Maya Angelou Day: The Dare That Became a Memoir

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She spent much of her childhood with her brother in Stamps, Arkansas, raised by their father’s mother. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came out in 1969, the first of seven autobiographies.

She read her poem On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2014, at eighty-six. In January 2022 she became the first Black woman to appear on an American quarter.

At sixteen she became the first Black woman to work as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She toured Europe with a production of Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955 and recorded a calypso album called Miss Calypso in 1957. She lived in Ghana from 1962 to 1965, was a friend of Malcolm X and organized for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. By the time she sat down to write about her childhood, she had forty years of material and the performer’s ear to shape it.

How did an editor’s dare start I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

Late in 1968, James Baldwin arranged for Angelou to have dinner at the home of the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judy. Afterward Judy Feiffer urged Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, to get a book out of her.

Angelou said no. She thought of herself as a poet.

So Loomis tried another approach. He told her it was just as well, since writing autobiography as literature was close to impossible. Baldwin, by most accounts, had a hand in the strategy. She took the bait, spent two years on the book, and Random House published it in 1969. It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970 and stayed on The New York Times paperback bestseller list for two years.

Loomis knew his writer. A flattering request had failed, and a challenge to her craft worked.

Why did Maya Angelou stop speaking as a child?

Because she believed her voice had killed a man. At eight, while living with her mother in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She testified at his trial. Soon afterward he was killed, and the child concluded that her words had done it.

She went almost silent for nearly five years. Her brother, Bailey, was the one person she’d still talk to.

She and her brother were sent back to Stamps, to their grandmother, who ran a general store in the Black part of town. The store is the stage for much of the book. Cotton pickers come in before dawn full of hope and come back at night with their hands cut and their pay short, and the child behind the counter watches all of it without a word. A silent girl in a busy store makes an ideal witness, and Angelou the writer used every bit of what that girl saw.

Back in Stamps, a woman of the town, Mrs. Flowers in the book, drew her out with books and poetry, reading aloud and asking the girl to read aloud too. The memoir treats that slow return to speech as the turning of her life, and it’s easy to see why a woman who’d spent years mute grew up to make her living with her voice, on stage, in classrooms and finally at a presidential inauguration.

The book tells the rape directly, in a child’s terms, without dwelling. That restraint lets a reader get through it, and it’s also why the book has been fought over in schools ever since.

Where did the title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings come from?

From Sympathy, a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Black poet born in Ohio in 1872. The title line comes from its third stanza, and the singer Abbey Lincoln suggested it to her.

Dunbar published the poem in 1899. In it the bird beats its wings against the bars until they bleed, and the stanza explains the song: “It is not a carol of joy or glee,” but a prayer. Angelou took the line and turned it into a promise about her own book. The reader will hear singing, and the book will show what it cost. That’s a heavy load for seven words to carry, and the title manages it without a subtitle or an explanation.

Seven borrowed words, and the right ones.

It’s a better title than most memoirs get.

It names the subject without naming the events, and it promises that the book will explain something. The book delivers. A reader who finishes the book knows why the bird sings and what the cage was made of.

What was Maya Angelou’s daily writing routine?

She described it to George Plimpton for The Paris Review in 1990. She kept a hotel room in every town she lived in, had the pictures taken off the walls, and never let the staff change the bed. She left home at six and tried to be at work by 6:30.

She worked on legal pads, on the bed, with a dictionary, a Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry. She stopped around 12:30 or 1:30 in the afternoon, went home, and after dinner read what she’d written that morning.

Then she cut. Out of nine pages written in a morning, she told Plimpton, she’d keep two and a half or three, and she called that evening reading the cruelest time.

A third survived, on a good day. Most writers keep far more than that and wonder why the book feels slack.

My own writing day runs in three parts: client work in the morning, my own books in the afternoon, client work again in the evening. I cut a lot too. The hotel room is the part of her routine most writers will never copy, and it’s the least important part. The separation is what counts, a place that’s only for writing and a time when the writing gets judged by someone in a colder mood than the one who wrote it.

Is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings autobiography or fiction?

Angelou called it autobiography, and that’s how most critics treat it.

