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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
01:36:12
Maya Angelou's debut autobiography was an instant hit when it was published in 1969, and it has never gone out of print in the nearly 60 years since it was released.
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A
Today on Zero to well Read, we're talking about I Know why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and this episode is sponsored by thriftbooks.com and you can find all kinds of editions of I Know why the Caged Bird Sings there. I want to shout out a couple here, the one you're going to see most often, and this is a great pick. They've continued to use the 1971 paperback cover, which is almost like this Matisse like cutout of a bird against a sunset. That's very cool. There's some other paperbacks you can find from the 70s I like just as well. There's a July 1978 bantam one that has these kind of pinkish red ribbons that's very 70s and cool. There's a 1983 one that's kind of the same but inverted on the other side and it's in green. There are all kinds of editions you can check out. There is a special edition from the folio Society from 2001, not in stock right now, but if you save it to your list on thriftbooks.com they'll send you a notification when it becomes available. Thanks to Thriftbooks.com for sponsoring this season of zero to well read.
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B
Hey folks, Rebecca here. I have some exciting news to share. Since we launched the show, the number one listener request has been for some kind of book club or community reading experience. We've been thinking about it and talking about what that might look like and how it could be uniquely Zero to well Read. You might have even heard us working through some of the elements of it on a recent Mailbag episode. And so today we are delighted to announce the launch of Zero to well Read guided read alongs. We're starting with with the Odyssey for an episode that will land July 7. In the run up, we're going to provide Read along participants with an exclusive mini episode about how to prepare for the read, what to pay attention to, and anything else you need to know before you dive in. You'll also be able to chat with us and other members as you read in a dedicated Patreon chat space and we'll be in the chat throughout the read, offering prompts, context and conversation as we go. If you want to join, it's easy, just sign up for an office hours membership on our Patreon. That's patreon.com 02 well read, which gives you access to the read alongs +ad free early listening to all zero to well read episodes and exclusive access to bonus content and just do what works for you. We'll suggest a reading schedule and provide some framework, but we're all grown ups here, so read when and how it works for you. You can chime in or just hang back and take it all in. We're so excited to get reading with all of you. Thank you for making this first year of Zero to well Read so successful again. You can join the read alongs@patreon.com 02 well read we'll talk to you soon.
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A
Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
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B
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're discussing Maya Angelou's groundbreaking debut autobiography, I Know why the Caged Bird Sings. Before we get started though, we just want to remind you. You can click the link in our show notes to sign up for our free newsletter or become a member to get access to our guided read alongs. The first one is later this summer. It will be the Odyssey by Homer. You can also sign up to get early ad, free episodes and bonus content. That's patreon.com 0to well read and if
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A
you've got a moment to rate and review the show, wherever you're listening would be great. Especially Apple podcasts or Spotify as well. You can see people leave some comments on the Spotify episodes from time to time.
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B
Yeah, it's really fun.
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A
If you've got a take you want to drop, you can put it there. Also, feel free to email us at 0 to well read@bookriot.com doesn't matter if you're listening to an old episode and you've got a take. We do mailbags from time to time. We're always looking for feedback and responses and to hear your reading stories. Got a really good request. Like a couple of Stoner requests. I think we're talking about Stoner on the other show and I don't know if that triggered people's minds, but he was like I'd like you guys to talk about Stoner. Trust me, I will say this. Whatever book you know about, it's on the list. But you raising your hand digitally, email wherever goes into some well of algorithmic brain space that we use to determine what books we're going to talk about. So zero to well read@bookriot.com Rebecca Today it's I Know why the Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou Low which I'm going to have to think about every time I say it from here on out. And this is one where her own biography and the book kind of get mixed up because, of course, this is the first of what, seven or eight autobiography memoirs that she does. Who, who was this person? What should we know about her in this book before we get into talking about it?
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B
She's, this is one of the more fascinating author biographies that we will have talked about on the show and we've talked about some really interesting people. But if you had only read this book or if you've never read it before, and maybe you only know of Maya Angelou from like her appearances on Oprah or I first encountered her in, I think, eighth or ninth grade. There's a lot about her that is surprising and really fascinating. She was a dancer. She was a civil rights activist. She was a poet who recited her work at a presidential inauguration. But before all of that, she was a little girl named Marguerite Johnson. She was growing up in Stamps, Arkansas. Her parents sent her and her brother to live there after they divorced, sent them to live with their grandparents. I know why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969. Angela was 41. And as you were saying, it's the first of seven autobiographies that she would write. This chronicles her early life. It starts when she's three, carries up through the age of 16 as she's writing about childhood in the Jim Crow South. Book begins in the 1930s, her formative experiences in the black church, the rape that she experienced at 8 years old. So here's a heads up, listeners. We will be talking about that experience and the way that she writes about it and the move to California in her teenage years that really changed the direction of her life in several ways. And also while living there, she became a mother at the age of 16. And she's just embarking on motherhood as the book ends. So that is who she was.
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A
It's a fascinating look at her life, but there's some structural features of her life that I think particularly lend themselves to a book like this. I think contribute to the way the book took off. The moment she's recalling here as she's a young person is interesting. Sort of depression into Post World War II and what racial politics were like in America then. Let's just say not ideal, to put it very, very mildly. But also and this connects we're going to get I'm going to have this in my note for later connects to several of the other books we've discussed on the show so far. But she's doing some Backwards, inside out sort of internal migration. So she ping pongs between St. Louis Stamps, Arkansas and various places in California. So it's urban and rural, between various family members living with their father for a while, then living with their mother, then living with her grandmother in all these blended sorts of situations. So you get a real tour of black America in the shape of this one young woman's movement between these spaces and switching between the church and school and work and the city and the country and the store and the bar and the Mexican brothel slash bar and the honky tonk. And it's really remarkable to see how much ground, literal ground, young Rita, as she's referred to in this book covers and then the book itself is 260 pages. It doesn't dwell. But the movement between, I think if anything, if there's an organizing principle, it's her family. It's her own experiences and interiority, of course, as all memoirs do. But it is the movement between these households and how they are different and how they give her sort of a stereoscopic, if not you add one more like her third eye. Like she's got multiple perspectives to start to see herself. And in any good coming of age story, which is this is maybe as good as it gets, the emergence of self awareness and critical consciousness is the thing that's being produced. And how that happens here is very much, I think Rebecca about where all these different spaces she finds herself in and her own interest in figuring stuff out as she goes. And her principal frustration is racism. But her most internal frustration is not getting it. Like that there are things out there that people know that adults know, that white people know, that grown people know that educated people know that rich people know that she doesn't. And she hates that. She hates that. And who can't relate to that.
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B
It's one of the most, I think, endearing and accessible parts of the story is like that she opens up about the things that she was either completely naive or ignorant of as a kid or the things that she misunderstood. Like there's a great bit near the end of the book where she's. She doesn't understand what lesbianism actually is, but her idea of it gets her really messed up for a little while and she starts to wonder if she is a lesbian. And she's like doing the time honored pre Google tradition of like looking it up in the dictionary, trying to figure out what things mean. And that happens several times for her. But the language is really poetic. It's really rich. Because Angelo has been a Practicing poet by the time that she writes this book. So she is telescoping between families in multiple cities, these extended communities that she's part of. She's also writing about her love affair with books and reading. So a great, you know, tool that we come across so often throughout great memoirs is along the lines of that development of critical consciousness, but becoming aware of the wider world, becoming aware of the ways that other people have seen the world. And really through the great works, you know, there's a beautiful line about how she first fell in love, met and fell in love with William Shakespeare when she's really quite young. And that. That carries her through, through the rest of this story and really the rest of her life.
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A
It's, you know, with autobiography. Memoir, we're going to be talking about the book and the person themselves. But like, she's writing this at 41, which is her first book, but she's been an artist, a dancer, an activist. I think probably I'm comfortable saying this might be a good Patreon office hours thing for us to do for this one since it's not sort of super prone to our character, our new character format, though there are certainly characters here of the most interesting author bio. She's very much in the running for this because she runs around. Runs around. That's not the right word. She's in the mix with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. James Baldwin. James Baldwin, of course, later, as most of us who are alive now or reading now know her at least in some part through the prism of Oprah, because she becomes kind of the gathering spirit of Oprah's literary consciousness. In the edition that I read, Oprah writes the introduction there in the Oprah Book Club. She's a central figure, and that's awesome in a lot of different ways. But I think what we find over and over again, we encounter these stories and these writers, they're spikier. They're much more complicated, more subversive, and to my mind, more interesting than the index. I'm sure there's a postage stamp of Maya Angelou, and there should be, but once you get to a postage stamp level of fame, the details tend to get washed away. And what's so amazing about Maya Angelou's principal work being her autobiography is like she's insisting on the specificity of herself, right? It's not just. It cannot just get all. Get washed away. Why is this book a thing? Like it was a thing from the very beginning. It gets published and it sells well immediately in 1968, 1969, apparently she was sort of induced to write it just because people thought she was interesting. What a flex is that.
