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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, Maya Angelou

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SETTINGS

The book has four main settings:

1. Stamps
2. St Louis
3. Los Angeles
4. San Francisco

A DISPLACED PERSON

Chapter 1 recalls how Maya (3) and Bailey (4) travelled by train from California to the rural Southern town of Stamps wearing tags on their wrists. Although Maya subsequently achieves a sense of security in various places, she never allows herself to become too attached to one particular place. The opening lines of the book, taken from a religious poem, seem to capture this wary attitude:
 
"What you looking at me for?

I didn’t come to stay …"

STAMPS, ARKANSAS

Stamps – particularly her grandmother’s store – provides stability in Maya’s uncertain life, although she and Bailey are accepted only "as a real mother embraces a stranger’s child. Warmly but not too familiarly." The Store stands each morning "like an unopened present from a stranger" with the soft dawn light falling on fish, tobacco, thread and a vat of lard slowly melting. Later, it fills with the babble of customers and it is also the place where a large, excited crowd gathers to hear the radio commentary on Joe Louis’s victory over a White boxer. It is here that Maya watches the "caterpillar green" field opposite turn frosty white on mornings when the cotton pickers awaited the wagons that would take them to "the remains of slavery’s plantations". The Store is a focal point for the local Black community – a source of pride since it is owned by a Black woman – and for Maya too it has a magical quality: "the lamplight … gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world".
 

THE SOUTH - RACIAL SEGREGATION

Stamps is part of the South, where slavery persisted longest and where racial persecution and segregation continued well into Maya Angelou’s lifetime. Chapter 1 refers to "the harshness of Black Southern life" endured by over-worked, under-paid cotton pickers. Chapter 3 describes how Uncle Willie who is forced to spend a night buried under potatoes as Klan members with "their cement faces and eyes of hate" roam the district. For a while, Maya works in service with the racist Mrs Cullinan who insists on calling her Mary for convenience. Maya admires the refined, literary Mrs Flowers and Mr McElroy, "an independent Black man" who owned his own land and house. "In Stamps," she tells us, "the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like". She recalls in tense, vivid detail the attempts of some White children to humiliate her grandmother and later a local white dentist’s refusal to treat her. She also recalls the humiliating graduation ceremony where a visiting White politician implies that Black children should not aspire to a high level of academic achievement.
 

ST LOUIS, MISSOURI

Father turns up one Christmas and spirits the two children off to their mother in St Louis, where illegal drinking, gambling, prostitution etc. are commonplace. The family is dominated by the powerful white-skinned Grandmother Baxter who has a German accent and is a police captain. Both her sons and her daughters have a reputation for meanness and are willing to kill in order to defend the family name. Indeed, they do kill Maya’s rapist, Mr Freeman. Maya thinks of St Louis as "a foreign country", noisy with traffic, doorbells, flushing toilets etc. She thinks of it as a temporary home and lives increasingly in her imagination:"I carried the same shield that I had used in Stamps: ‘I didn’t come to stay’." After the rape, Maya is grateful to be sent back to "the barrenness of Stamps" which she describes as "a cocoon". (Later, Bailey describes St Louis to open-mouthed locals as a wonderland of skyscrapers, fantastically tall cotton, deep snow etc.)
 

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

Later, after Bailey witnesses a Black man’s corpse being dragged from a pond, Momma Henderson takes the children to their mother in Los Angeles. They stay for about six months while Mother arranges more permanent accommodation in San Francisco. Momma, despite her limited Southern experience, manages to cope with the multicultural city, supermarkets, new accents, the maze of streets. In L.A., Maya is once again entranced by her mother’s beauty and charm, recalling, for example, a magical night when she and Bailey are woken to enjoy an impromptu party.
 

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

When the family (Maya, Bailey, Mother and stepfather "Daddy Cliddel") move to San Francisco, the war has just broken out. Japanese neighbourhoods are rapidly taken over by incoming Southern Blacks. Maya finds a new "sense of belonging" here and admires the city’s spirit: "friendly but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness". She loves "the anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveller" but recognises too that the racial tensions of the South have been imported here.

Maya is one of only three Black students in the "rarefied atmosphere" of a San Francisco high school which feels to her like a foreign country. Nevertheless, she is greatly influenced by one teacher, Miss Kirwin, who is "stimulating instead of intimidating". Maya notes how in the classroom Black children were highly aware of the difference between the Standard English learned in school and the Non-Standard variety they spoke outside: "We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort."
 

MEXICO

Daddy Bailey takes Maya on "a foreign adventure" into Mexico one weekend. She sees her father more relaxed than ever before, no longer "a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ‘personal niche’". He speaks fluent Spanish and is extremely popular both for his good looks and his American wealth.
 

THE CHURCH

Another setting which features large in the book, especially in the Stamps episodes, is the church. Indeed, the book opens in a church, with Maya tongue-tied as she tries to recall the words of a poem. Later, Momma’s spiritual song is her shield as the "powhitetrash" children taunt her. One of the most memorable and amusing episodes in the book involves the passionate Sister Monroe who cries out "I say, preach it!" in church and dislodges the anxious pastor’s false teeth. Then at a revival meeting in a tent erected near the railroad, an inspirational visiting preacher infuses people with hope as he acknowledges their deep suffering and begs God to grant them relief. Afterwards, however, they all ask themselves the same tired question: "How long, oh God? How long?"
 

Frankie Meehan