I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Background

Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Maya Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as a composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated on April 4, which was also her birthday. For many years, Angelou responded to King's murder by not celebrating her birthday, instead choosing to meet with, call, or send flowers to his widow, Coretta Scott King.Angelou was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968. The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day Judy Feiffer called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright, and was in the middle of writing a series for PBS television station WNET. According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, who advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology"; Angelou later reported that Loomis told her: "It's just as well, because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible". Angelou was unable to resist a challenge, and she began writing Caged Bird. After "closeting herself" in London, it took her two years to write it. She shared the manuscript with her friend, writer Jessica Mitford, before submitting it for publication.

Angelou subsequently wrote six additional autobiographies, covering a variety of her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes, and stretch from Arkansas to Africa, and back to the U.S., from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. Like Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted as a series of short stories, yet do not follow a strict chronology. Later books in the series include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013, at the age of 85). Critics have often judged Angelou's later autobiographies "in light of the first", and Caged Bird generally receives the highest praise.

Title

When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet whose works she had admired for years. Jazz vocalist and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln suggested the title. According to Lyman B. Hagen, the title pulls Angelou's readers into the book while reminding them that it is possible to both lose control of one's life and to have one's freedom taken from them. Angelou has credited Dunbar, along with Shakespeare, with forming her "writing ambition". According to Mary Jane Lupton, the caged bird in the title symbolizes a chained slave and appears frequently in Angelou's writings. Lupton also discusses Angelou's use of the word "sings", which she says critics have tended to downplay. The word creates an upward mood and "suggests the survival of African Americans through the spiritual". Although singing is more developed in Angelou's later books, she hints at the "possibilities of joyful song" in Caged Bird. Finally, also according to Lupton, the cage is a symbol of the restraint of not only the Black body, but of the female Black body. The cage is also a metaphor for the roles that force the bird to deny its identity and reject interrelationships with others, not just for the child Maya, but for almost everyone in her community.

The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy":

Plot summary

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen and the struggles she faces—particularly with racism and self-affirmation—in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother (Momma) and disabled uncle (Uncle Willie) in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book: they travel alone and are labeled like baggage.

Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the overt racism of her white neighbors and the subliminal awareness of race relations weaved in society. Although Momma is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' Black community, the white children of their town, in an "almost ritual insult", hassle Maya's family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls, for example, reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident which leaves Maya, watching from a distance, indignant and furious. Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders, where he moans and groans under the potatoes throughout the night. Maya has to endure the insult of her name being changed to Mary by a racist employer. A white speaker at her eighth-grade graduation ceremony disparages the Black audience by suggesting that they have limited job opportunities. A white dentist refuses to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him that she had loaned him money during the Depression. The Black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of racial victory when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis's championship fight, but generally, they feel the heavy weight of racist oppression.

A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps. He takes the two children with him when he departs, but leaves them with their mother in St. Louis. Eight-year-old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, 'Mr. Freeman'. He is found guilty during the trial, but escapes jail time and gets murdered, presumably by Maya's uncles. Maya feels guilty and withdraws from everyone but her brother. Even after returning to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps," who encourages her through books to regain her voice. This coaxes Maya out of her shell.

Later, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California, to protect them from the dangers of racism in Stamps. Maya attends George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she becomes the first Black female cable car conductor in San Francisco. While still in high school, Maya visits her father in southern California one summer and has some experiences pivotal to her development. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico. She experiences homelessness for a short time after a fight with her father's girlfriend.

Style and genre

Angelou's prose works, while presenting a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form, can be placed in the long tradition of African-American autobiography. Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development, however, often lead reviewers to categorize her books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as autobiographical fiction. Other critics, like Mary Jane Lupton, insist that Angelou's books should be categorized as autobiographies because they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies. Dolly McPherson states that Angelou's work demonstrates how a writer can use the autobiography to define her quest for human individuality, identify her struggle with "the general condition of Black Americans", and claim a representative role not only for Black Americans, but for "the idea of America". McPherson goes on to say that "through a study of her work, one gains a closer access to American cultural history".

