Maya Angelou has told in interviews how Robert Loomis, her eventual
Random House editor, goaded her into writing autobiography, teasing her
with the challenge of writing literary autobiography. Considering
herself a poet and playwright, she had repeatedly refused Loomis's
requests that she write an autobiography until he told her that it was
just as well: "`He ... said that to write an autobiograph - as
literature - is almost impossible. I said right then I'd do
it'" ("Maya, Angelou," with Hitt 211). Angelou often
admits that she cannot resist a challenge; however, it was not the
challenge of writing autobiography per se that Angelou could not resist
(and that led to the 1970 publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings), but the challenge implied in Loomis's remark about the
difficulty of writing autobiography "as literature."(1)
Angelou does not elaborate on how she distinguishes literary
autobiography from any other kind of autobiography, and of course, for a
poststructuralist, the challenge to write literary rather than
"ordinary" autobiography is meaningless because there is no
difference between the two (see Eagleton 201). For a formalist
aesthetic, however, the distinctive qualities and characteristics of
literary or poetic language as opposed to ordinary language are central
operative concerns (see Brooks 729-31, Shklovsky 12, Fish 68-69).
Cleanth Brooks's belief that "the parts of a poem are related
to each other organically, and related to the total theme
indirectly" (730) was a primary tenet of interpretation for
American New Critics, ultimately related to their determination to
distinguish literary from ordinary language. Poststructuratism in its
most vehemently anti-formalist manifestations usually belittles
Brooks's beliefs in organic unity and in the uniqueness of literary
language, but criticisms of formalism, and of "literature" as
a distinct and privileged category, so typical of much poststructuralist
theorizing, become specially problematic in relation to African-American
literature.
Many African-American texts were written to create a particular
political impact. As a result, one can hardly ignore either the
political conditions in which the slave narratives and Richard
Wright's early works, for example, were composed or the political
impact their authors (and editors and publishers, at least of the slave
narratives) intended them to have. Even African-American texts that are
not obviously part of a protest tradition are received in a political
context, as is clear from the tendency in much critical commentary on
Zora Neale Hurston to demonstrate an elusive element of protest in her
novels.
So important is the political to the experience of African-American
literature that it comes as no surprise that the increasing
incorporation of the African-American literary tradition into mainstream
academic literary studies since 1980 coincides exactly with the
increasingly greater significance of the political in the prevailing
critical paradigm: what better for a political literary criticism to
address than an overtly political literature?
The problem is that African-American literature has, on more than
one occasion, relied on confirming its status as literature to
accomplish its political aims. Since slavery relied on a belief that
those enslaved were not really human beings, slave narrators responded
by writing books that emphasized the fact that they themselves were
humans who deserved to be treated as such. Since emancipation,
African-American authors have used the same strategy to fight the belief
in racial hierarchies that relegated them to second-class citizen
status. One way to do this was to produce "high art," which
was supposed to be one of the achievements of the highest orders of
human civilization. African-American poetry provides many examples of
this strategy: Claude McKay's and Countee Cullen's reliance on
traditional, European poetic forms and James Weldon Johnson's
"O Black and Unknown Bards." Cullen's "Yet Do I
Marvel," for instance, relies on recognizable English
"literary" features: Shakespearean sonnet form, rhyme, meter,
references to Greek mythology, and the posing of a theological question
as old as the Book of job and as familiar as William Blake's
"The Tyger."
Thus for a critical style to dismiss the closely related categories
of form and of literature is to relegate to obscurity an important
tradition of African-American literature and an important political tool
of the struggle in the United States of Americans of African descent.
This is clearly true in respect to Caged Bird, which displays the kind
of literary unity that would please Brooks, but to the significant
political end of demonstrating how to fight racism. Angelou wrote Caged
Bird in the late 1960s, at the height of the New Criticism, and
therefore in order for it to be the literary autobiography Loomis
referred to, Angelou's book had to display features considered at
the time typical of literature, such as organic unity. This is a
political gesture, since in creating a text that satisfies contemporary
criteria of "high art," Angelou underscores one of the
book's central themes: how undeservedly its protagonist was
relegated to second-class citizenship in her early years. To ignore form
in discussing Angelou's book, therefore, would mean ignoring a
critical dimension of its important political work.
Because scholarly discussions of Angelou's autobiographical
works have only appeared in any significant number in the last fifteen
years, Caged Bird and her other books have avoided - or, depending on
one's view, been spared - the kind of formal analysis typically
associated with New Criticism or Structuralism.(2) Scholarly critics of
Caged Bird, often influenced by feminist and African-American studies,
have focused on such issues as whether the story of Angelou's young
protagonist is personal or universal, or on race, gender, identity,
displacement, or a combination of these. In relation to these issues,
they discuss important episodes like the scene with the
"powhitetrash" girls, young Maya's rape and subsequent
muteness, her experience with Mrs. Flowers, the graduation, the visit to
the dentist, Maya's month living in a junkyard, or her struggle to
become a San Francisco street-car conductor.(3) What they do not do is
analyze these episodes as Angelou constructed them - often juxtaposing
disparate incidents within an episode - and arranged and organized them,
often undermining the chronology of her childhood story and juxtaposing
the events of one chapter with the events of preceding and following
ones so that they too comment on each other. The critics do not explore
how Angelou, who has never denied the principle of selection in the
writing of autobiography,(4) shaped the material of her childhood and
adolescent life story in Caged Bird to present Maya's first sixteen
years, much as a bildungsroman would, as a progressive process of
affirming identity, learning about words, and resisting racism.(5) What
scholars have focused on in Caged Bird does merit attention, but an
attention to the formal strategies Angelou uses to emphasize what the
book expresses about identity and race reveals a sequence of lessons
about resisting racist oppression, a sequence that leads Maya
progressively from helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle
resistance, and finally to outright and active protest.
