The first in a six-volume series, Caged Bird is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma.
In the course of Caged Bird, Maya transforms from a victim of racism into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.
Caged Bird has been categorized as an autobiography, but Angelou utilizes fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, thematic development, and characterization.
[2] She uses two distinct voices, the adult writer and the child who is the focus of the book, whom Angelou calls "the Maya character".
[3] Scholar Liliane Arensberg suggests that Angelou "retaliates for the tongue-tied child's helpless pain" by using her adult's irony and wit.
[5] In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discussed "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs,[6] stating, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about.
[3] The book covers most of her childhood, from the age of three, when she and her older brother Bailey are sent to their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, until she was sixteen, when she gives birth to her son Clyde.
[9] Maya and Bailey's paternal grandmother, "a church-going, God-fearing woman whose store is the heart of black socializing in Stamps".
Early in Caged Bird, Momma hides him in a bin of potatoes and onions to avoid being detected by the Ku Klux Klan.
He is just as strict as Momma, however, beating Maya and Bailey after they disrupt a church service and threatening to burn her on a potbelly stove for not learning her multiplication tables.
Angelou stated later in her life that she recognized that her mother had abandoned her and her brother, which meant that Vivian was "a terrible parent of young children".
[21] He appears twice in Caged Bird, when he shows up in Stamps to drive his children to St. Louis, and when Maya visits him for a summer in San Diego.
She is the first person to treat Maya as an individual, and teaches her about the relationship between Blacks and the larger society, as well as "the beauty and power of language".
There are a number of minor characters in Caged Bird, members of the Black and white community in Stamps that fill out Maya's world and inform her influences and early experiences.
She and Bailey admire him because he does not go to church, which makes him " Three white rural girls who attempt to humiliate and intimidate Momma in front of her store when they taunt and expose themselves to her.
Momma reacts by passively humming a hymn, while Maya, watching from inside the store, weeps with shame and humiliation.
A white dentist who refuses to treat Maya's tooth pain, in spite of his debt to Momma, incurred during the Great Depression.
He puts a pall over the ceremony and crushes the educational dreams of the audience by insinuating that black students are only capable of becoming athletes.
He makes up for Mr. Donleavy's discouragement by leading the audience in "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing", the "Negro national anthem".