As Maya approaches maturity, she becomes more aggressive, more willing to take risks to establish her autonomy. The set-to with Daddy Bailey's live-in girlfriend is one of the liberating elements of the final chapters of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya's large, awkward frame and lack of refinement contrasts with Dolores's arrogance, daintiness, and fastidiousness; clearly, Maya is destined for trouble in the confines of the trailer that houses the three of them. She competes both consciously and unconsciously for Daddy Bailey's approval, pleasing him with her ability to converse in Spanish and her flexibility and graciousness on the doomed trip to the outskirts of Ensenada. Bailey, aware of the battle for his attention, laughs in self-congratulory amusement. Dolores, whom Maya characterizes as "mean and petty and full of pretense," is oblivious to the sadistic delight Bailey takes in pitting female against female.
Suspecting shady motives after Bailey deserts her temporarily at the cantina, Maya, unaware that he is off getting drunk with a local woman, fears that she has been bartered as a bride to a border guard. Her frank appraisal of Bailey's egocentric character and dubious principles suggests a destructive inadequacy in the man who should be a major figure in her life. As her mind toys with her father's affront to his only daughter, she bursts into hysterical tears, which Angelou characterizes with serio-comic precision. Ridiculing her reputation for brilliance, Maya gamely sets out to drive the fifty descending miles to Calexico.
Following the contretemps with local police, Maya faces greater uproar after Bailey's self-absorption and insensitivity goads Dolores to desperation. His hypocrisy in concealing the fracas to protect his position as "a Mason, an Elk, a naval dietician and the first Negro deacon in the Lutheran church" indicates that he is more concerned with social appearances than with Maya's discomfort, terror, and possible complications from the stab wound. In contrast, Maya, remembering the Baxter family's quick dispatching of Mr. Freeman and fearful of a second eruption of family vengeance, chooses to keep her wound secret from Vivian and to trust native survival skills by running away. Her choice, which is appropriate to teen logic, relieves her tensions and accords some temporary autonomy, which her wounded pride sorely needs.
Bolstered by a lack of parental restraint, like a "loose kite in a gentle wind floating with only my will for an anchor," Maya sleeps away her fears in a junked car and awakens to a multiracial group of other teenage runaways as independent as she. Together, she and the gang enjoy the illusion of total freedom while cadging free baths at one gang member's house. Crediting the experience with initiating her "into the brotherhood of man," she gains new insight into tolerance and trust. Back in San Francisco, believing that she has discredited Dolores' assertion that her mother is a whore, Maya—her displacement at an end—sinks into the satisfaction of costly gains achieved on the way to womanhood.
