I Know why the Caged Bird Sings

When I was three and my brother Bailey four, we arrived in the musty little town of Stamps, Arkansas, wearing tags on our wrists. Our parents had put an end to their calamitous marriage, and we were shipped from California to our grandmother, Momma, a tall, solid woman who owned the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store. The Store was the heart of the Black community, a place of morning laughter and evening weariness, where cotton pickers gathered at dawn full of boasts and returned at dusk, dirt-disappointed. We lived in its back rooms, in a world that smelled of onions, kerosene, and smoked meat, a world ruled by Momma's strictness and Uncle Willie's quiet pain.

Bailey was the greatest person in my world. Where I was big, elbowy, and grating, he was small, graceful, and smooth. He was my kingdom come, my protector against the casual cruelties of a world that saw me as a “too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair.” It was Bailey who understood my love for books, my escape into the worlds of Shakespeare and Kipling, and it was he who defended me from the pitying glances of our elders. And it was Uncle Willie, crippled since childhood, who sat like a giant black Z in his chair, hearing our times tables. I only saw him pretend to be whole once, for a pair of strangers, standing erect and hiding his cane. In that moment, watching him lurch back to his support like a man climbing out of a dream, I understood his burden and loved him more than ever.

One day our father, a handsome, booming stranger who sprinkled his sentences with “er” and “errer,” appeared in a clean gray car and swept us away to St. Louis. There, I met my mother, a woman whose beauty was a force of nature. “To describe my mother,” I thought, “would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.” Bailey fell instantly and forever in love. I was simply struck dumb; I knew at once why she had sent me away - she was too beautiful to have children. We moved in with her and her boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, a large, quiet man who waited for her with a deep, consuming stillness. In the night, when my nightmares were bad, I would be taken to sleep in their bed. One morning, after Mother had left early, I awoke to a strange pressure on my leg. It was Mr. Freeman. He didn't hurt me, not then, but he warned me, “If you ever tell anybody what we did, I'll have to kill Bailey.”

What we had done was a secret I couldn't understand, a weight I carried alone. Then one Saturday, he sent me for milk and when I returned, he was waiting. There was no gentleness this time, only a breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The pain was immense, but worse was the silence that followed. I became sick with a fever, and one day, as Bailey changed my sweat-soaked sheets, the blood-stained panties I had hidden fell at Mother's feet. In the hospital, Bailey promised me that Mr. Freeman couldn't kill him, that he wouldn't let him. So I told him. A few days later, after a trial where the lie I told lumped in my throat, Mr. Freeman was found dead, kicked to death behind the slaughterhouse. I was sure a man was dead because I had spoken. My words were poison. I decided that the only way to keep the world safe was to stop talking.

Sent back to the barren quiet of Stamps, I crept into a cocoon of silence. For nearly a year, I moved through the world like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible. Then I met Mrs. Bertha Flowers, the aristocrat of Black Stamps, a gentlewoman who threw me my first life line. She invited me to her home, a place that smelled of vanilla, and served me tea cookies and lemonade. “Words mean more than what is set down on paper,” she told me, her voice infusing them with shades of deeper meaning. “It takes the human voice to infuse them.” She read to me from *A Tale of Two Cities*, and I heard poetry for the first time in my life. She gave me books and made me read them aloud, and slowly, I began to speak again. I was liked, and what a difference it made.

Life in Stamps was a pendulum swinging between the soul-deep joy of our community and the constant, grinding pressure of segregation. We were all gathered in the Store one night, listening to the Joe Louis fight on the radio. When the Brown Bomber was knocked against the ropes, my race groaned. It was our people falling, another lynching, another Black man hanging on a tree. But when he rose, and the announcer's voice finally washed over us - “The winnah, and still heavyweight champeen of the world… Joe Louis” - we were the strongest people in the world. Yet that pride was always fragile. A few years later, at my eighth-grade graduation, a white speaker told our class that the most we could hope for was to be maids, farmers, and mechanics. The dead words fell like bricks in the auditorium until our valedictorian, Henry Reed, turned to us and began to sing, “Lift ev'ry voice and sing…” We all stood, our voices joining in the hymn of our survival, and we were on top again.

Mother sent for us, and we moved to the wartime boomtown of San Francisco, a city that felt like a state of beauty and freedom. But the world was changing, and so were we. I spent a strange summer with my father in Southern California, where a fight with his girlfriend left me with a knife wound in my side. I ran away, living for a month in a junkyard with a band of homeless children - white, Black, and Mexican - who taught me that I was not, after all, outside the pale of the human race. Back in San Francisco, I fought for and won a job as the first Black conductorette on the city's streetcars, swinging my money changer and calling out stops with a newfound authority.

I was growing up, but the path was a tightrope of youthful unknowing. Confused by my own awakening body and terrified I might be a lesbian, I decided I needed a boyfriend to clarify my position to the world. I orchestrated a clumsy, soulless encounter with a handsome neighborhood boy, an act of seduction that left me feeling only empty and unenlightened. Three weeks later, I discovered the world had ended, and I was the only person who knew it: I was pregnant.

I hid my secret for months, a quiet, guileless schoolgirl on the outside, a universe of fear on the inside. I graduated from high school, and only then did I confess to my family. There was no condemnation, only Mother's calm acceptance. “No use ruining three lives,” she said. After a short labor, my son was born, beautiful and totally mine. But I was afraid to touch him, terrified I might crush his fragile life. One night, Mother brought him to my bed. I lay stiff with fear, vowing not to sleep, but I drifted off. When she woke me, I saw that I had rolled onto my stomach, and under the tent of my arm, the baby slept peacefully, touching my side. “See,” she whispered, “you don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.”