amblers, hustlers, prostitutes, and gangsters all earned respectable titles and respect. Maya once heard the stories from the best con-artists in the country who cheated malicious, bigoted white men out of everything they owned. In the evenings after her school work was finished, and she never had any chores to do like in Stamps, her mother would take her out dancing and teach her to jitterbug in smoke and whiskey filled dance clubs. In Stamps, this wild way of life would be considered immoral to all religious and simple folk like Momma” (Carey, careycaged.html). Yet Carey adds that “Maya always seemed happiest in Stamps with her grandmother” because it was a bastion of security for her (Carey, careycaged.html). No matter where she wound up in her life, she could always fall back on her sense of identity developed in her grandmother’s home.Ironically, it was the restricted yet “safe” environment of Stamps that gave her birdlike spirit wings. The title of Angelou’s book came from a poem by nineteenth-century black poet Paul Dunbar, who ironically was caged by his color into the persona of his verse; because the white world expected a black poet to “sound black”, Dunbar was forced into making a living writing “dialect verse” although he could write perfectly lovely literary poetry.Angelou refused to play by those rules. Throughout her life she tended to knock down barriers, and yet as we read we realize that in most cases these barriers were not knocked down at the time Angelou is living them, but only later, after she has had time to reflect on them and present them to us. When she tells the anguished details of her life story, and echoes the Bible’s lament over suffering, “How long, oh God, how long?” (Angelou, 111), Maya’s indignation becomes our own, and it is we ourselves who are knocking those barriers down. Her story strikingly portrays the d...
