SOURCE: Moore, Opal. “Learning to Live: When the Bird Breaks from the Cage.” In Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean, pp. 306–16. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1993.

I bring the dreaded disease. I encourage their children to open their hearts to the “dark” side. To know the fear in them. To know the rage. To know the repression that has lopped off their brains—

—Toi Derricotte “From The Black Notebooks”

There is, it seems, a widespread movement afoot to assert the innocence of children even as we deny or sabotage that innocence. There is what appears to be a head-in-the-sand impulse to insist upon this innocence by simply refusing to acknowledge its non-existence. Never mind the “mean streets,” never mind the high teen pregnancy rates and drug use, or the phenomenal school dropout rates, or spiraling teen suicide statistics—never mind these real dangers to childhood. There are agencies at work to shield these unprotected children from books that might reveal to them the workings of their own minds and hearts, books that engender the agony of thought and the fearfulness of hope. If we cannot protect children from experience, should we protect them from knowing?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the autobiography of Maya Angelou, is the story of one girl's growing up. But, like any literary masterpiece, the story of this one black girl declaring “I can” to a color-coded society that in innumerable ways had told her “you can't, you won't” transcends its author. It is an affirmation; it promises that life, if we have the courage to live it, will be worth the struggle. A book of this description might seem good reading for junior high and high school students. According to People for the American Way, however, Caged Bird was the ninth “most frequently challenged book” in American schools (Graham 26, 1).¹Caged Bird elicits criticism for its honest depiction of rape, its exploration of the ugly spectre of racism in America, its recounting of the circumstances of Angelou's own out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and its humorous poking at the foibles of the institutional church. Arguments advocating that Caged Bird be banned from school reading lists reveal that the complainants, often parents, tend to regard any treatment of these kinds of subject matter in school as inappropriate—despite the fact that the realities and issues of sexuality and violence, in particular, are commonplace in contemporary teenage intercourse and discourse. The children, they imply, are too innocent for such depictions; they might be harmed by the truth.

This is a curious notion—that seriousness should be banned from the classroom while beyond the classroom, the irresponsible and sensational exploitation of sexual, violent, and profane materials is as routine as the daily dose of soap opera. The degradation of feeling caused by slurs directed against persons for their race/class/sex/sexual preference is one of the more difficult hurdles of youthful rites of passage. But it's not just bad TV or the meanness of children. More and more, society is serving an unappetizing fare on a child-sized plate—television screens, t-shirt sloganeers, and weak politicians admonish children to “say ‘no’ to drugs and drugpushers”; to be wary of strangers; to have safe sex; to report their own or other abusing parents, relatives or neighbors; to be wary of friends; to recognize the signs of alcoholism; to exercise self control in the absence of parental or societal controls; even to take their Halloween candy to the hospital to be x-rayed before consumption. In response to these complications in the landscape of childhood, parent groups, religious groups, and media have called for educators to “bring morality back into the classroom” while we “get back to basics” in a pristine atmosphere of moral non-complexity, outside of the context of the very real world that is squeezing in on that highly touted childhood innocence every single day.

Our teenagers are inundated with the discouragements of life. Ensconced in a literal world, they are shaping their life choices within the dichotomies of TV ads: Bud Light vs. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Life becomes a set of skewed and cynical oppositions: “good” vs. easy; yes vs. “catch me”; “right” vs. expediency.

In truth, what young readers seem most innocent of these days is not sex, murder, or profanity, but concepts of self empowerment, faith, struggle as quest, the nobility of intellectual inquiry, survival, and the nature and complexity of moral choice. Caged Bird offers these seemingly abstract (adult) concepts to a younger audience that needs to know that their lives are not inherited or predestined, that they can be participants in an exuberant struggle to subjugate traditions of ignorance and fear. Critics of this book might tend to overlook or devalue the necessity of such insights for the young.

Caged Bird's critics imply an immorality in the work based on the book's images. However, it is through Angelou's vivid depictions of human spiritual triumph set against a backdrop of human weakness and failing that the autobiography speaks dramatically about moral choice. Angelou paints a picture of some of the negative choices: white America choosing to oppress groups of people; choosing lynch law over justice; choosing intimidation over honor. She offers, however, “deep talk” on the possibility of positive choices: choosing life over death (despite the difficulty of that life); choosing courage over safety; choosing discipline over chaos; choosing voice over silence; choosing compassion over pity, over hatred, over habit; choosing work and planning and hope over useless recrimination and slovenly despair. The book's detractors seem unwilling to admit that morality is not edict (or an innate property of innocence), but the learned capacity for judgement, and that the necessity of moral choice arises only in the presence of the soul's imperfection.

