I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Survival and Self-Worth

Introduction: The Caged Bird as Metaphor

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been widely classified as an African-American autobiography, chronicling the experiences of a young Black girl in 1930s America. While undoubtedly the work is a valuable contribution to the genre of African-American history — describing as it does the plight of Black women living during a time of racial and sexual oppression — it is primarily a tale of survival. By choosing to render an honest account of her own painful insecurities as a child, along with her frequent encounters with racism, sexism, and classism, Angelou takes her readers through the process by which she learned to value herself and develop a sense of self-worth. Thus, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an inspiring work about the human ability to rise above even the most painful of circumstances.

Angelou approaches her journey toward self-worth almost chronologically, beginning at the age of three when she and her brother Bailey are sent to their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The very opening sets the tone for the revelations that follow. A young girl, dressed in a taffeta dress, stands before a congregation at church, asking, "What are you looking at me for?" (1). The words chosen to frame the sentence reveal the child's painful self-consciousness, a fact confirmed by her hasty flight from the scene. Angelou follows through on this dramatic exposition by explaining the sense of ugliness and insecurity that plagued her during those early childhood years.

Indeed, Angelou's description of her self-image evokes the reader's heartfelt sympathy for a young child who was made to feel ugly by a world that equated beauty with white skin and blue eyes: "Wouldn't they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn't let me straighten? My light blue eyes were going to hypnotize them…." (4–5). Maya Angelou thus begins her autobiography with an opening scene that sets the stage for understanding her feeling of being imprisoned in a cage.

Childhood Displacement and Racial Terror

For Angelou, her perceived lack of beauty was not the only reason she felt like a caged bird. Sent away to a strange place by divorced parents, both Maya and her brother Bailey endure the pain of rejection and guilt typical of young children separated from their biological parents. As the adult Maya reminisces, "if growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat" (6). Angelou is likely referring to her "displacement" on more than one level, for as her narrative unfolds she gives the reader an acute sense of the displacement suffered by the entire Black community.

Viewed through the eyes of the young Maya, the reader gains a vivid sense of the effects of racial segregation on the Black community. Forced to live in separate neighborhoods, send their children to segregated schools, and travel apart from the white community, it is hardly surprising that the Jim Crow era did little to improve race relations, especially in the South. Angelou's portrait of a young girl who wondered whether white people were real brings to life the degree of discrimination that was practiced: "I remember never believing that whites were really real" (20).

Angelou's work also provides horrific insight into the terrorization of Black folk by the racist South of the 1930s. She achieves this by recounting several incidents that reveal the degree to which racism aroused both fear and hatred. When Bailey comes home late one evening, for instance, it is apparent that Momma's anger at him stems more from fear that a lynch mob has victimized him than from ordinary parental concern. Both Bailey and Maya learn the meaning of fear, hatred, and alienation all too soon. They witness more than any young child in his or her formative years should ever have to see, as evidenced by Bailey's encounter with a white man's delight over the mutilated corpse of a Black man.

Not surprisingly, Momma tries to teach the young children to keep a safe distance from white folk: "Momma intended to teach Bailey and me to use the paths of life that she and her generation and all the Negroes gone before had found…to be safe ones" (39).

Trauma, Silence, and the Power of Literature

Life was to prove full of yet more pitfalls for the young Black girl, already suffering from a low self-image and an awareness of her community's conflict with a more powerful segment of society. Taken to live with her mother in St. Louis, the lonely child responds to Mr. Freeman's embrace hoping that she has at last found a loving father figure. The embrace, however, turns into rape the second time he holds her, and the child becomes even more displaced. Besides the trauma of the rape itself, Maya harbors misplaced guilt over Mr. Freeman's subsequent death: "Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people…. I had to stop talking" (85).

The seven-year-old proves as good as her words and retreats into total silence. It is not hard to imagine the trauma of a child who had already lived almost a lifetime's worth of pain — the consequences of a low self-image, racism, and now abuse. At this point the reader is left wondering whether this particular life is headed for a tragic ending. Instead, Maya's silence turns out to be a turning point. Sent back to Momma in Stamps, Angelou recalls the year she spent in her own silent world until Mrs. Flowers took an interest in her and introduced her to the world of literature.

It is clear that literature, though initially an avenue of escape, opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the young Maya. As she observes, "language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone that separates him from the lower animals" (95). Literature, along with her own desire to escape a life caged by society and feelings of inadequacy, lays the foundation for Maya's ultimate path of resistance. She repeatedly acknowledges the strong role models she found in Momma, Vivian, and Mrs. Flowers.

Works Cited

Angelou, M. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Bantam Books, 1969.