I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

 

 by Maya Angelou

This is the first of the writer’s 7- volume autobiography.

As a black woman she faced racism, extreme poverty and cruelty. She was only three and her brother four when “our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother” with tags on their wrists with their names on them.

So in this first volume she goes through her childhood with her grandmother in the American South of the 1930s.

There is almost no trauma she doesn’t suffer and not only by the discrimination all black people living in that side of the city face.

 Nevertheless, she has the power to love life and see the beauty of the world even after the rape by her mother’s lover.

The first volume finishes with her secret pregnancy at the age of sixteen. After teenage  confusion in her head whether she was a lesbian or not, because of very small breasts and her voice becoming hoarse, she decides to have “a sexual intercourse” with a handsome boy. Although this does not give an answer to her doubts about her sexuality, it gives her a son.

“Mother asked, ‘Who is the boy?’ I told her.

‘Do you want to marry him?’

‘No.’

‘Does he want to marry you?’ The father had stopped speaking to me during my fourth month.

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s that. No use ruining three lives.’ There was no overt or subtle condemnation. She was Vivian Baxter Jackson (her mother). Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between. Daddy Clidell assured me that I had nothing to worry about. That ‘women been gittin pregnant ever since Eve ate the apple.”