Maya Angelou Read Free Page A

the first major chapter.
    Maya’s mother, Vivian Baxter, was a nurse and card dealer; her father, Bailey Johnson Sr., was a doorman and also a dietician or meal adviser for the navy. They had a difficult marriage that ended in divorce and in their subsequent inability to deal with their young children. When Maya was three and her brother Bailey four, their father deposited the children on a train from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas, home of Bailey Sr.’s mother, Annie Henderson, owner and operator of a general store.
    Annie met the train to take charge of two forlorn children wearing instructions on their wrists that announced their names, their point of departure, and their destination. It was in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, an economic disaster that had its roots in the American financial system but was soon felt worldwide. Still, Annie Henderson had been able to survive because her general store sold such basic commodities as beans and flour and because she made wise and honest investments.
    Angelou recounts this desolate journey and arrival in the early pages of the book that has since brought her fame, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings . Published in 1970 when Angelou was forty-two, it covers her life from the age of three to the age of sixteen. Caged Bird is the first of six autobiographies depicting the life of this amazing African American woman ofletters. The other five are Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002).
The Woman in the Books
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1931–1944)
    In Caged Bird (1970), Angelou reconstructs her childhood, beginning as a three-year-old child living with her older brother under the protective hand of their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. The first volume vividly recalls life in Stamps, Arkansas, with its Christian traditions and its segregated society.
    When Maya was eight, her father took her and Bailey from Stamps to St. Louis to visit their mother, Vivian Baxter. It was there, in 1936, in a poorly supervised household, that Maya was seduced and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. After a brief trial Freeman was beaten to death, presumably by Maya’s three uncles. Horrified that her words had caused anyone’s death, Maya withdrew into a silence that the Baxters were incapable of handling. She and Bailey were returned to Annie Henderson and the community of Stamps, where for five years Maya remained mute. She was finally released from the burden of speechlessness in 1940, through her study of literature and guidance by a woman from Stamps named Mrs. Flowers.
    After graduating from the eighth grade, Maya, along with her brother Bailey, moved back to California, where she gave an early sign of her enormous potential to succeed by becoming the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She knew even then, from her experiences in Stamps and St. Louis, that she was black and female, someone with the cards stacked against her. “If you’re black you’re black. Whatever you do comes out of that. It’s like being a woman. No matter what age or even sexual preference, if you’re a woman you’re a woman” (“Icon” 1997).
    Serious problems arose for Maya in her mid-teens during a disastrous summer vacation in Southern California and Mexico with her father, Bailey Sr., and his girlfriend, Dolores Stockland. Maya and Dolores had a violent relationship that ended when Dolores stabbed Maya in the arm. Maya recovered, wandered around Southern California awhile, and lived in a junkyard. She then returned to Vivian Baxter, who began to establish a maternal closeness with her daughter. In 1944, when she was sixteen, Maya became pregnant after inviting a neighborhood boy to have sex with her. She gave