Self empowerment, faith, struggle as quest, survival, intellectual curiosity, complexity of choice—these ideas are the underpinning of Maya Angelou's story. To explore these themes, the autobiography poses its own set of oppositions: Traditional society and values vs. contemporary society and its values; silence vs. self expression; literacy vs. the forces of oppression; the nature of generosity vs. the nature of cruelty; spirituality vs. ritual. Every episode of Caged Bird, engages these and other ideas in Maya Angelou's portrait of a young girl's struggle against adversity—a struggle against rape: rape of the body, the soul, the mind, the future, of expectation, of tenderness—towards identity and self affirmation. If we cannot delete rape from our lives, should we delete it from a book about life?

Caged Bird with the poignant, halting voice of Marguerite Johnson, the young Maya Angelou, struggling for her own voice beneath the vapid doggerel of the yearly Easter pageant:

“What you lookin at me for?”
“I didn't come to stay. …”

These two lines prefigure the entire work. “What you lookin at me for …” is the painful question of every black girl made self-conscious and self doubting by a white world critical of her very existence. The claim that she “didn't come to stay” increases in irony as the entire work ultimately affirms the determination of Marguerite Johnson and, symbolically, all of the unsung survivors of the Middle Passage, to do that very thing—to stay. To stay is to affirm life and the possibility of redemption. To stay—despite the circumstance of our coming (slavery), despite the efforts to remove us (lynching) or make us invisible (segregation).

Angelou, in disarmingly picturesque and humorous scenes like this opening glimpse of her girl-self forgetting her lines and wetting her pants in her earliest effort at public speech, continually reminds us that we survive the painfulness of life by the tender stabilities of family and community. As she hurries from the church trying to beat the wetness coursing down her thighs, she hears the benedictory murmurs of the old church ladies saying, “Lord bless the child,” and “Praise God.”

This opening recitation lays a metaphorical foundation for the autobiography, and for our understanding of the trauma of rape that causes Marguerite to stifle her voice for seven years. In some ways, the rape of Marguerite provides the center and the bottom of this autobiographical statement.

Critics of the work charge that the scenes of seduction and rape are too graphically rendered:

He (Mr. Freeman] took my hand and said, “Feel it.” It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest with his left arm, and his right hand was moving so fast and his heart was beating so hard that I was afraid that he would die. … Finally he was quiet, and then came the nice part. He held me so softly that I wished he wouldn't ever let me go.

(61)

The seeming ambivalence of this portrait of the dynamics of interfamilial rape elicits distaste among those who prefer, if rape must be portrayed at all, for it to be painted with the hard edges of guilt and innocence. Yet, this portrait reflects the sensibilities of eight year old Marguerite Johnson—full of her barely understood longings and the vulnerability of ignorance:

… Mama had drilled into my head: “Keep your legs closed, and don't let nobody see your pocketbook.”

(61)

Mrs. Baxter has given her daughter that oblique homespun wisdom designed to delay the inevitable. Such advice may forewarn, but does not forearm and, characteristic of the period, does not even entertain the unthinkable improbability of the rape of a child. Aside from this vague caution, and the knowledge that “lots of people did ‘it’ and they used their ‘things’ to accomplish the deed …,” Marguerite does not know how to understand or respond to the gentle, seemingly harmless Mr. Freeman because he is “family,” he is an adult (not to be questioned), and he offers her what appears to be the tenderness she craves that had not been characteristic of her strict southern upbringing.

When asked why she included the rape in her autobiography, Angelou has said, “I wanted people to see that the man was not totally an ogre (Conversations, 156). And it is this fact that poses one of the difficulties of rape and the inability of children, intellectually unprepared, to protect themselves. If the rapists were all terrible ogres and strangers in dark alleys, it would be easier to know when to run, when to scream, when to “say no.” But the devastation of rape is subtle in its horror and betrayal which creates in Marguerite feelings of complicity in her own assault. When queried by Mr. Freeman's defense attorney about whether Mr. Freeman had ever touched her on occasions before the rape, Marguerite, recalling that first encounter, realizes immediately something about the nature of language, its inflexibility, its inability to render the whole truth, and the palpable danger of being misunderstood:

I couldn't … tell them how he had loved me once for a few minutes and how he had held me close before he thought I had peed in my bed, My uncles would kill me and Grandmother Baxter would stop speaking, as she often did when she was angry. And all those people in the court would stone me as they had stoned the harlot in the Bible. And Mother, who thought I was such a good girl, would be so disappointed. But most important, there was Bailey. I had kept a big secret from him.

(70–71)

To protect herself, Marguerite lies: “Everyone in the court knew that the answer had to be No. Everyone except Mr. Freeman and me” (71).

