each blow to Louis’s body is like a black man being beaten or a black maid being slapped for being “forgetful” (113). It is many years before Angelou is able to put such thoughts into spoken words to share with white and black audiences.

  The episodes concerning the powhitetrash girls and Dentist Lincoln provide apt examples of Maya’s reaction to the racism coming from the white community. As a historical document, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans. Angelou presents this material by recalling racist characters so real that one can feel their presence—Mr. Donleavy, Mrs. Cullinan, and other whites whose bigotry dramatically affects Maya’s childhood and leaves such a scar on the mature Maya Angelou that when she finally returns to Stamps in 1982 to film an interview with Bill Moyers, she refuses to cross the bridge into the white part of town.

  Of the whites who affect Maya’s character, one is Mrs. Viola Cullinan, a woman Maya works for when she is ten. Mrs. Cullinan has a vast array of cups and glasses, including the ones set aside for the servants. The woman treats Maya as though she does not exist, calling her Mary or Margaret instead of her given name, Marguerite. As Maya explains, whites called black people too many other names for centuries for her to tolerate Mrs. Cullinan’s abuse. Maya tries to get fired by coming late to work, but to no avail. One day, in a moment of anger, she smashes several pieces of Mrs. Cullinan’s prized china. Dolly McPherson sees Maya’s intentional breaking of Mrs. Cullinan’s china as an affirmation of Maya’s “individuality and value.” The confrontation is necessary if Maya is to save herself from the “dehumanizing atmosphere of her environment” (1990, 45).

  Another white whose bigotry affects Maya is Mr. Donleavy, the guest speaker at the eighth-grade graduation at the segregated Lafayette County Training School. Amid all of the pride and loving detail that surround Angelou’s exquisite description of graduation day, Mr. Donleavy hangs over the event like a dense white cloud. All his ideas about education are formed along divisions of race and gender. Some first-rate baseball and football players once graduated from Lafayette County Training School, he remarks, never mentioning the black girls. He is pleased that because of his efforts, the white students at Central High School will be getting new microscopes for their laboratories. When Donleavy leaves for a more pressing obligation, having destroyed the educational dreams of the black children, Henry Reed, the valedictorian, turns to the audience and starts singing the Negro national anthem.

  Angelou, who wrote the script for the film version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, presents the graduation scene quite differently, making Maya more central to the episode and making her more rebellious than she is in the book. Maya, not Henry Reed, delivers the valedictory speech. Instead of reading her prepared remarks, she attacks Donleavy’s concepts, saying that black boys don’t need to be football players and that black girls don’t have to be cooks or housekeepers. The audience is at first shocked, and even more so when Maya, not Henry, begins to sing James Weldon Johnson’s inspirational Negro national anthem, which had been banned from public ceremonies in the schools. But they gradually join her until their voices rise in a powerful chorus. As the camera pans the faces of the proud black audience, the film ends. Sadly, Maya’s triumphant rebuttal of Donleavy’s sexist and racist beliefs was not the reality at the 1940 graduation of the Lafayette County Training School, which occurred two decades before the civil rights movement and the reluctant integration of public schools.

  There are many other white people in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, people Maya knows through direct exposure, like Mr. Donleavy, or through a general awareness of their power over her life. Most of the men, like Mrs. Cullinan’s husband, remain blurred in her memory, like “all the other white men that I had ever seen and tried not to see” (89).

  Once she leaves Stamps for the more liberated atmosphere of San Francisco, Maya discovers a few whites who are kind to her. Miss Kirwin, Maya’s civics and current events teacher at the predominantly white George Washington High School, is a “rare educator” (182). Although Maya is one of three black students, Miss Kirwin shows no favoritism. She attaches no difference to the fact that Maya is black. The adult narrator confesses that Miss Kirwin was “the only teacher I remembered” (184)—and perhaps the only white person besides Mrs. Flowers who had ever befriended her.

  Setting

  Setting includes such considerations as racial distribution, climate, work environment, and other associated factors. In Angelou’s autobiographical series, the variety of settings is remarkable, as she sweeps the reader on a magic carpet that flies from Arkansas to Ghana, with stopping points in New York, Egypt, Los Angeles, and a number of European capitals. Setting designates how the characters interact. Her rape, for example, would not likely have occurred in Stamps, Arkansas, with its close-knit community and its rigid moral code.

  The first side of the triangular setting in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings begins on a train that takes Maya and Bailey to a small Southern town. There, in Stamps, Arkansas, she is engulfed with feelings of rejection and abandonment, countered by her love for Momma Henderson, for her brother, and for poetry. In Stamps, Maya is naive and innocent. She has fantasies of power involving her grandmother and herself as they conquer racism.

  The second side of the triangle is St. Louis, Missouri, where her mother Vivian is a card dealer and her paternal grandmother is a political power in the community. Maya and Bailey attend a large school where the students are so ignorant that the “country children” from Arkansas are moved up a grade. The extended family lives together until Vivian and Mr. Freeman get a house to share with Maya and Bailey. At this juncture, Maya is left vulnerable to assault.

