Arkansas - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still, 
and his tune is heard on the distant hill, 
for the caged bird sings of freedom.” 

Every state in the union has a history of racial animosity, violence, or institutionalized racism dating back to colonial times. Some states more than others have a particularly sordid reputation and history of civil rights abuses dating well beyond the Civil War, into the 20th century and even into today. One of these states would be Arkansas.

1919 was a year already plagued by racial violence and riots throughout the country, but the most violent of these incidences would happen in Phillips County, Arkansas. Approximately 100 black farmers met at a church near the town of Elaine to meet with the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America and discuss ways to reach fairer land settlements with white land owners. Two deputized white men arrived, presumably to spy on the meeting due to the fear that there were plans of a "black insurrection." Shots were eventually fired, and one of the white men killed. This quickly tumbled into the Phillips County sheriff leading into town an armed posse that began shooting black men on site; estimates range that anywhere from 200 to 800 black men were killed, along with 5 white men. 122 men, all black, were indicted for various levels of murder by a white-only state grand jury; 12 were sentenced to death after deliberations lasted less than an hour. The NAACP appealed many of these cases and had the original sentencing overturned by the Supreme Court, although many had to flee the state to avoid another wave of vigilante justice.

Perhaps more famous, or infamous, is the story of the Little Rock Nine. Following the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v Board of Education, the Little Rock School District approved a plan to integrate its public schools to comply with the ruling. The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, opposed this plan and enacted the National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower would then mobilize members of the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army, which both provided an escort to the nine students and federalized the National Guard, removing the 10,000 member body from Faubus's control. Faubus would continue to battle desegregation, and with the help of the state legislature passed a bill that closed all Little Rock public schools during a period now known as the Lost Year. When schools re-opened, black students were met with a renewed sense of animosity from their white counterparts. To them, it was the black students that were at fault for the schools closing, rather than the systemically racist government that ultimately made that decision.

The issues of racial strife and self-segregation continue to have their presence in Arkansas. Bill Clinton has been jokingly referred to by many as the "first black president" given his growing up in the majority-black city of Hope. The city of Harrison is the location of the national headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan and recently made headlines for billboards promoting white pride organizations. Arkansas's history and racial characteristics inevitably made its way into literature that is based in or around the state, such as the works of Maya Angelou.

As a piece of autobiographical fiction (that is, an autobiography with elements similar to fiction novels,) Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings gives readers a dramatized yet real-life glimpse into the challenges of growing up black in rural Arkansas. Set between the time when Angelou was 3 to 16 years old, the novel follows her and her brother as they experience various coming-of-age situations that challenge their senses of identity and status in a time and setting where racial tensions were still very prevalent.

"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." 

The novel starts with Angelou and her brother, Bailey, living with their grandmother they affectionately refer to as Momma in the rural town of Stamps, which is so racially segregated that Angelou was unaware white people existed for the first several years of her childhood. From an early age, Angelou and Bailey have never known a real home. They were sent to Stamps by their parents following their divorce, left as the charge of a porter hired to take care of them. The porter eventually abandoned them somewhere in Arizona, where they then had to hitch trains with only a piece of paper with their final destination written on it and stapled to their clothes. Angelou is bullied by the other black children in Stamps, despite Momma being the de facto matriarch of the black area of town. Her handicapped Uncle Willie, who lives with them, is also the brunt of jokes on account of his disability. Combined with Angelou and Bailey being distraught and confused as to why or how their parents could send them away, the young Angelou struggled with feeling like she ever truly belonged in Stamps.

Making matters worse is Angelou's realization at a young age that life as a black person in a racially segregated town presents unique challenges and burdens. A former white sheriff stops by Momma's general store one night to warn the family that an all-white mob are looking for a black man who acted inappropriately with a white woman, and were placing the blame on Uncle Willie on account of being an easy scapegoat. The family has to quickly hide Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin, lest he be beaten and likely lynched by the mob. Another incident shows Momma, although widely respected throughout the town as a successful businesswoman in the black community, being verbally harassed by a group of white children with one girl going so far as to flash her privates at her. These incidents begin to build a frustration in Angelou and Bailey with the "burden" of being black. All of these frustrations, along with the feeling of abandonment by their mother and father, leads Angelou to destroy the doll of a white, blonde girl her mother sends them for Christmas one year.

