I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Chapters 6–10

Sister Monroe, who had been the cause of all the excitement, walked off the dais, cool and spent, and raised her flinty voice in the hymn, “I came to Jesus, as I was, worried, wound, and sad, I found in Him a resting place and He has made me glad.”

He came through Stamps on a Saturday night, and Grandmother gave me the chore of making his pallet on the floor.

In fact, even in their absence they could not be spoken of too harshly unless we used the sobriquet “They.”

The judge had really made a gaffe calling a Negro woman Mrs., but then he was from Pine Bluff and couldn’t have been expected to know that a woman who owned a store in that village would also turn out to be colored.

The country had been in the throes of the Depression for two years before the Negroes in Stamps knew it.

Our customers didn’t even have to take their slated provisions home. They’d pick them up from the welfare center downtown and drop them off at the Store.

Bailey sat down beside me, and that time didn’t admonish me not to cry.

But Uncle Willie was suffering under our father’s bombastic pressure, and in mother-bird fashion Momma was more concerned with her crippled offspring than the one who could fly away from the nest.

The Negro section of St. Louis in the mid-thirties had all the finesse of a gold-rush town. Prohibition, gambling and their related vocations were so obviously practiced that it was hard for me to believe that they were against the law.

Her white skin and the pince-nez that she dramatically took from her nose and let hang free on a chain pinned to her dress were factors that brought her a great deal of respect.

She had pull with the police department, so the men in their flashy suits and fleshy scars sat with churchlike decorum and waited to ask favors from her.

The Syrian brothers vied for her attention as she sang the heavy blues that Bailey and I almost understood.

Their jobs and their family set them apart, but they were best known for their unrelenting meanness.

She crashed the man’s head with a policeman’s billy enough to leave him just this side of death. There was no police investigation nor social reprobation.

A natural comedian, he never waited for the laugh that he knew must follow his droll statements.