As Lupton states, what makes Angelou's autobiographies different than more conventional autobiographies is her "denial of closure". Lupton says that no other serial autobiography places the mother/child theme in the center of the conflict, which made it important to the book's narrative. Lupton calls the narrative style in Caged Bird "rich, humorous, intense, engaging". The language Angelou uses can be frightening and her dialogue in the book, which is sharp and direct, conveys her characters' distinctive language and both reflects the language of her literary models and draws on the Southern speech patterns of her characters. Her use of metaphor places Angelou "within the stylistic tradition of black protest literature". She also uses precision to describe objects or places and her observations are sensual. As Lupton puts it, "Her writing resembles a series of photographs or fragments of music: snapshots taken from many angles, notes played from a variety of instruments". McPherson agrees, stating that in her autobiographies, Angelou "uses the narrative gifts of an accomplished writer". Braxton compares Angelou's style to that of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson, stating that Angelou also uses "rhythmic language, lyrically suspended moments of consciousness, and detailed portraiture". Braxton, due to Angelou's use of humor and folklore, also calls her a "tale-teller par excellence." Harold Bloom, who does not think as highly of Angelou's poetry and does not find her subsequent autobiographies as compelling as her first, compares the tone in Caged Bird with the tone Rudyard Kipling uses in Kim, stating that Angelou "provides us with a voice that we encounter very infrequently, whether in life or in literature". According to Susan Gilbert, however, while Angelou records African American cadences and speech patterns, she does not limit herself "to the tongues of black Arkansas or ghetto streets". For example, Angelou describes the codeswitching that many in her community engage in; as Gilbert also says, the language Angelou uses "moves between a strong, colloquial simplicity and a sometimes over-blown literary mannerism".

Form

When Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature, according to critic Pierre A. Walker, was thematic unity. One of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion, in order to achieve her political purposes, which were to demonstrate how to resist racism in America. The structure of the text, which resembles a series of short stories, is not chronological but is arranged according to themes. Walker, in his 1993 article about Caged Bird, "Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form", focuses on the book's structure, and describes how it supports her presentation of racism. Walker states that critics had neglected analyzing its structure, choosing to focus instead on its themes, which he feels neglects the political nature of the book. He states, "One serves Angelou and Caged Bird better by emphasizing how form and political content work together". Angelou structures her book so that it presents a series of lessons about how to resist racism and oppression. Maya's growth in resisting racism unifies the book thematically, something that "stands in contrast to the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative". The way in which Angelou constructs, arranges, and organizes her vignettes often undermine the chronology of her childhood by "juxtaposing the events of one chapter with the events of preceding and following ones so that they too comment on each other". As Dolly McPherson points out, Angelou does not record every experience, but instead selects, through a series of episodic chapters, "valuable, life-determining truths about the world, about her community, and about herself". Lupton points out that Caged Bird's form develops from the characters' interaction with each other, not through the development of dramatic actions. According to scholar Sondra O'Neale, unlike Angelou's poetry and despite the nonchronological structure of the book, which O'Neale calls "skillfully controlled", Angelou's prose "follows classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms".

The incident with the "powhitetrash" girls in Caged Bird takes place in chapter 5, when Maya was ten years old, well before Angelou's recounting of her rape in chapter 12, which occurred when Maya was 8. Walker explains that Angelou's purpose in placing the vignettes in this way is that it followed her thematic structure. Angelou's editor, Robert Loomis, agrees, stating that Angelou could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader. Hagen sees Angelou's structure somewhat differently, focusing on Maya's journey "to establish a worthwhile self-concept", and states that she structures the book into three parts: arrival, sojourn, and departure, which occur both geographically and psychologically. Hagen notes that she does not begin Caged Bird chronologically, with Maya and Bailey's arrival in Stamps. Rather, she begins it later much later, with an embarrassing experience during an Easter service at church, an incident that demonstrates Maya's diminished sense of self, insecurity, and lack of status. George E. Kent divides Caged Bird into two "areas of black life": the religious-folk tradition, as represented through Maya's grandmother, and the blues-street tradition, as represented through her mother. Kent states that the first impact of the blues-street tradition on Maya and her brother is instability, when their mother ships the children to Stamps. Kent goes on to say that Angelou balances the qualities of both traditions, adding that "a good deal of the book's universality derives from black life's traditions seeming to mirror, with extraordinary intensity, the root uncertainty in the universe".

