Tag: 1930s

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (Adult Autobiography)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou (Adult Autobiography)

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

Before she became Maya Angelou, she was Marguerite Johnson. When she was three, Marguerite—along with her four-year-old brother, Bailey—was shipped from Long Beach, California to Stamps, Arkansas bearing little more than an identification tag with instructions on her wrist. The pair was sent to live with their paternal grandmother and crippled uncle. It was here where young Marguerite would watch the poor Blacks picking cotton in the fields, fall in love with Shakespeare, experience prejudice and hate from people far poorer and less educated than herself, and learn her multiplication tables. In the years following, she would be shuffled back and forth between her mother, father, and grandmother while surviving rape at the age of eight, celebrating her first library card, getting her first job, and experiencing motherhood.   

Angelou’s autobiography, which details her life from age 3 to 17, spent two years on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, was nominated for a National Book Award, received the Literarian Award in 2013, and yet remains one of the most banned and/or challenged books in America for its violence, racism, sexuality, childhood rape, and teen pregnancy.

Banning Angelou’s work—set in the 1930s and 40s and told from the lens of a young Black girl—because of its violence and racism is akin to banning a book on war because it’s too bloody. To measure a book set in the past using today’s racial, moral, and ethical standards is unreasonable, unfair, and unrealistic. It’s a false equivalent and no historical work, person, or idea could ever pass such a litmus test. Yes, Angelou’s book contains everything that it was banned for, but chastising these honest and true observations, experiences, and thoughts through removal doesn’t make our schools or society any better for it. How can it?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is gritty, sobering, shocking, and compelling while being uplifting, witty, honest, and hopeful. Angelou shares memories of her first Valentine, her 8th grade graduation, the stability a new stepfather brought to her family, her multiple scholarships to the California Labor School, the summer when she and her father took an unforgettable trip into Mexico, the month she lived in a junkyard, and being the first Black to work on the San Francisco streetcar system. At every turn, Angelou seemed to live her mother’s advice: Life is going to give you just what you put into it. And Angelou gave it her all.

Angelou’s title of her autobiography is a reference to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy”, which is filled with empathy for a bird longing and crying out for freedom. After reading Angelou’s early years, I felt that the caged bird sings because that was what it was born to do. Angelou is that bird and despite the limitations and bars placed around her, she refused to be a prisoner or a victim. She never stopped at finding a way to make the impossible possible and whenever she felt helpless or weakened, she rose above it all and sang because that was what she was born to do. Through her books and poetry, generations will continue to enjoy Maya Angelou’s song as long as we, as a society, are brave enough to keep the cage door open for all to hear.

Rating: 5/5

* Book cover image attributed to: www.abebooks.com

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A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck (J Historical Fiction)

A Year Down Yonder

A Year Down Yonder

Richard Peck (Juvenile Historical Fiction)

 It was 1937 and the country was in the midst of what people were calling the Roosevelt recession.  The Dowdel family, like so many others, had hit upon hard times and Mary Alice was to be sent to live with her grandmother until the family got back on their feet.  She and her brother, Joey, had spent many summers with Grandma Dowdel in her sleepy Illinois town, but Mary Alice was fifteen now and this visit was going to be a full twelve months!  With no telephone, an outdoor privy, a spooky attic, and everything being as old as Grandma…if not older…how was a city girl from Chicago going to survive in this hick town for one whole year?

A Year Down Yonder received the Newbery Medal in 2001 and was the sequel to Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago, recipient of a Newbery Honor in 1999.  In this wildly amusing and heartfelt book, Peck delivers one of the most outrageous, audacious, outlandish, and unforgettable characters when he gave us Grandma Dowdel.  She’s trigger-happy (and the whole town knows it) and not afraid to speak her mind.  But behind that gruff and crusty exterior lies a woman who’s generous to a fault and genuinely cares about her neighbors…although she would be the first to deny it.  Peck gives us small-town life and everything that comes with it.  From turkey shoots and Halloween hijinks to Burdicks (you’ll know one when you see ‘em) and burgoo, Grandma Dowdel handles everything with humor and candor and might even treat you to a glass of buttermilk and a square of corn bread in the process.

A Year Down Yonder takes readers to rural America and back to a time where folks learned how to make the most with what little they had and considered themselves blessed if they had their health, their family, and one or two people that could be counted on when it mattered most.  It’s a delightful and amusing book that extolls the virtues of kindness and the importance of family.  It also reminds us not to judge a book by its cover for it is often the tartest apples that make the best pies.  Just ask Grandma Dowdel.

Rating: 4/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.amazon.com

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