  The triangle is completed in San Francisco, the West Coast city that will be the central geographical focus of Angelou’s autobiographies until The Heart of a Woman. Her mother’s home furnishes the final setting for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, with three generations—Vivian, Maya, and Guy—united in a harmony that belies the separation and abandonment of Maya’s beginnings.

  Thematic Issues

  The literary theme depends for its effect on the use of repetition. In Maya Angelou’s autobiographical series, many different themes appear and reappear. The major themes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are motherhood, imprisonment, and rape.

  Probably the most consistent thematic issue found in Angelou’s autobiographies is motherhood. During much of Maya’s childhood her own mother is absent, and her conflicting feelings for Vivian Baxter are transferred to others, especially to Annie Henderson. Although Maya does not become a mother until the end of the autobiography, for most of the book she is concerned with the parenting qualities of Momma Henderson; of her brother Bailey; of her father, Bailey Sr.; of her mother, Vivian Baxter; and of other characters who either nurture her or deny her the mothering she craves—people who help her read; who clothe her; who show her the secrets of urban life. While Maya’s primary identification in Caged Bird is that of a daughter or granddaughter, these roles become secondary at the end of the book, when she becomes a black mother.

  The theme of motherhood is one of the central ideas in contemporary literature by black women. There is the mother who murders her infant in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), or the mother who strives for decent housing in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). According to Daryl C. Dance, the black mother is “a figure of courage, strength, and endura
nce,” a “Madonna” who has brought her race out of bondage and given them life (1979, 131). Mary Burgher writes that black women autobiographers have redeemed black motherhood from the myths of breeder and matriarch—always having babies, always being domineering—by revealing themselves as women who are both mothers and visionaries. Angelou and other autobiographers are “consistently expanding motherhood into a creative and personally fulfilling role” (1979, 115).

  A second major theme in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is imprisonment. Maya constantly feels caged, unable to get away from the homemade dresses she must wear to church, unable to escape the reality of her blackness. She is imprisoned by her job for Mrs. Cullinan and by her limited opportunities in a segregated school system. There are several painful scenes where she and Bailey, trapped in the church service, are conquered by hysterical laughter. At times Maya urinates at her pew as if in defiance of the restrictions imposed on her young body. She is trapped, too, by the bigotry of Stamps, whose town fathers demand that she and all African Americans live in only one section of town and attend only those schools in that part of town. Imprisoned inside her body, Maya believes that a “cruel fairy stepmother” has wickedly transformed her from a blonde child to a dark one.

  The theme of imprisonment is expressed in the title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which Angelou takes from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1896 poem, “Sympathy,” a poem about a caged bird that beats its wings against the bars. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes eloquently about Angelou’s image of the cage: “Unbreakable bars closed black communities in upon themselves, denying both the communities and the individuals who composed them access to the surrounding white world…. The cages constrained but did not stifle them” (1990, 221–22). The caged bird, a symbol for the chained slave, frequently reappears in Angelou’s writings, especially in The Heart of a Woman.

  Most critics who write about the title tend to underplay the verb sings, the last word and the one that creates an upward mood. But as we have observed, sings also suggests the survival of African Americans through the spiritual. As it is the nature of the caged bird to sing for its supper, so it is said to be the black person’s nature to make music while in bondage—to lift every voice and sing, to sing in praise of the Lord. In Dunbar’s poem, for instance, the bruised bird sings a prayer to God that it might be released.

  Although Angelou develops the singing aspects of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in her second and third volumes, she only hints at the possibilities of joyful song in the first book. For like a songless bird, Maya gives up all singing, all sound, during the five years that follow her rape. For five years she is mute, locked in a speechless body, as she has willed it. She is liberated from her caged silence only after Mrs. Flowers helps her release her voice. Listening to Mrs. Flowers read aloud, Maya describes the woman’s voice as singing: “Her voice slid in and curved down through and over the words. She was nearly singing” (84).

  A cage, as the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson warns us, restrains not only the black body but also the female black body; a black woman is doubly threatened because of her race and her gender. The third theme, rape, is a concept so forceful that it overwhelms the autobiography, even though it is presented fairly briefly in the text. The theme involves Maya’s two sexual experiences with Mr. Freeman. Both scenes are couched in metaphors, allowing her to describe her pain without having to directly speak/write about what she feels. Unable to comprehend the reality of her situation, she invents comparisons that sound like dirty jokes because they really are dirty jokes, played by a frustrated father substitute on an innocent girl.

  Maya compares his “thing” to a “brown ear of corn” (61). It feels pulpy like the “inside of a freshly killed chicken” (61). In both instances she compares what she is unsure of, the penis, to objects familiar to her rural upbringing—to corn and to chicken—as if trying to make the strangeness go away and the experience along with it.

