5 Paragraph Essay On I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
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“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is an autobiography written by Maya Angelou. She describes about her hard life “caged” growing up as a black girl from the South. Maya Angelou starts the novel about her life in the age of three with her four-year-old brother Bailey. They are turned over the care of their paternal grandmother in Stamps. She describes how the two children were sent away after they parents’ divorce, traveling by train across the Southwestern and cling to their tag “To whom It May Concern”, c/o Mrs Henderson. Both kids are looking this like rejection and loss of self-worth. “I’m being sent away because I’m no lovable”. Angelou generalizes the children situations as follows: “Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or black to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises.” (Caged Bird, 4). Smith states that Maya opens with a primal childhood scene that brings into focus the nature of the imprisoning environment from which the self will seek escape. The black girl child is trapped within the cage of her own diminished self-image around which interlock the bars of natural and social forces. (Interpretation, 6)
Her grandmother’s store is the center of life in the Negro community of the town, being the pick-up and drop-off point for cotton pickers in picking season. Her grandmother Henderson is presented not only as the main role in center of her family, but as the leader of the black community in Stamps, strong and religious. McMurry argues that from Maya’s eyes the customers in her grandmother’s store were trapped in cotton fields, no amount of hope and work to get them out. Her uncle Willie is caged “must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame”. Her grandmother rises each morning with consciousness of a caged animal (Interpretation, 27).
Maya and her brother Baily were very close during their childhood and most of their adolescence. Maya in her story writes, “During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love” (Caged Bird, 11). Maya writes that “But it was Shakespeare who said, `When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes. It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long that it couldn’t matter to anyone any more”. She also enjoys the works of many prominent black authors, which her Momma, or grandmother, approves more of. Although young Maya likes Shakespeare, and is fine with the fact that he is white, her Momma wouldn’t want to know that Maya enjoys a white man’s work. Maya feels that she again is “caged” and can’t express her thoughts and feeling about Shakespeare with grandmother.
Angelou recalls how Momma used to make them bathe and wash constantly, even in cold water in wintertime. She used to insist on them being respectful and clean, which most people were, except for the “powhitetrash” children that came into the town. Those that came to the store were often very rude, but young Maya and her family are not allowed to say anything, because they are black. Angelou describes her Momma; she is tall, big, and strong, and leads in the hymns at church every Sunday.
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