Themes

Identity

In the course of Caged Bird, Maya, who has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America", goes from being a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-aware individual who responds to racism with dignity and a strong sense of her own identity. Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the "formation of female cultural identity" is woven into the book's narrative, setting Maya up as "a role model for Black women". Scholar Liliane Arensberg calls this presentation Angelou's "identity theme" and a major motif in Angelou's narrative. McPherson states that the heart of Caged Bird, which she calls Angelou's "singular traditional focus" is "the growth of the individual from innocence to knowledge". Sidonie Ann Smith, using the opening incident at church, connects Maya's appearance with the imprisonment and displacement imposed on her by the white society around her. Smith goes on to say that the pain of Maya's displacement is intensified by her awareness of the displacement, a personal displacement that is amplified by "the ambience of displacement within the larger black community". Maya's displacement and "diminished self of self" is reflected in her community's diminished self image. Smith also connects Maya's rape with her displacement, stating that Mr. Freeman took advantage of Maya's feelings of abandonment, self-loathing, and rejection. Maya is freed from her further displacement by Mrs. Flowers, who accepted Maya for who she was and "allows her to experience the incipient power of her own self-worth". Braxton states that Angelou's "celebration of self" is nurtured and developed by Black women—Momma, Mrs. Flowers, and even Maya's mother, Vivian. Both Momma and Vivian are different representations of "the Jungian archetype of the Great Mother, protecting, nurturing, sheltering".

After Momma sends the children to their mother in California to protect them from the racism in Stamps, Maya learns from Vivian increased self-reliance; Braxton adds that Maya "grows out of the passive stage, asserting herself through action, and forging an identity". Maya's earlier rebellion against Mrs. Cullinan, her racist white employer, is another way she preserves her individual and affirms her self-worth. Smith connects this incident with Maya's grandmother's decision to send Maya and Bailey to their mother in San Francisco, where Maya finally feels at home; as Smith puts it, "She could feel in place in an environment where everyone and everything seemed out-of-place". This was solidified in her experiences in Mexico and San Diego with her father, her short period of homelessness, and her pregnancy and birth of her son. The book ends in this way: "The black American girl child has succeeded in freeing herself from the natural and social bars imprisoning her in the cage of her own diminished self-image by assuming control of her life and fully accepting her black womanhood". Angelou told a interviewer that she did not set out, while writing Caged Bird, thinking out her own life or identity, but that she was "thinking about a particular time in which I lived and the influence of that time on a number of people...I used the central figure—myself—as a focus to show how one person can make it through those times". Maya's unsettled life in Caged Bird suggests her sense of self "as perpetually in the process of becoming, of dying and being reborn, in all its ramifications". Angelou begins to describe her changing identity in the book's early pages describing the Easter church service, when Maya painfully realizes that her fantasy of becoming white will never happen. As Dolly McPherson states, the scene graphically re-creates "the dynamics of many young black girls' disillusionment and imprisonment in American society", which gives the message to Maya and girls like her that physical beauty is defined in terms of whiteness. Arensberg states that Maya's displacement, or rootlessness, as well as her geographic movements and temporary residences throughout the book, are formative aspects of Maya's identity. It also helps her develop "a stoic flexibility" that becomes a way for her to both protect herself against and deal with the world around her. According to Arensberg, the flexibility is "both a blessing and a curse: it enables her to adapt to various and changing environments, but it also keeps her forever threatened with loss or breakdown of her identity".

Racism

Joanne M. Braxton calls Caged Bird "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era". Pierre A. Walker expresses a similar sentiment, and places it in the African American literature tradition of political protest. Stamps, Arkansas, as depicted in Caged Bird, has very little "social ambiguity"; it is a racist world divided between Black and white, male and female. Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the Black community of Stamps, her presentation of vivid and realistic racist characters, "the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans", and her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society. Hilton Als characterizes the division as "good and evil", and notes how Angelou's witness of the evil in her society, which was directed at Black women, shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood. Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage, described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, as a prominent symbol throughout her series of autobiographies. Like elements within a prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression, forces that were outside Maya's control or comprehension. The caged bird metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle". Scholar Ernece B. Kelley calls Caged Bird a "gentle indictment of white American womanhood"; Hagen expands it further, stating that the book is "a dismaying story of white dominance". In the Stamps of Caged Bird, although "segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what Whites looked like" and Blacks rarely interacted with them, the white world was a constant threat and Blacks were expected to behave in a certain way in order to survive. As Keneth Kinnamon states, Angelou does not de-emphasize the effects of racism on her community, but "shows with respect if not always agreement the defensive and compensatory patterns needed to survive in such an environment". Lupton, who sees the themes of racism and slavery as separate from imprisonment in Caged Bird, states that Maya constantly feels caged, "unable to escape the reality of her blackness". Imprisonment is also expressed in the book's title.

Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird, contain a sequence of lessons about resisting oppression. The sequence she describes leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest". Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives her autobiographies their thematic unity and underscores one of their central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. In Angelou's depiction of the "powhitetrash" incident, Maya reacts with rage, indignation, humiliation, and helplessness. Angelou portrays Momma as a realist whose patience, courage, and silence ensured the survival and success of those who came after her. As Braxton put it, the white and female children "deliberately exploit their protected status to intimidate and humiliate" Maya's family. Braxton also considers the incident an implied threat towards the men in the family. Momma teaches Maya how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism, and that it is an effective basis for actively protesting and combating racism. Walker calls Momma's way a "strategy of subtle resistance"; Dolly McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance" and "a pivotal experience in her initiation" of Maya's awareness about her place in the racist world. McPherson, who considers the incident "a dramatic re-enactment of the kind of spiritual death and regeneration Angelou experienced during the shaping of her development", also states that the incident taught Maya how her grandmother was able to survive and triumph psychologically in a hostile environment. Not only was it a depiction of the tensions between Blacks and whites during the period, it also depicted how Momma was able to protest, transcend the children's behavior towards her, and preserve her own dignity. Braxton states that the incident demonstrates Momma's courage, a virtue Angelou learns to use and develop from her; Angelou praises Momma's courage in the book and praises it in later writings. Courage in the face of racism is also shown in Angelou's treatment of lynching. Early in the book, Momma helps a man trying to escape lynching by hiding him and giving him supplies for his journey, thus endangering her own security. Later, the family has to conceal Uncle Willy from a potential lynch mob in their store's potato and onion bin. Braxton states that it demonstrates the absurdity of lynching and that in this incident, Momma "fulfills the archetypical role of the outraged mother by concealing her innocent child".

Rape

Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text. Opal Moore calls Angelou's graphic and complicated depiction of rape and incest "the center and bottom" of the autobiography and states the rape must be understood within the context of the entire book; everything that happens to Maya in it "should be understood against the ravaging of rape". For Moore, the rape "raises issues of trust, truth, and lie, love, and the naturalness of a child's craving for human contact, language and understanding, and the confusion engendered by the power disparities that necessarily exist between children and adults". Angelou describes two sexual encounters with Mr. Freeman; she uses metaphors, which allow her to describe her pain without having to explain what and how she feels.

Scholar Mary Vermillion compares Angelou's treatment of rape in Caged Bird to Harriet Jacobs' in her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. According to Vermillion, one major difference between Angelou and Jacobs is the way somatophobia, which Vermillion defines as the "fear and disdain for the body", especially the female body, is depicted in their books. Angelou, for example, is freer to portray her rape, her body, and her sexuality than Jacobs because she does not have to deal with the 19th century patriarchal view of "true womanhood". Jacobs describes herself as beautiful and sexually desirable, but Angelou, as a child and young adult, thinks she is ugly. Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of African Americans; Jacobs uses the metaphor to critique slaveholding culture, while Angelou uses it to first internalize, then challenge, 20th-century racist conceptions of the Black female body. Angelou connects her rape with the suffering of the poor and the subjection of her race and "represents the black girl's difficulties in controlling, understanding, and respecting both her body and her words". Vermillion also connects the violation of Maya's body to her self-imposed muteness because she believes that her lie during the trial is responsible for her rapist's death. McPherson evaluates the rape in Caged Bird in light of how it affected Maya's identity, and how her displacement from the dangerous but comfortable setting of Stamps to her mother's chaotic and unfamiliar world of St. Louis contributes to Maya's trauma and withdrawal into herself. Sondra O'Neale states, however, that the birth of Maya's son at the end of the book provides the reader with hope for her future and implies that the rape would not control her life.

Arensberg, who blames Maya's vulnerability on her previous experiences of neglect, abandonment, and lack of parental love, notes that Maya's rape is connected to the theme of death in Caged Bird, as Mr. Freeman threatens to kill Maya's brother Bailey if she tells anyone about the rape. After Maya lies during Freeman's trial, stating that the rape was the first time he touched her inappropriately, Freeman is murdered (presumably by one of Maya's uncles) and Maya sees her words as a bringer of death. As a result, she resolves never to speak to anyone other than Bailey. Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words through the depiction of her self-imposed, five-year-long silence. As Angelou later stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk". Christine Froula connects Maya's self-imposed muteness with Ovid's retelling of the Philomela rape myth, in which the victim's power of speech becomes a threat to the rapist and another victim of the rapist.