The progression from rage and indignation to subtle resistance to
active protest gives Caged Bird a thematic unity that stands in contrast
to the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative. To claim thematic
unity is to argue that form and content work together, an assertion that
is an anathema to much current literary theory. However, the formal in
Caged Bird is the vehicle of the political, and not analyzing this text
formally can limit one's appreciation of how it intervenes in the
political. Critics should not focus on the political at the expense of
the formal but instead should see the political and the formal as
inextricably related. Indeed, some of the most well-received works on
American literature in the last decade offer compelling demonstrations
of such a symbiosis of form and content. Jane Tompkins' Sensational
Designs and Walter Benn Michaels' The Gold Standard and the Logic
of Naturalism, for instance, are exemplary instances of new historicism
or cultural criticism, but they nevertheless integrate virtuosic close
formal analyses of literary texts into their overall projects.(6)
Caged Birds commentators have discussed how episodic the book is,
but these episodes are crafted much like short stories, and their
arrangement throughout the book does not always follow strict
chronology.(7) Nothing requires an autobiography to be chronological,
but an expectation of chronology on the reader's part is normal in
a text that begins, as Caged Bird does, with earliest memories.
Nevertheless, one of the most important early episodes in Caged Bird
comes much earlier in the book than it actually did in Angelou's
life: the scene where the "powhitetrash" girls taunt
Maya's grandmother takes up the book's fifth chapter, but it
occurred when Maya "was around ten years old" (23), two years
after Mr. Freeman rapes her (which occurs in the twelfth chapter).
Situating the episode early in the book makes sense in the context
of the previous chapters: the third chapter ends with Angelou describing
her anger at the "used-to-be-sheriff" who warmed her family of
an impending Klan ride (14-15), and the fourth chapter ends with her
meditation on her early inability to perceive white people as human
(20-21). The scene with the "powhitetrash" girls follows this
(24-27), indicating how non-human white people can be. But if that was
all that motivated the organization of her episodes, Angelou could as
easily have followed the meditation on white people's non-humanity
with the episode where young Maya breaks the china of her white
employer, Mrs. Cullinan. What really organizes chapters three through
five is that Angelou presents the futility of indignation and the
utility of subtle resistance as ways of responding to racism. The scene
with the ex-sheriff comes at the beginning of this sequence and only
leaves Maya humiliated and angry:
If on Judgment Day I were summoned by St. Peter to give testimony to
the used-to-be sheriff's act of kindness, I would k unable to say
anything in his behalf. His confidence that my uncle and every other
Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under
their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear.
(14)
The scene with the "powhitetrash" girls causes Maya to
react with the same helpless anger and humiliation, but through the
response of her grandmother Henderson (whom she calls Momma) to the
girls, rudeness and crudity, Maya learns there can be a better and more
effective way to respond.
At first, Maya's reaction to the "powhitetrash"
girls is like her reaction to the used-to-be sheriff: rage, indignation,
humiliation, helplessness. When the girls ape her grandmother's
posture, Maya weeps, thinks of getting her uncle's rifle, and wants
to throw lye and pepper on them and to scream at them "that they
were dirty, scummy peckerwoods" (24-25). When they leave and Momma
politely calls good-bye to them, Maya's rage peaks:
I burst. A firecracker July-the-Fourth burst. How could Momma call
them Miz? The mean nasty things. Why couldn't she have come inside
the sweet, cool store when we saw them breasting the hill? What did she
prove? And then if they were dirty, mean and impudent, why did Momma
have to call them Miz? (26)
But once the girls leave, young Maya realizes that her grandmother
has achieved something@ Something had happened out there, which I
couldn't completely understand ... Whatever the contest had been
out front, I knew Momma had won" (26-27). Angelou claims that her
ten-year-old self could not fully understand what had happened, though
she did understand that there had been a contest of wills and that her
grandmother had won it.
The young girl can be only vaguely conscious of how to comprehend
the nature of the contest, but her next act and the organization of the
whole chapter indicate nonetheless how readers should comprehend it.
