Maya Angelou (13 page)

Worried that she might be a lesbian, she engages in sex with a young man from the neighborhood to disprove her fears. The sixteen-year-old girl, supported financially and emotionally by her parents, gives birth to a son, who becomes the focus of most of the remaining autobiographies.

Autobiography is generally written from the first-person point of view, the “I,” but while the “I” is the norm, it has occasionally been modified. For example, both Jamaica Kincaid, in
An Autobiography of My Mother
(1996), and Maxine Hong Kingston, in
The Woman Warrior
(1976), recount their lives from the viewpoint of their mothers. James McBride, in
The Color of Water
(1996), uses a double first-person point of view: his own autobiographical account is printed in Roman type and his mother's, also first person, is printed in italics. Through this technique, McBride is able to represent the connections and antagonisms between an African American son and his Jewish mother.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and the five succeeding volumes use the first-person narrative voice, even though there are many moments that sound more like fiction than autobiography.
Caged Bird
is told by a child who is artfully re-created by the adult narrator. From a child's perspective, Maya records her separation from her mother and father, and her strong religious and communal connections, shared with her paternal grandmother. Revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Southern black female who is at times a child, at times a mother, Maya Angelou introduces a unique point of view to American autobiography.

In classic American autobiographies—those written, for example, by the inventor/statesman Benjamin Franklin (1708–1790), or by Harvard professor Henry Adams (1838–1918)—the narrative is relayed by white men with sound family backgrounds and unlimited educational opportunities. The narrator's purpose in writing his story is to impart a model for living.
The memoirs of statesmen such as Winston Churchill (1874–1965), prime minister of England during World War II, would also fit this category.

In Angelou's case, the story is told from the unlikely perspective of a black Southern female whose chances to be someone were dreadfully limited, due to the constraints placed on the lives of African American people. And yet she is articulate, sarcastic, upsetting—not at all the kind of narrator that a frequent reader of autobiography expects. From the first moment, she records being underprivileged, an undesirable outsider. According to Sidonie Ann Smith, any black autobiographer will reveal his or her oppression in those earliest moments: “In Black American autobiography the opening almost invariably recreates the environment of enslavement from which the black self seeks escape” (1973, 367). Maya feels ugly and awkward throughout the entire first volume, although she does have flashes of self-pride, for instance when she believes that Momma Henderson is rewarding good behavior by putting her and Bailey in the front pew of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Generally, though, she considers her “black self” to be the cage that entraps her.

Similar negative self-perceptions are frequent in black female autobiography, for example, in the raw first line of Zora Neale Hurston's
Dust Tracks on a Road
(1942): “Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me” (3). For Angelou, the negative sense of self continues into the fourth volume,
The Heart of a Woman
, where she learns to appreciate more fully her changing character.

As the first-person narrator, Angelou is able to tell her unique story while at the same time sharing the contributions of black writers who came before her. From the first moments of
Caged Bird
, she establishes communication with earlier African American art forms: with the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, with the Negro spiritual, and with the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent). In that sense, the point of view becomes a collective one, the voice not only of the single autobiographer but also of the African American literary community. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes of the “collective identity of African American women” within the Southern landscape and in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou (1990, 222).

Structure relates to the shape of a narrative, to its overall design or patterns. C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon define structure as “the planned framework of a piece of literature,” determined by features like language,
formal divisions, and organization (1996, 459). The “planned framework” in Angelou's autobiographies is the concept of a journey or journeys—from south to north, from west to east to west, from place to place in the United States or across the Atlantic Ocean. In
Caged Bird
, the journey is a triangular one, almost like having a set of three thumbtacks—a map of the United States to represent California and Arkansas and Missouri. If the tacks are moved as the character Maya moves in the book, a reader can get a solid sense of how structure operates within an autobiographical text.

Each of Angelou's autobiographies relies on movement as equivalent to travel; the movement from journey to journey establishes the narrative line. In recording her momentous journey Angelou, without being directly repetitive, constantly re-creates and rewinds the structure, replaying it at different speeds and at different volumes. The idea of movement is extensive in the autobiographies, beginning with the denial of movement on the first page of
Caged Bird
—“I didn't come to stay”—to the word
traveling
, which dominates the title of the fifth volume,
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, and initiates the action in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
.

In writing
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, Angelou chooses the train ride from California to Arkansas to represent the beginning of her autobiographical journey. Eugenia Collier notes that Angelou's use of the journey is on one level an escape from an impossible circumstance, while “on another level, each is a further step in Maya's journey toward awareness” (1986, 22). Of other journeys within the triad, the trip to St. Louis in her father's car is the most terrible, for in St. Louis she is raped by her mother's boyfriend. Years later, in a journey to Mexico, this same father is present as the travel patterns again assume a sinister tone. Maya, who has never been behind the wheel of a car, maneuvers her father's car fifty miles down the mountainside because he is too drunk to drive. After she is stabbed by her father's girlfriend, she moves to a vacant lot and stays with a number of multiethnic teenagers who are also running away from unacceptable living situations. In that particular section of the book, the sense of movement—driving, stabbing, running, running away, bumping, yelling—becomes overwhelming.

Following this jolting series of events, Maya returns to Vivian and, in a desperate plan to prove she is a woman, becomes pregnant by a neighborhood boy. On the day she graduates from the summer school of Mission High School, still living in San Francisco with Vivian Baxter and Daddy Clidell, Maya leaves a note on their bed informing them that she is pregnant. After her mother and stepfather assuage Maya's fears, the mother-to-be slows down. In the quiet conclusion of
Caged Bird
, Maya lies in bed with her baby, her mother present, in a tableau of stillness that suggests the Nativity
scene. Angelou conveys the sacredness of motherhood here and in an earlier comment that she had had an “immaculate pregnancy” (245), preparing the stage for the blessed journey into motherhood that will be the underlying theme for the next volumes.

