I read Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” as a companion to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” as comparative literature for contrasting perspective, and it was instructive. As Mockingbird is told through the voice of a grown white woman recalling her childhood experience in the segregated south, this story is likewise told by a grown black woman doing the same. Each story is about a child’s examination of prejudice, but Scout in Mockingbird is looking from the outside in while Angelou is deep inside, trying to make sense of the white world – almost as if from Plato’s cave, interpreting shadows.
Their similarities and learnings are as poignant as their differences. Angelou writes
“What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”
It’s all a world of double standards, and they are a fearful thing. They allow you to hold diametrically aligned but contrasting views in the cradle of your mind with no moral angst whatsoever. It takes children a while to get the hang of it, but not long. The problem, of course, is that we all are guilty and remedy requires a hard lonesome fight against the resolute crowd.
Revisionist history is as old as mankind and truth has always been canonized by the victors. In time, facts matter less and less until all that remains is the operationalized outcome. This plays even harder when rationalization smooths over moral inconveniences. Solidarity helps, and societies conspire to protect their mores, but miraculously the outliers manage to find their lonely voice. Folks like Lee’s Atticus raise children who learn by their courageous example and the few take up the torch to move us inelegantly along.
I read Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” as a companion to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” as comparative literature for contrasting perspective, and it was instructive. As Mockingbird is told through the voice of a grown white woman recalling her childhood experience in the segregated south, this story is likewise told by a grown black woman doing the same. Each story is about a child’s examination of prejudice, but Scout in Mockingbird is looking from the outside in while Angelou is deep inside, trying to make sense of the white world – almost as if from Plato’s cave, interpreting shadows.
Their similarities and learnings are as poignant as their differences. Angelou writes
“What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”
It’s all a world of double standards, and they are a fearful thing. They allow you to hold diametrically aligned but contrasting views in the cradle of your mind with no moral angst whatsoever. It takes children a while to get the hang of it, but not long. The problem, of course, is that we all are guilty and remedy requires a hard lonesome fight against the resolute crowd.
Revisionist history is as old as mankind and truth has always been canonized by the victors. In time, facts matter less and less until all that remains is the operationalized outcome. This plays even harder when rationalization smooths over moral inconveniences. Solidarity helps, and societies conspire to protect their mores, but miraculously the outliers manage to find their lonely voice. Folks like Lee’s Atticus raise children who learn by their courageous example and the few take up the torch to move us inelegantly along.
Sometimes, thank God, they even write books.
A good author is not limited by limitations of format or genre.
Interesting and evocative for me just starting to read memoirs--though some I read which I thought were just novels.
Thanks, Joel. I have read and enjoyed the poetry of both women.