Angelou's description of the "powhitetrash" girls
emphasizes their dirtiness. They are "grimy, snotty-nosed
girls" (23), and "The dirt of [their] cotton dresses continued
on their legs, feet, arms and faces to make them all of a piece"
(25). In contrast to this, Maya's household is a model of
cleanliness. The first thing Momma tells Maya after the
"powhitetrash" girls have left is to wash her face (26). This
seems appropriate because of how much Maya had been crying, but its real
significance is apparent when considered in the context of the
chapter's beginning and of what Maya does at the end of the
chapter. The chapter begins: "Thou shall not be dirty, and Thou
shall not be impudent' were the two commandments of Grandmother
Henderson upon which hung our total salvation," and the two
subsequent paragraphs recount the ends to which Momma went to ensure her
grandchidren's cleanliness (21). At first glance, this would appear
to have nothing to do with the pain and humiliation of racism. But what
the entire chapter demonstrates and what the ten-year-old Maya vaguely
understands is that cleanliness, racism, and her grandmother's
"victory" over the "powhitetrash" girls have
everything to do with each other. Maya would seem to have understood
this - even though the adult Angelou claims she did not - for once she
has washed her face, without being told to do so, she rakes the trampled
front yard into a pattern that her grandmother calls "right
pretty" (27).(8)
Maya and Momma demonstrate that, unlike the white trash girls, they
are neither dirty nor impudent. This is where the victory lies. Part of
it consists of Momma's resisting the white girls, attempts to goad
her into descending to their level of impudence. But another part of the
victory lies in maintaining personal dignity through the symbolic
importance of cleanliness and politeness. The victory will not of itself
bring about the downfall of segregation which is perhaps why some
critics see Grandmother Henderson as ultimately helpless against racist
oppression [see Kent 76, and Neubauer 118]), but it does allow Momma and
Maya to be proud of themselves. By demonstrating their own cleanliness
and politeness, Maya and her grandmother establish their family's
respectability in the face of racism and subtly throw the attempt to
degrade them back on their oppressor. Furthermore, there is a more
effective strategy for reacting to racism and segregation than rage and
indignation, a strategy of subtle resistance, what Dolly McPherson calls
"the dignified course of silent endurance" (33). Later
episodes demonstrate the limitations of subtle resistance, but one
should not underestimate its powers: without risking harm to life,
liberty, or property, Momma is able to preserve her human dignity in the
face of the white girls' attempts to belittle her. It may be all
that she can do in the segregated South at the time, but it is
something. What is more, as Angelou subsequently shows, it serves as a
basis from which Maya can later move to actively protesting and
combating racism.
An important feature of the chapter is that Angelou organizes it
like a short story. It begins where it ends, with cleanliness and raking
the yard bracketing the scene with the white trash girls, and it leaves
the reader to work out the relationship between the confrontation with
the girls and the cleaning of the yard. Because of this organization,
the chapter becomes more than just a narration of bigoted behavior and
Momma's and Maya's responses to it: "Such
experiences," says McPherson, are recorded not simply as historical
events, but as symbolic revelations of Angelou's inner world"
(49). The "powhitetrash" chapter takes on the additional
dimension of a lesson in the utility of endowing everyday activities
such as washing, raking a yard, or minding one's manners with
symbolic value as a way of resisting bigotry. Making every minute of the
day a symbolic means of fighting segregation in turn means that
segregation is not a helpless and hopeless situation.
Angelou organizes the fifteenth chapter, the one about Mrs.
Flowers, in a similarly tight fashion, interrelating the themes of
racial pride, identity, and the power of words that run throughout. The
positive effect that the attention of the elegant Mrs. Flowers has on
the insecurity and identity crisis of young Maya is obvious.(9) By
helping Maya to begin to have some self-confidence, Mrs. Flowers
contributes to the young girl's affirmation of her identity:
"I was liked, and what a difference it made. I was respected ...
for just being Marguerite Johnson.... she had made tea cookies for me
and read to me from her favorite book" (85). Such respect and
affection from an older person Maya admired surely had an important
positive effect on a young girl suffering from the guilt and
self-loathing that resulted from being raped by her mother's
boyfriend. It is no wonder Angelou feels that Mrs. Flowers "threw
me my first life line" (77).
While the Mrs. Flowers chapter seems, at first glance, not to have
much to do with the politics of racism, this important step in
Maya's sense of identity has everything to do with race. Since she
had been twice sent away by her parents to live with her grandmother, it
is no surprise that Maya had an insecurity and identity problem. in the
opening pages of the book, Maya suffered from a strong case of racial
self-hatred, fantasizing that she was "really white," with
"light-blue eyes" and "long and blond" hair (2). At
that point, Maya entirely separates her sense of self from her sense of
race, and this is part of her identity crisis, since she refuses to
accept being who she is and hankers after a foreign identity that is a
compound of received ideas of white feminine beauty. By the end of the
book, the opposite is the case. When the white secretary of the San
Francisco street-car company repeatedly frustrates her attempts for a
job interview, Maya is at first tempted not to take it personally:
"The incident was a recurring dream, concocted years before by
stupid whites ... I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted
her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer." But then Maya
decides that the rebuffs, which have everything to do with her race,
also have everything to do with her personally, and this is because her
personal identity and her racial identity cannot be entirely separated:
"The whole charade we had played out in that crummy waiting room
had directly to do with me, Black, and her, white" (227). Attaining
the street-car conductor's job becomes not only a victory for civil
rights, as a result, but also a personal victory for Maya's sense
of self. One of the crucial transition points in this evolution over the
course of the entire book from the total separation of self-image and
race to the connection of the two comes in the Mrs. Flowers chapter, for
not only does Mrs. Flowers make Maya feel liked and respected, but
"she made me proud to be Negro, just by being herself"
(79).(10) This is the first statement of black racial pride in the book,
but others appear later: Joe Louis's victory, which "proved
that we were the strongest people in the world" (115), and
Maya's conclusion at the end of the graduation scene that "I
was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race" (156).
