As she reveals in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou [mah' yuh an' jeh loh] was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. The second child and first daughter of Bailey Johnson, a brash, insouciant Navy dietician, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse by profession and gambler by trade, Angelou acquired the first half of her pen name from her brother, Bailey Junior, whose babyish babbling transformed "my sister" into "Maya." Following her parents' divorce in 1931, Maya and Bailey, labeled on their wrists with "To Whom It May Concern," were dispatched by train from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas, a rural Southern backwash that contrasted deeply with the citified gaiety of Maya's birthplace.
Stamps' nurturing community spirit became Maya's surrogate family. Under the care of Momma, the children's Old South paternal grandmother, and their semi-paralyzed Uncle Willie, the children lived in the town's black quarter in the rear of the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, the family-owned grocery and feed store. There they absorbed iron-clad, no-nonsense religious and moral training, punctuated by lashes with a switch from a peach tree, and reminders that the Almighty brooked no laxness and that Momma Henderson tolerated neither dirt nor backtalk. Maya's escapism from her grim, dutiful everyday life led her to classic literature, particularly white writers—Shakespeare, Kipling, Poe, Thackeray, and James Weldon Butler—and notable black authors—Paul Dunbar, Langston Hughes, W E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson.
Returned by her father to the Baxters' extended family in St. Louis in 1936, Maya, thoroughly indoctrinated with Momma's strictures, was reintroduced to the easy ways of the big city, where her self-absorbed mother drank and danced in gambling halls, kept company with a new man, and encouraged her babies to enjoy food, music, and other indulgences which had been in short supply in Stamps. This idyllic season in Maya's life ended abruptly after Vivian's lover, Mr. Freeman, raped Maya. To add to the emotional torture, she was forced to testify against her attacker. After her uncles murdered the rapist, the tenderhearted eight year old, refusing to speak, crept into a wounded, private world of fear and guilt.
Unsuited to the demands of an emotionally damaged child, Vivian returned Maya to Stamps, where, with Momma's guidance, she rebuilt self-esteem by cocooning herself from the outside world, reading classic literature, excelling at school, and imitating the genteel, bookish tastes of Mrs. Bertha Flowers, an old-school black Southern aristocrat who ministered to her need for pampering. Following Maya's graduation with honors from the eighth grade at Lafayette County Training School in 1940, Momma escorted her to Los Angeles, where Vivian met them and helped them move into an apartment. After Bailey joined them a month later, Momma returned to Stamps, and Maya and Bailey joined Vivian in Oakland. Later, after Vivian married Daddy Clidell Jackson, the family eventually settled in a fourteen-room house on Post Street in San Francisco's Fillmore district.
Matriculating by day at George Washington High School and in the evening at the California Labor School from 1941 to 1945, Maya, who dreamed of becoming a real estate agent, complete with briefcase (in spite of her grandmother's hopes that she would become a preacher) developed the blend of scholarship and creativity that undergirds her current success. Following a short vacation at her father's trailer in southern California and a thirty-day disappearance, she returned to her mother's care and besieged city bureaucracy for a job as San Francisco's first black streetcar conductor. Shortly after summer school graduation from Mission High, she bore a son, Clyde Bailey "Guy" Johnson, who was fathered by a neighborhood boy.
