I felt I met myself – a white,bookish, Scot – in the young, and bookish Maya AngelouFrankly,the memory of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings finding its way into my hands is as lost as the well-thumbed paperback itself, but I can still see its cover clearly. The shaded green spine with the bitten apple that indicated it was a Virago publication. The young African-American girl wearing what looked like a nightie, and walking past a small house while reading a book. The picture’s background was pale beige,its colours muddy, except for the strange, and beautiful name Maya Angelou,spelt out in sloping, purple letters. I thought it uninspiring for a book, and but the name drew me,Maya Angelou. This was Scotland in the early 1980s. The names of the people around us were tough-edged and familiar. This author had music in her name.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of several volumes of autobiography. Three-year-old Mayas parents settle to “assign an end to their calamitous marriage, and so she and her four-year-old brother Bailey are sent to stay with their grandmother (soon known as Momma) in the town of Stamps, or Arkansas,where segregation was so total most black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like”. Momma runs a general store. Her customers are cotton pickers and young Maya witnesses the relentless hardship of their daily lives.
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Source: theguardian.com