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B
So in 1968, she had been close to Martin Luther King Jr. And she was devastated after he was killed. James Baldwin takes her to a party to try to cheer her up. And at the party, she's just being herself, telling stories about her life. This woman that met her there thinks, oh, this. This person should write a book. And so that woman calls her friend Robert Loomis, who was an editor at Random House, and says, you should try to get this Maya Angelou person to write a book. And she does. And it becomes, I know why the Caged Bird Sings. So it really just is that she was that captivating and so good at telling the story of her life that led to her doing this. She had already been working as a poet and a playwright. She might never have gone on this autobiography path otherwise. That's a great Sliding Doors moment. But we would not have had this book if not for, first of all, James Baldwin, you know, intervening to just try to cheer her up, but also someone who had connections to the publishing world. As she writes it and it comes out, it's received as really just a new kind of memoir, and she's received as a new kind of memoirist because black women at the time really rarely got to tell their stories in this way where they had full agency and control of it. And I think it's a fascinating piece of context that this comes out just a few months before Toni Morrison publishes the Bluest Eye. And Toni Morrison also working as an editor at Random House at that time. So they are writing into the same cultural moment and about similar, but not ideas, identical times in American history. The Bluest eye opens about 10 years later. Then I know why the Caged Bird Sings begins. Bluest Eye is, of course, in Ohio. Caged Bird starts us off in Stamps, Arkansas. So we're in the Jim Crow era of American history. But what that looks like in the south versus what it looked like in the north were quite different, similar in important ways. Racism was consistent, but the legal structures around governing life for black people were quite different. And this book just lands, I think, in a way that allowed black women and black artists to see themselves as they had never seen themselves represented before on the page. It was really powerful. This podcast is supported by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm going to reach for every day when I get dressed. And right now, I'm going for lighter fabrics, better materials, and pieces that feel effortless but still polished. That's why I keep coming back to Quints. They make high quality essentials from premium materials like breathable linen, washable silk and organic cotton, all without the luxury markup. Right now I am living in their 100% European linen high waisted shorts. They're one of those rare summer staples that work for almost anything. You can throw them on with a tank top and sneakers for work from home or a casual weekend look, or dress them up with sandals and a few pieces of jewelry for dinner or an evening event. They're lightweight, comfortable and somehow still look really put together even when it's brutally hot outside, which it has already been here in Virginia this year. Quince also has beautiful linen dresses and tops that start at just $32, plus soft denim and organic cotton sweaters that are perfect for layering on cooler summer nights. If you're lucky enough to get those, everything is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen. And it's not just clothing. Quint's also has elevated essentials for home, kitchen and bedding too. You can elevate your summer wardrobe right now when you go to quince.comwellred for free shipping on your 365 day returns. It's also available in Canada for our friends up there. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com well read for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com well ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play? You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci.
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A
Yeah, and you know it's this feedback loop of politics and art reinforcing each other, right? So the long struggle, the ongoing struggle for civil rights in America, makes a position where she's a part of it, she gets some notoriety. The halls of power, commercial power, is now interested in black stories because of the political dynamic that's going on. That political dynamic is going on because of and in response to and alongside artistic revolutions in black America that have been going on for 100 years to this point. And so it's so interesting to see them sort of dance together, the political power and the cultural power. They're not separate entities here. And this is one of those moments where you can really see them work hand in glove to get different kinds of stories, different kinds of representations. And then the market in America, at least, is ready for it because this sells well. It's on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. You have a note here. We'll talk about the total number of copies sold. I agree with you. I think it seems too low. But for two years, and then spawns a situation where her subsequent autobiographies are selling enough to keep getting book deals. Right? To keep. And then she goes on the circuit, Right? This is another thing about Angelo is like, she would do, like, 80 public speaking events a year. She was out there behind podiums, up on stages, in front of microphones, talking about her story, talking about life, talking about black people, sort of insisting on this continued amplification of her own story and how it's representative of other black stories and the work still to be done. So this combination of really intimate detail and then broad public engagement is pretty unusual for a memoir to this kind. We think of memoirs like, it's usually quite small and, you know, like Harper Lee, I guess, would be the yin to the yang here. Who disappears. There is no Harper Lee outside of the books, where Maya Angelou, she thinks of her calling of her project as manifestly being considerably different. So I find that. That's one thing I thought about this whole time. Like, this literally became a platform for her that she stood on and used, you know, into her 80s. She was out there for the rest of life, in the streets for the rest of her life doing this stuff.
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B
She was. I came across a great piece from 2002 in the New Yorker by the great critic Hilton Al.
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A
This is an unbelievable find.
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Thank you. He was reviewing one of her later memoirs, but he's talking about her project overall, and he writes that of black women. They were relegated to the margins of life. They found it difficult to rewrite themselves as central characters. Only in private could they talk about their personal lives. But Angelo took those stories public she wrote about blackness from the inside without apology or defense. And that is so on display in I Know why the Caged Bird Sings. She's writing like, this is not a shiny, happy portrait of Paul Black life. There are beautiful moments. There are also really awful, painful moments. And many of those are the product of racism. Some of them are the product of, like, a lack of education. Some of them are abuse within families and abuse within communities. There's violence is pervasive in the ways that. That she's looking at it. And she doesn't place blame onto the black community for it or undo blame, but she holds individuals accountable for their behaviors. And she's looking.
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People are peopling here. Right? I mean, that's another thing.
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People are peopling, but also systems are systeming. And she doesn't. Like, there's not a big flashing sign that's like, and now we're gonna talk about systemic racism. But in telling her own story, she connects it to broader themes. And there are a few sort of thesis statement moments throughout the text where she comes back to. This is part of a system that. Where she's telling us subtly, my story is my story, but it's not just my story. There are stories like this all throughout the. Of black people. And by opening up the possibility to tell your story, warts and all, she makes it possible for other black women to come forward and to tell their life stories and to be full, complicated, messy, rich humans in the ways that black people didn't have access to. I mean, this is like 60 years ago, this book. Not even. And that it was still so revolutionary then that she was able to do that.
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A
Yeah. My prep for these episodes is I read the text itself and then go back and find the subsequent documents. And one thing I was curious to see is if people were talking about how funny it could be. And I'll get to this in a moment, but I saw the same original New York Times review you have linked in our notes here by Christopher Lehman hopped A carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir of a black girl. Slow and clumsy growth to interior identity. There are a couple scenes. There's one scene I'll talk about later that is as funny as any scene that I can ever remember. And she is cutting and really funny. And this. This serio, comic light and dark element is also a really important thing that I think if you haven't read this book and you have what I miss, kind of my sense of what your sense might be of Maya Angelou in this book, I think you'll be surprised how dark it can get, how pointed it can get, and frankly, how funny it can be. To my knowledge, she never wrote fiction. I don't think she ever wrote a short story or a novel of any kind. I don't know that she needed to, but I would have read that. At the same time. I'd be curious to see where she was. You know, this is called autobiographical fiction. How close all these things are exactly to the truth. You never know in memoir, but you should always say that. Be careful of writers. This is one thing I always say. Just be careful out there, believing what writers are telling you. I have no reason to suspect her more than any other writer telling me that something actually happened. But that's something to keep in mind with all these kinds of writings. But for someone who spent her life writing, I think it's especially interesting to think about which stories she was choosing to tell. What is not said here, we can't know, but there are some interesting blank spaces for a reader to engage with. Baldwin loved her.
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B
Baldwin did love her. He said she liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity. I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood, when the people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved. Her portrait is a biblical study in life in the midst of death.
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A
I mean, I'm sure she would have read Go Tell it on the Mountain. And I'm sure Baldwin, having read Go Tell it on the Mountain, which is further on the fictional side of autobiographical fiction, but covers many of the same issues and similar time periods, would have been thrilled to see a book like this. So they're so different, but quite related.
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B
Yeah, you can just imagine the conversations that they would have had, especially about growing up in the black church and a couple of the really formative scenes in the book. But it's not just the bestseller lists that receive Angela. Well, it's not just her friends in the artistic community. She's nominated for the National Book Award for this in 1970. Just an incredible way to come out of the gate. And as you hinted at earlier than, the estimated total sales are only 2 to 3 million copies, which seems really low to me, given Angelo's profile. And the only hypothesis I have is that this is a really popular book for school syllabi. And I wonder if it's like schools have gotten their, you know, hundred copies of them and they're using them year after year after year, and it's just not getting replaced very much. There's also so many Maya Angelou books that maybe it's hard for attention to concentrate around 1. But I think if you know the title of one Maya angel book, it's probably this one. That sales number seems just surprisingly low to me.
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A
I. I think it's probably banned a lot. It is banned a lot. And I think that has to. It has to be accounted for here that in some districts it's. It's still taught. In some it's. It's banned. This is one of those books. I would never ban this book, nor would I ban most books from public libraries. I think this one. And you want to be a certain age so you get what's going on here so you can talk about the issues. Like, you could certainly read this at 8 or 9. It's not going to hurt you. But there are things that are going on here that a little more life experience, a little more sophistication of reading between the lines and understanding what's happening, have some sense of history, would be quite helpful for here. I also think that maybe, you know, memoirs, especially this moment, it's a difficult read. And also books by black people don't sell as well as memoirs by white people. And this is just something we need to talk about. This ongoing dynamic, racist dynamic in American book buying and publishing and reading was true then and it's true now. And it's just something to think about. Whereas, you know, I'm sure something like Bastard out of Carolina has sold a lot more for reasons that aren't about the quality of the work. But there is a racial dynamic that I don't know how to put a number on it. But we have to say that
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B
a great and really important point. And despite that, despite the lower than we would have expected sales numbers here, it's never been out of print in its 57 years since publication. And so these books, they remain in circulation. The publisher continues to invest in new copies of them, new editions. I imagine in three more years, we're gonna see some 60th anniversary editions with new introductions and continued reflections on Angelo's life. And as you mentioned, the edition that both of us read has an introduction from Oprah, who talks about how reading. I know why the Caged Bird Sings was her conversion moment as a young woman. And then she meets Maya Angelou early in her career, like in the late 70s when Oprah was a TV anchor in Baltimore, she meets Maya Angelou and pesters her for an interview. Angelo gives her five minutes. But from there they set off on what becomes a decades long and really enduring lifelong friendship.
