In this excerpt, McMurry explores the Image of the caged bird as a symbol of Angelou's struggle for self-realization in spite of the rigid roles that threatened her individuality.
As a songwriter, journalist, playwright, poet, fiction and screenwriter, Maya Angelou is often asked how she escaped her past. How does one grow up, Black and female, in the rural South of the thirties and forties without being crippled or hardened? Her immediate response [in an interview by Sheila Weller for Intellectual Digest,] "How the hell do you know I did escape?" is subtly deceptive. The evidence of Angelou's creative accomplishments would indicate that she did escape; but a closer look reveals the human and artistic complexity of her awareness. For the first volume of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is not.....
