Plot Development
A successful plot is a whole; in the conventional work of fiction it contains a beginning, a middle, and an end, each connected to the other. In an autobiography, plot is far less necessary, since it is concerned with the concept of the self rather than with the actions the self performs. In an autobiography it becomes difficult to draw the line between character (the one who acts) and plot (the action of the story). The two elements tend to fuse together, with plot becoming dependent on the feelings and mannerisms of the narrator.
Yet as many critics have maintained, the plot of an autobiography must also, like the plot of a novel, have a beginning, a middle, and an end. For the novel, the ending can be contrived or implausible, wild or fanciful, since the novel is not guided by the dictates of rationality. For an autobiography to be of value, the ending must be consistent with the beginning and the middle. In other words, the ending must occur within the predictable limits of what the author has already revealed to the reader. Angelou ends Caged Bird with the altogether believable scene of Maya, her own mother at her side, lying in bed with her baby, afraid that if she falls asleep she will roll over on her infant. There are no fireworks but a lot of feeling. Few readers realized, when they read this touching last scene in 1970, that the sleeping baby represented not only the end of Caged Bird but the beginning of Angelou’s serial autobiography. The question of how an autobiography ends is examined in each of the subsequent chapters of The Iconic Self.
The plot of Caged Bird begins when Maya and her brother Bailey arrive in Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their paternal grandmother and her crippled son, Willie. It covers thirteen years of chronological time, from Maya’s third to sixteenth year. Of the various incidents in the plot that greatly affect Maya, two of them are sexual in nature: being raped on a visit to St. Louis at the age of eight, and becoming pregnant at sixteen as a result of trying to prove to herself that she is not a lesbian.
Angelou’s recounting of the rape and its aftermath is brilliantly done. One might contrast Maya’s rape to John Grisham’s depiction of child molestation and rape in A Time to Kill (1992). Grisham’s fictional account, though, for all its graphic detail, is told from the perspective of a white male lawyer and not, as in Caged Bird, from the personal experience of a black female child. Grisham the novelist is removed from the event, while Angelou the autobiographer is painfully present.
The rape scene, so powerful in its physical and emotional impact, contains narrative elements that are magnified to the extent that the reader might think of the rape as the essence of plot. Maya’s stained panties, Mr. Freeman’s “cold face and empty eyes” (67), Maya’s outburst in court—each of these details is loaded with action. Ironically, for Maya the rape is the ultimate learning experience. Through her pain she becomes aware of being a small girl in a world controlled by men. The violation to her undeveloped body and the guilt she feels when her uncles evidently kick Mr. Freeman to death create a negative chain of events followed by five years of silence as Maya refuses to speak. She is finally restored to language through her close relationship with Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a learned friend of her grandmother’s, who liberates Maya from her wordless cavern.
The second major event in the plot is Maya’s decision to test her femininity by having sex, an action that results in pregnancy. For many young women, a teenage pregnancy might end in trauma, abortion, or parental rejection. For Maya, the pregnancy ends in her mother’s acceptance and the birth of her son. Sidonie Ann Smith connects the ending and the birth to Maya’s affirmation of self: “With the birth of her child Maya is herself born into a mature engagement with the forces of life” (1973, 374).
It is this “mature engagement,” this “birth,” that generates character development and theme in the remaining five volumes. Depending on where Maya goes, theme and character build upon the oppositions within the mother/son relationship. No other serial autobiography places the theme of mother and child within the eye of the conflict, making it of supreme importance to the narrative(s).
Character Development
Angelou’s autobiographies tend to derive their form through the interaction of characters rather than through the development of a dramatic line of action. When Maya and Bailey arrive in Stamps, hungry, alone, and unprotected, their characters lack all substance. They are as empty as the name tags they wear to assert their identities.