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A
I have a pitch for you. I was gonna save this for adaptation, but since it's not directly an adaptation of this, I think I would be interested in a one act play that's that first meeting of Maya Angelou. And a young Oprah like that would be a cool, you know, small thing to do and imagine. Or maybe you could follow them over subsequent meetings over the next, you know, 30 or 40 years as their fortunes and positions change, evolve and heighten. But that dynamic is a really important one. And Oprah being one of the, if not the signal, tastemakers in American books reading over the last 20 to 30 years in Angelo and I think kind of along with Toni Morrison, those combined being her lodestars that have powered her through this.
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B
Yeah, it also really complicates the reading of Angelo or it made this reading very surprising because my Oprah memories and like I was, you know, an early teen in the 90s when Oprah was at her peak and had Maya Angelou on frequently. So like my mental model of Angelou is sort of this like softer, grandmotherly woman, kind of always wearing like flowing garments. And she had this very like deep, compelling speaking voice. And it just always sounded like wisdom coming out from her. And it was wisdom, but there's kind of a gauziness to the Oprahfication of anyone. Toni Morrison resisted this a little bit more and it's not really fair to compare them. But Morrison insisted on being difficult in her personal presentation and in her work. And Angela's presentation was just different. But when you combined that with Oprah, it had been 25 years since I touched this book and it was so much sharper and spikier and more difficult at moments than I remembered from when I was a kid and than I expected from that gauzy Oprah, the Oprah ness of it all. So like you get a huge platform, but it can also really skew expectations.
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A
Yeah, the daytime TV ness of it has, you know, there's a patina of that Oprah. But that's one of the radical things about the Oprah's. Like I'm gonna pick Faulkner and Morrison and I know that it's like that's just that dynamic is hard to reconcile because they seem to be stealthily radical. It is, yeah. Yeah. We've talk a lot about the biography here. Rebecca, I think she was the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco that process of getting that job is detailed here. I would also watch a one act play about that sort of the bureaucratic Kafka esque racist, racist nightmare of just trying to get like a job, taking coins on the, on the trolley cars. She was a huge dancer. You get in this book. Her own mother's sort of nightlife performativity and she's inherited some of that. And she learns to dance in these, in these bars. Her real original name, I guess, is not Maya Angelo. I think I'll save the story of how she got that because that's something that's really wonderful moments for her and her brother in the book. She toured in Europe, Porgy and Bess. She cut a calypso record. She moved to Harlem in 59. When she was 30, she joined the Writers Guild. Like, I'm just sort of saying stuff now, Rebecca. Like, you've got a bunch of other things here. We could go through them all if you want. What else should we, I mean, what kind of a portrait of this person do we want people to understand insofar as we understand what kind of a woman she was at this point?
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B
And then after, she's a real pillar of the black artistic community and the black political community and the places that those two communities intersect? Like when she's dancing, she meets Alvin Ailey, the famous choreographer, and they have a dance team together.
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A
Amazing.
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B
She's acting in a play with Roscoe Lee Brown and James Earl Jones and Louis Gossett and Cicely Tyson. She moves to Cairo and then eventually she moves to Accra where she meets Malcolm X. Then she becomes friends with James Baldwin, like, and then eventually Oprah, like, people, other artistic people are drawn to her. And she's deeply involved in so many modes of self expression and so many modes of political expression. And like, I'm sorry if you're about to leave a podcast review on Apple that says keep the politics out of it. But there is like, there is no way to talk about Maya Angelou without talking about, about the ways that art is political, because all art is political. But to be a black woman who made the kind of art that she made and who showed up in the world as she did was political. And her existence in many ways was defined by her connections to the political activism community, the experiences that she had as a young black woman in the south and then what it meant to fight for civil rights going forward. And like, you have to hold that the whole time that you're reading her and remembering, like, this is, she has this Political consciousness. By the time she's writing, I know why the Caged Bird Sings. This is not just let me tell my story. There is a reason for telling this story. And she's demonstrating the impacts of racism in the same. In many of the same ways that Morrison uses fiction to do it in the Bluest Eye. There are just so many significant overlaps in the themes and the experiences that Morrison's characters and Angelo herself have. But this is informed by political life and life in an inescapably politicized place.
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A
I think it's not hard to imagine the kind of stage presence she would have had in a live situation. Because do yourself a favor and go Google Maya Angelou interview. And just to hear her talk. And she's very attuned to rhythm and intonation and timbre. It's like she is a performer, a consummate sort of performer of spontaneity that doesn't look like performance, but you can feel it at the same time. And she talks about this in the book. She talks about rhythms and she talks about things. And this woman who is very important to her in her own artistic growth, reading the same passage she read, but doing it so much differently, with attention to the elocution of the thing. One of the great voices that I think that's ever existed in my life of reading. Yes.
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B
He would have killed on the button poetry YouTube page.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. Let's see. I had read this before. I guess it's a good time to get into our first exposure. I'll say. I'm not sure. The first time I read this, I don't know if it was after the Oprah sort of emergence of that as a cultural dominance. I don't think I read it at school. I honestly can't remember for this particular time. I did it on audio for the first couple hours. Cause I wanted to get a sense of it. But I was like, I can't highlight stuff, but I wanted to. But she narrates. It is a long way of saying, how is that?
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B
It has to be wonderful.
- [33:06]
A
I mean, it's unbelievable. So I tend to listen to my audiobooks at like 1.1 or 1.2 speed, just because it's. I find a lot of the narration too slow for my attention span. But this one, I was like, could I even slow it down? What Can I make this last longer, though? It is languorous in its way, but it's all. It's a performance in a different kind of way. It's Tremendous. So if you're an audiobook kind of person, the language here. I tend to say that the. For memoirs, the audiobook is the canonical experience. And it could be, but this is one where I found myself wanting to slow down and take another look at sentences. And as we've said before, audiobooks are very difficult to do that. So maybe at some other point I'll go back and just have the audio experience and do that. But I can really recommend it from what I listened to the couple hours I did.
- [33:55]
B
Yeah, as I said, I was in eighth or ninth grade, I think. I don't remember much about it. I do remember the rape that she describes because it's very much on the page. And I was a white kid in suburban Kansas City, so I'm sure that the class was mostly like, racism is bad. Okay. But not. I don't remember any, like, real depth or a conversation about the systems around it. But it was this one person's experience of racism. And so to read it with an adult political consciousness is really interesting.
- [34:25]
A
What is it like to read this? What it's all about? So we've talked. It's ages, sort of 3 to 16. So as soon as she can start remembering some stuff, that's where it comes out. And you have the point here. That's a collection of vignettes in chronological order, which is, I think, what a lot of memoirs are. But this feels more like that. Like you move from one situation to another. Like, sometimes she'll just give you a little set piece because it's important to her. Sometimes the things connect to things that have happened in the past. The net effect is a feeling about what it was like to be in these places at a time. But there's not a story per se, except that she's grown up. Any coming David's story. But there's not a central. There's not really a central conflict like her and her brother's absence from her parents at various times. And dislocation is the central tension. But it's not really a narrative tension. Rebecca. So there's not. The story is. Here are stories from my wild and interesting life told with grace and discernment.
- [35:23]
B
Yeah, there's not a flowing narrative to it, but I did think several times about what Laura McGrath was talking about when she was here with us doing Interpreter of Maladies, that in a short story collection, all the stories should lead to a singular aesthetic effect. And Angelo achieves that with the vignettes here. There is a singular aesthetic effect. It's kind of A singular feeling of having read this. But you end one chapter and you don't know if the next chapter is going to pick up a week or a month or a year later. It's just kind of slices of life, but they are ordered as she's growing up. And in that way, it feels like dropping into scenes from a movie. Like, it's quite cinematic. It's really detailed, creatively arranged, and I think, creatively told. Like, there are aspects of this that. Do they feel more like reading fiction? There's this character development and setting of the scenes. And there have been arguments about this book for its entire existence, about, should we. Can we really call it autobiography? Or is this autobiographical fiction? And Angelo, I couldn't find anything where she weighed in, but the book is classified, you know, like in the Library of Congress as autobiography. So we're gonna go with that. But it's also, as we were saying, just so much more complicated and so much darker than the grandmotherly image that she had near the end of her life. And by the time, many readers our age and younger would have been introduced to her.
- [36:50]
A
Yeah. And, you know, as it often happened, coming of age stories. It's funny to think about Perks of Being a Wallflower as a coming of age story that we talked about recently, where you get slipped in, like, these grand statements about what life is like and what people are like or what love is like, or what pain or separation is like. And this is a really interesting quote that you got from Hilton Owls here, where Angela writes from the vantage point of a woman who has compromised nearly everything. And for what? To judge those who haven't. This sanctimonious clouds virtually all her work, despite its rehabilitation. So I think that's a longer lens looking at Angelo. But in this situation, too, I was seeing this very much as a teenager who. Who is sort of coming to grips with the world. And I think a lot of teenagers do this. I certainly did. One way of creating a self is to say what is not the self. And I don't do that. And that is bad. And that is dumb. And I'm not like those other people who are dumb idiots over there. I am me. And that lends itself to sort of a personal pocket of pomposity that hopefully will be punctured over time. That's a lot of peas in a row there. I didn't mean to do all that really good alliteration there, but you do feel that again. But on the other hand, and I would leaven that a little bit, it's one of my quotes here. Her own wrestling with and recognition that there are things she does not know, I think does counterbalance that to some degree, at least in this particular context.
- [38:11]
B
Yeah, it doesn't have that insufferable quality that teenagers can have where they're like, here's how life really is.
- [38:17]
A
Right?
