I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Prologue–Chapter 5

Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother.

Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises.

On Saturdays, barbers sat their customers in the shade on the porch of the Store, and troubadours on their ceaseless crawlings through the South leaned across its benches and sang their sad songs...

In later years I was to confront the stereotyped picture of gay song-singing cotton pickers with such inordinate rage that I was told even by fellow Blacks that my paranoia was embarrassing.

She seemed to hold no rancor against the babysitter, nor for her just God who allowed the accident.

In the evening, when we were alone like that, Uncle Willie didn’t stutter or shake or give any indication that he had an “affliction.”

His nonchalance was meant to convey his authority and power over even dumb animals.

Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves’ dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abominations.

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise?

An independent Black man. A near anachronism in Stamps.

Crossing the Black area of Stamps which in childhood’s narrow measure seemed a whole world, we were obliged by custom to stop and speak to every person we met, and Bailey felt constrained to spend a few minutes playing with each friend.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Many women who worked in their kitchens traded at our Store, and when they carried their finished laundry back to town they often set the big baskets down on our front porch to pull a singular piece from the starched collection and show either how graceful was their ironing hand or how rich and opulent was the property of their employers.

All adults had to be addressed as Mister, Missus, Miss, Auntie, Cousin, Unk, Uncle, Buhbah, Sister, Brother and a thousand other appellations indicating familial relationship and the lowliness of the addressor.

My grandmother, too, followed their orders, except that she didn’t seem to be servile because she anticipated their needs.