She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This is the first of seven autobiographies which chronicle the life of Marguerite Johnson, aka Maya Angelou. We start off with Maya being sent with her brother Bailey to live with her grandmother and uncle in Stamps, Alabama. As time goes on, Maya eventually goes to live with her mother in St. Louis, as well as in San Francisco, and spends time with her father at various points as well. Some pretty rough stuff goes down (think mom's boyfriend getting too friendly with an 8-year-old Maya) but Maya manages to persevere into young adulthood, at which time she becomes a parent herself.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Blob friends, 
   I didn't love this book, nor did I dislike it. I really liked various parts of it, and most of all, I really liked Maya Angelou herself after reading it. As a book, I'm not sure I'll walk away remembering every detail for years to come, but it definitely made an impression. Here are some other thoughts...

Hot takes
- Maya Angelou is very funny.
- Maya Angelou had a pretty intense coming of age, and it's fairly miraculous that she not only survived, but thrived and then recounted it so eloquently for us.
[For evidence, see such scenes as "driving dead drunk dad home from Mexico when you don't know how to drive, let alone drive stick shift", or "bounces back after her mother's boyfriend rapes her when she is 8"]
- Maya Angelou is a badass.

Seven volumes of autobiography
Okay, so I didn't know there were seven volumes in her autobiography, or that this was only the first of the seven. Admittedly, she had a pretty cool first 17 years, so I can see there being plenty of fodder for more books, but seven? That feels like a lot. That reminds me of someone else... (Cough) Proust? ;)

Maya and Bailey/Scout and Jem
The relationship between Maya and Bailey reminded me a lot of the relationship between Scout and Jem. Both were the only pair of children in their families, both grew up under one strong parental voice (Atticus, Momma) and both fiercely fought for the other at various critical points of childhood.

Momma and Marilla
Since we're on the topic of other books this book reminded me of, I'll just also let you know that Momma (Maya's grandma) reminded me a lot of Marilla Cuthbert. Some samplings:

• Momma never answered questions directly put to her on any subject except religion.

• Knowing Momma, I knew that I never knew Momma. Her African-bush secretiveness and suspiciousness had been compounded by slavery and confirmed by centuries of promises made and promises broken.

Mom's family in St. Louis
Lots of things happen when Maya and Bailey move to St. Louis for a time and live with their mother. This was one of my favorite lines, in reference to her mother's brothers:

I admit I was thrilled by their meanness. They beat up whites and Blacks with the same abandon, and liked each other so much that they never needed to learn the art of making outside friends.

Not condoning violence here, but I liked the idea that they were so insular they never bothered to learn how to meet other people. 

Did de-segregation burst something beautiful within the Black community? 
I'm sure I am not the first person to ask this question. In fact, I'm sure there are whole treatises and papers on the subject. I mention it here because the community that Maya grows up in in Stamps, while certainly suffering in a variety of ways because it is segregated from the white community, has an incredible warmth and vibrancy and community. I'm sure various sub-communities still exist within black culture, but this was the first time I read something that really made me stop and go, "ooh, did we ruin something while we were trying to fix something else?"

Lampfish of Twill
Was one of my favorite books growing up, and I thought of it when I read this line: 

• The lamplight in the Store gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world which made me want to whisper and walk about on tiptoe.

After
As Maya tries to recover from being raped, she's still only 8 or 9 years old, so in many ways she doesn't really know how to process what she's feeling. I liked what this line captured, and it reminded me of the way that Roxane Gay talks about her life in terms of "before" and "after". 

For nearly a year, I sopped around the house, the Store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible.

Mrs. Flowers
Mrs. Flowers is a delightful character, and a real person who serves as a critical role model for Maya when she returns to Stamps after her time in St. Louis. She reminded me of many such a character - the old wealthy woman who shares her books - only here, her library and wealth are all the more remarkable because she is also a black woman in the early 20th century. Here are some lines I liked: 

• It would be safe to say that she made me proud to be Negro, just by being herself.

• I was liked, and what a difference it made.

• I wouldn't miss Mrs. Flowers, for she had given me her secret word which called forth a djinn who was to serve me all my life: books.

We are more alike than we are unalike
This is a line from a famous Maya Angelou poem that Oprah references in her introduction to my copy of this book. It struck me immediately, because I expected to have little in common with Maya, and instead found myself over and over again seeing points of connection and similarity. Here's the list I came up with: 

- Preserving (In Stamps the custom was to can everything that could possibly be preserved.) While this reminded me of my own family, it also reminded me of my most recent read, and Paradise Pickles and Preserves. So interesting how my books never fail to follow each other in seen and unforeseen ways.