In her evolution from child to woman, Maya Angelou fills her readers’ imaginations, as have very few similar characters in American autobiography. Alfred Kazin (1964) argues that re-creating those early years offers the autobiographer the greatest incentive. Childhood, he contends, is the perfect perspective for revealing the self, in part because the narrator derives pleasure from transferring the informed thoughts of an adult into the imaginative visions of a child. Although he is not writing about Angelou, Kazin’s remarks fit her perfectly. This chapter investigates Maya’s character as a child and young adult, with attention to how she acts and is acted upon in three specific areas: in the family, in the black community, and in the white community. Maya’s performance in these areas reveals the diversity of her character and gives a sense of the various moods, attitudes, and strategies involved in her survival as a black child in a world manipulated by images of whiteness.
Autobiography is a genre designed to be a revelation of the self, as shaped through personal attachments, often with present or absent family members. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya’s interaction with her mother, brother, son, and grandmother tends to order and solidify her experiences. Although these are all strong relationships, Maya’s ties with her grandmother are probably the most important in forming her character.
Momma Henderson is a church-going, God-fearing woman whose store is the heart of black socializing in Stamps. She has strict ideas about taking God’s name in vain and even stricter ones about relating to white folks. Believing in the safe approach, Momma insists that talking to “white-folks” is taking a chance with “one’s life” (39). Despite her many strengths, she is a woman who submits to racist behavior without a struggle, maintaining the submissive manners of the past. Maya is unable to accept her grandmother’s position that for Southern blacks to survive in a racist society, they must develop a strategy of obedience. She disagrees with Annie Henderson’s passive stance but fears how whites might react to Bailey’s having witnessed a black man’s death at their hands. Annie, fearing white vengeance, finally sends the children to the safety of California.
There are a number of episodes in which Maya and Momma Henderson disagree about white folks. The most dramatic involves some rural white girls who stand in front of Mama’s store and taunt her, like the witches from Macbeth. One of the “powhitetrash” girls brazenly exposes her private parts in a butt-naked handstand to the God-fearing Momma. Symbolically, the adolescent is displaying her white sexuality before Annie Henderson, store owner, a black woman who is unable to respond except through passively humming a spiritual. In his interpretation of this episode, Stephen Butterfield sees Momma’s passivity as a victory in self-control (1974, 211), whereas Dolly McPherson reads the confrontation as an example of white girls using their power to “treat a Black woman like another child” (1990, 32). Maya, furious at her grandmother’s compliance, wishes that she could blow away the problem with a rifle.
In another racist episode, Momma takes Maya to the town’s white dentist, who humiliates his black patients by saying that he’d rather put his “hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s” (160). In each instance, it is Annie’s passivity that disturbs Maya, who is beginning to articulate her anger about racism. Maya’s response is to invent a fantasy in which Momma Henderson holds Dentist Lincoln by the collar and orders him to “leave Stamps by sundown” (161). This stock phrase from a western movie grants Annie the male authority that Maya wants her to have: Annie is the hero, and the dentist is the unforgiven villain. The fantasy, printed in italics, is Maya’s way of dealing with the d
entist’s racist behavior and with her grandmother’s inability to question his racism.
It hurts Maya to see her grandmother humiliated by a so-called professional who is unworthy, who even owes her interest payments on a loan. These humiliating situations cause Maya to feel confused toward Momma Henderson, who represents conflicting qualities: she is both strong and weak, courageous and fearful, caring and cold. Angelou exaggerates Annie’s power, recalling that Momma Henderson—over six feet tall—was “taller than any woman in my personal world” (38). To Maya her physical strength is unequaled. Mildred A. Hill-Lubin, who argues for the cultural importance of the black grandmother in African and African American communities, selects Annie Henderson as a grandmother who represents physical strength and the “stability and the continuity of the Black family and the community” (1986, 257). Although Momma becomes Maya’s source of knowledge, values, and morality, she is still troubled by her grandmother’s opinions about language, race, and white writers such as Shakespeare, Maya’s “first white love” (11). When they recite poetry for Momma, Maya and Bailey are careful to choose the black poet James Weldon Johnson instead of the dead, white Shakespeare.
