Angelou, Maya

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is a powerful, inspirational childhood autobiography by Maya Angelou, the well-known literary, artistic, and spiritual figure. The book spans her early childhood through adolescence, most of it spent in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. The author's voice is primarily the first-person vantage point of a child. The opening scene is Easter Sunday in church, with young Maya squirming in the children's section; spiritual and religious issues permeate the book. Angelou captures many common paradoxes of living, and explores the role of faith and spirituality in reconciling these tensions. Pervasive through the book are influences of race, gender, socioeconomic status, geographical region, and historical era. This autobiography contextualizes spiritual development. Every page speaks a human voice, and thus captures the authenticity of the personal and institutional in a child's spirituality.

Throughout the book, Angelou illustrates how children's many social contexts—family, church, school, peers, neighborhood, and so on—all influence spiritual development. Spirituality's life-affirming role in the African-American community is made particularly evident in Maya's childhood during which she lived in a small, segregated town in Arkansas. The values, worldviews, and disciplines in the faithful communities of which she is a part uphold her spiritual journey. However, other communities (such as Maya's time in St. Louis with her mother) are lacking in spiritual grounding, and Maya's development suffers. In both communities, Maya's spirituality is crucial in her resilience against tough odds.

A crucial figure in Maya's life is her maternal grandmother, Momma, who raises Maya and her older brother in Stamps, Arkansas, after the children's negligent parents in California sent them packing. Momma shares her theology in verbal assertions, such as God “never gives us more than we can bear” (p. 132) and [Page 7]“God is love. Just worry about whether you're being a good girl then he will love you” (p. 47). Momma's authoritarian behavior, demands for cleanliness and obedience in the name of God, and her own daily spiritual disciplines provide a powerful model for Maya's observational learning of spirituality. Momma begins each day with morning prayer and she regularly invokes God to cope with stressors. A traumatic incident occurred when unkempt, impudent white girls approached Momma to mock her, a display of disrespect that Momma would never tolerate from her own family. Young Maya watched helplessly as her grandmother stood her ground, and did not defend herself but instead quietly uttered under her breath. Maya, the young spiritual apprentice observing her grandmother's faith in action, could hear her elder singing, “Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.” Maya saw that faith serves as a shield against the slings and arrows of a hard life, and she concluded that “whatever the contest had been out front, I knew Momma had won” (p. 27). This indelible experience, witnessing how faith allows one to endure suffering and enables one to salvage spiritual victory from the jaws of defeat, gave Maya a deep metaphor to grasp the essential theme of death and resurrection.

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