I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

“He must have tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame.”

Uncle Willie, who had to live all his life with a muscle dysfunction, is seen by his fellow Stamps residents only through the optics of his disability. Yet he wants them to see his personality, and not his disease. As a Black man, he has to suffer from double oppression from how others perceive his race and his disability. Thus, he feels trapped in his body, just like a bird is trapped in its cage. 

“Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.” 

Deprived of parental care from an early age, Maya satisfies her need for love in her relationships with Bailey. Handsome and quick-witted, Bailey is the pride of the Johnson family. Maya, too, adores her brother, and he remains her best friend and confidante throughout the years. 

"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, and found to be safe ones. She didn't cotton to the idea that white folks could be talked to at all without risking one's life. And certainly they couldn't be spoken to insolently. In fact, even in their absence, they could not be spoken of too harshly unless we used the sobriquet ‘They.’ If she had been asked and had chosen to answer the question of whether she was cowardly or not, she would have said that she was a realist."

This quotation summarizes Momma’s attitude toward the white population and her strategy of dealing with them. While she prefers to avoid interactions with white people as much as possible, Maya doesn’t understand this approach and struggles to follow Momma’s advice. In retrospect, Maya realizes that Momma had to witness many instances of racial violence and discrimination, and these experiences forced her to pick a stance of nonconfrontation. 

“Her world was bordered on all sides with work, duty, religion and ‘her place.’ I don’t think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched.” 

This quote describes Momma Henderson as she is seen through Maya’s eyes. Although Momma is undemonstrative with her feelings, both Maya and Bailey feel her love, which manifests itself in the acts of care. Despite being strict and conservative, Momma is kind and generous not only towards her grandchildren, but towards other residents of Stamps as well.

“I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary. But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding?” 

Separated from her mother at the age of three, Maya doesn’t know her until the family is reunited four years later in St. Louis. By this time, Maya is so used to fantasizing about her mother, that she can’t quite perceive her as a living person. Maya, who has always thought of herself as unattractive, is enchanted with Vivian’s beauty, but she struggles to connect with her on the emotional level. 

“I had decided that St. Louis was a foreign country.” 

When Maya and Bailey move from rural Stamps to modern St. Louis, they marvel at the new foods and entertainment options, available in the city. Although they find this novelty exciting, they struggle to feel at home in St. Louis. By treating the place as a foreign country, Maya gives up on her attempts to associate herself with St. Louis, and instead cements her feeling of displacement.

“Then came the last visit from the visiting nurse, and the doctor said I was healed. That meant that I should be back on the sidewalks playing handball and enjoying the games I had been given when I was sick. When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness.” 

When at the age of eight Maya becomes a rape survivor, her family assumes that the girl is recovering from the incident when she physically heals. However, the rape deeply traumatizes Maya, and she is no longer the person she was before the abuse. As she refuses to speak, Maya’s family doesn’t treat her silence as a manifestation of a serious psychological condition and instead perceives it as a childish whim. This causes Maya to become even more withdrawn, and she is forced to process her traumatic experience on her own.

“It would be safe to say that she made me proud to be Negro, just by being herself.”

Growing up, Maya doesn’t have many female role models, and when she meets Mrs. Flowers, the girl is immediately enchanted. Although Maya admires her grandmother, she can’t identify with her because Momma is illiterate and overly religious. Mrs. Flowers, on the other hand, is intelligent and graceful, and Maya watches her in adoration. 

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”

Mrs. Flowers speaks these words to Maya when she tries to persuade her to come out of her withdrawal. An insightful and wise woman, Mrs. Flowers knows that in order to make Maya speak, she needs to show her why speaking aloud is important. As Maya, following Mrs. Flowers’ advice, begins to recite poetry and read aloud, her healing begins, and she rediscovers the power of written and spoken word.

"As I ate, she began the first of what we later called ‘my lessons in living.’ She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations." 

During her first meeting with Maya, Mrs. Flowers teaches the girl to appreciate not just formal education, but also folk wisdom. She encourages Maya to be an attentive listener and not to dismiss alternative ways of learning. Thus, following Mrs. Flowers’ advice, Maya gradually becomes an acute observer and a perceptive listener. 

“To be allowed, no, invited, into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist. When I said aloud, ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…’ tears of love filled my eyes at my selflessness.”

This quotation foregrounds Maya’s love for reading and her fascination with books. Although she lives in a small rural town, through reading Maya breaks barriers and explores the whole world. Since she doesn’t feel like she belongs in Stamps, books serve as a kind of escape for her. When she reads, she is transported to new, undiscovered places, and there she feels free from the oppressions of her reality. 

“I was liked, and what a difference it made. I was respected not as Mrs. Henderson’s grandchild or Bailey’s sister but for just being Marguerite Johnson.” 

