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I first read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings many years ago. I clearly remember the hardships of growing up as a black child in the American South of the 1930s that she described - the discrimination and poverty as a background to the trauma of her parents' divorce and her rape by one of her mother's boyfriends.
Recently, I came across the reprint of all six volumes at the local bookstore and decided to tackle them all. I loved reading the first volume again and it remains my favourite. I didn't find the last two as interesting, even though it dealt with the civil rights movement and the deaths of her friends, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It seemed to lack a certain depth - like she had left something out on purpose.
Perhaps I missed the beautiful descriptive passages which were so abundant in the earlier volumes and which made me feel like I was looking through a window to her past.
Below are some of the gems from her first book...
...barbers sat their customers in the shade on the porch of the Store, and troubadors on their ceaseless crawlings through the South leaned across benches and sang their sad songs...
...the pickers would step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground.
...the old ladies took up the hymn and shared it in tight harmony...the humming crowd...like tired bees, restless and anxious to get home...
The summer picnic gave ladies a chance to show off their baking hands...chickens and spareribs sputtered in their own fat and a sauce whose recipe guarded in the family like a scandalous affair...
Maya Angelou has lived a rich and varied life as waitress, singer, actress, dancer, activist, writer and poet, in the US as well as in different countries in Africa. Her books celebrate her life.
The other volumes in the autobiography are:
- A Song Flung up to Heaven
- Singing and Swinging and Getting Merry like Christmas
- All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes
- The Heart of a Woman
- Gather Together in My Name
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