The Mrs. Flowers chapter emphasizes black racial pride by combining
two apparently disparate episodes on the basis of their thematic
affinity, much as the "powhitetrash" chapter did. Here the
affinity is not cleanliness but the power of words, a theme central to
African-American autobiography, from the slave narratives to Richard
Wright's Black Boy and beyond. The importance of the power of
words, in themselves and in poetry, and by implication, the importance
of literature run throughout Caged Bird, (11) especially after the rape,
when Maya fears that her lie at Mr. Freeman's trial caused his
death. Black Boy demonstrates the negative power of words each time
Wright is abused for-not saying the right thing,(12) yet the book
concludes on a positive note when Wright realizes that he can harness
the power of words to his own artistic and political ends. Much the same
thing happens in Caged Bird. Maya refuses to speak because she fears the
potentially fatal power of words, but throughout the second half of the
book she acknowledges that the imagination can harness the power of
words to great ends. One of the high points in this realization comes at
the end of the graduation scene, when the audience, having been insulted
by a white guest speaker, lifts its morale by singing James Weldon
Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (155). Maya
realizes that she had never heard it before. Never heard the words,
despite the thousands of times I had sung them." and this leads her
to appreciate the African-American poetic tradition as she never had
before (and Angelou expresses that appreciation with an allusion to
another Johnson poem): "Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how
often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the
lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made
less tragic by your tales?" (156). Because Johnson's words,
like Angelou's story, are gathered "from the stuff of the
black experience, with its suffering and its survival", to use
Keneth Kinnamon's words, the singing of "Lift Ev'ry Voice
and Sing" at the end of the graduation episode "is a paradigm
of Angelou's own artistic endeavor in I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings" (132-33).
Mrs. Flowers lays the groundwork for this later appreciation of the
power of the poetic word by explicitly stating the lesson of the
positive power of words in her conversation with the ten-year-old Maya
(her message is further emphasized because the main point of her
invitation and attention to the mute girl is to convince her to use
words again). "[B]ear in mind," Mrs. Flowers tells Maya,
"language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man
and it is language alone that separates him from the lower animals. ...
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice
to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning" (82). Mrs.
Flowers's speech and her reading from Dickens themselves make Maya
appreciate poetry - "I heard poetry for the first time in my
life" (84), she says about Mrs. Flowers's reading - and the
spoken word, but Angelou arranges the entire chapter to emphasize the
power of words. The chapter begins with a description of Mrs. Flowers
and her elegant command of standard English, which contrasts in their
conversations with Momma's heavy dialect, much to Maya's
shame: "Shame made me want to hide my face.... Momma left out the
verb. Why not ask, `How are you, Mrs. Flowers?'... `Brother and
Sister Wilcox is sho'ly the meanest - ' `Is,' Momma?
`Is'? Oh, please, not `is,' Momma, for two or more"
(78-79), As a result, Angelou has focused the chapter on the importance
of words and their pronunciation, even in its very first pages, before
Maya enters Mrs. Flowers's house.
The chapter's end, after Maya returns from her visit, also
emphasizes the importance of words, this time in contrast to the way
white people use words. When Maya tells her brother, "By the way,
Bailey, Mrs. Flowers sent you some tea cookie - ," Momma threatens
to beat her granddaughter (85). The crime is that since "Jesus was
the Way, the Truth and the Light," saying "by the way"
was, in Momma's view, blasphemous (86). This episode would seem
thematically unrelated to the rest of the chapter and only an example of
Momma's domestic theocracy were it not for the chapter's final
sentence: "When Bailey tried to interpret the words with:
"Whitefolks use" by the way" to mean while we're on
the subject,' Momma reminded us that `whitefolks' mouths were
most in general loose and their words were an abomination before
Christ'" (86-87). While the "by the way" episode
concludes the chapter, Black Boy fashion, with an example of the awful
power of words, this final sentence concludes both the episode and
chapter just as the emphasis on cleanliness concluded the
"powhitetrash" chapter: through their greater attention to
details, the Henderson/Johnson clan shows itself to be superior to
whites, and instead of showing Momma to be abusive and tyrannic, the
"by the way" episode anticipates the affirmation later in the
book of the strength blacks find in the careful - even poetic - use of
words, just as Mrs. Flowers does in her reading and in her speech about
words.
