I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

Hiya!

I sure do hope that your week has started on a high note because every new day and week is a start of fresh beginnings. So, bask in that and make the most of this week.

I started reading this biography last week and wow. You know those books that overwhelm you and you just can’t get enough of the writer’s life? This is one of those. I should have read it before reading Letter to my daughter because it was a prelude to everything that came after, for her to write to her daughter.

Dr. Maya Angelou was one of the world’s most important writers and activists. Born on 4^th April, 1928, she lived a chronicled and extraordinary life rising from poverty, racism, violence and became a renowned author, poet and play wright, civil rights activist working alongside Malcom_X, Martin Luther and memoirist. In 1969, she thrilled the world with this book that has been followed by volumes of autobiographies, essays, poems and collections of papers. She died on 28^th May, 2014 but the life she lived will remain a legacy.     

****

Wouldn’t they be surprised one day when I woke out of my black ugly dream and my real hair, which was long and blonde, would take the place of the kinky mass on my head that Momma never let me straighten? My light blue eyes were going to hypnotize them… then, they would understand why I never picked up the southern accent or spoke the common slang and why I had to be forced to eat pig tails and snouts, because I was really white and because my fairy step mother was understandably jealous of my beauty and had turned me into a too-big negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that could hold a number two pencil.

These are the confrontations that rush through Maya’s mind on stage, as she gazed out to a room filed with white parents and a few negroes, when she fails to remember the words of the poem she was meant to recite at school. She was just 10 and the crowd adored the cute white little girls in their floppy round dresses and kept aww-ing throughout their recitals. She wanted to be the cute little white girl but she failed wretchedly because the dress she wore that day exposed her long thin, black legs and made her dread the possibility of being accepted.

My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful.

****

Maya, born as Marguerite Johnson, lived with her brother Bailey, grandmother and uncle in the black community in Stamps Arkansas, USA. The first happenstance she had with her parents was when they received Christmas presents from them one Christmas and both her brother and herself, tore up the presents because they felt abandoned. They couldn’t fathom why their parents had sent them out into the world with their grandmother and cared less to check in on them. This is the life Maya knew. The life she’d grown into, to hate the white man and scramble for peanut butter cookies with the kids in the neighborhood whenever the grandma made some.

In Stamps, the segregation was so complete that most black children didn’t really know what whites looked like other than that they were different, to be dreaded and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for an the ragged against the well-dressed.

The circumstances surrounding Mayas childhood and the things she saw her grandmother do, informed her desire to free the African men and women from condescending grasp of the Whiteman. Her fight for civil rights through poetry and her essays is definitely a creation of her infantile.

Momma intended to teach Bailey and me to use the paths in life that she and her generation and all the Negroes had gone before had found, and found to be the safe ones. Don’t speak insolently of the white man, even when they aren’t in the vicinity.

Maya struggled with her esteem so much so that it put her in situations that made my heart crush, for a young girl as herself, then. Bailey her brother, was always the social one, the outgoing brother who related with most crowds wherever they went. He was the lighter of the two and a very handsome chocolate color. She always felt adopted.

Anyhow, one morning, Maya and Bailey’s dad shows up at the door in Stamps and he takes them to California. It is then that they meet their beautiful mother in the arts and immediately fell in love with her. Maya thought she was too good to be real. The parents weren’t together and at that point, Baxter Johnson was staying with a man who took advantage of Maya.

The first time he held her, she felt recognized. She felt secure in his grip and the next time he did it, he was forcing himself into her ten-year-old body. His defense was that she liked him holding her. What he didn’t know was that Maya craved attention because she never got it from the parents she never grew up with, or the schoolmates in Stamps who always gave it to Bailey or her family for that matter. When he held her, she finally felt a sense of purpose. Like she belonged. After the abuse, Maya slumped into a depression and withdrawal for almost three years of her childhood.

Until she met poetry.

She met poetry from an elderly lady in Stamps who told her that reading out the poems from the books would help her slowly, reintegrate into the world she had fallen so far away from. She read her, her favorite poems and Maya knew, she belonged, in between the words, intonations of her voice and the poets.

Childhoods’ logic never asks to be proved because all conclusions are absolute… I didn’t question why Mrs. Flowers has singled me out for attention, nor did it occur to me that Momma had told her to give me a little talk. All I cared about was that she had made me tea cookies and read to me from her favorite book of poems. It was enough to prove that she liked me.

Of the many themes that stood out for me in this book, my heart cringed at this. The fact that she craved the attention she never got. We need to build a whole new generation of stability. Family should be a priority. Children who grow out of broken families have a lot going on in their lives and we need to protect our future children and the next generation from this. From having daddy issues or having an attention deficit. I’m sure that if we prioritize our families and seek to make them work, with the help of God, our children won’t have to go through this.   

Towards the end of the book and the last chapters, Maya prides herself in the lessons her mother taught her and this statement keeps resounding; Life is going to give you just what you put in. put your whole heart in everything you do and pray. Then you can wait.

****

If you’re passionate about the history of black culture, poetry, civil rights, I’m sure you’ll love this book. With the whole Black Lives Matter revolution going on right now, its important that we are more informed about this thing that we’re so vocal about.

This is a must read during this lock-down. Pleas share with me your take homes when you get round to reading it.

Cheers.