I started reading this book and found I could not put it down. I read through it in two days and was hungry for more. I went searching for more Maya and I found her next two autobiographies titled "Gather Together in My Name" and "Singin' and Swingin' and Getting Merry Like Christmas". It wasn't until I picked up her complete set of autobiographies that I realized that "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" was her first attempt at writing a book. You'd never know it by the quality of writing. The reader is instantly transported to Stamps, Arkansas just before the Depression. The book carries your though and out of the Great Depression.You can almost taste the dusty roads and feel the heat on your shoulders and you travel through town and meet all the interesting characters who visit grandma's store. The first person perspective of Maya is passed onto the reader and you truely get a feel for what it must of been like to be black, and in the south during this turbulent time. Your heart goes out to little Maya who has been sent to live with her grandmother but longs to know her parents. Her brother Bailey becomes your hero as he has become Maya's. You'll learn what schooling was like and the importance of going to church to this rural community. Ms. Angelou went on to do so many great things with her life and this book gives you a glimpse of how her strength came to be. She's not only strong but calm no matter what life throws at her. Maya is a wonderful woman, a role model for any race/color/or age. I highly recommend this book as a starting point for a journey with Ms. Angelou. Follow up with the rest of her autobiographies!

Maya Angelou's autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a story in which she reflects back on her life. This book starts out when she was sent from Long Beach, California to Stamp Arkansas. As a child, Maya, or Marguerite, as she was referred to in the text, was faced with many difficulties with being Black. She held beliefs that she was really a blonde haired, blue-eyed girl under her outer sking. Besides struggling with the fact that she was a Black girl, she also had many hardships with being a girl. A big hardship she faced was being raped by her mother's boyfriend when she went to visit her mother in St. Louis.
After the many difficulties she faced as a child, she started to overcome them. A lady named Ms. Bertha Flowers helped her begin her defeat of her problems by allowing her to feel as if she had someone who was actually there to help her. After the help of Ms. Flowers, Maya ascended and slowly started to conquer her troubles. At the books end, Maya finds a boyfriend, and they eventually have a son.

In her autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou recounts her life story as a young, keenly intelligent but insecure black girl in the South during the 1930s and California during the 1940s. The book conveys the difficulties associated with the mixture of racial and gender discrimination endured by a southern black girl, though, and this is perhaps the most fundamental theme explored in her autobiography. The intersectionality of race and gender is a pivotal thread of Angelou's theme, where more than one type of subjugation results in a multiple burden for the victim. Overall, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is a powerful, stirring account of the intersectionality of race and gender regarding black women. Though segregation had been officially declared null and void, many of the Southern states were steeped in racist tendencies that further multiplied the gender inequality that exposed black women to a multi-faceted oppression. Peiss, Hine, Terborg-Penn, Bederman, et. al. all examine threads of this intersectionality, and in discussing these threads, one can draw a distinct comparison between anti-black, anti-black women sentiment and Angelou's personal experiences. As a girl, Angelou believed her gender to be a limiting factor. She considered herself to be unheroic, and incapable of achieving spectacular feats like the boys in her comic books. In the narrative, being female for Angelou is just as trying as being black, and she struggled with the double burden, rather than embracing it. However, as more and more black women slowly overcame their troubles as a result of the overwhelming intersectionality of the time, so did Angelou. The novel ended with hope because she bucks the stereotype to become the first black female streetcar conductor. Angelou's spike in confidence and belief in her ability reflects the gradual evolution of black women's race and gender after decades of imprisonment, and foreshadows a future of activism, struggle for respect and eventual victory in those regards.

The Essence of Dreams...The Creativeness of Silence...The Fortitude of Love...