20-21). The scene with the ‘powhitetrash’ girls follows this (24-27), indicating how non-human white people can be. But if that was all that motivated the organization of her episodes, Angelou could as easily have followed the meditation on white people's non-humanity with the episode where young Maya breaks the china of her white employer, Mrs. Cullinan. What really organizes chapters three through five is that Angelou presents the futility of indignation and the utility of subtle resistance as ways of responding to racism” (Walker, 91). This organization also makes the narrative seem less like the story of someone’s personal life and more like a universal experience.Through her travels, Maya sees for herself that racism exists wherever one goes. Although the foundation of her childhood is laid in Stamps, she also spends time with her mother and father in more cosmopolitan areas, as Sara Carey observes: Rotating between the slow country life of Stamps, Arkansas and the fast-pace societies in St. Louis, Missouri and San Francisco, California taught Maya several random aspects of life while showing her segregated America from coast to coast” (Carey, careycaged.html). The only way to escape it, Angelou learns, is to cultivate the person one is inside and become that person on the outside as well.Angelou was privileged to have family that loved her, and a sense of rootedness in that. Sara Carey writes that Angelou had “the perspective of growing up as a southern Negro girl in three radically different [environments]: Stamps, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Maya’s protective and unadorned world in Stamps helped her hold sacred and moral family values . . . . [while living with her mother in the city] helped her control her ‘tender heart’ and emotions” (Carey, careycaged.html).Carey observes that “In California, Maya experienced an entirely different perspective on life, where g...
