This wasn’t really what I expected. When I saw this on the list for this fall’s Southern lit book club selections, I was excited I was finally going to fill this gap in my reading. While I think many read this in high school, it wasn’t one of the ones we covered in my classes (we read other classics like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Beloved). While I have picked up some quintessential high school reads, I never got around to this one – with a title like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I was expecting something incredibly sad and I knew that Angelou was raped as a child. The thing, though, is that while the autobiography deals with that in a very straightforward manner, I didn’t find the rest of the book too brutal – The Bluest Eye, for example, was much more devastating as a read.
I am actually a bit surprised, though, that this is such a widely chosen book for high school. This isn’t because of maturity level or subject matter but more because I found the book oddly boring at times. I’m a white 40s something woman so there is of course the target audience issue; beyond that this book is almost 60 years old (published in 1969). I have read many books that were likely influenced by this book, thus unfortunately creating the position where I think some other, more recent books have been better at showing things that may have been done first here (Oprah for example mentions feeling seen for the first time in this book). While Angelou was closer to my age when this was published (she would have been 40/41), she primarily chooses to write as if from the young child she was during the time of the story (3-17), in the moment. Rarely does the book take a moment to add hindsight or the adult perspective; it is always very much set in the moment. When Angelou does step away from the immediacy and give context, it added so much information such as when she examines the relationship the Black community had with Japanese-Americans and how the Japanese neighborhood quickly became the Black neighborhood once World War II started. The impacts of racism are always there, in the background, whether it’s whispers of lynch mobs, segregation or the limited yet frustrating interactions with the whites that bother into their area.
The book itself is told in a linear fashion, taking us through the author’s childhood but sometimes it feels more like a collection of vignettes than a narrative. Sometimes, these chapters end up revealing quite a bit about what life was like for a young Black in the South, such as the graduation scene, but other times, I couldn’t quite figure out why this particular story from her life was included.
In some ways, Maya seems an odd child; very introverted and isolated, even before her mom’s boyfriend raped her. As a result, the book is also very inward focused. There are glimpses of the community and life as a Black girl in rural 1930s Arkansas but her relationship with her community feels distant (she does have a great line about how knowing her grandmother means not knowing her because she keeps things so close), and it seems so much of Maya’s life is this mix of wanting to feel loved and wanted (after all her parents left her with her grandparents), and marching to the beat of her own drum (and in several of those instances, I couldn’t understand her thought process).
