I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

At the age of three, Maya and her brother Bailey, a year her senior, have to go on a train journey from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas. Their parents have recently divorced and decided to send the children to live with their paternal grandmother, Momma.

The new town welcomes them “warmly, but not too familiarly” (6). The children live with their grandmother and uncle behind the Store—“always spoken with a capital s”(6)—a grocery store Momma opened after running a mobile lunch counter. Momma's workdays begin early: She wakes up at four in the morning and says a simple prayer, thanking God for yet another day.

Since the Store is located in the heart of the Black part of the town, it becomes a way station for cotton pickers. At daybreak every morning, wagons come to get the workers and “carry them to the remains of slavery’s plantation” (7), and in the soft glow of sunrise, young Maya sees the cotton pickers’ cheerful, hopeful mood as they stumble into the Store to buy food for the day. They believe that by working hard they will make enough money to live a decent life, yet when they return after a long day of toiling in the field, Maya recognizes their disappointment and anguish. In the harsh afternoon heat, the workers seem exhausted and distraught, knowing that their chances to get out of debt only diminish and that after a short night's rest, they will have to come back to the same drudgery. This observation will later cause Angelou to speak out against a stereotype of cheerful singing cotton pickers. 

While living with Momma, Maya is often disciplined by Uncle Willie, her father's brother, who has a disability. When he was three years old, his babysitter accidentally dropped him, and the left side of his body became paralyzed. Since Uncle Willie has to use a cane to walk and has a speech impediment, neighbors and local children often make fun of him, but he ignores their mockery. In Maya's eyes, he is “proud and sensitive” (11) and tries not to let his disability rob him of his dignity.

One day, after Maya comes home from school, she sees Uncle Willie in the Store pretending to two customers that he is not disabled. The visitors are unfamiliar to Maya, and she later learns that they are school teachers from Little Rock. Uncle Willie makes an effort to stand up straight without a cane and acts as if he runs the Store, and when Maya comes in, he immediately sends her outside to play. When one of the strangers asks if he has any children of his own, Uncle Willie tries to create the impression that his hands are full because he takes care of his elderly mother and his brother’s two children. After the customers leave, Uncle Willie grabs his cane, “hand over hand, like a man climbing out of a dream” (13). Maya realizes that Uncle Willie was tired of being disabled, “as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame” (13), and at this moment she feels strangely close to him. 

For Maya and Bailey, days are busy and filled with chores. After school, they have to feed the chickens and help in the Store. Maya soon becomes skilled at weighing and measuring and enjoys spending time in the Store, calling it “[her] favorite place to be” (16). She especially loves being there in the mornings, when it is filled with the warm glow of the rising sun, while by the end of the day the Store seems to her “tired” (16), with “its job half done” (16).

In the evenings, Momma, Uncle Willie, Maya, and Bailey usually open a few cans of sardines and some crackers and enjoy a quiet dinner together. During their evening meal, Uncle Willie doesn’t “stutter or shake or give any indication that he had an ‘affliction’” (16).

Late one day, as Maya and Bailey are doing their evening chores, Mr. Steward, a former sheriff, comes to the Store to tell Momma that Uncle Willie should "lay low" that night. Considering himself above other people in Stamps, Mr. Steward doesn't make an effort to explain anything and only says that a Black man "messed with a white lady" (17), so the Ku Klux Klan, or "the boys" (17) as he refers to them, might come to the Store later that night and look for Uncle Willie.

Maya resents Mr. Steward for his self-righteousness, but Momma takes his warning seriously and hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin, where he spends the whole night under “potatoes and onions, layer upon layer, like a casserole” (18). The Ku Klux Klan doesn’t come to the Store that night, but Maya realizes that if they did, they would have found Uncle Willie and lynched him.