- [38:17]
B
Yeah, but you, you see her coming around to these kind of lofty declarations about life and the nature of humanity and the way things really are, and it feels both wise and youthful, which is how the best of us are at that point in life or how your best moments are at that point in life. I would not claim to have been anything other than insufferable at 16, but I think Angelo maybe had some more things dialed also. A really, to me remarkable thing about this reading experience is that her responses to so many of the events in her life are surprising and counterintuitive. And like she finds this sense of freedom and acceptance and non judgmentalness while she's living in a junkyard with a bunch of other homeless kids for a month. Which should be terrifying. And maybe it was in the moment, but the way that she writes about it is wild and is just like this was liberating and exciting. And that's in some of the early reviews of the book that like when you think she should be one way, it turns out she's gonna be the other. And that can, like being consistently surprised by her is a real pleasure here.
- [39:23]
A
She also dramatized that when she meets other people and goes to other places, it's almost never like she thinks it's going to be. That's at the end when she's terrified, understandably so to tell her adults in her life, let's put it this way, about her pregnancy, but it doesn't turn out like she thinks it's going to. The thing she was most worried about doesn't really happen. So that's another way of demonstrating that she doesn't have everything figured out yet because her ability to predict the future and people's responses are pretty bad, as most people are when they're 14, 15, 16 for sure. the same time time she also, I
- [39:59]
B
think, really is able to highlight what we would talk about as intersectionality today. Like she's writing about race and class and gender and about beauty and ugliness, taking on these same topics that more difficult literary work takes on. And her ability to marry this kind of matter of fact presentation of the issues with really adorned beautiful writing makes it, I don't want to say More palatable. I think it makes it more accessible to get into the ideas. And that is, I think, one of the things that Oprah was being sneakily radical with is this book is. It's a delight to read. It's beautifully written, and it also contains very difficult, dark, painful stuff and highlights the intersections of race and class. So she's writing about, during her time in Arkansas, how her people are at the bottom of the racial social structure because they are black, but they think of themselves as higher class than the group that she describes as powhite, trash, all one word. Because they have less money than her grandmother does, and they seem less invested in public respectability or in presenting themselves in certain ways. And so that that interplay of. Of race and class and of where people sit in social structures is on display. But it all. Also, she's talking about how segregation. Excuse me, how segregation is dehumanizing not just for black people, but for everyone who engages in it. Because she has so little exposure to white folks that she says, I remember never believing that whites were really rich as a kid, and I couldn't force myself to think of them as people. People were those who lived on my side of town. And, like, this is not good for any of us. And she doesn't have to come out and say, this is bad for all of us, but by saying, I could not grok the idea that these other people existed and that they were the same as me is a way of telling that story without hammering it home too hard.
- [41:54]
A
Yeah. And one of the locations in the book, and I think my favorite, favorite bits of the book, where she's at the store in Stamps, Arkansas, the store that her grandmother owns allows the interplay of people that maybe wouldn't connect. Like, it allows her to see a lot of the dynamics of the town in one. Because as people come for their food and you get commerce and you get the cotton pickers, but then you get the people traveling through at the same time. And that's where she gets to see these sort of. If she gets to see blending, it happens there. And often those moments of friction and fissure are most apparent at the scene of the store. So anyway, that's something to look out for, too. Like, that's a liminal space that's very interesting for these different. Like, it's. What's the word for when the salt water and the fresh water come together at the same time. I used to know the word for that, but I'm old and can't remember things now. It's a very fertile place in the water. And it's a very fertile place in this particular book. At the same time, the representation of the rape that happens is not what you think it's going to be. And it surprised me again how it's portrayed. I think it's probably best to let people experience for themselves. But it's complicated. And one thing she is showing is this bleed over from affection to rape to sex to parenting and how confusing it was to her. And she doesn't really have language. And in the moment it wasn't as traumatic as you might expect. But the long trauma of it suffuses the rest of the book. And one thing that I think Angela Lowe does quite beautifully is doesn't come in back with an adult sensibility and portray it. She tries to narrate what it was like over the years to have gone through that experience and think about it and have affect all kinds of pieces of her life.
- [43:43]
B
This is one of the bravest things that she does in this book, I think, is that she writes about there are a couple instances of molestation before the full rape. And because her community and her family specifically have been really silent around sex. And she's only 8 years old when it happens. So she does not know in any of these instances what's happening to her. And the early moments before the rape feel like affection in some ways and they feel like love to her.
- [44:15]
A
And she thinks intimacy or something. Yeah. Yes.
- [44:18]
B
She calls it the holding time. And there is a moment that she describes herself wanting some of that feeling of being held by this person that from her adult perspective and after this man has raped her, she understands differently. But I found it. It's just heartbreaking and also just so courageous to have talked about all of those feelings that were so mixed up in her rather than to paint it the way that you're expected to paint a story like that. And she's never saying that it's okay, of course. And she's never saying that it was like a good experience for her or anything like that. But one of the side effects of how silent her community had been around all of these things is that she didn't have a pre existing lens to understand or interpret what is being done to her. And having a person hold her close when no one else in her family had at first feels good. And that she. She is willing to say that. And to let it be so complicated is such a gift, I think, but also just really, really brave. And it's a very bracing thing to read.
- [45:30]
A
Yeah. Because I think now, if you've done a lot of reading, you know how these. You've seen some of these scenes narrated before. And I think the simplest way to put it is just kind of reiterating what you said. It's unlike other representations of it and it's adding different nuance and different understanding and. And in some ways it's less terrifying, weirdly, and sometimes it's much more terrifying. It's just. I think she's trying to narrate what it felt like at the time and how she did and did not understand it. Pretty remarkable at the same time. So it subverts so many of these coming of age tropes. Not that lives are tropes, but, you know, there's things that happen when you're coming of age. Your own sexuality and your parents and school and friends. But almost every time it goes the other way. So, for example, this. I'm so afraid of telling my family that I'm pregnant. It's the climax of the book, but it doesn't go how you think it's going to go. Right. There's no grand resolution and it feels like a biographical cliffhanger, bit of an ending. Like it ends.
- [46:30]
B
It really does.
- [46:31]
A
Like, you know, it's interesting to think about her childhood ending at the moment that her child is born, which in a way makes sense. But she's only 16 at the same time. And we don't think about adulthood in quite the same ways that this book is thinking about. About it. But even within the book, like, you don't get a lot of the stuff that you're expecting, at least not in the way that you're expecting it. So you just might look for if you're going to go back and read this, you know, how. What are modern, sort of more typical representations of these stages? And what is Angelo doing? How is it different? Maybe she's doing it on purpose, maybe she isn't. What scenes are she choosing to show and what are she choosing to withhold here? Because. Because she's for most of this part of her life, a pretty lonely kid. So she's a wallflower in a very, very sort of direct way. But there is no, at this moment, reintegration into the thing. Right. That's often a coming of age trope or move is like you're an outsider, then you're reintegrated into the whatever. That's not really happening in this part of the book. That's not what this is about. If anything, it's about taking everything she's learned about being a kid, about being black, about being a young woman woman, and then realizing once she has her own kid that maybe she can do it differently. Right? Maybe she can. This is her own thing. And maybe she has an opportunity to take what she has seen and take what she has learned and make different mistakes or just sort of see, take her own feeling of being alone and taking her own awareness and doing something different with it. Which is frankly, I think, what most of us want from a memoir. Autobargue. What can I take from this experience and integrate into my own understanding of how the world is put together? Together?
- [48:08]
B
Yeah. It's really powerful stuff.
- [48:11]
A
Also you're seeing here, and this is something we covered in the Bluest Eye, a transition of black survival strategies into exploring haltingly and painfully black, I'll call them thrival strategies. Right. Her grandmother who runs a store is very much safe. Be safe, safe, safe, safe, safe. Just keep your head down, pick the cotton, go to school, become a nurse or become a maid. Like just do what's available to you and stay safe. But Maya Angelou's parents generation was the generation below that. And they didn't quite feel though the threat of racial violence was real and omnipresent, it wasn't so overwhelming that they didn't want to go out and try stuff. They didn't want to go move out to California, they didn't want to join the Navy, they didn't want to work in a bar. And so you're seeing that tension and that evolution over time times like how are we going to explore black possibility? Well, initially survival was amazing and still remains amazing. But going out one further and then building on subsequent generations, I really felt that here to see over these course
- [49:14]
B
of these three generations, it really made me think back to the warmth of other suns, which we read last year, and Wilkerson writing about that tension that existed between the generations that grew up still in slavery. And then the generations that moved in the Great Migration and then the generation after that, like Maya Angelou's parents did move. They moved to the Midwest and then they moved to California. So they are participating in the Great Migration. She doesn't call it that at the time. It's still going on. It's like pretty early in the Great Migration when she's writing in 1969. So she's in that second gen group who their parents have made this move and they have lived not outside of racism by any stretch, but, but not under the same kinds of restrictions, not under the same painful effects of racism. And they are pushing for more options and more expansion. There's a moment in her childhood, I think she's graduating from grade school and a person who's a local politician comes and is giving a speech. And it's very clear that he thinks that the only options for young black kids are to become famous athletes. And she writes about how he had exposed us. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washer women. And anything higher that we aspire to was farcical and presumptuous. It was awful to be black and have no control over my own life or how maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur. And by the time that she is in her teenage years and in California in the 40s, more of those options are opening up and she's pushing for them herself. Like before she, you know, decades before she meets Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. She does undertake this great campaign to get herself a job working on the streetcars in San Francisco and be the first black person to have been a streetcar conductor. And that in itself is a form of activism. She's not thinking of herself that way, but you can see that that's forming for her and that she's motivated by this desire to have access to all of the options and all of the things in the world that anybody of any other race would have.
