A Feminist Reading
Feminism is a system of thought that is focused on women’s rights. It insists on equality of women in the home, in the marketplace, and in those institutions that control women’s lives: education, medicine, and government. One basic feminist assumption is that women are victims in a patriarchal society, in which power is held by the father or by his male representatives in the community, and in which all important decisions are made by men. Women who contest those decisions in the quest for social change are feminists, whether they identify with the term or not.
Most scholars trace the origins of feminism to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As large groups of working men experienced democracy and freedom for the first time, women began to demand similar privileges—the right to vote, to own property, and to control their bodies and their minds (Wright 1992, 98–99). In America, the feminist movement grew but then subsided in the 1920s, after women won the right to vote.
A second wave of feminism began to surge in America in the late 1960s, at about the time that Angelou was getting ready to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Called the New Women’s Movement, this revival of feminism was indebted to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with its grassroots appeal and its strategies for social change. After a number of black women refused to accept inferior positions in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, the two leading civil rights groups, a split occurred along gender lines. Many black women separated themselves from male authority and formed their own organizations on campuses and in the community.
The heroine of Caged Bird arrived on the literary scene in 1970, at the very moment when women in America were creating black sister’s leagues or forming small discussion groups to share their experiences of oppression under the patriarchal order. Emerging American feminists, most of them white, were getting ready to learn, to discuss, and to listen. In an editorial from Women: A Journal of Liberation, a group of Baltimore feminists claimed that the “women’s movement has provided a vehicle for self-realization and a growing collective consciousness, out of which we can form a new culture, with goals that ultimately stand in opposition to the goals of capitalism” (1972, l). The time was indeed ripe for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Angelou herself worked with pro-African women’s groups through her affiliation with the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH). The women of CAWAH organized a sit-in at the United Nations building in New York after Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Zaire, was assassinated. Angelou also accepted a leadership role in the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr. invited her to become Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It is unlikely that she affiliated with groups exclusively defined as feminist. When asked if she is a feminist or if she supports the feminist cause, Angelou has been vague. She told Jeffrey M. Elliot that she considers black women to be more self-reliant than white women. She also believes in “equal pay, equal respect, equal responsibility” for everyone (1989, 93). As for her being a feminist, Angelou had a practical but elusive comment: “I am a feminist. I’ve been female for a long time now. I’d be stupid not to be on my own side” (Forma, quoted in Elliot 1989, 162).
A feminist reading of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings raises a number of questions relating to women and their social conditions. First, does Caged Bird develop themes of specific relevance to women? Second, is Caged Bird centered around a strong, aware female character or characters? Third, do the women characters bond with other women in an effort to change conditions under patriarchy?
The first question, is Caged Bird’s theme relevant to women? is emphatically answered in the text. Momma Henderson’s nurturing of her granddaughter mirrors the mother/daughter relationship that forms the emotional foundation of feminism. As Marianne Hirsch argues, feminists must “find ways to speak as mothers” if they ever hope to estimate and understand women’s differences (1989, 195). Maya is daughter, granddaughter, and finally mother as she charts her development as a woman. She is concerned with the women in her community, even though she sometimes sees their lives as limited. Like the majority of women, she gives birth to a child. Because the various plot strands in Caged Bird are tied to the theme of motherhood, it is an excellent example of a feminist book.
With regard to the second question, does the central female character of Caged Bird project a strong, positive image of women? Probably not. In one of the most quoted phrases from the book, she describes herself as an “ugly black dream” (2). Unfortunately, Maya shows contempt for herself in the parts of the autobiography that take place in Stamps and St. Louis, for reasons that have to do with her racial and sexual experiences. When she is raped by Mr. Freeman, Maya’s self-esteem plunges to the point where she refuses to speak. Not until she regains her voice and moves to California does her sense of self-worth expand. Although Maya is to some degree a negative character, she is a potential feminist because she is aware of the forces in society that are working against her.
In answer to the third question, does the character in the autobiography form bonding relationships with other women? Maya does bond with other women on a close, personal level, but she and the other women of Stamps are unable to affect any major changes in the patriarchy. Black women in the late 1930s, although they could influence each other’s lives, had no power to question the social order because the people in power were white and racist. There were no civil rights laws to protect political dissenters in Arkansas. Were a woman to challenge the system in Stamps, Arkansas, in the 1930s or 1940s, she might end up dead. Only years later, when Maya leaves Stamps and goes to California, does she challenge the patriarchal order by becoming the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
On a personal level, there are significant bonding relationships among women. The bonding that takes place between Maya and Mrs. Flowers clearly supports the reading of Caged Bird as a model for feminist autobiography. Mrs. Flowers is the primary example of feminism in Stamps: she is independent, she has the economic resources to survive on her own, she respects herself, and she cares about other women, to the extent that she takes control of Maya’s education, helping her to read and regain her own voice. Without her, Maya would never have become a writer.