Literacy

As Lupton points out, all of Angelou's autobiographies, especially Caged Bird and its immediate sequel Gather Together in My Name, are "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it". Lupton compares Angelou's informal education with the education of other Black writers of the twentieth century, who did not earn official degrees and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms". Angelou's quest for learning and literacy parallels "the central myth of black culture in America": that freedom and literacy are connected. As Fred Lee Hord puts it, "the book world was a world of integration, where you were the confidant of all the denizens—in whose skins, regardless of color, you could move inside and breathe free". Hord adds that Maya also rejected the part of her culture "that she associated with powerlessness in the world of book learning". For example, one of the most traumatic experiences Angelou relates in Caged Bird is her eighth-grade graduation, when the white commencement speaker denigrates Blacks, reduces their potential to athletics, and conveys to his audience a sense of impotence and nothingness. The anger and depression Maya feels changes when Henry Reed leads the audience and graduates in the Negro National Anthem, when Maya senses the pride and strength of her community. As Hord puts it, Maya realizes, for the first time, "how black writers not only made possible an alternative world, but pushed the boundaries outward in her actual world". Hord also states that the white speaker helped Maya demystify her ideas about the power of education for African Americans; the composer of the Anthem also provided her with the strength to resist the white speaker's dehumanization of her community.

Angelou states, early in Caged Bird, "During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois' 'Litany at Atlanta.' But it was Shakespeare who said, 'When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.' It was a state with which I felt most familiar". As Hord states, Shakespeare identified with the state Maya, "a young castaway without parents in a freedom-stifling, small southern town", found herself in. Christine Froula, though, in her discussion about incest in Caged Bird and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, points out that Maya and Bailey gave up memorizing a scene from Shakespeare to avoid their grandmother's opposition to reading a white author, choosing Johnson's "The Creation" instead. Froula goes on to state that the vignette "raises the question of what it means for a female reader and fledging writer to carry on a love affair with Shakespeare or with male authors in general" and connects Maya's attraction to Shakespeare and his writings with Maya's rape described later on. Mary Vermillion sees a connection between Maya's rape and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, which Vermillion calls "Angelou's most complex and subtle examination of Maya's attachment to white literary discourse" and which Maya memorizes and recites when she regains her speech. Vermillion maintains that Maya's attachment to Lucrece indicates her attachment to the verbal and the literary, which leads her to ignore her corporeality and helps her find comfort in the poem's identification with suffering. As Vermillion states, Maya must use the words she memorizes and recites to reconstruct her own body. Froula says that although Maya's memorization of Lucrece helps her overcome her literal muteness, it ushers her into a literary recovery because it connects her voice to Shakespeare's words. Froula goes on to say, "But if Shakespeare's poem redeems Maya of her hysterical silence, it is also a lover she embraces at her peril" because it "signals a double seduction" of white and male culture. Braxton, however, explains Maya's connection with Shakespeare and with Dunbar, who influenced Angelou more than the other writers she names in Caged Bird, by stating that they "speak directly to her dilemma—the problem of developing a positive self-image in a culture whose standards of beauty are uniformly white, and the problem of finding a place for herself in that culture". Maya finds novels and their characters complete and meaningful, so she uses them to make sense of her bewildering world. She is so involved in her fantasy world of books that she even uses them as a way to cope with her rape, writing in Caged Bird, "...I was sure that any minute my mother or Bailey or the Green Hornet would bust in the door and save me".

Reception and legacy

Critical reception and sales

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. It became a bestseller immediately after it was published. Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book "liberates the reader into life" and called it "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death". According to Angelou's biographers, "Readers, especially women, and in particular Black women, took the book to heart". By the mid-1980s, Caged Bird had gone through 20 hardback printings and 32 paperback printings. The week after Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, sales of the paperback version of Caged Bird, which had sold steadily since its publication, and her other works rose by 300–600 percent. The 16-page publication of "On the Pulse of Morning" became a bestseller, and the recording of the poem was awarded a Grammy Award. The Bantam Books edition of Caged Bird was a bestseller for 36 weeks; 400,000 copies of her books were reprinted to meet demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, marking a 1,200 percent increase.

