Like the rest of the new arrivals, Maya develops a sense of belonging to the ten-square-block area around Post Street and evolves the San Francisco personality — friendly, cool, and distinguished. However impressed she is with her newfound freedom and the offerings of a cosmopolitan city, she maintains a sense of racial separation, particularly from white insiders who think of the Southern influx, both white and black, as "raucous unsophisticated provincials." The racial incident that concludes Chapter 27 is one of the rare instances in Angelou's prose which fails to ring true, as though she tacked it on just for effect. An example of bathos, or anticlimactic sentimentality, it lessens her skillful recreation of wartime San Francisco. For good reason, she seems to distance herself from the story's origins.
In contrast to this lapse is the extended anecdote which concludes Chapter 29, the San Francisco segment of Maya's education. The exemplum or detailed story of how Red Leg and Just Black bilk a bigoted cracker, a standard version of the trickster motif common to Afro-American and Native American lore, serves a structural purpose. At the end of the narrative, Angelou attempts to rationalize why "It's all right if we do a little robbing now" to even out the balance of years of injustice. Shifting to her own ability to shuck off standard grammar for vernacular, she concludes good-naturedly, "It be's like that sometimes." The implication that she learns much about life from the underworld members brought home by Daddy Clidell figures significantly in sequels to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, particularly Gather Together in My Name.