At the end of the narrative, Maya returns to her mother, Vivian Baxter—city woman, blackjack dealer, and free spirit. She is able to draw from Vivian Baxter the strength and support she needs as she prepares to have a baby. Thus, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which begins with the separation of mother and daughter, ends in their bonding. The mother/daughter/infant triangle of the final scene marks the completion of Maya’s journey to womanhood. Although she is still fearful and dependent, she shows signs of being able to control her life as a black woman.
Chapter 4
Gather Together in My Name (1974)
Gather Together in My Name begins in San Francisco shortly after the end of World War II. The illusion of racial equality in San Francisco during the war years begins to vanish. With white soldiers reclaiming their lives as civilians, black workers were expected to return to their farms and black military heroes to their ghettos. Angelou’s prefatory observations about race and the job market are intended to place the autobiographer within a historic framework, with her personal economic situation echoing the postwar decline of African American society.
At seventeen, Maya is looking for a job that will bring her recognition, money, and independence, but she lacks the skills necessary to achieve these goals in a dominant white economy. In addition, she believes, as do many young women, that to achieve her own goals she must leave her mother and stepfather, who have supported her, and define a new life for herself and for her two-month-old son. Leaving her family thus creates a double bind for the struggling single mother; she depends on them, but at the same time she wants to be independent.
Gather T
ogether traces Maya’s emergence into the world of work, carefully recounting her pursuit of economic stability as she moves from job to job—from Creole cook, to dancer, to prostitute, to fry cook. During the course of the autobiography she sometimes acts irresponsibly, endangering the safety of her son, who is kidnapped by a babysitter. She also exposes herself to a number of risky relationships with men: a dancer, a married man who sells stolen clothes, and a vein-scarred drug user.
At the end of Gather Together, she is finally saved when her most reliable friend, Troubador Martin, demonstrates the dangers of drug addiction by walking her through a heroin den. Shocked and repentant, Angelou, in a promise to reclaim her innocence, abandons her degenerate life and vows to return with her son to her mother’s protection.
Narrative Point of View
In Gather Together in My Name, Angelou continues but alters the point of view of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Caged Bird is the first-person account of a child who becomes a mother; Gather Together is the first-person account of that mother and her struggle to survive as a black woman in white America. Thus, the autobiographical form makes a surprising leap away from the growing pains of the sensitive child narrator of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to the survival tactics of the continuation of the narrative. Despite the difference, Angelou continues, as in Caged Bird, to challenge the norm of standard American autobiographies, in which the narrator is usually a prominent, educated white male.
The Maya of Caged Bird is easily recognizable as a child growing up in rural America whose experiences of abandonment and rape make her as memorable, in her way, as Mark Twain’s adventuresome Huckleberry Finn is memorable in his. The Maya of Gather Together is a different kind of person, one who has come of age, a survivor whose endurance is representative of a new class of black women. The point of view thus changes from that of an engaging girl to a sexy, willful mother who is the same person but dramatically different. Angelou’s unorthodox altering of the growing-up pattern or Bildungsroman by way of a sequel surprised her critics, many of whom never guessed that the author would transform the girl from Stamps into the loose-living mother from California.
Angelou’s deviation from proper conduct was a violation of autobiographical tradition. A black woman who deals with lesbians, hookers, and drug addicts is bound to rock the standards used for centuries in evaluating American and European autobiography. Traditionally, the genre has been subdivided into professions occupied by men: statesmen, educators, soldiers, financiers, church fathers, and the like. Not until the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s did a significant number of writers challenge this elitist notion of life-telling. Like Ann Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), Gather Together in My Name is one of several contemporary black texts that reinvent the very notion of autobiographical decorum. They tell it like it is, without obeying the strictures of language and behavior found in mainstream works.
When she first tried to tell her story, Angelou confessed to her difficulty with point of view. She felt that she was fragmented, that to convey her personality she would have to split herself into two women, one respectable and the other improper, one the autobiographer and the other her seamier self. “I wanted this fictional girl to do all the bad things and I was Miss Goodie Two Shoes,” she explained in our interview. She thought she needed to have “a fictional character go along side, I guess in the margins.” She told her editor, Bob Loomis, about her plan and he said, “Try it.” But it didn’t work. So her husband Paul encouraged her to reject this split point of view, believing that the truth of her experience was real and whole: “Tell it. Because if it happened to black girls it happened to black boys, happened to white girls it happened to white boys. This is true” (“Icon” 1997).
Angelou told this writer that before Gather Together was published, she became increasingly worried about the adverse effect her autobiographical truth saying might have on her family. Thus, she gathered them together—Bailey, Vivian Baxter, her husband Paul Du Feu, and her son—and read to them the sections on prostitution and drugs. And she said, “I want to read you this. If it hurts you, I won’t put it in.” Each accepted what she had written about her life—Vivian with a joke, Bailey with absolute trust. “My brother said, ‘I love you. One thing about you, you don’t lie. I love that.’” As for Guy, Angelou continued, “He came between me and my husband and just took me and said, ‘You are the great one’” (“Icon” 1997). Her family’s encouragement made it possible for her to represent a young black woman’s struggle to tell the truth, even when the truth could possibly cause harm to herself and others.