Uncle Willie, Annie Henderson’s son, has been under her special care since he was a child, crippled at the age of three when a babysitter dropped him. Willie walks with a cane to support his disfigured body. In an early scene, Maya witnesses Momma burying Uncle Willie in a large bin, under layers of potatoes and onions, to avoid being detected by the Ku Klux Klan. Still, Uncle Willie has an active role in running the store, which is the hub of the black community. He handles the sales on the night of the heavy-weight championship between the famed black boxer, Joe Louis (1914–1981), and a white man. All of black Stamps gather at Annie’s store to watch the historic fight. Men and women living under the yoke of racism think that if Louis loses “we were back in slavery and beyond help” (113).
In the film version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, directed by Fielder Cook, there is a touching scene between Willie and Maya that occurs after the fight is over. Joe Louis has won and Uncle Willie feels that he has been redeemed, that he, too, is a man who can stand up to whites. Although Uncle Willie’s sentiments are, strangely, not conveyed in Angelou’s book, they are beautifully presented in the film in dialogue between Maya and her uncle that adds depth to his character.
After Momma Henderson, Maya’s brother Bailey is the family member who has the greatest influence on her young life. He is bright, clever, and good-spirited. Maya measures people by her small-framed brother, her hero, her “Kingdom Come” (19). For five years Vivian has ignored Maya and Bailey, at times trying to buy their affection by sending presents. During their estrangement from Vivian Baxter, Maya learns to cope by putting her trust into the strong hands of Annie Henderson and the reliable good feelings of her brother.
One day Bailey Sr. arrives from California to take them on a journey. After the trip has started, he announces that they are going to see their mother. Vivian has left California and is living in St. Louis, Missouri, with the Baxter family, headed by Grandmother Baxter, a neighborhood precinct leader of German/black descent who has connections with the city police. There are three formidable brothers, Tutti, Tom, and Ira. Maya is in awe of her beautiful mother, a woman “too beautiful to have children” (50). She often describes her mother through images of lightness or floating: for instance, she moved “like a pretty kite that floated just above my head” (54).
Six months later, Vivian and the children move into a house with Mr. Freeman, who works in the Southern Pacific Railway yards. The harmony of the newly formed family is brutally disrupted, though, when Mr. Freeman rapes Maya. After the rape it is Bailey and not Vivian who is able to comfort Maya; he is her voice and spirit during the years of silence that follow their return to Stamps.
In a powerful episode Bailey comes home to Momma Henderson shaken and pale. He saw a dead, bloated black man, covered with a sheet, pulled from the water. A white man ordered Bailey and some colored men to put the corpse into a jail filled with prisoners. Confused and unable to understand why white people could have such hatred of blacks, Bailey gets no answers from his grandmother or his uncle.
Bailey’s encounter with the dead man prompts Momma Henderson to send the children to Vivian Baxter, who has since left St. Louis and returned to California. In a poignant image that emphasizes the geographical distance between California and Arkansas and between mother and children, Maya imagines a mother who could never “laugh and eat oranges in the sunshine without her children” (42).
Again on a train, Maya and Bailey return to Vivian Baxter. Maya is thirteen and Bailey a year older. Vivian captivates both children with her worldliness and elation. Not until her early twenties does Maya see herself as having separated herself emotionally from her mother. She told novelist Rosa Guy, “I began to see her as a character I would have read about” (1989, 221).
Maya’s father, Bailey Sr., is less prominent than Vivian Baxter in shaping Maya’s character. He represents the absent father, the man who is not there for his children. This figure is prevalent in American literature, among urban and rural, poor and middle-class, black and white families. Maya sees her father only twice in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—first, in his initial appearance when he drives his children to St. Louis; and second, when Maya visits him for a bizarre summer vacation in Southern California. In neither instance is he able to show much affection for his daughter. He does not reappear in the other autobiographies. Bailey James Johnson died in San Diego in 1968, the same year that marked the death of Martin Luther King (Essence 2014, 104).
