h an experience would be traumatic for any little girl of any ethnic background, it is particularly so for Maya because she already suffers from low self-esteem because of her race.Nonetheless, Angelou does not want the rape to cast a despairing pall over what she really intends to be an inspirational success story. As she once said, she uses "one specific incident to control the book (the rape) but with an underlying implication that the incident will not control a life" (Angelou, cited in angelou.htm).Pierre Walker observes that it is somewhat unusual for an autobiography like Angelou’s to be arranged in any sequence other than a chronological one. Yet, as he points out, Angelou’s arrangement of anecdotes makes good sense intuitively, even if it violates a strict observance of chronology: “Caged Birds commentators have discussed how episodic the book is, but these episodes are crafted much like short stories, and their arrangement throughout the book does not always follow strict chronology.(7) Nothing requires an autobiography to be chronological, but an expectation of chronology on the reader's part is normal in a text that begins, as Caged Bird does, with earliest memories. Nevertheless, one of the most important early episodes in Caged Bird comes much earlier in the book than it actually did in Angelou's life: the scene where the ‘powhitetrash’ girls taunt Maya's grandmother takes up the book's fifth chapter, but it occurred when Maya ‘was around ten years old’ (23), two years after Mr. Freeman rapes her (which occurs in the twelfth chapter). Situating the episode early in the book makes sense in the context of the previous chapters: the third chapter ends with Angelou describing her anger at the ‘used-to-be-sheriff’ who warned her family of an impending Klan ride (14-15), and the fourth chapter ends with her meditation on her early inability to perceive white people as human (...