The internal organization of chapters, as in the
"powhitetrash" and Mrs. Flowers chapters, into thematic units
that would make Cleanth Brooks proud is but one of the effects Angelou
uses in Caged Bird. Equally effective is the way Angelou juxtaposes
chapters. For example, she follows the Mrs. Flowers chapter, with its
lessons on the power of words and on identity, with the chapter (the
sixteenth) where Maya breaks Mrs. Cullinan's dishes because the
white employer neglects to take a single but important word -
Maya's name - and Maya's identity seriously. This chapter
comments, then, on the previous one by showing Maya acting on the basis
of what she has learned in the previous chapter about the importance of
words and about affirming identity. Maya's smashing of the dishes
is also an important stage in the progression of strategies for
responding to racial oppression from helpless indignation, to subtle
resistance, to active protest. No longer helplessly angered and
humiliated, as she was by the former sheriff and the white girls
taunting her grandmother, Maya shows in the Mrs. Cullinan chapter that
she has internalized the lesson of the "powhitetrash" episode
and can figure out, with her brother's advice, a way to resist her
white employer's demeaning of her that is subtle and yet allows her
to feel herself the victor of an unspoken confrontation. After Mrs.,
Cullinan insists on calling her Mary instead of Margaret (which best
approximates her real name, Marguerite), Maya realizes that she can
neither correct her employer nor simply quit the job. Like her
grandmother with the rude white girls, Maya cannot openly confront her
oppressor, nor can she allow the situation to continue. Instead she
breaks Mrs. Cullinan's favorite dishes and walks out, exulting as
Mrs. Cullinan tells her guests, Her name's Margaret, goddamn it,
her name's Margaret!" (93).(13)
Angelou follows this chapter with a series of three chapters, the
seventeenth through the nineteenth, each of which depicts subtle black
resistance to white oppression. However, while the sixteenth chapter
ends with Maya exulting at the efficacy of her resistance of Mrs.
Cullinan, these chapters increasingly express the limitations of subtle
resistance. The seventeenth chapter tells of Maya's and
Bailey's viewing movies starring Kay Francis, who resembles their
mother, and describes how Maya turns the stereotypical depiction of
black people in Hollywood movies back onto the unknowing white members
of the audience. As the whites snicker at the Stepin Fetchitlike black
chauffeur in one Kay Francis comedy, Maya turns the joke on them:
I laughed too, but not at the hateful jokes.... I laughed because,
except that she was white, the big movie star looked just like my
mother. Except that she lived in a big mansion with a thousand servants,
she lived just like my mother. And it was funny to think of the
whitefolks' not knowing that the woman they were adoring could be
my mother's twin, except that she was white and my mother was
prettier. Much prettier. (99-100)
This passage works very much like Momma's victory over the white
trash girls: the whites' taunts are turned back on them, though the
whites may not know it. Nonetheless, this permits the black person to
feel superior instead of humiliated while avoiding the kind of open
confrontation that could lead to violence. What is problematic about the
seventeenth chapter is that, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth
chapters, the end of the chapter casts a shadow on the success achieved
in the moment of subtle resistance by describing Bailey's very
different reaction to the movie: it makes him sullen, and on their way
home, he terrifies Maya by running in front of an oncoming train (100).
In the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters, which tell of the
revival meeting and the Joe Louis fight, a black community is able to
feel superior to whites. Both chapters, though, end ambiguously, with a
reminder that the feeling of superiority is transitory and fragile. At
the revival, the congregation thrills to a sermon that subtly accuses
whites of lacking charity while reminding the congregation of the
ultimate reward for their true charity. The congregation leaves the
revival feeling, "It was better to be meek and lowly, spat upon and
abused for this little time than to spend eternity frying in the fires
of hell" (110-11). Again, the oppressed are able to feel superior
without risking the violence of an open confrontation. The final two
paragraphs of the chapter, however, compare the gospel music at the
revival with the "ragged sound" of the "barrelhouse
blues" coming from the honky-tonk run by "Miss Grace, the
good-time woman" (111). Like the parishioners at the revival, the
customers of the suitably named Miss Grace "had forsaken their own
distress for a little while." However,
Reality began its tedious crawl back into their reasoning. After all,
they were needy and hungry and despised and dispossessed, and sinners
the world over were in the driver's seat. How long, merciful
Father? How long? ... All asked the same questions. How long, oh God?
How long? (111)
Whereas the "powhitetrash" and Mrs. Cullinan chapters ended
on a note of victory, this chapter ends on one that rings more of
defeat. This is because the book moves through the three strategies for
responding to white racist oppression - helpless indignation, subtle
resistance, and active protest - and at this point is preparing the
transition from the limited victories of subtle resistance to the
outright victory of active protest.
The next chapter, the nineteenth, which describes the community at
the store listening to a Joe Louis match, follows the same pattern as
the revival chapter. Louis's victory provides his fans a stirring
moment of racial pride and exaltation: "Champion of the world. A
Black boy. Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the
world. People drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like
Christmas" (114). But while Louis's victory allows his black
fans to feel themselves stronger and superior to their white oppressors,
there are limits to how far the black community can rejoice in its
superiority. The chapter ends by mentioning that those who lived far out
of town spent the night with friends in town because, "It
wouldn't do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely
country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the
strongest people in the world" (115).
Because chapters eighteen and nineteen explore the limits to
subtle, but passive, resistance, the book has to go on to present other
possible ways of responding to white oppression. The climactic response,
one that consists of active resistance and outright protest, is
Maya's persisting and breaking the color line of the San Francisco
street-car company, described in the thirty-fourth chapter. Since Caged
Bird was written in the late sixties, at the height of the black power
movement, and at a time that was still debating the value of Martin
Luther King's belief in non-violent protest, it is no surprise that
this act of protest is the climactic moment of resistance to white
oppression in the book, a moment that says: Momma's type of
resistance was fine in its time and place, but now it is time for some
real action.(14) There are at least three other episodes in the second
half of Caged Bird, however, which explore the line between subtle but
passive resistance and active, open protest: the graduation scene
(chapter twenty-three), the dentist scene (chapter twenty-four), and the
story Daddy Clidell's friend, Red Leg, tells of double-crossing a
white con man (chapter twenty-nine).
