In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."
        I know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of the most interesting and inspiring books you will ever read. This book is re-enacted in the reader's mind of the childhood of a women named Maya Angelou. This book discussed her struggles as a child and growing up. Maya went through many rough times ever since she was a little girl. This novel is an autobiography; this book deals a lot with family morals along with self-morals as well. It deals with some adult situations, for example Maya was raped when she was just a very young girl. Since she was raped she went through many emotional problems to the point when she went mute and did not speak to hardly anyone for many years. In I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the reader will learn that Maya found her fate at an immature state of mind and by her knowing that her life would be different and more difficult than anybody else her age. She went through some other really rough times that made her childhood even tougher and painful but at the same time taught Maya to face life's challenges head on.
      This novel also talks about the two different lifestyles that both she and her big brother Bailey had to encounter. The lives that they had to face in Arkansas with her grandmother and uncle Willie and the life that she had with her mother in St. Louis.
Even though she was not truly happy either place/life being with her grandmother seemed to spark more joy then a little bit in Maya's heart.
      In this excerpt, draw the student’s attention to how two black women are described from a child’s point of view—Mrs. Flowers, well-educated, refined, graceful, gentle and gracious, a black woman who can compete with any rich white folks in the town, and how Momma stands in contrast with Mrs. Flowers.
      The exquisite description and narration with psychological insights and minute details are characteristic of many women writers. The reader is not to miss how a black woman is eulogized against the background of social discrimination against the blacks in the U.S. Note sentences like “She acted just as refined as white folks in the movies and books and she was more beautiful, for none of them could have come near that warm color without looking gray by comparison”. “It was fortunate that I never saw her in the company of powhitefolks. For since they tend to think of their whiteness as an evenizer, I’m certain that I could have had to hear her spoken to commonly as Bertha, and my image of her would have been shattered like the unmendable Humpty-Dumpty.”