Maya Angelou (16 page)

Reports from newspapers and Internet sources suggest that not all readers have appreciated the effectiveness of Angelou's language. An Edgewater, Maryland, mother has campaigned against
Caged Bird
being a required book in South River High School because it is “sexually explicit, racially divisive and too graphic about lesbianism” (Gross 1997, A1). In Mebane, North Carolina, in the state where Angelou once lived, wrote, and taught, similar charges were brought against her poetry. Threatened with losing his job for bringing Angelou's poetry to class, a fourth-grade teacher apologized: “I never in my wildest dreams thought that anybody who would read a poem at the presidential inauguration could write such filth” (
http://www.blackvoices.com/thenews/97
. Web. July 6, 1997).

Unhappily, this fear of Angelou's truth-telling has been spreading as white parents discover her power and confront the anger of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, a black classic written almost five decades ago. One news source, summarizing the censorship of Angelou's first autobiography, claims that it was the book “most frequently challenged in schools in the 1995–1996 academic year” (
http://www.planetout.com/pno/newsplanet/article.html/1998/01/13/4
. Web. January 4, 2013).

These objections to
Caged Bird
from parents and school boards lead to a final aspect of Angelou's style, one that distinguishes it from so many other autobiographies. That is its element of candor, of openness, as though she were telling the truth and nothing else—“as if” because Angelou the autobiographer often alters the “truth” for artistic reasons. What matters from a literary standpoint is not the question of Angelou's telling the absolute truth but rather her gift of convincing readers of the narrator's desire to be accurate, so that her rape becomes a believable account of a young black girl's horrifying experience. Profanity and sexual references are a necessary part of this experience.

Feminism is a system of thought that is focused on women's rights. It insists on equality of women in the home, in the marketplace, and in those
institutions that control women's lives: education, medicine, and government. One basic feminist assumption is that women are victims in a patriarchal society, in which power is held by the father or by his male representatives in the community, and in which all important decisions are made by men. Women who contest those decisions in the quest for social change are feminists, whether they identify with the term or not.

Most scholars trace the origins of feminism to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As large groups of working men experienced democracy and freedom for the first time, women began to demand similar privileges—the right to vote, to own property, and to control their bodies and their minds (Wright 1992, 98–99). In America, the feminist movement grew but then subsided in the 1920s, after women won the right to vote.

A second wave of feminism began to surge in America in the late 1960s, at about the time that Angelou was getting ready to write
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. Called the New Women's Movement, this revival of feminism was indebted to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with its grassroots appeal and its strategies for social change. After a number of black women refused to accept inferior positions in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, the two leading civil rights groups, a split occurred along gender lines. Many black women separated themselves from male authority and formed their own organizations on campuses and in the community.

The heroine of
Caged Bird
arrived on the literary scene in 1970, at the very moment when women in America were creating black sister's leagues or forming small discussion groups to share their experiences of oppression under the patriarchal order. Emerging American feminists, most of them white, were getting ready to learn, to discuss, and to listen. In an editorial from
Women: A Journal of Liberation
, a group of Baltimore feminists claimed that the “women's movement has provided a vehicle for self-realization and a growing collective consciousness, out of which we can form a new culture, with goals that ultimately stand in opposition to the goals of capitalism” (1972, l). The time was indeed ripe for
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
.

Angelou herself worked with pro-African women's groups through her affiliation with the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH). The women of CAWAH organized a sit-in at the United Nations building in New York after Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Zaire, was assassinated. Angelou also accepted a leadership role in the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr. invited her to become Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It is unlikely
that she affiliated with groups exclusively defined as feminist. When asked if she is a feminist or if she supports the feminist cause, Angelou has been vague. She told Jeffrey M. Elliot that she considers black women to be more self-reliant than white women. She also believes in “equal pay, equal respect, equal responsibility” for everyone (1989, 93). As for her being a feminist, Angelou had a practical but elusive comment: “I am a feminist. I've been female for a long time now. I'd be stupid not to be on my own side” (Forma, quoted in Elliot 1989, 162).

A feminist reading of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
raises a number of questions relating to women and their social conditions. First, does
Caged Bird
develop themes of specific relevance to women? Second, is
Caged Bird
centered around a strong, aware female character or characters? Third, do the women characters bond with other women in an effort to change conditions under patriarchy?

The first question, is
Caged Bird
's theme relevant to women? is emphatically answered in the text. Momma Henderson's nurturing of her granddaughter mirrors the mother/daughter relationship that forms the emotional foundation of feminism. As Marianne Hirsch argues, feminists must “find ways to speak as mothers” if they ever hope to estimate and understand women's differences (1989, 195). Maya is daughter, granddaughter, and finally mother as she charts her development as a woman. She is concerned with the women in her community, even though she sometimes sees their lives as limited. Like the majority of women, she gives birth to a child. Because the various plot strands in
Caged Bird
are tied to the theme of motherhood, it is an excellent example of a feminist book.