A successful plot is a whole; in the conventional work of fiction it contains a beginning, a middle, and an end, each connected to the other. In an autobiography, plot is far less necessary, since it is concerned with the concept of the self rather than with the actions the self performs. In an autobiography it becomes difficult to draw the line between character (the one who acts) and plot (the action of the story). The two elements tend to fuse together, with plot becoming dependent on the feelings and mannerisms of the narrator.

Yet as many critics have maintained, the plot of an autobiography must also, like the plot of a novel, have a beginning, a middle, and an end. For the novel, the ending can be contrived or implausible, wild or fanciful, since the novel is not guided by the dictates of rationality. For an autobiography to be of value, the ending must be consistent with the beginning and the middle. In other words, the ending must occur within the predictable limits of what the author has already revealed to the reader. Angelou ends
Caged Bird
with the altogether believable scene of Maya, her own mother at her side, lying in bed with her baby, afraid that if she falls asleep she will roll over on her infant. There are no fireworks but a lot of feeling. Few readers realized, when they read this touching last scene in 1970, that the sleeping baby represented not only the end of
Caged Bird
but the beginning of Angelou's serial autobiography. The question of how an autobiography ends is examined in each of the subsequent chapters of
The Iconic Self
.

The plot of
Caged Bird
begins when Maya and her brother Bailey arrive in Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their paternal grandmother and her crippled son, Willie. It covers thirteen years of chronological time, from Maya's third to sixteenth year. Of the various incidents in the plot that greatly affect Maya, two of them are sexual in nature: being raped on a visit to St. Louis at the age of eight, and becoming pregnant at sixteen as a result of trying to prove to herself that she is not a lesbian.

Angelou's recounting of the rape and its aftermath is brilliantly done. One might contrast Maya's rape to John Grisham's depiction of child molestation and rape in
A Time to Kill
(1992). Grisham's fictional account, though, for all its graphic detail, is told from the perspective of a white male lawyer
and not, as in
Caged Bird
, from the personal experience of a black female child. Grisham the novelist is removed from the event, while Angelou the autobiographer is painfully present.

The rape scene, so powerful in its physical and emotional impact, contains narrative elements that are magnified to the extent that the reader might think of the rape as the essence of plot. Maya's stained panties, Mr. Freeman's “cold face and empty eyes” (67), Maya's outburst in court—each of these details is loaded with action. Ironically, for Maya the rape is the ultimate learning experience. Through her pain she becomes aware of being a small girl in a world controlled by men. The violation to her undeveloped body and the guilt she feels when her uncles evidently kick Mr. Freeman to death create a negative chain of events followed by five years of silence as Maya refuses to speak. She is finally restored to language through her close relationship with Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a learned friend of her grandmother's, who liberates Maya from her wordless cavern.

The second major event in the plot is Maya's decision to test her femininity by having sex, an action that results in pregnancy. For many young women, a teenage pregnancy might end in trauma, abortion, or parental rejection. For Maya, the pregnancy ends in her mother's acceptance and the birth of her son. Sidonie Ann Smith connects the ending and the birth to Maya's affirmation of self: “With the birth of her child Maya is herself born into a mature engagement with the forces of life” (1973, 374).

It is this “mature engagement,” this “birth,” that generates character development and theme in the remaining five volumes. Depending on where Maya goes, theme and character build upon the oppositions within the mother/son relationship. No other serial autobiography places the theme of mother and child within the eye of the conflict, making it of supreme importance to the narrative(s).

Angelou's autobiographies tend to derive their form through the interaction of characters rather than through the development of a dramatic line of action. When Maya and Bailey arrive in Stamps, hungry, alone, and unprotected, their characters lack all substance. They are as empty as the name tags they wear to assert their identities.

In her evolution from child to woman, Maya Angelou fills her readers' imaginations, as have very few similar characters in American autobiography. Alfred Kazin (1964) argues that re-creating those early years offers the autobiographer the greatest incentive. Childhood, he contends, is the perfect
perspective for revealing the self, in part because the narrator derives pleasure from transferring the informed thoughts of an adult into the imaginative visions of a child. Although he is not writing about Angelou, Kazin's remarks fit her perfectly. This chapter investigates Maya's character as a child and young adult, with attention to how she acts and is acted upon in three specific areas: in the family, in the black community, and in the white community. Maya's performance in these areas reveals the diversity of her character and gives a sense of the various moods, attitudes, and strategies involved in her survival as a black child in a world manipulated by images of whiteness.

Autobiography is a genre designed to be a revelation of the self, as shaped through personal attachments, often with present or absent family members. In
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, Maya's interaction with her mother, brother, son, and grandmother tends to order and solidify her experiences. Although these are all strong relationships, Maya's ties with her grandmother are probably the most important in forming her character.

Momma Henderson is a church-going, God-fearing woman whose store is the heart of black socializing in Stamps. She has strict ideas about taking God's name in vain and even stricter ones about relating to white folks. Believing in the safe approach, Momma insists that talking to “white-folks” is taking a chance with “one's life” (39). Despite her many strengths, she is a woman who submits to racist behavior without a struggle, maintaining the submissive manners of the past. Maya is unable to accept her grandmother's position that for Southern blacks to survive in a racist society, they must develop a strategy of obedience. She disagrees with Annie Henderson's passive stance but fears how whites might react to Bailey's having witnessed a black man's death at their hands. Annie, fearing white vengeance, finally sends the children to the safety of California.