- [51:22]
A
It's interesting because. Because there's a version of her self portrayal in this book that's quite passive and observant. But then there's a moment like this, and the other one that comes immediately to mind was when she decides no longer to. Well, she wants to have a sexual experience of her own volition. And the way she goes about that, let's say it's forthright. Rebecca. I think as a. Well, we could just say we're talking about the books here. Sorry.
- [51:44]
B
Formidable presence, Maya Angelou.
- [51:45]
A
She knocks on the cute kid down the block's door and says, do you want to have sexual intercourse with me? That's what she. And she does sort of the same version of that to the San Francisco public transit system of like, you are going to give me a job. She, like, tries to jetti and mind trick them. And some of it seems to have worked. It works. And you can imagine how useful that forthrightness, that boldness would have been and how it made possible the things she would go on to do with her life. You can't do all the things that she did. Even the next couple decades after this book came out and on either side of it, I guess really without sort of innate boldness and willingness this to put yourself out there in, in multiple ways. And so seeing that come to seeing that be put on the page, you get a sense of like, oh, here, here are the building blocks that would become this formidable person on, on a grander stage. At the same time, the church has an early importance in this. It sort of fades as we get into and we move into the city. We stop going to church as much. But certainly in Stamps, one of my favorite pieces was her thinking about, about why the church mattered so much to black people. And you know, it's a fairly common, not common, but like it's understandable I guess. Like there's something else to be aspired to if you're under the oppression of slavery or racism or real injustices of any kind. That's true for a lot of different kinds of people.
- [53:08]
B
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B
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- [54:36]
A
The thing I was thinking about this time and there's a quote about it is like but also it's the ultimate sign of equality, right? Because not only is this not all there is, but these systems we are taking part in aren't going to apply. They don't apply on this higher level. In fact, the meek shall inherit the earth. The last shall be first. Like there's Even language in the New Testament that suggests a reversal of fortune. And she doesn't spend a lot of time on it, but the way that she does describe it and she sees it through her own eyes, I think is a really helpful way of understanding, like, the importance of the black church in these moments and still today in many, many places. But if for someone like us, that's grow inside the church, but not a black church, I found it very helpful and very identifiable in a way that cuts through a lot of, like, a clinical understanding of how these socioeconomic forces happen for me.
- [55:28]
B
Yeah, I love that point. Like, I was thinking about all of the ways that the church provides people with a way to make meaning out of their suffering. And she writes about that. That people whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction. Extinction. Consider it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. But I love this point that you're pulling out that also there's a sort of great equalizing quality to the church. And the quote of would God the Father allow his only son to mix with this crowd of cotton pickers and maids, washerwomen and handymen? I knew he sent his spirit on Sundays to the church, but after all, that was a church, and the people had had all day Saturday to shuffle off the cloak of work and the skin of despair. And there are really moving portrayals of the church, but then also are really fun, funny portrayal of the church.
- [56:16]
A
Yeah, yeah. And that, you know, this fundamental representation that you can pull out of the New Testament of like. And you, It's. You don't. You don't need to be a biblical scholar to see those teachings, apply it to American races and be like, this is not the way things should be. And so allow sort of a low level resistance to it. Because, like, no, that's not how it's supposed to be. Like, even the books you made us read to convert us are saying, this is not the way it's supposed to be. And so it's no surprise, surprise that the church becomes such an important part in the. In the grander story of American civil rights movements in the years leading up to Angelo writing this book. Okay, maybe my favorite part of the show is when we get to do our stray thoughts. Rebecca, where would you like to begin?
- [56:58]
B
We can move around a lot of them. I spent a lot of time. I was just kind of obsessed with wondering how she constructed these memories, because she spoke frequently about being a lifelong journaler, but she couldn't have been journaling at three years old when the story begins. And the book's language and imagery is so detailed and really mature that she is bringing her adult perspective and her poetic sensibilities to it. I kind of love it for that. That, like, even if it's. If none of it comes from documentation, she's remembering these formative moments in her life and giving them to us the way that they felt. And that really rings true for like, one of the more famous Maya Angelou quotes was like, people won't remember what you said or what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel. And I think it works for her wor as well. But just like, also just the framings and expectation that the people in your life give you make such a difference to how you experience life. Because we were talking about it at the top of the show. Like, experiences that we would assume to be terrifying and traumatic are often presented as exciting or adventurous with her. Like, she's moving from house to house. And that could be really disruptive in the life of a kid. But she's like, it just meant that my family was meant to do bigger and more interesting things than everybody. And Even the original 1970 New York Times Book Review says, as she tells it, what should be sad is funny and vice versa. And that really sums it up. There are so many moments where you think the emotion is going to go one way and she flips it on its head.
- [58:34]
A
Let me see, what do I have here? I think that we know that she survives the events really matters totally. Because if this is the blue die, right? Similar. I mean, it does different things. I don't want to conflate them, but they're swimming in similar waters. A lot of the tension is what's going to happen to this person, what's going to happen to these people? And that you know, that she survives and that the. The tenor of the narration is that of thriving, not of merely surviving, not of, like, brokenness that is not the. The adult she's to trying. Trying to relate it as it happens, but it's with a present tense sensibility and you get a few little asides or pauses where you said, like, later I would think, and my brother would think about this later, that there is some sense of futility so that you're not spiraling towards like a horrible act of violence like that of Great Gatsby. You just know it's not going to happen. So it gives you a little bit of cushion to be in these moments without being terrified. Because if you didn't know that this is a horror story in so many scenes.
- [59:39]
B
Yeah. And, like, some of it is just horrifying. Like, she and her brother, when they're. When their parents divorce and send them to Stamps to live with their grandma, they put them. They put these toddlers, she's three and her brother's four, on a train and they get a porter who agrees to watch them, but he abandons them, like, at the first stop. And they just have their tickets pinned to their little jackets. And they are on this train by themselves until they get to Arkansas now, California to Arkansas on a train in, like, 1932.
- [60:10]
A
You're moving between Jim Crow. Like, there's all kinds of wild stuff
- [60:13]
B
going on at the same time multiple days. And she talks about it was just other black travelers sharing their food with them and kind of communally keeping an eye on these kids. That must have been the way that they made it there. But it's astonishing also, we have to ring the bell for we used to be smarter.
- [60:31]
A
One of the bits we didn't know we were gonna keep doing. But yes, absolutely.
- [60:35]
B
Like, she's reading Shakespeare and Bronte. She and her brother are reading Poe for fun. She name checks the Brobdingnagians from Gulliver's Travels later in the text. There are, like, just all sorts of classics and classical book references throughout. And they're reading them as kids, like 8 and 9 year olds by the fire at night. But they're also speaking pig Latin. And, like, do kids still speak Pig Latin? Latin.
- [61:01]
A
I love this point. I'm going to ask my kids if they know what pig Latin is. And couldn't they say I did? You did as a kid, right? Yeah. You knew pig Latin?
- [61:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. I had to slow down and, like, translate it for myself in the book. But I remember doing it and I wonder if that has survived. And then really my last and maybe most prominent stray thought here was sex ed is a good thing, like, in so many ways, for telling kids about their bodies and what's okay and what's not. But also, like, you can get pregnant the first time you do it, as Maya Angelou learns the hard way.
- [61:35]
A
And didn't seem to be really even thinking about pregnancy as a possibility. Like, in that narration of, like, having sex.
- [61:41]
B
She just wants the experience.
- [61:42]
A
She just wants the experience. Like, didn't really even connect the dots. Like, this is a thing that could happen at all. Let me do a couple more web of literary connections to other zero to well read books. Maybe we could make this a new segment. Like, which Other books. Does it speak to bluest eye warmth of other stones? To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Tell it on the mountain. All in the water here. Very much so. I think this is a reflection of our interests. Like we are interested in this web of books and how they start to connect to each other. Very much so.
- [62:08]
B
I think it's one of the theses of the show is that the reason to read the great books is to see the connections between them and how they speak to each other.
- [62:17]
A
Yeah. And we get Hamlet in this book and we get a lot of other books that get name check. Dickens gets name checked. At one point, Bailey comes back for the merchantman brings and brings her Look Homeward angel by Thomas Wallace Wolf, which for a while was a. Was a really famous book of coming reach. I don't think anybody reads Thomas Wolfe anymore that I really liked it when I was a teenager. Let's see. The scene where the woman goes buck wild at the church service and the whole congregation is trying to deal with her is maybe one of the funniest scenes in any of the books we've covered and maybe one of the funniest scenes I've ever read.
- [62:46]
B
Yeah, she's like rushing the altar, beating the passenger with her purse. She's so taken by the Holy Spirit.
- [62:53]
A
Preach it, Lord, Lord.
- [62:56]
B
And well, that happens. And then when Angelo and when Maya and Bailey get the giggles in church, like, this is hysterical that this is happening, but they're supposed to be taking it seriously. And like the trope of little kids trying not to laugh in church is a trope because it's so real.
- [63:12]
A
So real.
- [63:12]
B
And they just fall on the floor. They can't keep it together. And that whole thing is, it's. I mean, it is just so funny. And also such a counterpoint to James Baldwin's presentation of it. I thought a lot about the threshing floor scenes in Go Tell it on the Mountain and people also falling on their knees and, you know, hands in the air and running to the altar. But this is a joyful and silly and just wild and uncontrollable.