Falling as they do between the Joe Louis chapter and the San
Francisco street-car company chapter, these three episodes chart the
transition from subtle resistance to active protest. The graduation
scene for the most part follows the early, entirely positive examples of
subtle resistance in Caged Bird. The only difference is that the
resistance is no longer so subtle and that it specifically takes the
form of poetry, which in itself valorizes the African-American literary
tradition as a source for resisting white racist oppression. Otherwise,
the graduation chapter conforms to the pattern established by the
"powhitetrash" and Mrs. Cullinan chapters: first, there is the
insult by the white person, when the speaker tells the black audience of
all the improvements which the white school will receive-improvements
that far surpass the few scheduled for the black school (151). There is
Maya's first response of humiliation and anger: "Then I wished
that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all whitefolks in their
beds" (152), shared now by the community: "[T]he proud
graduating class of 1940 had dropped their heads" (152). Then there
is the action on the part of a member of the black community - Henry
Reed's improvised leading the audience in "Lift Ev'ry
Voice and Sing" (155) - that at the same time avoids an
irreversible confrontation with the white oppressor and permits the
black community to feel its dignity and superiority: "We were on
top again. As always, again. We survived" (156).
The primary difference in the graduation chapter is that because
the audience sings together, the resistance is a community action. The
resistance is still not exactly an outright protest and it still avoids
open confrontation, since the white insulter has left and does not hear
the singing. Otherwise, the scene resembles a civil rights protest two
decades later. The graduation also serves as an introduction for the
dentist chapter, which is similar to the graduation chapter because of
the way it highlights literature as a possible source for resisting
racist oppression, and which is the crucial transitional chapter from
subtle resistance to active protest because it opens the door to the
eventuality of open confrontation by presenting the closest instance in
the book of a black person in Stamps openly confronting a racist white.
The insult in the dentist chapter occurs when Stamps's white
and only dentist - to whom Maya's grandmother had lent money,
interest-free and as a favor-refuses to treat Maya's excruciating
toothache, telling Maya and Momma, "[M]y policy is I'd rather
stick my hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's" (160).
From this point on, though, the chapter ceases to follow the pattern of
the previous examples of resistance. Instead, Momma leaves Maya in the
alley behind the dentist's office, and in a passage printed in
italics, enters the office transformed into a superwoman, and threatens
to run the now-trembling dentist out of town. Readers quickly perceive
that this passage is italicized because it is Maya's fantasy, but
they do have to read a few sentences of the fantasy before realizing it.
The chapter ends, after Maya and Momma travel to the black dentist in
Texarkana, with Angelou's explanation of what really happened
inside the white dentist's office - Momma collected interest on her
loan to the dentist, which pays the bus fare to Texarkana - and
Angelou's remark: "I preferred, much preferred, my
version" (164).
The fantasy scene bears attention because it is the only one like
it in Caged Bird. It is the only italicized passage in the book and the
only one that confuses the reader - even if only for a moment - over
what is real and what is fantasy. Some critics have argued that this
passage serves the purpose of underlining how limited Momma's
ability to fight racism is,(15) and it is true that in a better world,
Momma would have been able to exact proper and courteous care from a
dentist who was beholden to her. This reading, however, does not account
for either the uniqueness of the presentation of the passage or the very
real pride Maya feels for her grandmother as they ride the bus between
Stamps and Texarkana: "I was so proud of being her granddaughter
and sure that some of her magic must have come down to me"
(162-163). On the one hand, the italicized passage does highlight the
contrast between what Maya wishes her grandmother could do to a racist
with what little she can do, thus again demonstrating the limitations of
subtle resistance as an overall strategy for responding to racist
oppression. On the other hand, the fantasy passage anticipates the kind
of outright confrontations between oppressed black and racist oppressor
that occurred when Maya broke the street-car company's color line
and in the civil rights movement. Although it is only a fantasy, it is
the first instance in Caged Bird of a black person openly confronting a
racist white, and thus is the first hint that such confrontation is a
possibility,
The fact that the fantasy passage is an act of imagination is also
significant, since it hints that imagination and storytelling can be
forms of resisting racism. It is natural to read the fantasy passage in
this way because of its placement immediately after the apostrophe to
Black known and unknown poets" at the end of the graduation chapter
(156). Because of this passage praising black poets, we are all the more
inclined to see the imagined, italicized, fantasy passage five pages
later as itself an instance of poetry. For one, the apostrophe includes
in the category of "poets" anyone who uses the power of the
word -" include preachers, musicians and blues singers" Thus,
anyone who uses language to describe pain and suffering and their causes
(i. e., blues singers) belongs in the category of poets. According to
this definition, the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a
blues singer, and therefore a poet, too, since telling why the caged
bird sings is an instance of describing pain and suffering and their
causes, an instance of the blues. Loosely defined, poetry is also an act
of imagination, and thus the italicized fantasy passage in the dentist
chapter is poetic, since it is an act of imagination. in fact, it is the
first instance of Maya being a poet, and thus the first step towards the
far more monumental act of writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
itself. Poetry, in all its forms, can be an act of resistance. The
graduation chapter has already made that clear, but the dentist chapter
makes it clear that the victim of racial oppression can herself become a
poet and use her poetry as a form of resistance. Maya had begun to learn
the positive power of poetry and of words in the Mrs. Flowers chapter.