By the end of 1969, critics had placed Angelou in the tradition of other Black autobiographers. Poet James Bertolino asserts that Caged Bird "is one of the essential books produced by our culture". He insists that "[w]e should all read it, especially our children". It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, has never been out of print, and has been published in many languages. It has been a Book of the Month Club selection and an Ebony Book Club selection. In 2011, Time Magazine placed the book in its list of 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923. Caged Bird catapulted Angelou to international fame and critical acclaim and was a significant development in Black women's literature because it "heralded the success of other now prominent writers".

The book's reception has not been universally positive; author Francine Prose, who calls Caged Bird a "survival memoir," or "a first-person narrative of victimization and recovery", considers its inclusion, along with books like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in the high school curriculum as partly responsible for the "dumbing down" of American society. Prose calls the book "manipulative melodrama", and considers Angelou's writing style an inferior example of poetic prose in memoir. She faults Angelou with poor writing, including combing a dozen metaphors in one paragraph and "obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously".

Influence

When Caged Bird was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African-American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, Black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Julian Mayfield, who calls Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", has insisted that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for African American autobiography as a whole. Hilton Als insists that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a Black autobiographer could, as he put it, "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense". After writing Caged Bird, Angelou became recognized as a respected spokesperson for Blacks and women. Caged Bird made her "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer". Although Als considers Caged Bird an important contribution to the increase of Black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than to "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist" of its time, at the end of the American Civil Rights Movement. Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other women writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world".

Opal Moore has called for better preparation for teachers who use Caged Bird in their classrooms, stating that the book is a difficult text for both teachers and students. Angelou's autobiographies, especially Caged Bird, have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches to teacher education. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has used Caged Bird and Gather Together in My Name when training teachers to appropriately explore racism in their classrooms. Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony causes readers to wonder what she "left out" and to be unsure how to respond to the events Angelou describes. These techniques force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their privileged status in society. Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography and her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".

Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener states that Angelou's book provides a useful framework for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya face and how a community helps these children succeed as Angelou did. Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has used Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence. He has called Caged Bird a highly effective tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.

Censorship

Caged Bird has been criticized by many parents, causing it to be removed from school curricula and library shelves. The book was approved to be taught in public schools and was placed in public school libraries through the U.S. in the early-1980s, and was included in Advanced Placement and gifted student curriculum. Attempts by parents to censor it began in 1983. Some have been critical of its sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions. Many parents throughout the U.S. have sought to ban the book from schools and libraries for being inappropriate for younger high school students, for promoting premarital sex, homosexuality, cohabitation, and pornography, and for not supporting traditional values. Parents have also objected to the book's use of profanity and to its graphic and violent depiction of rape and racism. Educators have responded to these challenges by removing it from reading lists and libraries, by providing students with alternatives, and by requiring parental permission from students. In 2009, Angelou expressed her sorrow and outrage about the banning of all her books, stating that those who insisted upon banning them had not read them. She also said, “I feel sorry for the young person who never gets to read [Caged Bird]".

In 2021, the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, which stated that banning books like Caged Bird and The Color Purple by Alice Walker "points to a larger pattern of banning books significant to African American history and culture". They found that Caged Bird was banned in prisons throughout the U.S.; for example, the book was banned in North Carolina prisons because officials determined that its depiction of sexual assault was a security threat.

In 2023, the book was banned, in Clay County District Schools, Florida.

Caged Bird appeared third on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000, sixth on the ALA's 2000–2009 list, and fell to 88th place on the ALA's 2010–2019 list. As of 1998, it was one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms.

In April of 2025, the United States Naval Academy's library removed Caged Bird and 380 more books "after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion."

Film version

A made-for-TV movie version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was filmed in Mississippi and aired on April 28, 1979, on CBS. Angelou and Leonora Thuna wrote the teleplay; the movie was directed by Fielder Cook. Constance Good played young Maya. Also appearing were actors Esther Rolle, Roger E. Mosley, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Madge Sinclair. Two scenes in the movie differed from events described in the book. Angelou added a scene between Maya and Uncle Willie after the Joe Louis fight; in it, he expresses his feelings of redemption and hope after Louis defeats a white opponent. Angelou and Thuna also present Maya's eighth grade graduation differently in the film. In the book, Henry Reed delivers the valedictory speech and leads the Black audience in the Negro national anthem. In the movie, Maya conducts these activities.