- [63:38]
A
Yeah. So a chronicle. You know, think of this as a chronicle of a radical shift of black person in America. From the anecdote where a black woman referred to as men. Mrs. Accidentally, like in the 30s, is like a legendary story that a black woman could be referred to as Mrs. And then on the other side of Maya Angelou life, she sees Oprah, she sees all these things that would happen later. A really remarkable kind of a fulcrum Point on which to see this longer history. I just thought that was fascinating to think about at the same time. I would have died in Mexico. There's a situation where her father took. Takes her to go drinking and womanizing in Mexico, where he was supposed to be picking up spices, but he picks up something for sure. And she sort of left her own devices. She has to drive his car while he's drunk and try to get across customs. I wouldn't have made it, Rebecca. I wouldn't made it.
- [64:31]
B
No.
- [64:32]
A
Is she 12? At this age? I'm not even sure what age she's supposed to be.
- [64:34]
B
She's like 12 or 14. Like, one of the great scenes in the book that does that subverting of expectations. Because, like, she's scared because she doesn't know how to drive, but she is not as scared as she should be. Here her, it's like this great adventure and she figures it out, and she's so proud of herself that she figured it out. But, like, also, her dad has taken her on this. It's totally unnecessary for him to take her. He's gonna go see his mistress. And like, this also happens repeatedly in memoirs. Like, all these people have stories about their parents taking them with them to go see the side piece. And like, what are we doing? Why are we taking our kids with us?
- [65:15]
A
No information security when it comes to your dalliances is very important. And I think that's one thing we've learned here. The well of Loneliness by Radcliffe hall was a real thing. This is a real book that Maya Angelou, in this book recounts reading. It's about lesbians in 1920s per sexual perversion. But it reminded me, I think the closest analog we would have is like Flowers in the Attic. Rebecca. Like, this is how this was passed around like this. Like, it became a phenomenon where you could get information that wasn't readily available through authorized channels. So this was 1928, Radcliffe Hall. She was a writer who had gotten a lot of notoriety. Like, she was a famous writer, but she wanted to be the one that sort of broke the barrier of writing a mainstream book about lesbians. And as you might imagine, it caused a ruckus. So if you want a lot of
- [66:10]
B
confusion and you want to end your.
- [66:11]
A
If you to want to entertain yourself with a moment of literary history, go check out the well of Loneliness Wikipedia page. I don't remember if I even knew about this book the first time. I don't remember having ever seen it before. But just to remember that there's all kinds of the Ability of art to break out of containers is something that's really important to remember. And this is. I can imagine Angelo wondering if this book will do for other people what well of loneliness did for her. Which is sort of punctual. Sure. Sort of a hermetically sealed understanding of how the world is put together was real, binary and surface and blah, blah, blah. She doesn't really get well of loneliness, but she gets. The most important thing is like, there's other ways to be in the world. There's other ways to be in the world and that is worth exploring. And she explores it a little bit and she wonders. And it's presented quite, quite differently. So that's an interesting one too.
- [67:05]
B
She's like curious about it and titillated by it. And also really worried about, like, are the lesbians going to be okay?
- [67:11]
A
Yeah. And she sees her friend take off her shirt and she has breasts and she's like, that's beautiful. Am I gay? And what does that mean? And it's not presented. She's concerned for her own normalcy as a survival mechanism, but it's not a moral. She doesn't care morally. She's more like, what is it gonna mean for me just living my life?
- [67:26]
B
Just sort of figure out if this is a component of her identity or not. Yeah.
- [67:30]
A
Angela's ability to see herself and draw sustenance from the old white guys. It's just a thought I had. How does it complicate, subvert you need representation in literature, ideas. I'm not saying that. That it means you don't need representation, but I think it does subvert this idea that there's nothing to. If you are not an old white guy, there's nothing for you in those texts. Like this is very much counter to. There are things there. This canon, this body of work should be complicated and diversified and expanded. But it doesn't necessarily need to be rejected. Right. How can you think long. You know these. There. There are things here for you in these books. And that's one of thesis of this show. Interesting to see. See it here.
- [68:07]
B
Morrison drawing on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf would make the same argument.
- [68:10]
A
Yes. I guess it's just teacher's note. Pay attention to what authors can't help but say so. Footnotes, parentheses. That's just something that's interesting to see. The parentheses I pulled out here was the dread of futility has been my lifelong plague. That is an interesting way to see her biography. You could see it as a. I don't know, kind of a revelation. Revelry of fear, of futility. That's another way of seeing it. I don't know that's positive as much, but I think it's interesting to look at. Speaking of things teachers do. Wait, why does the caged bird sing exactly?
- [68:47]
B
Well, the book takes its title from an 1899 poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar called Sympathy that includes several standards, but you have one of them here in our notes. I know by. The caged bird sings Ah, me When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore when he beats his bars and he would be free. It is not a carol of joy or glee But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core But a plea that upward to heaven he flings. I know why the caged bird sings.
- [69:15]
A
So here the bird is praying. Right. This is a prayer from his heart's deep core for liberation. Right? Sure. Great. That's a very plain text reading. I'll just say this. I know why the Cage Burstings might be one of the great titles of all time. I don't think we've said that here. It's an unbelievable title.
- [69:34]
B
Great book title.
- [69:36]
A
But I will say this as well. A prayer is what? A prayer to whom? Because this is not. This is not a sacred text. Right. This is not a text of God is going to liberate me. So if this is a prayer, who is a prayer, too? Is it very. That's the question I keep thinking about. I'll let people come to their own conclusions. I could spend six to 10 hours, probably just that little piece alone.
- [69:58]
B
You have fun with that over in office hours.
- [70:00]
A
And the second, regular work, art as prayer. But if art is a prayer, who is it praying to? And what is the expectation of return? I'd find that all very, very interesting.
- [70:09]
B
It also intersects for me with the famous old hymn. I sing because I'm happy. I sing because I'm free. His eye is on the sparrow. And you also get the bird references there, but of course, that's straight from Scripture.
- [70:21]
A
Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Emily Dickinson. Hope is a thing with feathers which purses in the soul and sings a tune without words. Birds. And never stops at all. I think you could do a nice little close reading undergraduate course or high school course and sort of comparing birds.
- [70:39]
B
Yeah. If you're listening to this because you have homework, here's your paper idea.
- [70:43]
A
Yeah. Here's your paper idea. Yeah. Do some birds. All right. Notable quotes, Rebecca Bunch, where would you like to begin?
- [70:48]
B
Well, let's start as we always do with Goodreads. Favorite quote. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story in sight. You.
- [70:56]
A
Nice quote. I have to believe there are greater agonies, but that's me and by far
- [71:03]
B
not the best quote in this book. No, it's just such a wonderful.
- [71:06]
A
It tends to be the most hallmark card friendly. Gets the number one Goodreads favorite.
- [71:10]
B
Yeah. If you could live, laugh, love it onto a pillow. That's what Goodreads is gonna go for. This book is low key. Maybe not even low key. A mothers and daughters book.
- [71:20]
A
Yes.
- [71:21]
B
Her relationship with her mother, her relationship with the grandmother who largely raised. Raised her complicated, but especially with her mother. And she says to write about my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power or the climbing falling colors of a rainbow. And then later. But what mother and daughter understand each other or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding. Like having been 16, you cannot understand each other and you can't grok that the other one like you doesn't understand you. And how is it possible that they don't understand you? Really nails it there.
- [71:57]
A
Do you think though? I mean, I guess this goes back to my point about like the. The denouement of this book being her own child. Maybe I'm too hopeful or whatever. But don't you think. Do you agree with my sense that maybe she also doesn't believe this has to be the case? Like what if you went into motherhood having thought this already or. Or having had this experience or thinking about your own ex? Like I don't think my sense is maybe my hope as a parent is this is not a necessary and unavoidable case condition of parents relating to those children. It's something that definitely does happen. But is it invaluable that this is inviolable, that this is a truth of humans? The answer is no.
- [72:36]
B
I agree with you. I think she's pushing back on it in many ways. And she talks also about her grandmother saying, knowing Mama, I never. Or knowing Mama, I knew that I never knew mama. And she wants to be known and seen so, so vividly. And it's so painful to her that I think at 16, when she's having her son at the end of this book, like there's no certainty that she will go forth letting herself be known by him. But you can see that there's a longing there to have a different kind of parent child relationship. I really love this. The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination as are intelligence and necessity when unblinted by formal education. Education.
- [73:24]
A
A poet, you can tell, but not flowery in a way that you know, you may stereotype poetical language. It's compact and precise. That's what we really get. A poet really in their bag when they're writing a memoir or fiction is like you're going to get subordinate clauses or positives or describing descriptors that pound for pound hit as hard as Joe Lewis does on the radio. Here, here, I'll do a couple, then I'll kick it back to you. Here's a good example of that. I couldn't believe that our mother would laugh and eat oranges in the sunshine without her children. So like we know what she means. She's not actually talking about laughing and eating. That she could be happy, that she could be vibrant, that she could have moments of pleasure that aren't unsullied by abandoning her kids. Like to a kid that to many kids, I should should say that is an image they want of their parents is that their principal goal is to be caring, centered towards, pointed towards their kids. Well, being in this idea not just of indifference, but exuberance in the laughing and eating orange in the sunshine. That's about as exuberant especially as this young girl can imagine. And what ordinance certainly represented in the 1930s. I'm sure you have in your own family history stories of the Depression like mine where you got an orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking, right? Like my grandmother was. Do that. The idea that you'd unbounded this plenty and carefreeness and not being subject to the horrors of Stamps, Arkansas. And you left me behind. Terrifying. Just completely devastating. Let's see. My tears were not for Bailey or so this is when Bailey leaves. He grows up and he moves out. My tears were not for Bailey or Mother even myself, but for the helplessness of mother mortals who live on the sufferance of life. In order to avoid this better end, we would all have to be born again and be born with the knowledge of alternatives even then. So I've talked before and other ideas like the goal of a liberal education. I think really the goal of engaging with the arts is it gives you a sense of the bigness of the world and other possibilities for being. That's here. That's the positive. That's the affirmative case for knowing shit, Rebecca, is that maybe you could make yourself happier by seeing other choices. The shadow doubt that's behind that though. Is that enough? Right? Can you actually change your. Can you Change your stars? Can you change even who you are? Can you change the structures? Can you find a way to live in the world in which you find yourself knowing that there's all alternatives? But then does it work? Can it work? And then the terror that comes along with the possibility that maybe not. And that's all there in two sentences heading stuff.
