I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou's turbulent experiences through late childhood and adolescence transformed into an almost positive force in her adult life as they helped enlighten, inspire, motivate and shape her very being. They provided her with the vehement fuel that drives her achingly powerful words and allowed her the knowledge and wisdom that led to self-discovery (finding one's inner self) and eventually knowledge of self (understanding one's inner self), two endeavors that most of humanity is never able or perhaps willing to acquire. In Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Marguerite Johnson experiences a particularly difficult childhood where she is often displaced geographically, socially and racially, and is even raped at a young age, yet she is able to overcome these adversities and succeed in life. Growing older, Maya becomes more aware of both the peccability and the vitality of her community. She attends a church revival throughout which a priest moralizes unreservedly against white hypocrisy through his sermon on charity and benevolence. The spiritual vigor and zeal achieved during the sermon soon disperses as the revival crowd walks home past the purlieu. Furthermore, Maya observes the entire community focusing on the Joe Louis heavyweight championship boxing match, dreadfully yearning for him to secure his title against the white man.

Maya encounters the sinister effects of racial discrimination and segregation in America at an awfully young age. Growing up in Stamps, she comes head to head with an entrenched southern racism that patents itself in formidable daily indignities and affronts, as well as petrifying lynch mobs: "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. It is an unnecessary insult" (4). This vivid assertion ends the opening section of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Although this portion, which acts as a prologue, mostly emphasizes Maya's point of view at five or six years old, this statement clearly comes from Angelou's adult voice. Looking back on her childhood experiences, Angelou notes that she not only fell victim to a hostile, racist, and sexist society, but to other social forces as well, including the displacement she felt from her family and her peers. Maya feels displaced primarily because when she was three years old, her parents sent her away to live with her grandmother. This early separation, as well as subsequent ones, leave her feeling rootless for most of her childhood. Angelou's autobiography likens the experience of growing up as a black girl in the segregated American South to having a razor at one's throat. Her constant awareness of her own displacement--the fact that she differed from other children in appearance and that she did not have a sense of belonging associated with anyone or anyplace--becomes the "unnecessary insult" that she must deal with at such a young age. Over the course of the work, Maya details numerous negative effects of such displacement, including her susceptibility to Mr. Freeman's sexual molestation. Maya often imaginatively envisions herself as a beautiful, blonde white female with blue eyes ensnared in, in her own view, a distasteful African-American human being. Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the callous struggles of being shuttled across the country from household to household. Life was incredibly demanding, but not insoluble.

The importance of Joe Louis's world championship boxing match to the black