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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first autobiography volume out of a collection of 6 books. It covers the period from childhood to adolescence of an African-American girl named Marguerite aka our author Maya Angelou.

Maya's journey starts when she's 3. Her divorced parents send her with her brother Bailey Jr. to a southern town called Stamps in Arkansas where their grandmother Annie Henderson lives. After a while, the father Bailey Johnson Sr. takes the kids to see their mother Vivian Baxter in St. Louis in which they'd spent about a year before moving back to Stamps. After a brief stay there, the kids finally settle in San Francisco with their mom and new stepdad.

In her early years, she hears horrifying stories on the whites and their racism against the blacks. Therefore she develops a natural resentment against white people (that was around the time preceding World War II). Maya's amazing story-telling takes you back to the 1930-40's time span and you can almost feel what she'd encountered as if you were actually there. I caught myself laughing out loud at the insanely humorous "preach it" scene in the church.

The author has a simple yet thorough approach in explaining social scopes. She talks about life, family, religion, death, economy, sexuality, racial segregation and discrimination. She spots the light on a bitter physical/physiological experience of rape and molestation. The content in this part is disturbing, but it was within the context and necessary to document a horrible sexual abuse that happens everyday in this messed up world. The author sincerely shared the rape scene as innocently as an 8-year-old would. In my opinion, her descriptions weren't vulgar.

I highly recommend this book to everyone, even younger readers can read it with supervision of adults in order to explain the mentioned "Rated R" situations. Hopefully all parents/teachers/mentors invest some time to guide children, educate them about their bodies, teach them how to avoid harassment of any kind, embrace them if they unfortunately had faced such a situation, let them know that despite whatever happened they don't have to suffer alone, give them a beam of hope that they can survive and succeed in life. I'll definitely read all Maya's works.

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Maya Angelou's Autobiographies:
1) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
2) Gather Together in My Name.
3) Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas.
4) The Heart of a Woman.
5) All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes.
6) A Song Flung Up to Heaven.