I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
The young girl in this autobiography felt lonely and
unloved—until she met an unusual woman who threw her a ‘lifeline’. In this part
of her true story, Maya Angelou and her older brother Bailey lived with their
grandmother in the small rural town of
We lived with our grandmother
and uncle in the rear of the Store (it was always spoken of with a capital s),
which she had owned some twenty-five years.
Early
in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to
the sawmen in the lumberyard (east Stamps) and the seedmen at the cotton gin (west Stamps). Her crisp meat
pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two
places at the same time, assured her business success. From being a mobile
lunch counter, she set up a stand between the two points of fiscal (financial)
interest and supplied the workers’ needs for a few years. Then she had the
Store built in the heart of the Negro area. Over the years it became the lay
(non-religious) center of activities in town. On Saturdays, barbers sat their
customers in the shade on the porch of the Store, and troubadours on their
ceaseless crawlings through the South leaned against
its benches and sang their sad songs of the Brazos (a district in central Texas
around the Brazos River) while they played juice harps (jew’s
harps—musical instruments held in the mouth and plucked) and cigar-box guitars.
The
formal name of the Store was the William Johnson General Merchandise Store.
Customers could find food staples, a good variety of colored thread, mash for
hogs, corn for chickens, coal for oil lamps, light bulbs for the wealthy,
shoestrings, hair dressing, balloons, and flower seeds. Anything not visible
had only to be ordered.
Until
we became familiar enough to belong to the Store and it to us, we were locked
up in a Fun House of Things where the attendant had gone home for life.
Weighing the
half-pounds of flour, excluding the scoop, and depositing them dust-free into
the thin paper sacks held a simple kind of adventure for me. I developed an eye for measuring how full a
silver-looking ladle of flour, mash, meal, sugar or corn had to be to push the
scale indicator over to eight ounces or one pound. When I was absolutely
accurate our appreciative customers used to admire: “Sister Henderson sure got
some smart grandchildrens.” If I was off in the
Store’s favor, the eagle-eyed women would say, “Put some more in that sack,
child. Don’t you try to make your profit offa
me.”
Then
I would quietly but persistently punish myself. For every bad judgment, the
fine was no silver-wrapped kisses, the sweet chocolate drops that I loved more
than anything in the world, except Bailey. And maybe canned
pineapples. My obsession with pineapples nearly drove me mad. I dreamt
of the days when I would be grown and able to buy a whole carton for myself
alone.
Although
the syrupy golden rings sat in their exotic cans on the shelves year round, we
only tasted them during Christmas. Momma used the juice to make almost-
black fruit cakes. Then she lined heavy soot-encrusted iron
skillets with the pineapple rings for rich upside-down cakes. Bailey and I
received one slice each, and I carried mine around for
hours, shredding off the fruit until nothing was left except the perfume on my
fingers. I’d like to think that my desire for pineapples was so sacred that I
wouldn’t allow myself to steal a can (which was possible) and eat it alone out
in the garden, but I’m certain that I must have weighed the possibility of the
scent exposing me and didn’t have the nerve to attempt it.
Until
I was thirteen and left
At this point in her story, Maya was about ten years old
and had returned to Stamps from a visit to
For nearly a year, I sopped
around the house, the Store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit.
Then I met, or rather got to know, the lady who threw me my first lifeline.
Mrs.
Bertha Flowers was the aristocrat of Black Stamps. She had the grace of control
to appear warm in the coldest weather, and on the
Her
skin was a rich black that would have peeled like a plum if sagged, but then no
one would have thought of getting close enough to Mrs. Flowers to ruffle her
dress, let alone snag her skin. She didn’t encourage familiarity. She wore
gloves too.
I
don’t think I ever saw Mrs. Flowers laugh, but she smiled often. A slow
widening of her thin black lips to show even, small white teeth, then the slow
effortless closing. When she chose to smile on me, I always wanted to thank
her. The action was so graceful and inclusively benign (kind).
She
was one of the few gentlewomen I have ever known, and has remained throughout
my life the measure of what a human being can be.
One
summer afternoon, sweet-milk fresh in my memory, she stopped at the store to
buy provisions. Another woman of her health and age would have been expected to
carry paper sacks home in one hand, but Momma said, “Sister Flowers, I’ll send
Bailey up to your house with these things.”
She
smiled that slow dragging smile, “Thank you, Mrs. Henderson. I’d prefer
Marguerite, though.” My name was beautiful when she said it. “I’ve been meaning
to talk to her, anyway.” They gave each other age-group looks.
There
was a little path beside the rocky round, and Mrs. Flowers walked in front
swinging her arms and picking her way over the stones.