  The most famous example of this kind of comparison is the camel/needle metaphor. Angelou writes: “The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t” (65). Mary Vermillion (1992), in her reading of the metaphor, associates the passage with the biblical parable that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Angelou’s “needle” is also a metaphor for how rape must feel to a vulnerable child. If Maya’s vagina (her body) is like a needle’s eye and Mr. Freeman’s penis is like a camel, then there is a repulsive physical implication behind the metaphor. Angelou has found the appropriate image to convey the horror of a child’s flesh being ripped by an enlarged, thrusting penis. The child (needle) gives because the rapist (camel) cannot.

  Literary Style

  The literary style in Caged Bird is rich, humorous, intense, and engaging. Sometimes Angelou’s language is frightening, as in the camel metaphor, or vicious, as in the white dentist’s remark that he’d “rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s” (160). Angelou’s use of the tabooed and inhuman word nigger is meant to emphasize the clash between the dentist’s presumed profession as healer and the low-level nature of his language and philosophy.

  Another feature of her style, evident in the depiction of the dentist, is the use of sharp and direct dialogue to convey the distinctive language of a character. Although dialogue is a stylistic feature throughout Angelou’s entire autobiographical series, it seems most dynamic in Caged Bird, owing to the string of such wild-speaking characters as Sister Monroe, Mrs. Cullinan, or Dentist Lincoln.

  As the discussion of Maya’s rape looked closely at the use of language to communicate overwhelming pain, so the comparison of Negroes to dogs places Angelou’s use of language within the stylistic tradition of black protest literature. In much African American literature, one finds the theme of dehumanization, meaning the state of being denied human qualities such as intelligence and sensitivity. Thus, the hero of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (1944) is depicted as less than human: he crouches in a sewer and gnaws on a pork chop bone, as do dogs. Claude McKay, in his poem “If We Must Die” (1919), uses a series of animal references to convey the dehumanization of black men in America—hogs, barking dogs, and packs of doglike men—to emphasize the ferocity of whites and the victimization of blacks.

  There are a number of such references in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. At the beginning of the book, Bailey and Maya wear instructions on their wrists announcing their names and destination: like cattle, they are named and branded. Maya, who initially pities her mother’s lonely boyfriend, compares him to some cute little pigs who were slaughtered in Stamps for sausage. After the trial, Grandmother Baxter calls Freeman a “mad dog” (72). These comparisons are precise, exact. In fact Angelou’s most valued technique as a stylist may be the precision with which she describes objects or places, a precision so sharp that readers carry the descriptions with them, even when the book is closed. Her observations are sensual, keen to the essences of smell, sound, and sight. Her writing resembles a series of photographs or fragments of music: snapshots taken from many angles, notes played from a variety of instruments.

  Although Sondra O’Neale (1984) claims that Angelou for the most part avoids a stereotypical black vocabulary, and that her style reflects the rich language of her literary models (Poe, Dunbar, Dostoyevsky, to name a few), readers should have ears tuned to the folksy charm of the dialogue in Caged Bird—to Angelou’s drawing on Southern speech patterns such as Momma’s saying “didn’t cotton to” (39) or “he gonna be that kind of nasty” (164). The narrator of Caged Bird projects a youthful exuberance as she harvests one figure of speech after another from her fertile imagination.

  Reports from newspapers and Internet sources suggest that not all readers have appreciated the effectiveness of Angelou’s language. An Edgewater, Maryland, mother has campaigned against Caged Bird being a required book in South River High School because it is “sexually explicit, r
acially divisive and too graphic about lesbianism” (Gross 1997, A1). In Mebane, North Carolina, in the state where Angelou once lived, wrote, and taught, similar charges were brought against her poetry. Threatened with losing his job for bringing Angelou’s poetry to class, a fourth-grade teacher apologized: “I never in my wildest dreams thought that anybody who would read a poem at the presidential inauguration could write such filth” (http://www.blackvoices.com/thenews/97. Web. July 6, 1997).

  Unhappily, this fear of Angelou’s truth-telling has been spreading as white parents discover her power and confront the anger of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a black classic written almost five decades ago. One news source, summarizing the censorship of Angelou’s first autobiography, claims that it was the book “most frequently challenged in schools in the 1995–1996 academic year” (http://www.planetout.com/pno/newsplanet/article.html/1998/01/13/4. Web. January 4, 2013).

  These objections to Caged Bird from parents and school boards lead to a final aspect of Angelou’s style, one that distinguishes it from so many other autobiographies. That is its element of candor, of openness, as though she were telling the truth and nothing else—“as if” because Angelou the autobiographer often alters the “truth” for artistic reasons. What matters from a literary standpoint is not the question of Angelou’s telling the absolute truth but rather her gift of convincing readers of the narrator’s desire to be accurate, so that her rape becomes a believable account of a young black girl’s horrifying experience. Profanity and sexual references are a necessary part of this experience.