In her father’s absence, Maya finds substitute father figures, men like Mr. Freeman, who will give her the attention her father cannot, or she makes fun of men so they become undesirable to her. She enjoys joking with Bailey about pompous fatherly types like Reverend Thomas, who visits Annie Henderson to take advantage of her home cooking. Uncle Willie, her father’s blood brother, is a substitute father in the strictest sense. At one time, Maya, feeling sorry for her uncle’s disability, comments that if he wishes, she would be his make-believe daughter. She admits that Uncle Willie would have been a better father than Bailey Sr. But his speech problems and her insecurity prevent a good relationship from developing between them.
The most apparent father substitute is Mr. Freeman, a man who sits up and waits until Vivian comes home from dealing poker in gambling parlors. When Maya has nightmares, the three of them sleep together. One morning after Vivian gets up, Mr. Freeman touches Maya and pulls her on top of him, his right hand moving rapidly. Maya feels “at home” and imagines that he is her “real father” whom she has finally found (61). While not a member of the family, Vivian’s live-in boyfriend has a husband’s place in Vivian’s sex life and a stepfather’s role with regard to Vivian’s daughter, a trust that he violates in both cases.
When Maya reveals that it was Freeman who raped her, he is put on trial and found guilty. Soon afterward, Freeman’s body is discovered, beaten to death. Maya suspects her uncles. After Maya becomes mute, Vivian is unable to break through her wall of silence. Maya and Bailey are once again returned to Stamps.
The black community of Stamps is an extended family. Through her interaction with the black people of Stamps, Maya develops her character, growing stronger and sharpening her wit by associating with people like Sister Monroe, Reverend Thomas, Mr. McElroy, and Mrs. Flowers. Some of Maya’s insights are related to social class. Mr. McElroy is the only black man Maya has ever seen whose trousers match his jackets. She learns that he wears suits, and she claims that suits are good things because when men wear them they look a bit like women, making their appearance less severe. Maya and Bailey admire Mr. McElroy because he doesn’t go to church, which makes him “courageous,” since he is Annie’s neighbor (16).
Almost everyone else in the town is a churchgoer, from Momma Henderson to Deacon Jackson. A great deal of the humor in Caged Bird derives from Angelou’s c
aricatures of Southern black folks who’ve got religion. The funniest episodes involve Sister Monroe, who is not always able to come to the Sunday service. When she does, she shouts as loud as possible to make up for having been absent. One morning when Reverend Taylor is preaching the sermon, Sister Monroe starts yelling “Preach it” so loud the church shakes (33). One deacon hits the preacher, who hits another deacon in a chain reaction while Sister Monroe walks calmly from the altar.
Another figure of ridicule is Reverend Thomas, a repulsive church official who comes to Stamps four times a year; on those occasions he eats “like a hog” at the home of Annie Henderson (27). There are several reasons why Maya and Bailey despise Reverend Thomas: He is obese; he never remembers their names; and worst of all, he eats the very best pieces of chicken at Sunday dinner. He, too, becomes Sister Monroe’s victim when one Sunday while he is preaching she hits him so hard on the head with her purse that his teeth fly onto the floor near Maya and Bailey. At this point the children roll on the floor, laughing hysterically until Uncle Willie takes them next door to a church building and gives them “the whipping of our lives” (37).
Of all of the black residents of Stamps, the one person Angelou treats with unqualified respect is Mrs. Bertha Flowers. Maya calls her the “aristocrat of Black Stamps” (77). A self-supporting, independent, graceful woman, Mrs. Flowers gently nurses Maya through her years of silence by reading to her and loaning her books so that Maya’s love of literature makes her want to speak it. The critic Mary G. Mason (1990), although she doesn’t specify Angelou, has observed a pattern in women’s autobiographies in which another woman—a mother, a daughter, a grandmother, a friend—helps the subject identify herself as a writer. This pattern certainly holds true for Mrs. Flowers, whose encouragement is a major factor in Maya’s development as reader, autobiographer, and poet.
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