- [76:07]
B
It is. It is. I think one of my favorite scenes in the book is, I guess for some context, after Angelo is raped as a child, her mom's family, her brothers, like, go and kill the man who raped her. And she's devastated by the knowledge that having said something means that a man is dead. So she just decides not to talk for a while. And in trying to get her to speak again, her mama, her grandma is, like, at her wit's end. And she asks this local woman, Bertha, flowers to kind of take Maya under her wing. And Bertha gives her what Maya calls her lessons in living. They talk about books and culture, and it opens things back up for her. And she writes about that. That I've tried often to search behind the sophistication of years for the enchantment I so easily found in those gifts. The essence escapes, but its aura remains, remains. To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers and to share their joys and fears was a chance to exchange the southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist. I was liked. And what a difference it made.
- [77:21]
A
Sometimes it's pretty simple. Her own. Her own ver. You know, this is something I'm always interested in, is how do authors portray journeys to a new consciousness or an opening of a critical conscious or understanding that the world is just one among manys. And maybe things could be other ways. I think that's something that I think about a lot. It's like, talk about her own frustration with futility, her own desire to be known, her own sense that other people knew things she didn't. Which leads to this sort of epistemological, nihilistic moment, which is the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of. Without willing it, I'd gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. I mean, what else is a coming of age story than that? Everything, sort of. That's the Christmas tree. All the ornaments of coming of age are really hung upon that central one. Anything else you want to do on the.
- [78:19]
B
I think that hits. I mean, we could do. You can do quotes from this book, all the livelong day. It's wonderful, wonderful.
- [78:25]
A
All right, Rebecca, is this for you? How you know if this is for you or if it's not for you?
- [78:29]
B
I mean, I think if you're interested, especially from a perspective today where we do get more literature about black life in what one of the landmark Works of 20th century Black stories was, this is well worth your time to pick it up. And then on the flip side, maybe not for you. If the descriptions of sexual abuse are going to be a hard path, they are pretty detailed.
- [78:53]
A
And I don't know that there are scenes of racial violence as directly narrated as that sexual assault. But there are intimations, overtones, stories from the past and then the imminent possibility of it happening to characters in the book. I'd extend it further. Like, if you like coming of age stories, this is one of the best to ever have done it. So you don't necessarily need to be directly interested in black life. Is especially interesting interest. That will help. But like just read it. If you like coming of age stories about being a girl, about being a young person. If you like history too, I think, you know, memoirs of historical memoirs of the time and place are as good of histories as any textbook you're going to read.
- [79:30]
B
I'm pretty resistant to mothers and daughters stories for my own complicated reasons. But I really love this one.
- [79:36]
A
Yeah. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
- [79:42]
B
We're going to crack at this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time. New friends, you are Gary the Snake. And your last name Desnake.
- [79:51]
A
Dream Team Hidden new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at Zootopia 2. Now available on Disney.
- [80:05]
B
Rated PG. This Father's Day, when you ship UPS Air at the UPS Store, your items
- [80:10]
A
arrive on time with your money back
- [80:12]
B
guaranteed at no extra cost. It's like the father of all shipping services.
- [80:16]
A
It shows up to the airport way
- [80:17]
B
too early just to play it safe. It's overprotective about all the things that truly matter.
- [80:22]
A
And it's always prom, especially to be with family. Make it your first choice to celebrate your dad.
- [80:27]
B
Ship UPS Air with our money back guarantee exclusively at the UPS Store US retail locations. Visit the upsstore.com airshipping for full details.
- [80:35]
A
Terms and conditions apply. The immortal questions at Art asks, which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I have my neighbor? How do I know what I know. Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? A lot of them.
- [80:57]
B
Yeah. Deals with a lot of them. Primary. What is the good life?
- [81:04]
A
And does she get a representation of the good life? If she could pick someone's life in the book that she's like, I wish I could. That were available to her. Like, maybe she dreams about being a white girl early. Like, this is a thing that happens, but that we're within the bounds of her understanding of the possible. Does she have someone to point to?
- [81:19]
B
I think it's maybe Bertha Flowers is probably the closest. Maybe it's some combination of Bertha Flowers and her mother with her mother's, like, beauty and liberation and how powerful she is, but without the part of abandoning your kids.
- [81:32]
A
Yeah. Just eating oranges and laughing in your face, in your dreams.
- [81:36]
B
But I think that it's about. Just as it's about coming to awareness and coming to consciousness. It's her looking around at, like, how could I live my life? What kind of life do I want to have? And the life that she's pushing for, that she's trying to chart for herself, is very different from any of the lives that she has seen in any of her communities before. It's threaded through with, what do I owe my neighbor? There's a lot of, is this all that there is? And what else might there be more in the, like, mortal plane than in the mortal Quiro? Yeah, she's not really concerned with, like, questions of the soul or is God real? Or what happens after you die or any of those things. And as with anything that deals with racism, you're going to get some, like, what's the deal with good and evil? But she's less interested in trying to, I don't know, dig up, like, the origins of evil than in simply acknowledging the ways that it exists and the ways that it shapes and impacts her life.
- [82:35]
A
Yeah, I think, for me, how do I know what I know? The quote I just did before in a couple. I think she's, you know, she's trying to synthesize several streams of knowing. Right. There's the political one that she's born into, the cultural one, the economic one, the racial one, but also the family system ones, the artistic ones, the religious ones, the educational ones, and trying to sort of pick through them to find what's meaningful to her and how she can build out from that. And this idea that we end the book with this new unsullied life suggests that maybe she can take these things and find a path forward that isn't so cluttered, that isn't so confusing, that isn't so conflicted and painful, and maybe can spare herself and her future generations that calamity of not knowing and not knowing and being just subject to the knowings of others that makes her so nuts. And are we sure this isn't about art and writing? Rebecca?
- [83:32]
B
This is 100,000% about art and writing, about writing and books saving her life. And then of course, she is a writer and she doesn't know herself as a writer yet in this book, but it's writing her way into an understanding of herself.
- [83:48]
A
Yeah. Could you get the most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation?
- [83:53]
B
I mean, yes and no. I guess. There's not a signal adaptation. The only time it's been adapted was for a 1979 made for TV movie that you can't like. It's not streaming anywhere. You can watch a pretty shaky version of it on YouTube. The reviews were positive. Like they basically said for being a made for TV movie, this is pretty good. It's true to the story. Angelo was a co writer on it and it like portrays all of that. But I like bounced through some of it on YouTube and it removes her. There's no voiceover, it removes her narration. So you see the scenes of her life, but you're missing that really great interiority that she brings. I'm pretty surprised that this has not been redone, especially with what we've seen with other major texts like the Color Purple has been redone and also made into a musical that was adapted into a film. It feels ripe for a readaptation. But I think I would do it as a movie if you're.
- [84:51]
A
I agree with you, movie. My note here is a modern full budget version of this would win some folks some Oscars. Yeah, it just would. I don't know, I found myself maybe being more interested in a. The model we have for this. It's wrong for so many reasons, but like Maya Angelou lives like a Forrest Gump like life. Not in terms of his own experience, but like more of her own volition and ability of encountering almost all the major figures in black American life from like 1951 up and through. She died. So is there like a the Maya Angel? Is there a version of her, a biopic of her that like is eight episodes in different. You know, there was that movie like One Night in Miami where there's a Bunch of like, there's Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. What if it was that? But Maya Angelou was the thing that stayed in each scene. And you're, you know, you're with Alvin Ailey and then you're with Baldwin and then you're with Malcolm X and then you're with Oprah and like, you get a chamber piece of each of them. I don't know. I found myself more interested in that than a direct application of this because as you say, the narration, the voice here is hard to without just a whole bunch of voiceover get onto the screen. So I feel like I got it. I got what I want out of this story. What I don't really have is the Maya Angelou life story over time on screen. She has all the books, she has all the stories. You have all the raw materials just sitting there waiting for you. I'm sure Oprah optioned it. I'm sure that it was talked about at some point. I'd be curious to hear what projects did not happen related to this.
- [86:27]
B
That's a great question. I also thought about the technique that Romel Ross used in his adaptation of Nickel Boys, which is shot as if you are looking through the eyes of the main character. And that would be an interesting way to do. I know why the caged bird sings through the eyes of Maya as she's growing up. And it does drop us not into the linguistic interiority, but more of the felt experience. That could be really powerful.
- [86:54]
A
Yeah. Trivia, adaptation rumors, Mr. Trivia quotes and more. This is just a. This is our junk drawer for other interesting stuff that we've got.
- [87:00]
B
I mean, there's like. Just go to the Wikipedia page about Maya Angelou and go down the rabbit hole is really my recommendation just to fascinate fascinating life. But in addition to, you know, the book taking its title from Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem Sympathy, she had this famous writing ritual where she worked almost exclusively from hotel rooms, even in the cities where she lived. And she's talked about it widely. Like, if you Google that, you will find her giving interviews about, like, getting up in the morning, leaving home, going to the hotel room she had rented for the next couple of months, and, like being in silence and surrounding herself with her typewriter and her books and doing the thing and that she needed to be in a place that was quiet and that was different from her house and that was dedicated to doing that work. And she was pretty religious about doing it that way. A really incredible ritual in addition to all of the creative stuff that we talked about in her early life higher in the show. She also continued to act and to write for a theater and for screen as she became famous. She portrayed Kunta Kinte's grandma in the TV adaptation of Roots. Really incredible stuff. And then in 1993 she recited on the Pulse of Morning, which is one of her poems at Bill Clinton's inauguration. And when that happened, her book sales went up 1,200% in 1993 over the previous year. So a real inflection point. Like she first became well known and famous in the 70s when Caged Bird comes out. But then this early 90s moment with the combination of Clinton's inauguration and then Oprah really vaults her into like more super superstardom.