This feeling of isolation doesn't limit itself to Stamps. Angelou and her brother eventually move to St. Louis during the middle of Prohibition to live with their mother Vivian. Although kind and affectionate towards Angelou and Bailey, Vivian's friends are involved in organized crime, and their "meanness" personally affects Angelou and limits her ability to consider St. Louis home. This is made worse when Vivian's live-in boyfriend begins sexually molesting and eventually rapes Angelou. Mr. Freeman, the boyfriend, is tried and convicted for rape, but is soon found beaten to death. It's quickly understood that Freeman's outcome was at the hands of her mother's friends. Angelou's thoughts that she might be the only person responsible for these events causes her to go voluntarily mute, her reasoning being that confessing and testifying to the rape lead to the death of a man, so speech should be limited so bad things don't happen again. This eventually frustrates her mother, who decides to send Angelou and Bailey back to Stamps.

Although Angelou begins to develop during this second period of Stamps, having overcome her muteness with the help of the town's own black aristocrat and making her first real friend aside from her brother, it's not until Angelou and her family move to San Francisco that she begins to feel like she finally belongs somewhere. With World War 2 just having started, San Francisco experiences a radical shift in demographics: white men are sent to war, the Japanese are displaced due to the government's internment programs, and African Americans move in to take advantage of the new employment opportunities. Angelou makes history by being the city's first black streetcar operator, which gives her a newfound sense of purpose and responsibility that she had never experienced before. She excels in her studies and graduates early at 16. Her mother's new boyfriend becomes the closest thing to a father-figure that Angelou ever had. The novel ends with her becoming pregnant after a curious fling with a stranger, and the newfound role of motherhood fills her with amazement and the greatest feeling of belonging of all.

"The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all these common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence."

Viewed from a wide lens, there's quite the contrast between I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and another book mentioned on this blog: To Kill a Mockingbird. While both books follow the stories of young women experiencing prejudices and growing up in the rural south, the similarities more or less end there. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout has the benefit of growing up white with a prominent and highly respected lawyer for a father, and her experiences with prejudice are limited to the ones that Atticus introduces her to or she accidentally stumbles across with her brother. Angelou doesn't have this luxury. The prejudices she experiences are encountered first hand, whether they happen to Momma, Bailey, Uncle Willie, or even herself. Scout had the benefit of growing up during the Depression in a stable household with friends and neighbors. Angelou never felt like she had a home until late into her teenage years, which had burdened her with a debilitating sense of displacement.

Angelou's childhood in Stamps is a constant stream of events that make her realize at a young age that being born both black and female is a curse. As mentioned above, she has to help the family hide Uncle Willie from a white mob. She watches as Momma, the woman who she thought everyone respected and looked up to, is accosted by white children who otherwise had nothing to their names besides being white in a segregated town. At the age of 10, she takes up a housekeeping job with a white woman who treats her as a servant, even going so far as to take Angelou's sense of identity away from her by calling her "Mary" rather than Maya. At her 8th grade graduation, a white public figure brings up how the white schools have received additional funding for state of the art science equipment, and the black schools are turning out nationally famous athletes.

There is one significant similarity between the two books, and that's how both Scout and Angelou come to realize the strength of their relatives. Just like Scout learns that Atticus is something more than just her father, Angelou realizes the same with Momma. Although distraught about how the white children treat Momma, she's amazed at how Momma handles the situation by ignoring the children and humming a Gospel tune to herself. When Angelou has to be taken to a white dentist for a toothache, Momma reminds the dentist that it would be a mistake to turn them away given how much money she, a black woman, had loaned him, a white man, in the past. This incident causes Angelou to look at Momma like "a superhero" who's more than a caretaker, but also an inspiration.

"I wouldn't miss Mrs. Flowers, for she had given me her secrete word which called forth a djinn who was to serve me all my life: books."

Something that's a repeating theme in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the importance of literature as an emotional outlet. From a young age, Angelou turns to reading as a way to escape her feelings of displacement. When she moves to St Louis, she avoids the uncertainty of living around her mother's mobster friends by staying shut in at the library, reading fairy tales that give her courage. When she enters her state of muteness following the trauma of her rapist's trial and murder, Bertha Flowers, Stamps's black aristocrat mentioned earlier, takes Angelou under her wing and instructs her to read books to herself aloud and discuss them with her later. Like for many of us, words in a book take Angelou to places she would have never gone before, and were the one constant thing in her life that she could depend on. It's no doubt this love of reading is what shaped her into the author and poet she would become internationally known for later.

I was originally hesitant to include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the list of books I would read, given how I was hoping to limit it to fiction books and this is technically an autobiography. I'm very happy that I didn't choose something else. Books like this give us a window to view into the lives and experiences of other people not like us, and just as Maya Angelou read books at a young age to picture herself as a hero in fairy tales or to visit places she had never thought of before, so too can we use books for the same purpose.

On another note, the book is ranked #3 in the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged or banned books, so at least consider taking a look at what the scandal is for yourself.