I
know why the caged bird sings, and frankly I think it's amazing that she still
can. She has gone through so much growing up, including being raped at the age
of 8 (9 maybe?), multiple moves from grandmother to mother to grandmother to
mother to father to homeless to mother (all before the age of 18), and a
lifetime of adventures that I know will not be lived by myself. Yeah, "she" doesn't sound like a
literal bird anymore. "She" is actually a real African American
girl/woman living from 1938 to present time named Maya Angelou and she has
dealt with quite a lot of troubles. It doesn't explain or give all the details,
but at the very tender age of 4 she left her parents her brother via train to
go live with her grandmother ("Momma") in Stamps, Arkansas. Her life
here during this time may have been the easiest she's ever had it. Whilst here,
she realizes how "different" "whites" and "blacks"
are. She sees her mother take the abuse from the white children and be
subjected to the humiliation of having them taunt her, and calling her by her
first name and having her call them Mrs. and Mr. When she is a little older (8
or 9) her and her brother (whom both share a very close bond) are picked up by
their dad of whom they know nothing about. This might be the first
time Maya (the girl) imagines a crisis. Her father is so perfect and
him and Bailey seem to be able to talk to each other so easily that Maya begins
to suspect that she is adopted. Not that big of a conflict, but it is her
first.
Her
father drops them off at their mom's (real) and they learn that their parents
are divorced. She goes through many adventures and horrors, such as being raped
by her mothers boyfriend, having to deal with the fact that he was murdered
because she spoke, being called horrible words due to her skin color, being
refused much needed treatment because of her skin color, crashing her father's
car in Mexico, getting assaulted by her dad's girlfriend, losing her brother
(left for a job), having to live in a junkyard, false belief of her sexuality
(she thought she might have been lesbian [?]), dealing with her changing body,
and becoming pregnant at an early age (16). Despite all this, after each event
she always manages to smile and keep going (some took longer time to recover
then others however).
The
last event was the pregnancy, which contained the most beautiful quote and
scene throughout the book. I'll lead up to it (generally, not specifically due
to the fact that I do not feel entirely comfortable speaking about it): Due to
her influence about a lesbian novel Maya had recently read, she believed she
was lesbian and her body was mutated and misshapen. She talks to her mom shyly
and is rejoiced to hear that her body is perfectly normal. Unfortunately, due
to the fact that while her fried was undressing at a sleepover and she thought
that her friend looked beautiful, she began thinking again that she was
lesbian. She decided to prove to herself that she wasn't with the first thing
that popped into her head, unprotected casual sex with a stranger (totally the
first thing to pop into my head as well, mhmm, yep). She did (luckily didn't
get a disease) and a couple of months later realized she was preggers. It took
more then half a year for her to tell her mom, and when she did her mom was not
ashamed at all. Maya gave birth, and for some reason she was scared she might
hurt her baby boy. She loved him unconditionally, but she was scared she might
do something accidentally. After the third week of the child’s life, Maya’s mom
forced Maya to sleep with the child in the same bed. She did and when her mom
came to wake her and show her that she had unconsciously rapped her arms
protectively around her baby whilst sleeping. Her mom then said to
her: "See, you don't have to think about doing the right thing. If
you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking." [Chapter 36,
pg. 281]
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