With regard to the second question, does the central female character of
Caged Bird
project a strong, positive image of women? Probably not. In one of the most quoted phrases from the book, she describes herself as an “ugly black dream” (2). Unfortunately, Maya shows contempt for herself in the parts of the autobiography that take place in Stamps and St. Louis, for reasons that have to do with her racial and sexual experiences. When she is raped by Mr. Freeman, Maya's self-esteem plunges to the point where she refuses to speak. Not until she regains her voice and moves to California does her sense of self-worth expand. Although Maya is to some degree a negative character, she is a potential feminist because she is aware of the forces in society that are working against her.

In answer to the third question, does the character in the autobiography form bonding relationships with other women? Maya does bond with other women on a close, personal level, but she and the other women of Stamps are unable to affect any major changes in the patriarchy. Black women in the
late 1930s, although they could influence each other's lives, had no power to question the social order because the people in power were white and racist. There were no civil rights laws to protect political dissenters in Arkansas. Were a woman to challenge the system in Stamps, Arkansas, in the 1930s or 1940s, she might end up dead. Only years later, when Maya leaves Stamps and goes to California, does she challenge the patriarchal order by becoming the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.

On a personal level, there are significant bonding relationships among women. The bonding that takes place between Maya and Mrs. Flowers clearly supports the reading of
Caged Bird
as a model for feminist autobiography. Mrs. Flowers is the primary example of feminism in Stamps: she is independent, she has the economic resources to survive on her own, she respects herself, and she cares about other women, to the extent that she takes control of Maya's education, helping her to read and regain her own voice. Without her, Maya would never have become a writer.

At the end of the narrative, Maya returns to her mother, Vivian Baxter—city woman, blackjack dealer, and free spirit. She is able to draw from Vivian Baxter the strength and support she needs as she prepares to have a baby. Thus,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, which begins with the separation of mother and daughter, ends in their bonding. The mother/daughter/infant triangle of the final scene marks the completion of Maya's journey to womanhood. Although she is still fearful and dependent, she shows signs of being able to control her life as a black woman.

Chapter 4

Gather Together in My Name
begins in San Francisco shortly after the end of World War II. The illusion of racial equality in San Francisco during the war years begins to vanish. With white soldiers reclaiming their lives as civilians, black workers were expected to return to their farms and black military heroes to their ghettos. Angelou's prefatory observations about race and the job market are intended to place the autobiographer within a historic framework, with her personal economic situation echoing the postwar decline of African American society.

At seventeen, Maya is looking for a job that will bring her recognition, money, and independence, but she lacks the skills necessary to achieve these goals in a dominant white economy. In addition, she believes, as do many young women, that to achieve her own goals she must leave her mother and stepfather, who have supported her, and define a new life for herself and for her two-month-old son. Leaving her family thus creates a double bind for the struggling single mother; she depends on them, but at the same time she wants to be independent.

Gather Together
traces Maya's emergence into the world of work, carefully recounting her pursuit of economic stability as she moves from job to job—from Creole cook, to dancer, to prostitute, to fry cook. During the course of the autobiography she sometimes acts irresponsibly, endangering the safety of her son, who is kidnapped by a babysitter. She also exposes herself to a number of risky relationships with men: a dancer, a married man who sells stolen clothes, and a vein-scarred drug user.

At the end of
Gather Together
, she is finally saved when her most reliable friend, Troubador Martin, demonstrates the dangers of drug addiction by walking her through a heroin den. Shocked and repentant, Angelou, in a promise to reclaim her innocence, abandons her degenerate life and vows to return with her son to her mother's protection.

In
Gather Together in My Name
, Angelou continues but alters the point of view of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Caged Bird
is the first-person account of a child who becomes a mother;
Gather Together
is the first-person account of that mother and her struggle to survive as a black woman in white America. Thus, the autobiographical form makes a surprising leap away from the growing pains of the sensitive child narrator of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
to the survival tactics of the continuation of the narrative. Despite the difference, Angelou continues, as in
Caged Bird
, to challenge the norm of standard American autobiographies, in which the narrator is usually a prominent, educated white male.

The Maya of
Caged Bird
is easily recognizable as a child growing up in rural America whose experiences of abandonment and rape make her as memorable, in her way, as Mark Twain's adventuresome Huckleberry Finn is memorable in his. The Maya of
Gather Together
is a different kind of person, one who has come of age, a survivor whose endurance is representative of a new class of black women. The point of view thus changes from that of an engaging girl to a sexy, willful mother who is the same person but dramatically different. Angelou's unorthodox altering of the growing-up pattern or
Bildungsroman
by way of a sequel surprised her critics, many of whom never guessed that the author would transform the girl from Stamps into the loose-living mother from California.