Abandonment in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel opens with three-year-old Maya and her four-year-old bother Bailey traveling alone across the United States wearing wrist tags that read “To Whom It May Concern.” The siblings are being sent away from their newly divorced parents to live with their paternal grandmother, and Maya reacts by pretending her parents are dead. “I couldn’t believe that our mother … Read the rest