I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou's first venture into autobiography, is, like the author herself, packed with promise. Like most autobiography, the story line follows the author's memories, which are colored by photos, letters, and other people's interpretations and repetitions of past events. The conversations are obviously padded or wholly fictionalized to fill in what people probably said at the time. The Maya character, sometimes endowed with more sophistication and understanding than is appropriate to her young age, reflects a blend of memory and the adult author's hindsight.
Taking her text from a line that echoes through Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "Sympathy," Angelou selects an evocative title linked to images of powerlessness and defeat, but resonant with hope, creative energy, and zestful savvy. As evidence that she has experienced the prototypical struggle for freedom and self-worth, she gives the impression of confessing all triumphs and shortcomings, even scenes and events which a more discreet author might have concealed from public view. The positive tone of her work uplifts the reader with renewed belief in the human ability to mitigate random injustice in order to survive. By growing stronger than the challenges that beset her, Maya completes the coming-of-age pilgrimage and arrives at adulthood, her dignity intact and her promise assured.
Ironically, the focal point of Angelou's talent is her delight in language, which she masters despite a year's self-imprisonment in muteness. Her skill at interweaving varied sounds, diction, metaphor, verse, hymns, scripture, and rhythms enlivens the narrative with texture and spirit. The resulting facile, readable blend covers the fourteen years of her childhood — from her arrival in Stamps, Arkansas, in 1931, at age three to her graduation from Lafayette County Training School and subsequent bonding with her three-week-old son at her mother's house in San Francisco in October 1945. Examples of her appealing turns of phrase are plentiful:
