school, becomes pregnant, gives birth to her son,
Guy, and subsequently agitates to be hired as San
Francisco’s first black female streetcar conductor.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a story of the
racial tragedy of black childhood in the South, the
Ku Klux Klan, segregation, betrayal, wandering,
sexual molestation, and rootlessness. It is also the
story of Angelou’s grandmother’s Puritan world
of racial pride, the southern black church, the fast
saloon life of Vivienne Baxter, and the theme of
segregation outside the South, particularly on the
West Coast.
Following the journey pattern of the journey
out, the quest, the achievement, and the transition
to the next home, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
is an affirmative narrative. The prose is rich in
brilliant social portraiture, self-irony, memorable
anecdotes, poignant metaphor, and the sharply
evoked ethos of various places. Its values of healing,
growth, courage, and the achievement of personal
voice and spiritual wholeness are foregrounded
against a background of precariousness, racial
tragedy, and ever-present death. Angelou records
the beginnings of her personal self-constructions
from idolizing her brother to being overwhelmed
by her mother’s beauty to her rejection of her selfish
father along with her sexual naiveté, her southern
religious heritage, her numerous self-deceptions,
and her premature emergence into motherhood at
age 16. Angelou’s narrative stages the development
of personal mythos; racial self-hatred; fear, love,
and rage toward her parents; moments of great
humor; willful self-destructiveness; and the desire
to transcend social death.
In the five volumes that follow this one, Ange-
lou makes American literary history through the
development of the new genre of a serial authoeth-
nography. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings she
writes both her individual self and her collective
and communal black female self as she discovers
language, voice, and her longing for “home.” As
a métis, or cultural translator, Angelou reclaims
a series of multiple cultural and racial traditions,
which she then ethnographs into a coherent iden-
tity. It is out of her deliberate work as a cultural
translator that she manages to create a sense of
place, people, and “tribe,” unified out of both per-
sonal and collective fragmentations. Eschewing the
typically tragic mode of such writing, Angelou’s
work turns to the ironic and comic mode, staging a
narrative of transcendence forged through linking
herself to the long tradition of African-American
first-person autobiographical literature found in
such classic works as OLAUDAH EQUIANO’s The In-
teresting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,
FREDERICK DOUGLASS’s The NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE
OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, and HARRIET JACOBS’s IN-
CIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SL AV E GIRL. I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings is one of America’s most beloved
autobiographic works.
Gloria CroninIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs (1861)
Written by HARRIET JACOBS (under the pseudonym
Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
was the first published narrative written by a for-
mer female slave. Lydia Maria Child, the white
abolitionist, edited the work, and for many years
critics and historians believed that Child was the
author. It was not until the 1970s, when scholar
Jean Fagan Yellin verified the authenticity of the
narrative and the life of Harriet Jacobs, that proof
was provided that Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl was not a work of fiction. In this narrative,
Jacobs, a former slave in North Carolina, recounts
her experiences in slavery, her growing awareness
of her true condition of bondage, her painful quest
for freedom, her determination to protect her chil-
dren at any cost, her flight to freedom, and her life
as a freeperson.
Significantly, Jacobs adopts the tone of the sen-
timental novel, a genre popular with 19th-century
middle-class white women, to frame her story. She
uses the formula to critique the domestic slavery
of women as well as the slavery of millions of Af-
rican Americans. Moreover, this genre allowed
Jacobs to gain a wider audience; like her fictional
counterpart, Linda Brent, trapped by her poverty
and beauty, Jacobs fell prey to an unscrupulous,
older man. In Jacobs’s case, the sexual predator is
also her white slave owner, Dr. Flint—a man nearly266 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl