Two part reading response:" I know why the caged bird sings" by Maya Angelou 

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou describes her life as an insecure black girl in California during the 40’s. Maya’s parents get divorced when she is only three years old and send Maya and her brother, Bailey, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, who runs a store in the rural area of  Stamps, Arkansas. Maya suffers due to her black skin and thinks that she is very ugly compared to white girls but she also doesn’t feel equal to other black children. When Maya is eight, her father, who she doesn’t remember at all, arrives in Stamps and takes her and Bailey to live with their mother, Vivian, in St. Louis, Missouri. Vivian works in gambling parlors and one morning her friend, Mr. Freeman, sexually molests Maya, and he later rapes her. They go to court and then Mr. Freeman is murdered in a horrible way. Maya has to live with the shame of having been sexually abused. She also believes that she is somehow responsible for Mr. Freeman’s death because she denied in court that he had molested her before the rape. Now she believes that everything she says has consequences, so she stops speaking to everyone except Bailey. Maya and Bailey return to Stamps to live with Momma, who introduces her to Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a kind-hearted woman who tells Maya to read works of literature out loud, giving her books of poetry that help her to regain her voice. During her life Maya goes through several incidents that teach her about the tremendous nature of racism. At age ten, Maya takes a job for a white woman who calls her “Mary” for her own convenience. Maya gets very angry and breaks the woman’s fine china. At Maya’s eighth grade graduation, a white speaker puts down the black community by explaining that black students are expected to become only athletes or servants.  The thing that makes everything worse is the time when Bailey encounters a dead, black man and witnesses a white man’s satisfaction at seeing the body. Momma begins to fear for the children’s well-being and saves money to bring them to Vivian, who now lives in California.When Maya is thirteen, the family moves to live with Vivian in Los Angeles and then in Oakland, California. When Vivian marries Daddy Clidell, a kind man, they move with him to San Francisco, the first city where Maya feels at home. She spends one summer with her father, Big Bailey, in Los Angeles and has to put up with his indifference and his evil girlfriend, Dolores. After Dolores cuts her in a fight, Maya runs away and lives for a month with a group of homeless teenagers in a junkyard. She returns to San Francisco and at sixteen she hides her pregnancy from her mother and stepfather for eight months and graduates from high school. The story ends as Maya begins to feel confident as a mother to her newborn son.

Maya Angelou's story certainly demonstrates the struggles which a black girl had to pass back in the days when black people were humiliated by others and were used as slaves. This is a fine demonstration that black people were seen not as people and definitely were not treated as ones either. She has written about the difficulties of that time and the bad conditions and circumstances that wouldn't let anyone get out of the stuggles they were experiencing. The fact that even the justice or government would't protect and defend black people is a sign of a deep racism carved in all of the society. There had to pass years and years for slavery to come to an end and for people to be less racist. Anyway, Maya basically had to move from place to place in order to be safe and not risk her life. I bet she never felt free to do what she wanted to or have a normal life like others. I really like the fact that the author has felt the need to share her story and be so open about it because besides helping fight racism it has inspired many people who have been victims of different incidents not to stay quiet but speak about it and make sure that justice is served.