Racism In Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” Essay, Research Paper

Racism in Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”

Maya Angelou, the current poet laureate of the United States, has become for many people an exemplary role model. She read an original poem at the inauguration of President Clinton; she has also appeared on the television show “Touched by an Angel,” and there read another poem of her own composition; she lectures widely, inspiring young people to aim high in life. Yet this is an unlikely beginning for a woman who, by the age of thirty, had been San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor; an unmarried mother; the madam of a San Diego brothel; a prostitute, a showgirl, and an actress (Lichtler, 861927397.html). Her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings argues persuasively that what made Angelou’s pursuit of her exceptionally high potential so unconventional — as well as so inspiring — was the racism that seemed determined to keep her down.

In her book, an autobiography, Angelou paints a vivid picture of a poor black girl who, with her brother Bailey, was sent to live with their grandmother in Arkansas while her mother, an entertainer, pursued a much faster life in California. The little girl, called Ritie (short for Marguerite; “Maya” was her brother’s name for her), had the peculiar experience of growing up in a black community whose rules were laid down by white people Maya hardly ever saw. As a website on Angelou’s life and works observes, “White people were more than strangers — they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen, they ruled” (“Discussion,” caged.html)

Consequently, she experienced racism in no uncertain terms. In Chapter 17, Angelou describes how her brother Bailey stayed out late one night, long after the curfew blacks had to observe in order to avoid being lynched by white supremacists. Bailey wasn’t caught by the whites, but he was caught by his Uncle Willie, who whipped him to impress upon him the importance of never doing anything so foolish again.

In another instance, Angelou describes an incident in which she had a terrible toothache from two abscessed teeth. Since her grandmother (whom Maya called “Momma”) had once loaned money to a white dentist, Momma decided to take Angelou to him to see if he would treat her teeth, despite the fact that white doctors did not normally treat blacks. The dentist refused, telling Momma that “he’d “rather stick [his] hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s” (Angelou, 160).

In another instance, a group of “po’ white trash children” confront Momma at her store, taunting her. As Renee Barlow notes, “They were represented as clownish, dirty, and rather silly. On the other hand, Mama simply stood like a rock and sang the Gospel. Her beauty of soul versus their disgusting antics creates a powerful scene about the nature of the oppressed and the oppressor. Marguerite, meanwhile, lies crouched behind the screen in agony at the inability of her class to command respect simply because of their color. Then, as the scene progresses, she understands that in spite of the disparity of power between the po’white trash and Mama, Mama has won” (Barlow, 861927397.html). She has won not because she has outsmarted the white youths or even — strictly speaking — overpowered them, but because she has outclassed them.

This is a powerful lesson for a child to learn, and one that would stand Maya in good stead all her life. Because of her color, she learned young that she would always be considered a second-class citizen in the white world. But that did not mean she needed to BE a second-class citizen. She grew up to be second-class to no one.

Angelou relates another anecdote that occurred later in her life, in which she was able to stand up for herself and her autonomy. While she was working for a white family as a maid, the family decided they’d rather call her Mary. Angelou explained that Mary wasn’t her name, but they didn’t care. Such a situation had a long history under slavery, when it was common to change a slave’s African name — or even the name he was called by his previous owners — without any consent on the part of the slave himself. Pierre Walker notes that “Since slavery relied on a belief that those enslaved were not really human beings, slave narrators . . . emphasized the fact that they themselves were humans who deserved to be treated as such. Since emancipation, African American authors have used the same strategy to fight the belief in racial hierarchies that relegated them to second-class citizen status” (Walker, 91). Angelou decided that she at least needed the dignity of being called her own name, and consequently she quit her job.

But the development of Maya’s proudly actualized self was not a smooth process by any means. An critical incident in her life occurred when, at the age of eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend — an event she relates in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. As Sarah Nichols notes, “The language used in the scene is hardly explicit, yet it does deal with a sensitive issue and evokes a strong emotional response. As [Angelou] describes the pain and the confusion of the situation, one cannot help but feel sorry for the naive and hurt child” (Nichols, 861927397.html).

At that time one wouldn’t have expected anyone to be interested in the welfare of a young black girl. Yet Maya is actually called to testify to what Mr. Freeman has done to her, and she is bitterly disappointed in herself that she cannot tell the full truth; whereas he actually abused her twice, she only admits to one instance. The trauma following this unreasonable demand on such a young child causes her to fall psychologically mute for five years. While such an experience would be traumatic for any little girl of any ethnic background, it is particularly so for Maya because she already suffers from low self-esteem because of her race.

Nonetheless, Angelou does not want the rape to cast a despairing pall over what she really intends to be an inspirational success story. As she once said, she uses “one specific incident to control the book (the rape) but with an underlying implication that the incident will not control a life” (Angelou, cited in angelou.htm).