Some schools that have chosen not to ban Caged Bird completely have compromised by deleting “those rape chapters.” It should be clear, however, that this portrayal of rape is hardly titillating or “pornographic.” It raises issues of trust, truth and lie, love, the naturalness of a child's craving for human contact, language and understanding, and the confusion engendered by the power disparities that necessarily exist between children and adults. High school students should be given the opportunity to gain insight into these subtleties of human relationships and entertain the “moral” questions raised by the work: should Mr. Freeman have been forgiven for his crime? (After all, he appears to be very sorry. When Marguerite awakens from the daze of trauma, Mr. Freeman is tenderly bathing her: “His hands shook” (66). Which is the greater crime, Mr. Freeman's rape of Marguerite, or Marguerite's lying about the nature of their relationship (which might be seen as having resulted in Mr. Freeman's death)? What should be the penalty for rape? Is the community's murderous action against Mr. Freeman's unthinkable crime merely a more expedient form of the state's statutes on capital punishment? Might we say he was “judged by a jury of his peers”? Which is the greater crime—if Marguerite had told the truth and Mr. Freeman had been acquitted, or Marguerite's lie, and Mr. Freeman's judgement by an outraged community? What is the truth? Didn't Marguerite actually tell the basic truth, based on her innocence, based on her inability to understand Mr. Freeman's motives? As Maya Angelou might say, “Those are questions, frightful questions, too intimate and obscenely probing” (Black Women Writers, 3)² Yet, how can we deny young readers, expected to soon embark upon their own life-altering decision-making, the opportunity to engage in questions so relevant as these. How can we continue to forearm them solely with t-shirt slogans?

Caged Bird, in this scene so often deleted from classroom study, opens the door for discussion about the prevalent confusion between a young person's desire for affection and sexual invitation. Certainly, this is a valuable distinction to make, and one that young men and women are often unable to perceive or articulate. Angelou also reveals the manner by which an adult manipulates a child's desire for love as a thin camouflage for his own crude motives. A further complication to the neat assignment of blame is that Marguerite's lie is not prompted by a desire to harm Mr. Freeman, but out of her feelings of helplessness and dread. Yet, she perceives that the effect of that lie is profound—so profound that she decides to stop her own voice, both as penance for the death of Mr. Freeman and out of fear of the power of her words: “… a man was dead because I had lied” (72).

This dramatization of the ambiguity of truth and the fearfulness of an Old Testament justice raises questions of justice and the desirability of truth in a world strapped in fear, misunderstanding, and the inadequacy of language. The story reveals how violence can emerge out of the innocent routines of life; how betrayal can be camouflaged with blame; that adults are individual and multi-dimensional and flawed; but readers also see how Marguerite overcomes this difficult and alienating episode of her life.

However, the work's complexity is a gradual revelation. The rape must be read within the context of the entire work from the stammer of the opening scene, to the elegant Mrs. Flowers who restores Marguerite's confidence in her own voice (77–87) to the book's closing affirmation of the forgiving power of love and faith. Conversely, all of these moments should be understood against the ravaging of rape.

Marguerite's story is emblematic of the historic struggle of an entire people and, by extension, any person or group of people. The autobiography moves from survival to celebration of life and students who are permitted to witness Marguerite's suffering and ascendancy might gain in the nurturing of their own potential for compassion, optimism and courage.

This extended look at the scene most often censored by high school administrators and most often criticized by parents should reveal that Angelou's Caged Bird, though easily read, is no “easy” read. This is, perhaps, part of the reason for the objections of parents who may feel that the materials are “too sophisticated” for their children. We should be careful, as teachers, designers of curriculum, and concerned parents, not to fall into the false opposition of good vs. easy. What is easier for a student (or for a teacher) is not necessarily good. In this vein, those parents who are satisfied to have this work removed from required lists but offered on “suggested” lists should ask themselves whether they are giving their kids the kind of advice that was so useless to Maya Angelou: “keep your legs closed and don't let nobody see your pocketbook.” Without the engagement of discussion, Caged Bird might do what parents fear most—raise important issues while leaving the young reader no avenue to discover his or her relationship to these ideas. Perhaps the parents are satisfied to have controversial works removed to the “suggested” list because they are convinced that their children will never read anything that is not required. If that is their hope, we have more to worry about than booklists.