She
said, without turning her head, to me, “I hear you’re doing very good
schoolwork, Marguerite, but that it’s all written. The teachers report that
they have trouble getting you to talk in class.” We passed the triangular farm
on our left and the path widened to allow us to walk together. I hung back in
the separate unasked and unanswerable questions.
“Come
and walk along with me, Marguerite.” I couldn’t have refused even if I wanted
to. She pronounced my name so nicely. Or more correctly, she spoke each word
with such clarity that I was certain a foreigner who didn’t understand English
could have understood her.
“Now
no one is going to make you talk—possibly no one can. But bear in mind,
language is man’s way of communicating with his fellowman and it is language
alone which separates him from the lower animals.” That was a totally new idea
to me, and I would need time to think about it.
“Your
grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That’s good, but not
good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human
voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”
I
memorized the part about the human voice infusing words. It seemed so valid and
poetic.
She
said she was going to give me some books and that I not only must read them. I
must read them aloud. She suggested that I try to make a sentence sound in as
many different ways as possible.
“I’ll
accept no excuse if you return a book to me that has been badly handled.” My
imagination boggled at the punishment I would deserve if in fact I did abuse a
book of Mrs. Flowers’. Death would be too kind and brief.
The
odors in the house surprised me. Somehow I had never connected Mrs. Flowers
with food or eating or any other common experience of common people. There must
have been an outhouse, too, but my mind never recorded it.
The
sweet scent of vanilla had met us as she opened the door.
“I
made tea cookies this morning. You see, I had planned to invite you for cookies
and lemonade so we could have this little chat. The lemonade is in the icebox.”
It
followed that Mrs. Flowers would have ice on an ordinary day, when most
families in our town bought ice late on Saturdays only a few times during the
summer to be used in the wooden ice cream freezers.
She
took the bags from me and disappeared through the kitchen door. I looked around
the room that I had never in my wildest fantasies imagined I would see. Browned
photographs leered or threatened from the walls and the white, freshly done
curtains pushed against themselves and against the wind. I wanted to gobble up
the room entire and take it to Bailey, who would help me analyze and enjoy it.
“Have
a seat, Marguerite. Over there by the table.” She carried a platter covered
with a tea towel. Although she warned that she hadn’t tried her hand at baking
sweets for some time, I was certain that like everything else about her the
cookies would be perfect.
They
were flat round wafers, slightly browned on the edges and butter-yellow in the
center. With the cold lemonade they were sufficient for childhood’s lifelong
diet. Remembering my manners, I took nice little ladylike bites off the edges.
She said she had made them expressly for me and that she had a few in the
kitchen that I could take home to my brother. So I jammed one whole cake in my
mouth and the rough crumbs scratched the insides of my jaws, and if I hadn’t
had to swallow, it would have been a dream come true.
As
I ate she began the first of what we later called “my lessons in living.” She
said that I must always be tolerant of ignorance but understanding of
illiteracy. That some people unable to go to school, were more educated and
even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen
carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely
(ordinary; everyday) sayings were couched the collective wisdom of generations.
When
I finished the cookies she brushed off the table and brought a thick, small
book from the bookcase. I had read A Tale
of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She
opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life.
“It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Her
voice slid in and curved down through and over the words. She was nearly
singing. I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the same that I had read? Or
were there notes, music, lined on the pages, as in a hymnbook? Her sounds began
cascading gently. I knew from listening to a thousand preachers that she was
nearing the end of her reading, and I hadn’t really heard, heard to understand,
a single word.
“How
do you like that?”
It
occurred to me that she expected a response. The sweet vanilla flavor was still
on my tongue and her reading was a wonder in my ears. I had to speak.
I
said, “Yes, ma’am.” It was the least I could do, but it was the most also.
“There’s
one more thing. Take this book of poems and memorize one for me. Next time you
pay me a visit, I want you to recite.”
I
have tried often to search behind the sophistication of years for the
enchantment I so easily found in those gifts. The essence escapes but its aura
(a general feeling) remains. To be allowed, no, invited, into the private lives
of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange
bitter wormwood (a bitter-tasting plant) for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a
hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist. When I said aloud, “It is a far, far
better thing that I do, than I have ever done….” Tears of love filled my eyes
at my selflessness.
On
that first day, I ran down the hill and into the road (few cars ever came along
it) and had the good sense to stop running before I reached the Store.
I
was liked, and what a difference it made. I was respected not as Mrs.
Henderson’s grandchild or Bailey’s sister but for just being Marguerite
Johnson.
Childhood’s
logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute). I didn’t question
why Mrs. Flowers had singled me out for attention, nor did it occur to me that
Momma might have asked her to give me a little talking to. All I cared about
was that she had made tea cookies for me
and read to me from her favorite
book. It was enough to prove that she liked me.