Some reviewers have labeled it autobiographical fiction because it’s built like a novel, with full scenes, reconstructed dialogue, developed characters and themes that run from the first chapter to the last.

Nobody remembers a conversation from age seven word for word. A memoir that wants to read as literature has to rebuild those conversations, and Angelou did it openly. The facts hold. The dialogue is a writer’s reconstruction of what was said. That’s the standard working method of memoir as opposed to biography, and Loomis’s dare was really about whether anyone could pull it off at book length.

The other trick in the book is the double voice. The girl in Stamps doesn’t grasp what she’s seeing, and the woman writing in 1969 understands all of it, and Angelou lets both speak in the same paragraph. The child reports the humiliation at the dentist’s office or the graduation speech, and the adult adds one dry sentence that tells you what it meant. Memoir writers who drop either voice end up with a diary or a lecture.

I know a little about the attempt. Around 1987 and 1988 I spent a year writing a 2,000-page autobiography, typed by hand on a classic Mac, bound twelve hardcover copies and mailed them to relatives. The family reaction was bad. My sister liked it. Years later I wrote My Life in Crazytown, a much shorter book.

Angelou managed in 1969 what most people writing about their own families never do. She made a private story readable by strangers, and she did it by writing scenes.

Summary tells a reader what happened. A scene lets the reader stand in the room while it happens, and Angelou almost never settles for summary.

Why do schools challenge I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

For its account of the rape, for its frankness about sexuality and for its depiction of racism. The American Library Association ranked it sixth on its list of the most challenged books of 2000 to 2009, just behind Of Mice and Men.

The book is about a child who stopped speaking because she believed words could kill. A school that removes it to protect children from its words has missed an irony that writes itself, and the argument comes up again every year during Banned Books Week.

The objections aren’t invented. The book is frank, and it was meant to be.

Parents have a real interest in what their children read and when. A book about childhood rape isn’t for every eleven-year-old. The same book tells some readers, for the first time, that people survive what happened to them and live to say it out loud.

What else did Maya Angelou write besides the autobiographies?

Poetry first, and lots of it. Her 1971 collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1993 she became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration since Robert Frost in 1961, and her recording of the poem won a Grammy for best spoken word album.

She kept adding forms late. Her first produced screenplay came when she was forty-four.

Her screenplay for Georgia, Georgia, produced in 1972, was the first original screenplay by a Black woman to be filmed. She taught for decades as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, beginning in the early 1980s.

She’d spent years on stages before she published a poem, and it shows in every line meant for a room.

The poems were written for the voice. On the page some of them run long and explain what the images have already shown, and read aloud by Angelou they work in a way the printed text doesn’t always match. The inaugural poem is the clearest case. It’s a speech in verse, built for a crowd on an inauguration morning, and it did that job.

What doesn’t hold up in Maya Angelou’s books?

The later volumes. Caged Bird has the tightest frame of the seven, one childhood with a clear ending, and the books that follow it cover a crowded adult life that resists that kind of shape.

Gather Together in My Name came in 1974, The Heart of a Woman in 1981, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes in 1986 and A Song Flung Up to Heaven in 2002. The later the book, the more it reads like a public life being recounted by someone who already knows how it turned out, and the discovery that drives Caged Bird, a child finding out what the world is, can’t be repeated. The child grew up. The books had to change with her, and they lost some force in the trade.

Start with the first book. Read the others for the history.

How should you mark Maya Angelou Day?

Read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and if you’ve read it, read the chapter about Mrs. Flowers again and notice how much work one secondary character does. Then find a recording of Angelou reading her own poems. The page is half the poem.

Then watch the 1993 inauguration footage and hear how she paces On the Pulse of Morning for a crowd.

If you write, try her routine for a week. Write in the morning somewhere that’s only for writing, and reread the pages that evening with the intention of keeping a third.

Angelou took an editor’s dare and won it seven times. For another writer whose readers mattered more than her critics, see Toni Morrison Day, and the rest of the author birthdays are on the literary holidays calendar. If you’ve got a life story you’ve been told can’t be written, my writing services exist for exactly that.

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