Racial protest, identity, words, and form in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

College Literature, Oct 1995 by Walker, Pierre A

The Mrs. Flowers chapter emphasizes black racial pride by combining two apparently disparate episodes on the basis of their thematic affinity, much as the "powhitetrash" chapter did. Here the affinity is not cleanliness but the power of words, a theme central to African-American autobiography, from the slave narratives to Richard Wright's Black Boy and beyond. The importance of the power of words, in themselves and in poetry, and by implication, the importance of literature run throughout Caged Bird,(11) especially after the rape, when Maya fears that her lie at Mr. Freeman's trial caused his death. Black Boy demonstrates the negative power of words each time Wright is abused for not saying the right thing,(12) yet the book concludes on a positive note when Wright realizes that he can harness the power of words to his own artistic and political ends. Much the same thing happens in Caged Bird. Maya refuses to speak because she fears the potentially fatal power of words, but throughout the second half of the book she acknowledges that the imagination can harness the power of words to great ends. One of the high points in this realization comes at the end of the graduation scene, when the audience, having been insulted by a white guest speaker, lifts its morale by singing James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (155). Maya realizes that she "had never heard it before. Never heard the words, despite the thousands of times I had sung them," and this leads her to appreciate the African-American poetic tradition as she never had before (and Angelou expresses that appreciation with an allusion to another Johnson poem): "Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?" (156). Because Johnson's words, like Angelou's story, are gathered "from the stuff of the black experience, with its suffering and its survival," to use Keneth Kinnamon's words, the singing of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" at the end of the graduation episode "is a paradigm of Angelou's own artistic endeavor in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (132-33).

Mrs. Flowers lays the groundwork for this later appreciation of the power of the poetic word by explicitly stating the lesson of the positive power of words in her conversation with the ten-year-old Maya (her message is further emphasized because the main point of her invitation and attention to the mute girl is to convince her to use words again). "

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ear in mind," Mrs. Flowers tells Maya, "language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone that separates him from the lower animals. ...Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning" (82). Mrs. Flowers's speech and her reading from Dickens themselves make Maya appreciate poetry--"I heard poetry for the first time in my life" (84), she says about Mrs. Flowers's reading--and the spoken word, but Angelou arranges the entire chapter to emphasize the power of words. The chapter begins with a description of Mrs. Flowers and her elegant command of standard English, which contrasts in their conversations with Momma's heavy dialect, much to Maya's shame: "Shame made me want to hide my face...Momma left out the verb. Why not ask, 'How are you, Mrs. Flowers?"...'Brother and Sister Wilcox is sho'ly the meanest--' 'Is,' Momma? 'Is'? Oh, please, not 'is,' Momma, for two or more" (78-79). As a result, Angelou has focused the chapter on the importance of words and their pronunciation, even in its very first pages, before Maya enters Mrs. Flowers's house.