- Singer sewing machines - Momma's black Singer sewing machine is featured prominently early on, which reminded me of my own sitting next to me and my mother's and my sister's and so on and so on. 

- Marguerite - Maya's name is Marguerite, and some members of family call her Ritie, while her brother ends up giving her the nickname Maya, which clearly stuck. Marguerite is a family name that shows up all over my maternal lineage, so I immediately felt a kinship with her. 

- Refuge in books/library - Maya has a lot to handle and absorb as she grows up, but, like me, she found refuge in books and in that wondrous invention, the library. 

When spring came to St. Louis, I took out my first library card, and since Bailey and I seemed to be growing apart, I spent most of my Saturdays at the library (no interruptions) breathing in the world of penniless shoeshine boys who, with goodness and perseverance, became rich, rich men, and gave baskets of goodies to the poor on holidays. The little princesses who were mistaken for maids, and the long-lost children mistaken for waifs, became more real to me than our house, our mother, our school, or Mr. Freeman.

- Frequently internalizes rather than verbalizes - I've worked on this over the years, but young Maya reminded me a great deal of myself. 

- Quilts - there's a great line about Momma checking to see if their feet are clean under the quilts. 

- Momma (Grandma) threatening you with her eyes to stay still and quiet at church - my grandma also struggled to keep me in line at church from time to time. ;)

- Laughter so easily turns to hysteria for imaginative children - I loved this line, and it reminded me of the only time I was kicked out of my house (very briefly, to stand on the back porch - no big deal, to be clear) which was for laughing too hard at the dinner table and being unable to control myself. 

- Feeling ungainly/unpretty, esp. as compared to family - Maya is surrounded by beauty in her family, and she feels a little like an ugly duckling, which I identified with. 

- Bologna, potato salad - Both staples at the Stamps summer picnics; both featured at many a family gathering I attended. 

- Going to parties and wanting to read - I distinctly remember going to a family get together, and upon seeing that there were several other children who had been allowed to read the latest Harry Potter in the front room, begging my mother to be allowed to return to the car and read my own copy. (She acquiesced.)

- Playing croquet & pinochle - I'm not sure why so many of Maya's childhood pastimes overlapped with ones I encountered, but again, I found it striking.

- Oakland, San Francisco - I found it particularly interesting to read the sections which took place in Oakland and San Francisco, as I have been there several times for work in the last year. 

Great lines about race
There were so many to choose from, but I've cultivated a selection for you. 

• If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

• In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like. I remember never believing that whites were really real.

• The Depression must have hit the white section of Stamps with cyclonic impact, but it seeped into the Black area slowly, like a thief with misgivings.

• Maya, on a woman named Mrs. Cullinan calling her the wrong name repeatedly, then renaming her "Mary" to suit her: I decided I wouldn't pee on her if her heart was on fire. lolololololz

• Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being 'called out of his name'. It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called n***ers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks.

• The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.

• The night suddenly became enemy territory, and I knew that if my brother was lost in this land he was forever lost. This line and the one above reminded me so vividly of Emmett Till. 

• On thinking Joe Louis had lost a big fight against Max Schmeling (a white man): My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black Boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful.

• It was awful to be a Negro and have no control over my life.

• The humiliation of hearing Momma describe herself as if she had no last name to the young white girl was equal to the physical pain. It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness.

Great lines more generally

• The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve. 

• On meeting her dad for the first time: And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again. I love the use of humpty-dumpty as a verb. :)

• Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft.

• Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

• There was going to be a storm and it was a perfect night for rereading Jane Eyre.

Words new to me
Gladstone - a small portmanteau suitcase built over a rigid frame which could separate into two equal sections, typically made of stiff leather and often belted with lanyards. The bags are named after William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), the four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

catheads - a Southern term for biscuits

didoes - mischievous tricks; pranks; antics. Also, baubles or trifles

mumbledy-peg - a children's game played with a pocketknife, the object being to cause the blade to stick in the ground or a wooden surface by flipping the knife in a number of prescribed ways or from a number of prescribed positions

I'll leave you with two of my favorite lines:

Idiots and lunatics drove cars, why not the brilliant Marguerite Johnson?

Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

If I don't blob before we get there, happiest of holidays and happy winter, friends! I'm off to A Separate Peace.