Like the literary titles of the other five autobiographies, the title Gather Together in My Name is elusive, perplexing. It seems to relate, as Sondra O’Neale argues, to a New Testament passage that calls the “travailing soul to pray and commune” (1984, 33). Although Angelou does not discourage a religious reading, she offers a more specific interpretation, explaining that too many parents lie to their children about the past. She says: “Somebody needs to tell young people, listen, I did this and I did that. I thought, all those parents who lie, and fudge, and evade and avoid, could gather together in my name and I would say it” (“Icon” 1997).
Angelou wanted the title, Gather Together in My Name, to convey the same point of view inherent in the autobiography—the narrator wanted her gathering of readers to know what had happened to her so that other young people in similar straits could avoid the same pitfalls. It seems, then, that the narrator of Angelou’s most controversial book is gathering a double audience: young people who need direction and older people who need to give it. In her name the tarnished past will come forth. The truth will be told.
What the narrator achieves in the second volume is a remarkable sense of authenticity. As a straightforward recorder of life, she replaces the smooth chronology of Caged Bird for an episodic series of fragments that mirror the kind of discord found in actual life. Gather Together has an expanded consciousness that enables the reader to identify with an African American woman experiencing life among a diverse class of people, including prostitutes. Sondra O’Neale writes that Angelou “so painstakingly details the girl’s descent into the brothel that Black women, all women, have enough vicarious example to avoid the trap” (1984, 32).
At least one black woman experienced the kind of salvation that O’Neale is describing. A young woman came to a book signing in Cleveland, Ohio, shortly after Gather Together was published. It was a large crowd, and Angelou tried to speak to everyone in turn: “Suddenly there was this girl, black girl, with false nails, badly put on, and I looked up, and she had fake hair hanging down, false eyelashes, and it was 10:30, 11:00 in the morning. In a micro-miniskirt. I said, ‘Hello. And your name?’ She leaned over and she said, ‘I saw you on television. You even give me hope.’” Angelou paused. “If she’s the only person I wrote the book for, it’s all right, because I talked to her” (“Icon” 1997).
As it turns out, the girl in the miniskirt is not the only person Angelou wrote the book for. Despite some negative reviews, and despite some rather unflattering remarks from one television commentator, the Maya of Gather Together in My Name is an inspiring woman primarily because of what she dares to reveal about herself. Her point of view in this second volume can best be described as open or naked—a first-person perspective so honest that autobiography becomes personal contact.
Structure
Each of Angelou’s autobiographies is structured through the use of a journey, either an extensive one such as from America to Europe in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), or a condensed one, as in the San Francisco-Stamps-St. Louis triad in Caged Bird. In contrast, the movement in Gather Together consists of far smaller segments or episodes, almost like bus rides or, to use a more artistic comparison, like dance movements. Thus, Angelou recounts her work and sexual experiences in a rhythm familiar to the many young black peo
ple who, like her, have been excluded from high-paying careers or elegant housing. She circles in place, at the edge of the dance floor, whereas in the following four volumes she is in the air, like a bird or a jet, soaring to Europe, Africa, Germany, back to Africa, and finally landing in America.
Like certain kinds of twentieth-century African American music, especially jazz, Gather Together in My Name has a musical structure in which several melodies are played simultaneously by different instruments. These melodies intertwine or cross each other. For example, the piano and the saxophone play against each other in John Coltrane’s monumental album My Favorite Things, recorded in the early 1960s around the time when Angelou was in Ghana. This crossing of sounds, called “polyphony,” rarely results in harmony.
Like the masters of modern jazz, Angelou structures Gather Together by recalling a series of discordant episodes or chords, scenes so dissimilar in texture that they give the autobiography a chaotic or fragmented quality. For example, when Maya finally gets to dance, she feels eternally anchored to the spot, as if a “stake had been driven down through my head and body” (102). In the next episode, without a transition, Maya visits her mother, who is cooking dinner for a male friend. Maya agrees to run to the neighborhood grocery store, only to discover on her return that Vivian has stabbed David, one of her lovers, who had attacked Vivian for inviting a rival for dinner. The layering of images—dancing and eating, the stake and the knife, lover A, lover B—creates the impression of upheaval. The two episodes immediately follow one another, like a double exposure or two pieces of cellophane stuck together. Although Maya is the ordering element—the glue throughout the text—she experiences such a variety of disjointed incidents that at first there seems to be little connection among them. This layering of narrative elements resembles polyphony and creates the kind of ordered chaos that characterizes Angelou’s style and themes.
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