I Know Why the Caged Bird Reads (2/3)

I found a couple of reasons so far why people love reading Maya Angelou's books at least a bit more than other books about racism. In most stories or accounts of oppression, they usually talk about how they struggled through the cruel treatment of the "superior race". I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings does talk about that, but also includes a great deal of her own community and personal family problems. It provides a link between her, the author, and readers who may have not gone through as terrible things as she or other oppressed groups had. After establishing the fact that she was a just a little girl like everyone else, she then informs us more about her problems besides oppression, like child abuse. That created a sort of empathy link between me and the little girl Marguerite.

She was given the name Marguerite, but it evolved to her current name Maya.

Her words are filled with so much technique that a little girl simply cannot have, but the emotions that are portrayed derive from a youngster with a lot of scars. I felt this the most when Marguertie was in St. Louis, where she was born and where her mother lived. SPOILER ALERT: She had been raised in Arkansas by her grandmother until her mother decided to take her and her brothere Bailey back one day. Marguerite only had Bailey her whole life, but when the reunited with Mother, she felt very distant from her brother. He seemed to love Mother more than Marguerite, who had no feelings for Mother. When the siblings are sent back to Arkansas, Bailey feels heartbroken while Marguerite feels nothing. She says, "We were on the train going back to Stamps...I had to console Bailey. He cried his heart out down the aisles of the coach, and pressed his little-boy body against the window pane looking for a last glimpse of Mother Dear...I cared less abotu the trip than about the fact that Bailey was unhappy, and had no more thought of our destination than if I had simple been heading for the toilet" (Angelou 88). The imagery and the way she wrote down her emotions is undoubtedly an adult's, but the emotion that was expressed was of a child saddened by a broken family. I could tell that by growing up with a strictly religious grandmother, Marguerite had been taught about the strong powers of her God all her life. To her Bailey was like God because he was the only one she could trust with anything and the person she loved the most and strongest. To have to see him love a person that she did not loved more than Marguerite broke her heart, and made her lose some of the reasons to live.