I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I read this story before when Angelou was about to come to Slippery Rock University for a presentation/speech. Much of her presentation was on the first book in the series, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many people in audience knew this.
While going through this story for a second time, I realized that it’s all about silence, particularly silencing. I couldn’t understand the first time through why the title was “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” until I read that it was because the bird still has a song to sing. The title and the concept in the story, then, provide an interesting juxtaposition between silence and singing. Angelou remains silent out of embarrassment, respect, fear, and direct orders. Those moments are prevalent throughout the entire book, up until the moment when she is raped and chooses to remain silent except when she interacts with Bailey.

During my undergraduate career, I had taken a creative non-fiction course for a few weeks. I ended up dropping it because it conflicted with my work on the newspaper, but I was there long enough to begin to cover the problem nonfiction writers have with memory. There is an issue about a lack of detail within memory, which the author must create instead of transcribe. The first incident I saw of this problem was on page 7 in Chapter One. Angelou describes her grandmother’s routine in the morning, including her prayer and actions before calling the children to wake them up. Angelou couldn’t know this unless her grandmother described it to her, or she used conjecture.

I read an article recently in Writer’s Chronicle about writing nonfiction from a child’s perspective. The author said that as an adult, the writer must maintain his or her own mentality and vocabulary instead of trying to sound like a child, though children are prone to insightful intuition. It’s still possible to present a child’s mentality without sounding like one. Examples the author used were “We as children understood” or “Looking back upon it,” and other variations. I noticed the difference in adult and child mentality in Angelou’s writing on pages 11 and 21, for examples. On page 11, Angelou refers to Uncle Willie by saying, “He was so proud and sensitive. Therefore he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t crippled, nor could he deceive himself that people were not repelled by his defect.” Here some readers may think that she’s being an insightful child, but I think that because it’s in the narration, it’s the adult Angelou reflecting on the situation. On page 21, she writes “I watched him with the excitement of expecting him to do anything at any time… I see him now as a very simple and uninteresting man…” Here Angelou incorporates both her thought processes and perceptions as a child, and then switches to her perceptions as an adult.

I think that this work is timeless because it deals with childhood, maturity, changes, personal invasion, and trauma as well as racial tension. Those are things that will be around even if race becomes no longer an issue. She provides almost a primary source for history as well because of living in the segregated south and through prohibition in the city. Her work is certainly literary and has a unique voice due to Angelou’s growth through literary works and her upbringing from Momma.

When I thought back to a moment in childhood, I remembered waking up on Christmas morning to find footsteps and a trail of tinsel from the tree to the deck door, and the snow on the next disturbed. Everyone swore it was Santa, and my grandfather told me that Santa had stepped on his hand at night and apologized to him. But when I tried to remember sensory details, I couldn’t. I couldn’t immerse myself in memory as well as Angelou seems to, and I would be creating much of the details by combining memories from other Christmases and conjecture of what would have been there, instead of what was. I remember general incidents, but most details elude me.