culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

REMUS BEJAN
Store and spread itself over the family in washed life waves. Momma opened
boxes of crispy crackers and we sat around the meat block at the rear of the Store. I
sliced onions, and Bailey opened two or even three cans of sardines and allowed
their juice of oil and fishing boats to ooze down and around the sides. That was
supper. . .” (1971:13)
Annie Henderson’s Store is an agora of the community, it serves as focus
and gathering place, and somehow resides over the city’s temporal and spatial
order. In spite of, or in contrast with, the utter despondency and gloom of life in
Stamps, there is containedness in this setting, which controls the girl’s sense of
displacement. She does not want to fit here, however it does shape her.
The necessary dependence of subjectivity on place is given special emphasis
in Angelou, who very often writes as if she thinks of persons as tied to places, as
being who and what they are through their inhabiting of particular places and their
situation within particular locations. As Momma, Uncle Willie seem to be part of
the landscape of Stamps, so are grandmother Baxter and her children part of the
townscape of St Louis. In gaining a sense of home and of place, a sense of her own
identity – the landscape of Stamps, St. Louis, or San Francisco and all that is
associated with them, plays a special role. A particularly good example of this
point is the passage that introduces to the reader Maya’s white acquisitive and
tradition-bound employer and the barren wife of Mr. Cullinan, and “her Alice-in-
Wonderland house”: “The exactness of her house was inhuman. This glass went
here and only here. That cup had its place and it was an act of impudent rebellion
to place it anywhere else. [. . .] The large round bowl in which soup was served
wasn’t a soup bowl, it was a tureen. There were goblets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream
glasses, wine glasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water
glasses. [. . . ] Soup spoons, gravy boat, butter knives, salad forks and carving
platter were additions to my vocabulary and in fact almost represented a new
language.” (1971: 88)
The importance of memory to self-identity, and the connection of memory
with place, illuminates a feature that is present in I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings, namely, the way in which the experience of places and things from the past
is very often an occasion for intense (self)-reflection, such as the frequently quoted
diatribe against Southern racism that opens chapter 6: “Stamps, Arakansas, was
Chitlin’ Switch, Georgia; Hang ‘Ern High, Alabama; Don’t Let the Sun Set on
You Here, Nigger, Mississippi; or any other name just as descriptive. People in
Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro
couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be
satisfied with chocolate. A light shade had been pulled down between the Black
community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a
fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things” - white folks’ cars and white
glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all, their wealth
that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. They had so many clothes they
were able to give perfectly good dresses, worn just under the arms, to the sewing
class at our school for the larger girls to practice on.” (1971: 40)
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