If parents are concerned about anything, it should be the paucity of assigned readings in the junior high and high school classrooms, and the quality of the classroom teaching approach for this (and any other) worthwhile book.³ Educators have begun to address the importance of the preparation of teachers for the presentation of literature of the caliber of Caged Bird which is a challenge to students, but also to teachers who choose to bring this work into the classroom.⁴Caged Bird establishes oppositions of place and time: Stamps, Arkansas vs. St. Louis and San Francisco; the 1930s of the book's opening vs. the slave origins of Jim Crow, which complicate images related to certain cultural aspects of African-American life including oral story traditions, traditional religious beliefs and practices, ideas regarding discipline and displays of affection, and other materials which bring richness and complexity to the book, but that, without clarification, can invite misapprehension. For example, when Marguerite smashes Mrs. Cullinan's best pieces of “china from Virginia” by “accident,” the scene is informative when supported by its parallels in traditional African-American folklore, by information regarding the significance of naming in traditional society, and the cultural significance of the slave state practice of depriving Africans of their true names and cultural past. The scene, though funny, should not be treated as mere comic relief, or as a meaningless act of revenge. Mrs. Cullinan, in insisting upon “re-naming” Marguerite Mary, is carrying forward that enslaving technique designed to subvert identity; she is testing what she believes is her prerogative as a white person—to establish who a black person will be, to call a black person by any name she chooses. She is “shock[ed] into recognition of [Marguerite's] personhood” (Black Women Writers, 9). She learns that her name game is a very dangerous power play that carries with it a serious risk.

With sufficient grounding, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings can provide the kinds of insights into American history and culture, its values, practices, beliefs, lifestyles, and its seeming contradictions that inspired James Bald win to describe the work, on its cover, as one that “liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity,” and as “… a Biblical study of life in the midst of death.” A book that has the potential to liberate the reader into life is one that deserves our intelligent consideration, not rash judgements made from narrow fearfulness. Such a work will not “teach students a lesson.” It will demand an energetic, participatory reading. It will demand their seriousness. With the appropriate effort, this literary experience can assist readers of any racial or economic group in meeting their own, often unarticulated doubts, questions, fears, and perhaps assist in their own search for dignity.

Notes

1. Joyce Graham, in her dissertation “The Freeing of Maya Angelou's Caged Bird,” offers a comprehensive overview of the history of censorship efforts directed specifically against Caged Bird: the issues and arguments raised in connection with the teaching of the work, a look at the National Council of Teachers of English's efforts to provide guidelines for the improvement of teacher preparation in the teaching of literature, and a case study of one well documented censorship challenge. Dr. Graham also includes an interview with Dr. Angelou discussing the nature and motive of censorship. This timely examination of the rising fear of literature in schools provides an invaluable look at the parents and administrators behind the news reports on censorship challenges.

2. Dr. Angelou makes this comment in response to her own questions: Why and how frequently does a writer write? What shimmering goals dance before the writer's eyes, desirable, seductive, but maddeningly out of reach? What happens to the ego when one dreams of training Russian bears to dance the Watusi and is barely able to teach a friendly dog to shake hands?

3. In “The Other Crisis in American Education,” college professor Daniel J. Singal discusses the decline of competency among the “highest cohort of achievers,” those students who eventually apply to America's most prestigious colleges and universities. This general failing in the achievement levels of juniors and seniors is attributed to the assigning of “easier,” less challenging reading materials, and the failure of teachers to design written and oral activities that demand higher levels of comprehension. As a result, students entering college are unable to function adequately in their coursework. Singal quotes a college professor: “No one reads for nuance. They [students] pay no attention to detail.” Says Singal, “I have been amazed at how little students have managed to glean from a book I know they have read. … Twelve to fifteen books over a fifteen-week semester used to be the rule of thumb at selective colleges. Today it is six to eight books, and they had better be short texts, written in relatively simple English.” In other words, college professors are simply unable to assign traditional work loads given the skill levels of their students.

4. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard have collected a number of essays on the images of African-Americans in literature, and discussions related to children's responses to the literature. Some of the essays address the matter of censorship as it relates to racist depictions in literature. Paul Deane provides a look at the seldom acknowledged racist images to be found in the traditional serial novels which are typically considered to be wholesome, completely unobjectionable adolescent fare.

Works Cited

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam, 1969.

———. “Shades and Slashes of Light.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. 1–3.

Cudloe, Selwyn R. “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical Statement.” Black Women Writers. 6–24.

Deane, Paul C. “The Persistence of Uncle Tom: An Examination of the Image of the Negro in Children's Fiction Series.” The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism, 2nd ed. Eds. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985. 162–168.

Derricote, Toi. “From the Black Notebook.” Kenyon Review 13.4 (Fall 1991): 27–31.

Graham, Joyce L. “Freeing Maya Angelou's Caged Bird.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Newman Library, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, VA, 1991).

Singal, Daniel J. “The Other Crisis in American Education.” The Atlantic Monthly, (Nov. 1991): 59–74.

Tate, Claudia. “Maya Angelou.” Black Women Writers at Work. (New York: Continuum, 1983): 1–11. rpt. in Conversations with Maya Angelou. Ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. 146–156.