This study will examine the theme of the harshness of black life in the South, focusing on the experiences of Maya Angelou in her autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou suffered poverty, racism, child abuse, rape, abandonment, and a self-hatred born of a society dominated by white images of beauty and worth. Angelou eventually learns her own worth as a black woman, as a creative speaker and writer, and as an individual human being, but, unfortunately, those beautiful and redemptive truths comes only after a youth full of suffering.
As McPherson notes, "Angelou's initial crisis" involves "her acceptance of herself as an outcast (because of her rejection by her parents" (McPherson 16). Angelou returns to this crisis as the crux of her predicament and that of blacks in the South: "Why did they send us away, and What did we do so wrong? So Wrong?" (Angelou 51). The words recall those of Jesus on the cross, asking why God had forsaken him.
Angelou puts this terrible abandonment in a social context to demonstrate its significance to Southern blacks in general. After her father and mother "decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage," Angelou and her brother, ages 3 and 4, were shipped to their grandmother's home by train--alone. She writes:
Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises (Angelou 6-7).
Angelou is eased in her suffering somewhat by the discovery that she shares her despair with other suffering blacks in the racist South: "They were needy and hungry and despised and dispossessed, and sinners the world over were in the driver's seat. . . . All asked the same questions. How long, oh God? How long? (Angelou 128).
Angelou's suffering may be typical of black...