Now she begins the process of harnessing the power of words to positive
effect, a process that concludes with the composition almost thirty
years later of the very book in hand.
The final instance of not-quite-outright resistance is the scam Red
Leg tells kin chapter twenty-ninej of pulling on a white con man. This
episode is not the open, active protest of Maya's integration of
the street-cars, since it does not involve a direct confrontation with
the white racist, but it is closer to it than any of the previous
examples of resistance because the white person ends up knowing that he
has been had at his own game. The inclusion of the episode is at first
glance irrelevant to the heroine's personal development, but
Angelou's comments at the end of the chapter make clear how the
passage fits with the rest of the book. For one, Angelou remarks that,
"It wasn't possible for me to regard Fred Leg and his
accomplice] as criminals or be anything but proud of their
achievements" (190). The reason for her pride is that these black
con artists are achieving revenge for wrongs incurred against the entire
race: "`We are the victims of the world's most comprehensive
robbery. Life demands a balance. It's all right if we do a little
robbing now", (190-91). The scam is, therefore, another example of
fighting back against white domination and racist oppression, an example
that, like the others, meets with the author's approval.
The scam artist chapter ends, like so many other chapters, with a
paragraph that appears to have little to do with what precedes. It tells
of how Maya and her black schoolmates learned to use Standard English
and dialect in their appropriate settings. This short paragraph
certainly belongs to the commentary running throughout the book on
appreciating the significance and power of words: "We were alert to
the gap separating the written word from the colloquial" (191). It
also serves to emphasize the superior ability of blacks to adapt to and
get the best of circumstances and situations: "My education and
that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of
our white schoolmates. in the classroom we all learned past participles,
but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s's
from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs" (191). Angelou
shows here the superior adaptability of her black schoolmates (and that
Maya has come a long way from her scorn of her grandmother's use of
dialect): the blacks learn all the whites do and more. This lesson is
entirely appropriate to the con artist chapter, since what the stories
about pulling scams demonstrate is the black version of heroism, which
is to make the most of what little one has - in other words,
adaptability: [I]n the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who
is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by
ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast"
(190).
Within strictly legal confines, such an ability is the essence of
the American myth of success, and undoubtedly, at least part of the
appeal of Caged Bird is that it corresponds both to this definition of
black heroism and to the outline of a typical success story.(16) The
product of a broken family, raped at age eight, Angelou was offered at
first "only the crumbs" from her "country's
table." She suffers from an inferiority complex, an identity
crisis, and the humiliation of racist insults. By the end of the book,
however, she no longer feels inferior, knows who she is, and knows that
she can respond to racism in ways that preserve her dignity and her
life, liberty, and property, and she knows - and demonstrates in
addition through the very existence of the book itself - that she can
respond by using the power of words. It may be impossible to convince a
poststructuralist that there is something uniquely literary about
Angelou's autobiography, but certainly part of what this
autobiography is about is the power and utility of literature and its
own genesis and existence as a protest against racism. One serves
Angelou and Caged Bird better by emphasizing how form and political
content work together. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese says in respect to the
general tradition of autobiographies by African-American women:
The theoretical challenge lies in bringing sophisticated skills to
the service of a politically informed reading of texts. To read well, to
read fully, is inescapably to read politically, but to foreground the
politics, as if these could somehow be distinguished from the reading
itself, is to render the reading suspect. (67)
To neglect many of the formal ways Caged Bird expresses its points
about identity, words, and race is to ignore the extent to which Angelou
successfully met Loomis's challenge, an important aspect of her
artistic accomplishment, and the potential utility of this text in
literary classrooms, especially those that emphasize combining formal
and ideologically-based approaches to analyzing literature.