Pierre Walker observes that it is somewhat unusual for an autobiography like Angelou’s to be arranged in any sequence other than a chronological one. Yet, as he points out, Angelou’s arrangement of anecdotes makes good sense intuitively, even if it violates a strict observance of chronology: “Caged Birds commentators have discussed how episodic the book is, but these episodes are crafted much like short stories, and their arrangement throughout the book does not always follow strict chronology.(7) Nothing requires an autobiography to be chronological, but an expectation of chronology on the reader’s part is normal in a text that begins, as Caged Bird does, with earliest memories. Nevertheless, one of the most important early episodes in Caged Bird comes much earlier in the book than it actually did in Angelou’s life: the scene where the ‘powhitetrash’ girls taunt Maya’s grandmother takes up the book’s fifth chapter, but it occurred when Maya ‘was around ten years old’ (23), two years after Mr. Freeman rapes her (which occurs in the twelfth chapter). Situating the episode early in the book makes sense in the context of the previous chapters: the third chapter ends with Angelou describing her anger at the ‘used-to-be-sheriff’ who warned her family of an impending Klan ride (14-15), and the fourth chapter ends with her meditation on her early inability to perceive white people as human (20-21). The scene with the ‘powhitetrash’ girls follows this (24-27), indicating how non-human white people can be. But if that was all that motivated the organization of her episodes, Angelou could as easily have followed the meditation on white people’s non-humanity with the episode where young Maya breaks the china of her white employer, Mrs. Cullinan. What really organizes chapters three through five is that Angelou presents the futility of indignation and the utility of subtle resistance as ways of responding to racism” (Walker, 91). This organization also makes the narrative seem less like the story of someone’s personal life and more like a universal experience.

Through her travels, Maya sees for herself that racism exists wherever one goes. Although the foundation of her childhood is laid in Stamps, she also spends time with her mother and father in more cosmopolitan areas, as Sara Carey observes: Rotating between the slow country life of Stamps, Arkansas and the fast-pace societies in St. Louis, Missouri and San Francisco, California taught Maya several random aspects of life while showing her segregated America from coast to coast” (Carey, careycaged.html). The only way to escape it, Angelou learns, is to cultivate the person one is inside and become that person on the outside as well.

Angelou was privileged to have family that loved her, and a sense of rootedness in that. Sara Carey writes that Angelou had “the perspective of growing up as a southern Negro girl in three radically different [environments]: Stamps, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Maya’s protective and unadorned world in Stamps helped her hold sacred and moral family values . . . . [while living with her mother in the city] helped her control her ‘tender heart’ and emotions” (Carey, careycaged.html).

Carey observes that “In California, Maya experienced an entirely different perspective on life, where gamblers, hustlers, prostitutes, and gangsters all earned respectable titles and respect. Maya once heard the stories from the best con-artists in the country who cheated malicious, bigoted white men out of everything they owned. In the evenings after her school work was finished, and she never had any chores to do like in Stamps, her mother would take her out dancing and teach her to jitterbug in smoke and whiskey filled dance clubs. In Stamps, this wild way of life would be considered immoral to all religious and simple folk like Momma” (Carey, careycaged.html). Yet Carey adds that “Maya always seemed happiest in Stamps with her grandmother” because it was a bastion of security for her (Carey, careycaged.html). No matter where she wound up in her life, she could always fall back on her sense of identity developed in her grandmother’s home.

Ironically, it was the restricted yet “safe” environment of Stamps that gave her birdlike spirit wings. The title of Angelou’s book came from a poem by nineteenth-century black poet Paul Dunbar, who ironically was caged by his color into the persona of his verse; because the white world expected a black poet to “sound black”, Dunbar was forced into making a living writing “dialect verse” although he could write perfectly lovely literary poetry.

Angelou refused to play by those rules. Throughout her life she tended to knock down barriers, and yet as we read we realize that in most cases these barriers were not knocked down at the time Angelou is living them, but only later, after she has had time to reflect on them and present them to us. When she tells the anguished details of her life story, and echoes the Bible’s lament over suffering, “How long, oh God, how long?” (Angelou, 111), Maya’s indignation becomes our own, and it is we ourselves who are knocking those barriers down. Her story strikingly portrays the difference between a life spent building the solid foundation of past generations, and a life spent carving out new roles for oneself.

________. “Discussion: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Sweet Briar College Website. http://greetings.sbc.edu/book/review/caged.html

________. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” (Review). The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English Website. http://edx1.educ.monash.edu.au/VATE/pub/angelou.htm

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. (New York, NY : Bantam Books) 1971.

Barlow, Renee. “Race Relations in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/msgspool/banned/background/861927397.html.

Carey, Sara. “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” (Review). (1996). http://www.mcs.net/~prndrgst/careycaged.html.

Lichtler, Jennifer. “Maya Angelou’s Life.” http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/msgspool/banned/background/861927397.html.

Nichols, Sarah. “Censorship of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.” http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/msgspool/banned/background/861927397.html.

Walker, Pierre A. “Racial Protest, Identity, Words and Form in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.” (1995) Vol. 22, College Literature, Oct. 1, pp. 91.