She also owned an extra house that she rented to a family of poor white people who occasionally came to the store to taunt her and her family.ĭuring the Depression, Mrs. Annie had status in the black community she owned and ran a successful general store that supplied the black community with food and sundries. When Angelou was three and her brother, Bailey, was four, her parents divorced and shipped the two young children to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in the stark, dusty, black section of Stamps, Arkansas. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Bailey, a doorkeeper and naval dietician, and Vivian, a nurse and real estate agent, Johnson. I know why the caged bird sings!' Author BiographyĪngelou was born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. It is a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings. 'When he beats his bars and he would be free.

The source of the title of the book is a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar entitled 'Sympathy.' 'I know why the caged bird sings,' writes the poet. But most of all her story is the story of discovering who she is-of working her way through a multifaceted identity crisis. During these years, she struggled against the odds of being black at a time when prejudice, especially in the South, was at its height. A host of other unforgettable characters fill out the cast for this earnest, sometimes sardonic retelling of the drama of Maya Angelou's growing-up years. It is also the annals of her relationships with a rich and diverse cast of characters, chief among them her determined, strict, and wise grandmother, Annie Henderson, her crippled and bitter uncle, Willie Johnson, her bright and imaginative brother, Bailey Johnson, Jr., her playboy father, Bailey Johnson, and her beautiful, brilliant, and worldly mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson. Louis, Missouri, and glitzy San Francisco, California. It is a remarkably vivid retelling of the turbulent events of her childhood, during which she shuttled back and forth between dramatically different environments in rural Stamps, Arkansas, slightly raunchy St. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first-and many say the best-of five autobiographical volumes the gifted African-American author Maya Angelou wrote.

From i know why the caged bird sings