To give Maya credit where credit is due, I’m sure discovering why the caged bird sings is supposed to be surmised from the overall tale of her autobiography. I wasn’t exactly expecting her to come out and put it down in black and white, but I did expect a little more exposition on the subject. However, I did find this quote from her online that I did not find in the book:
A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. A bird sings because it has a song.
In light of that statement, the title of her autobiography makes more sense. Just like the caged bird, she was controlled by people and made to do things that were against her nature, that didn’t allow her the chance to be free. Yet also like the bird, she still sang and did not allow evil to write her story. She refused to let her metaphorical cage keep her from doing what she was made to do.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was brilliant. It’s one woman’s story about growing up and into who she was created to be. I loved it. I devoured it like a rabid hyena on an injured rabbit. Seriously. Okay, maybe that metaphor was a little much but you know what I mean.
I immensely enjoyed being educated about the difficulties of being African American because it’s so easy for me to let my whiteness blind me to injustices:
“As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see the corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism does not affect them because they are not people of color: they do not see “whiteness” as racial identity. In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”
-Peggy McIntosh
Don’t get me wrong, that’s not the point of Dr. Angelou’s story but it does provide one with a good starting education on the subject. I, however, surmised her point to this: Evil will happen to us, but we ultimately decide how to let it affect us. We can choose to either give it power over us or to say, “To Hell with it. I am worth more than that.”
Perhaps, because of where I am in my own journey and because of my feelings of kinship with Dr. Angelou for various reasons, this is what the book taught me. For you, it may be different.
May her story meet you where you are and teach you something wonderful.
