Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator.[5] In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965.[6] In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated on April 4, which was also her birthday. For many years, Angelou responded to King's murder by not celebrating her birthday, instead choosing to meet with, call, or send flowers to his widow, Coretta Scott King.[7][8]
Angelou was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968.[9] The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day Judy Feiffer called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011,[10] and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book".[9] At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright, and was in the middle of writing a series for PBS television station WNET.[11][12] According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, who advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology";[13] Angelou later reported that Loomis tricked her into it by daring her: "It's just as well", he said, "because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible".[9] Angelou was unable to resist a challenge, and she began writing Caged Bird.[11] After "closeting herself"[14] in London it took her two years to write it. She shared the manuscript with her friend writer Jessica Mitford before submitting it for publication.[14]
Angelou subsequently wrote six additional autobiographies, covering a variety of her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes, and stretch from Arkansas to Africa, and back to the US, from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination.[15] Like Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted as a series of short stories, yet do not follow a strict chronology. Later books in the series include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013, at the age of 85). Critics have often judged Angelou's later autobiographies "in light of the first", and Caged Bird generally receives the highest praise.[16]
Beginning with Caged Bird, Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years.[17] She would get up at 5 am and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.[18] Critic Mary Jane Lupton states that this ritual indicated "a firmness of purpose and an inflexible use of time".[17] Angelou went through this process to give herself time to turn the events of her life into art,[17] and to "enchant" herself; as she said in a 1989 interview with the BBC, to "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang".[19] She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even during traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, to "tell the human truth" about her life. Critic Opal Moore says about Caged Bird: "...Though easily read, [it] is no 'easy read'".[20] Angelou stated that she played cards to reach that place of enchantment, to access her memories more effectively. She has stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!" She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".[19] Angelou told scholar Joanne M. Braxton that she tried to "suspend herself from the present" while writing her autobiographies and put herself into the time wrote about, despite understanding that "I might be trapped in that time", a process she called "frightening".[21] According to Myra K. McMurray, when Angelou was often asked how she escaped from her painful past, she would respond, "How the hell do you know I did escape?" McMurray states that Caged Bird is not "an exorcism of or escape from the past", but that it was "a transmutation of that past", adding, "The almost novelistic clarity of Caged Bird results from the artistic tension between Angelou's recollected self and her authorial consciousness".[22]
Title
When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet whose works she had admired for years. Jazz vocalist and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln suggested the title.[23] According to Lyman B. Hagen, the title pulls Angelou's readers into the book while reminding them that it is possible to both lose control of one's life and to have one's freedom taken from them.[24] Angelou has credited Dunbar, along with Shakespeare, with forming her "writing ambition".[25] According to Mary Jane Lupton, the caged bird in the title symbolizes a chained slave and appears frequently in Angelou's writings.[4] Lupton also discusses Angelou's use of the word "sings", which she says critics have tended to downplay. The word creates an upward mood and "suggests the survival of African Americans through the spiritual".[2] Although singing is more developed in Angelou's later books, she hints at the "possibilities of joyful song" in Caged Bird. Finally, also according to Lupton, the cage is a symbol of the restraint of not only the Black body, but of the female Black body.[2] The cage is also a metaphor for the roles that force the bird to deny its identity and reject interrelationships with others, not just for the child Maya, but for almost everyone in her community.[26]
The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy":[note 1]
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,When he beats his bars and would be free;It is not a carol of joy or glee,But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings – I know why the caged bird sings.[27]