This quotation marks an important step in Maya’s journey toward self-acceptance. Throughout her whole childhood and adolescence, Maya struggles with insecurity and self-doubt. She feels as if people are nice to her because she is Momma Henderson’s granddaughter or Bailey’s sister. But when Mrs. Flowers befriends Maya, she recognizes and appreciates the girl’s unique personality. Thus, the friendship transforms Maya, and helps her become more confident.

“Her name’s Margaret, goddamn it, her name’s Margaret.” 

As Maya shatters Mrs. Cullinan’s treasured family china, the woman all of a sudden remembers Maya’s real name, although prior to this, she had been calling her Mary. Mrs. Cullinan gives Maya a new name in an attempt to exercise her power over her, but Maya resists such degrading treatment. 

“People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.” 

Growing up in Stamps, Maya is surrounded by religious fundamentalism. As the local Black community suffers from daily discrimination, faith becomes their healing and coping force. For them, divine power and justice is the only antidote to the mistreatment they have to endure on Earth.

“Even if they were society's pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus, the Son of God.”

This quote foregrounds the importance of religion for the Black community of Stamps. While they have to endure hardships in their daily struggle to make a living, they console themselves with the idea of a just God who will welcome them in Heaven. Their faith is what helps the Black population of Stamps not to lose hope, and in it, they find healing and respite. 

“Graduation, the hush-hush magic time of frills and gifts and congratulations and diplomas, was finished for me before my name was called. The accomplishment was nothing. The meticulous maps, drawn in three colors of ink, learning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece —it was for nothing. Donleavy had exposed us.

We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher than we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."

When a white politician, Mr. Donleavy, is invited to speak at the grade school graduation ceremony, Maya is shocked. Instead of giving an inspiring speech, he degrades the school and its pupils, and leaves right after finishing the last sentence, demonstrating his disregard for the event. Before the ceremony, Maya felt proud of her academic achievements and hopeful about her future, but Mr. Donleavy’s speech leaves her devastated and hopeless.

"It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the white folks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us." 

As Maya listens to Mr. Donleavy deliver his speech at her graduation ceremony, she is overwhelmed with anger and disappointment. She had been looking forward to this day, and saw it as a pinnacle of her academic efforts. But Mr. Donleavy’s demeaning speech makes her feel hopeless and powerless. Moreover, in Maya’s interpretation, his words prove all the long-standing stereotypes about Black people, and Maya cannot forgive him for humiliating them so much on the day when their achievements were supposed to be celebrated. 

"The city became for me the idea of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness." 

When Maya moves to San Francisco, she falls in love with the city, and treats it as her best friend. She enjoys its atmosphere of freedom, and appreciates its diversity. San Francisco, with its energy and vibrancy, contrasts sharply with conservative, rural Stamps, and the city becomes Maya’s solace and refuge. 

“The air of collective displacement, the impermanence of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of the more recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging. In San Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something” 

This quote highlights an important moment in Maya’s struggle with her feeling of displacement. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Maya couldn’t find a place where she would feel at home, and only when she arrives in San Francisco on the eve of the Second World War, does she find a sense of belonging. The dynamic, ever-changing city becomes a place where Maya can finally find a place for herself.

“To me, a thirteen-year-old Black girl, stalled by the South and Southern Black life style, the city was a state of beauty and a state of freedom. The fog wasn't simply the steamy vapors off the bay caught and penned in by hills, but a soft breath of anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveler.”

After living in Stamps, where everyone knows each other, Maya finds freedom in the anonymity of the big city. Exposed to people from different cultural backgrounds, Maya ceases to feel like a misfit and recovers a feeling of belonging. San Francisco welcomes Maya, and among its vibrant population she finds a place for herself.

“He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.”

At first, Maya and Bailey don’t try to establish good relationships with Daddy Clidell, assuming that he is just one of many suitors who adore their mother. Yet with time, they begin to appreciate his gentle manner and unassuming character, and he becomes the first real father figure in their lives. Although he is uneducated, Clidell manages to become a thriving entrepreneur, and he provides for Vivian and her children, while treating them with care and respect. 

“Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of. I knew I knew very little, but I was certain that the things I had yet to learn wouldn't be taught to me at George Washington High School.”

This quotation marks a drastic change in Maya’s attitude toward schooling. Although she has always valued education, after working as a streetcar conductor for one semester, Maya finds it hard to return to school. Her classmates now seem to her childish, and she doesn’t see what she can learn from them. 

“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.” 

Perceptive and wise, Maya from a young age becomes aware of all the forces that she has to fight as a Black woman. Even though the adolescent years are complicated in themselves, a Black woman has to simultaneously grapple with discrimination, white supremacy, and the lack of control over her own life. Maya acknowledges that in order to succeed, she needs to overcome many more difficulties than her white peers, but this realization doesn’t make her give up, and instead empowers her to follow her path against all odds.