An Autobiography of Overcoming Racism and Trauma With Literature
"I Know why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou is a best-selling autobiography that recounts the author's experiences growing up in the segregated South, overcoming trauma, and finding her voice as a writer and activist.
Maya was three when she was uprooted for the first time; her brother, Bailey, was four. When their parents, who lived in California, divorced, they sent the children back to their father’s mother. Two tickets were pinned to Bailey’s jacket and they were entrusted to a porter who was also making the long train journey from Los Angeles to Arkansas.
Their final destination was a place called Stamps. It was like a hundred other towns in the old slave states of the American South. Like all those towns, it was a small and shabby island in a sea of caterpillar-green and snow-white cotton fields.
The greatest commonality between such places, though, was the political system they shared. After the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, Black Americans had looked forward to a future in which they tilled their own land. A future in which they joined the ranks of the independent, property-owning smallholders whom the Founders said were the backbone of this virtuous republic. Those hopes had withered on the vine in places like Stamps, Arkansas.
What had come instead was the separation and subjugation – by violence and the threat of violence – of legally free Black people by white former slaveholders. Segregation, which was what this policy was called, solidified the division between those who owned the cotton fields and those who worked them. It was so absolute that Black children knew only one thing about white townsfolk: that they were dangerous. Their dread blended fear with the instinctual hostility the disenfranchised have always felt for the powerful and rich.
Maya later learned that frightened Black children had traveled across the United States thousands of times before she boarded that Arkansas-bound train. Some had joined parents in Northern cities; others had traveled south to live with grandparents in towns like Stamps. Like Maya and Bailey, they had sat in segregated carriages and been given cold fried chicken and potato salad by passengers who took pity on these “poor little motherless darlings.”
Momma, as everyone called Maya’s grandmother, was a formidable woman. She owned the only Black store in Stamps – a general store that sold everything from canned sardines to sewing supplies, chicken feed, coal, and flower seeds. Beyond that, Momma’s store was a social hub. An institution. Cotton workers went there for supplies and stood around gossiping and discussing the weather and yields. Lumberyard workers came in at lunch for crisp meat pies and cool lemonade. And on Sunday, after church, just about every Black family stopped by to talk to neighbors, eat peanuts and candy, and listen to the wireless.
Momma worked hard, never complained, and expected the same from others. Toil, she said, was the burden the Lord had seen fit to bestow upon humans – especially those with darker complexions. Justice comes in the next life when we lay down our burdens. Momma dealt with the white children who taunted her in her own store the same way she dealt with the indignities she suffered at the hands of their parents: she turned the other cheek.
Children, in Momma’s view of things, should work, so Maya and Bailey started helping out in the store. They fed the pigs out back, scrubbed floors, and fetched water from the well. Once they’d learned their times tables, they served customers and gave them change from the till. When their chores were done, they were expected to improve themselves. That meant studying the Bible and learning not to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Maya saw herself as an unlovable outsider. She didn’t feel like she belonged – she didn’t look like she belonged. Her family was attractive – everyone said so. Bailey, who was small and graceful and had luscious black curls, certainly was. She, by contrast, was big and awkward and had hair like black steel wool. That wasn’t just how she saw it – adults said hurtful things about her features and wondered aloud why she didn’t take after her good-looking parents.
Her brother was a lifeline in those moments when it seemed as though she might drown in loneliness. When some lady made those kinds of remarks, Bailey winked at his sister from across the room – a sign he was plotting revenge. When the lady in question was done, Bailey affected a friendly manner and said he’d seen her son. Was he alright, he asked, because he looked sick enough to die. “From what?” came the surprised reply, “he ain’t sick.” Bailey placidly answered that it seemed to him that the boy must have a fatal case of the “Uglies.”
Maya gritted her teeth, bit her tongue, and suppressed the smile creeping across her face. Later, brother and sister sat under the black walnut tree behind Momma’s store and laughed until their sides were sore. Of all the needs a lonely child has, Maya later saw, there is one that absolutely must be met. For a child to have hope of being whole one day, she needs an unshakable support. For her, that was Bailey – her salvation.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is the first part of a critically acclaimed seven-volume autobiography by the American writer and poet Maya Angelou. A vivid account of growing up in America during the Depression, it documents Maya’s life between the ages of three and sixteen. Hailed for its unflinching portrayal of displacement, discrimination, and trauma, it is also a life-affirming study of how hope can prevail amidst death and despair.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
