I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a good memoir. This book is a tale of a young black girl in the time before the Civil Rights movement. In this book Maya Angelou and her brother Bailey go to live with their grandmother and Uncle Willie in the Stamps, Arkansas after their parents divorce. While Maya is living with her grandmother and uncle she feels like an outcast in society. She is not pretty like her brother, instead she is tall and gangly with wild hair.
In Maya is eight years old she moves back in with her mother and mother's family in St. Louis, Missouri. There she is sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend Mr. Freeman. After that she stops speaking and her and her brother return to Stamps. After a few years in Stamps they return to St. Louis to live with their mother. Their mother then moves to San Fransisco. During the summer in California she goes to visit her father. While with her father she ends up driving her father's car home after he passes out, gets yelled at by her father's girlfriend, gets stabbed by her father's girlfriend, and finally runs away.
After living with a group of homeless children in a junk yard for a month she returns home. Her she becomes the first black person to conduct a streetcar. While she is back up she seduces a neighborhood boy. After the seduction she ends up with some rather unfortunate consequences.
This is the moving tale of Maya Angelou's childhood days.

Books by the Author

• All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
• A Song Flung Up to Heaven
• The Heart of a Woman
• Signin’ and Swingin
• Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
• Gather Together in My Name
• Letter to My Daughter
• The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
• Hallelujah! The Welcome Table
• Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
• Maya Angelou: Poems