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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1)

Maya Angelou

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. Week 9: Female Author

* Week 9: Introduction
By Jessica · 11 posts · 207 views

last updated Mar 02, 2015 12:01AM

* Week 9: Progress Post
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last updated Oct 27, 2015 04:32AM

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What Members Thought

Jun 24, 2017 Heather Godwin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir-biography

The first 3/4 of this book is amazing.
I love Maya's voice, she creates amazing scenes and feelings through her words and imagery.
This was her first book I've read, having loved her poetry long before and I can't believe I never read this before.

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.

During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was m The first 3/4 of this book is amazing.
I love Maya's voice, she creates amazing scenes and feelings through her words and imagery.
This was her first book I've read, having loved her poetry long before and I can't believe I never read this before.

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.

During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois' “Litany at Atlanta.” But it was Shakespeare who said, “When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.” It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.

The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.

“Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That's good, but not good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”

The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. Any break from routine may herald for them unbearable news. For this reason, Southern Blacks until the present generation could be counted among America's arch conservatives.

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 whitefolks 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.

It was the poem written by James Weldon Johnson. It was the music composed by J. Rosamond Johnson. It was the Negro national anthem.

Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

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