NOTES
(1) Angelou tells the story of how she came to write I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings in several interviews collected by Jeffrey M. Elliot
(80, 151-52, 211). She admits having an inability to "resist a
challenge" ("Westways" 80) in her 1983 interview with
Claudia Tate ("Maya Angelou" 151-52), and in at least two
interviews, she discusses James Baldwin's possible role in helping
Loomis use her attraction to a challenge as a ploy to get her to agree
to write an autobiography ("Westways" 80, "Maya
Angelou", with Tate 151). (2) A search in the MLA computerized data
bank reveals forty-four items on Angelou, with the oldest dating back to
1973, three years after the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings. Twenty-eight of these forty-four items have appeared since 1985,
and only nine appeared before 1980 (and of these, two are interviews,
one is bibliographic information, and one is a portion of a
dissertation). There are different possibilities for interpreting these
facts: on the one hand, it may be that scholarly critics have been slow
to catch up, to Angelou, slow to treat her work - and thus to recognize
it - as literature worthy of their attention; on the other hand, it may
be that the scholarly status of Angelou's work has risen in concert
with poststructuralism's rise and has done so because
poststructuralism has made it possible to appreciate Angelou's work
in new ways. (3) For the significance of identity in Caged Bird, see
Butterfield (203), Schmidt (25-27), McPherson (16, 18, 121), and
Arensberg (275, 278-80, 288-90). On displacement, see Neubauer (117-19,
126-27) and Bloom (296-97). For a consideration of the personal vs. the
universal, see McPherson (45-46), Cudjoe (10), O'Neale (26),
McMurry (109), and Kinnamon, who stresses the importance of community in
Caged Bird (123-33). On the "powhitetrash" scene, see
Butterfield (210-12), McPherson (31-33), and McMurry (108). For an
extensive consideration of the rape, see Froula (634-36). For the effect
of the rape on Maya and her relationship with Mrs. Flowers, see Lionnet
(147-52). For the graduation, see Butterfield (207), McMurry (109-10),
Arensberg (283), and Cudjoe (14). For the visit to the dentist, see
Braxton (302-04) and Neubauer (118-19). For the month in the junkyard,
see Gilbert (41) and Lionnet (156-57). (4) See Angelou's interviews
with Tate ("Maya Angelou" 152) and with Neubauer
("Interview" 288-89). In an interview included in
McPherson's Order Out of Chaos, Angelou mentions a number of
incidents she omitted - some consciously, some unconsciously - from
Caged Bird (138-40, 145-47, 157-58). O'Neale, who writes that
Angelou's "narrative was held together by controlled
techniques of artistic fiction" (26) and that her books are
"arranged in loosely structured plot sequences which are skillfully
controlled" (32), does not discuss these techniques or arrangements
in any detail. (5) Angelou creates enough potential confusion about her
protagonist's identity by having her called different names by
different people - Ritie, Maya, Marguerite, Margaret, Mary, Sister. For
the sake of consistency, I use the name "Maya" to refer to the
protagonist of Caged Bird and the name "Angelou" to refer to
its author. (6) Michaels's book is published in Stephen
Greenblatt's series, "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural
Poetics," and Tompkins' book, whose subtitle is The Cultural
Work of Arnerican Fiction, 1790-1860, emphasizes reading literature in
its historical context. Tompkins' chapter, "Sentimental Power:
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History," and
Michaels' chapter on McTeague strike me as brilliant close literary
analysis. (7) Schmidt (25) and McPherson (26) comment on the episodic
quality of Caged Bird. Schmidt is the one commentator on Caged Bird to
mention that "each reminiscence forms a unit" (25). An
indication of how episodic Caged Bird is is how readily selections from
it have lent themselves to being anthologized. (8) McMurry argues
insightfully that Maya "is using the design [she rakes in the front
yard] to organize feelings she could not otherwise order or express,
just as Momma has used the song to organize her thoughts and feelings
beyond the range of the children's taunts. She triumphs not only in
spite of her restrictions, but because of them. It is because, as a
Black woman, she must maintain the role of respect toward the white
children that she discovers another vehicle for the true emotions"
(108). Kinnamon, arguing that "Angelou's purpose is to portray
cleanliness as a bonding ritual in black culture" (127), contrasts
the importance of washing in the "powhitetrash" chapter with
the scene in Black Boy where Richard Wright tells of his
grandmother's washing him. (9) See Bloom, who points to Mrs.
Flowers as "a perceptive mother-substitute" (293). Sexual
identity is central to the book's last two chapters, in which
Angelou tells of Maya's concerns about her sexual identity and the
birth of her son. For discussions of these last two chapters, see Smith
(373-74), Buss (103-04), Schmidt (26-27), McPherson (53-55), Arensberg
(290-91), Butterfield (213), Lionnet (135-36), Demetrakopoulos (198-99),
and MacKethan (60). (10) By being herself, Mrs. Flowers made Maya proud
of her racial background, "proud to be Negro," but the real
lesson Maya needs to learn is double: by being herself, Maya herself can
be "proud to be Negro" and by being "proud to be
Negro," Maya can be herself. Thus the language of the phrase
implies the link between being "proud to be Negro" and being
oneself. (11) See MacKethan, who emphasizes "verbal humor as a
survival strategy" in Caged Bird. Cudjoe, arguing that "speech
and language became instruments of liberation in Afro-American
thought," reads Caged Bird in the context of this important theme
(10-11). (12) Examples of this abuse occur when Wright tells his
grandmother to kiss his ass, when he nonchalantly answers his
uncle's question about the time of day, or when a drunken white man
bashes him in the face for forgetting to say "sir" (40-44,
149-53, 173-74). (13) Thanks to my colleague, Mark Richardson, for
pointing out that in Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin the sailors
rebelled against their officers by smashing dishes and for implying that
dish smashing as an act of rebellion may be a literary trope. (14)
Angelou has spoken in at least two interviews of the importance of
protest in her work ("Zelo Interviews Maya Angelou, 167; "The
Maya Character" 198). (15) See, for example, Neubauer (118). Mary
Jane Lupton also feels that in the dentist episode "the grandmother
has been defeated and humiliated, her only reward a mere ten dollars in
interest for a loan she had made to the dentist" (261). (16) On May
29, 1994, twenty-four years after Caged Bird's initial publication,
the paperback edition was in its sixty-seventh week on the New York
Times Book Review, list of paperback best sellers.
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