- [88:39]
A
I'm just remembering this now. I believe she was the first poet to read inauguration since Robert Frost read at Kennedy's inauguration which was a real glow up moment for Frost. And then Rita Dove, I believe read it Obama's first inauguration and she sold a bunch of copies. And of course Amanda Gorman read at Biden's inauguration. Is the inaugural poem the single greatest publicity placement for a poet? I think it has to be.
- [89:05]
B
Yes, probably. Especially what else can you hold air off the. The air.
- [89:08]
A
Yeah. But even that is not the. I don't think Amanda Gorman got seven figure book deals. Okay, let's see. Oh, go look for photos of Maya Angelou writing in those hotel rooms. She like will like lie on the floor with half her. She knew what she worked and worked for her.
- [89:25]
B
She sprawled out.
- [89:26]
A
Yeah, Ma would have loved a we work. That's my hot take about this particular situation. I didn't have hot takes here, Rebecca. I mean I didn't. I struggled to come up with one.
- [89:35]
B
There's something about this book that resists the hot take. So I'm fine with just letting it stand.
- [89:41]
A
Maybe it's our ongoing simmering take of do not think you know what the hell is up with these books and people unless you've read them relatively recently, not under the guise of some pre existing condition, whether it be a class or a book club or a political or cultural moment or whatever.
- [89:59]
B
Did you look at the book club questions in the back of no, I couldn't bring.
- [90:03]
A
I should have done it. I can. It's good content but like I can't. It like burns my heart.
- [90:08]
B
Yeah. No, don't. It just. It. It hurts the soul.
- [90:11]
A
Yeah. Further Reading Read alikes Books inspired by this one and more.
- [90:16]
B
So many. We've name checked several. That would be great. Read alikes even if we hadn't done episodes on them, but we do have episodes on the Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I gotta say, I feel pretty good about having all of those in the Inside the first year of this podcast. Yeah, great stuff there. And then you've got an interesting array here. Tell me about your picks.
- [90:44]
A
Well, I was thinking about just, okay, some other memoirs by people kind of of the similar ilk, like black people that, you know, round out your mini reading list of black memoirs in America. There's, of course, Dust Tracks on the Road by Zora Neale Hurston, which I think would have been the most famous memoir by a black woman before. Before why the Cageburg scenes came out. I think they came out like 1946, 1948. So it's still 20 years before Hurston. The great Zora Neel was a little bit more known for invention in her biography, documented by invention. So that's another piece of the puzzle there, too. And then Black Boy by Richard Wright is his memoir. Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son, his own story, his memoir, Growing up, they're all tremendous at the same pie. But then I wanted to connect it to some other stories like she did like other stories. Like, if you're interested in coming days, there's an array of them. Sentinel Medal, Asian by Gustav Flaubert, 1869. Portrait of, you know, his obsession with an older married woman. And there's social upheaval and it's funny and satirical and very like biting about the society of its day. Like it's clearly not the same as being black and white racist American. But all of these stories, a coming of age story needs like a canopy of something to push against for it to be a coming of age story and to relocate that and find where people are pushing against the canopy is very interesting. And on the real, satire, it's satire. But Candide by Voltaire, of course, is playing with this idea of we live in the best of all possible worlds, right? Like, this is one of the philosophical precepts of the day. And you can think, I think there's an interesting way of reading. I know why the Cage Burke scenes as doing that before American rah rah stuff like, look how great America is. You can see this as a version of the candide puncturing holes of it, not quite as farcically, but still with the same brio and the same wit and the same sort of dark frustration with this idea. Like, this is as good as we can do. This is as well as we can do.
- [92:49]
B
I saw Candide in your notes here, and I have been waiting to hear about how you were gonna bring that to.
- [92:54]
A
Did I do it? Did it make sense to you at all?
- [92:55]
B
Yeah, that works for me.
- [92:56]
A
Thank you very much. Cocktail party crib sheet. I have the one that I. This is also my hot take. I didn't have one. But, like, it's just not what you think it is, man. Like.
- [93:04]
B
Yeah.
- [93:05]
A
And you. I was even wondering about the COVID Maybe this was my hot take. I think these books, and I'm looking at the Morrisons, too, these new reissues of Morrison. I don't know how much they affect people's understanding or feeling about these books. Books are. But I don't like the covers that are like a bird and a flower on a really, like, primary colored field. Like, it's not. It's not offensive, but I feel like it's trying to say something that's sort of not true about these books. But I don't know what else to do. I'm not a cover designer. Am I wrong? Maybe that's.
- [93:38]
B
I'm trying to, like, reach for a word. I think it kind of. I'm going to invent something. It, like, comfort washes them.
- [93:43]
A
Yes.
- [93:43]
B
That it makes these books that are spiky and difficult because they. They're about difficult, dark things in many ways. Not exclusively, but they're addressing hard stuff about life and about. Especially these books about being black in America. Like, that there are. To put a, like, floral cover on. It says, this isn't going to be as hard or it's not going to be as hard as you think. And I think I'm of two minds about that. One is if it gets more people to engage with. With the book. Okay. Trick them. Do whatever you gotta do on these book covers. If it will get more people to just be open to picking it up. If it lowers the, I don't know, intimidation level at all. But as a representation of the book's contents, I don't care for it either.
- [94:30]
A
Yeah. And I think the easiest way for me to understand it, to look at really any book that we talk about, any book that becomes a paperback favorite, compare what that is, especially if it's an older book to the original hardcover. And they seem more interesting, they seem more dynamic, they seem more inscrutable. Right. They don't have a patina of making it safe to buy at a Barnes and noble, which is. That's a fine place to buy it. But I do feel in some way that it contributes to a softening of fuzziness of what the actual books and actual words covers are.
- [95:04]
B
And I hate that we've got to shave the edges off off to make these stories palatable to the publishing industry's imagined reader. Which is a middle aged white woman. Right. My other cocktail party crib sheet really is. You can, you could just say like that Angela is using her life story to argue this thesis that she states pretty late in the book, the black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she's caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and black lack of power. The fact that the adult American black female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect, if not enthusiastic acceptance.
- [95:59]
A
Final beat our zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read, cred and oh, damn factor. Historical importance. Fascinating. It's relatively new, so that's always a factor we take into account here. It has sold a lot, but I think it outkicks its coverage in importance at the political moment. Comes out in the long history of Maya Angelou. Seven, seven and a half.
- [96:27]
B
I think a seven is right, maybe. Yeah, seven, seven and a half. Not quite an eight, but like talk to me in five or ten more years, right?
- [96:34]
A
Yeah, 50 years if it's still being read. Interesting to see a very high readability score. I would say there's difficult subject matter which is, you know, you shave off a point or two there. But beyond that, I have a hard time getting lower than eight and a half or so. I agree.
- [96:48]
B
The language itself is really accessible. We can go.
- [96:50]
A
8 and a half reads quickly too. Like it's not difficult, but it's also not easy. Like it's really in a sweet spot of approachability and substance and then craftsmanship. It's hard to do those things all to one side. Current relevance of central questions. I mean, it's not a 10 because this is not the world we're in, but it's also not not the world we're in. So I'll let you float a number
- [97:15]
B
there if you want eight or a nine. It's still pretty high.
- [97:18]
A
Yeah, I maybe would do eight, but yeah, eight. Five. Sure. That looks good to me. Me book nerd read cred is a really interesting one.
- [97:27]
B
I think this is higher, having done the research for this episode than I would have guessed before, given that the sales numbers are lower than I expected. And I checked the Goodreads and It's like around 5 or 600,000 ratings, which sometimes older books don't have as high of ratings because a lot of the people who read them read them before Goodreads existed. But I would have expected or hoped to see more there. So I think there is high book nerd read cred for this, especially if you're coming to it as an adult outside of a middle school classroom required reading experience. I'd say eight and a half or nine. Pretty high.
- [98:01]
A
I like that oh damn factor. I think this one's deceptively.
- [98:05]
B
It is high.
- [98:08]
A
It's always difficult in a historical text to kind of pretend like you could imagine what the shock of the newness of this book would feel like. I think there are moments and it tends to be smaller ones where like oh damn, oh damn. There's like a lot of little ones. But then like if I say it's one of the funniest scenes I've ever read, I have to attention must be paid. Eight and a half.
- [98:33]
B
Sure.
- [98:33]
A
Something like that. Good score.
- [98:35]
B
Pretty high scores. My age.
- [98:36]
A
Pretty high score. Pretty high score. Not a huge surprise. But I guess coming into it, just looking at it and maybe I'm proving my own thesis of one. It's like it's underrated now. So somehow at this point. All right, Rebecca, thank you so much. You can go to patreon.com 02 well read for guided read alongs free newsletter membership options. You can follow us on the socials at 02 well Read podcast. Shoot us an email 02 well Read bookriot.com Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. Zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. What are we gonna do in office hours? We're gonna figure it out. We're gonna talk about characters and maybe a little side discussion of the most interesting people, the most interesting author bios that we've talked about so far. Rebecca, thank you so much.
- [99:22]
B
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