The first of Angelou's seven autobiographies opens with two children wearing shipping tags: Marguerite Johnson, three, and her brother Bailey, four, sent from California to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother โ Momma, who runs the town's Store and holds the Black community's center. Angelou renders the segregated South of the 1930s whole โ its humiliations, its church, its small dignities โ and then the rupture: taken to live with her mother in St. Louis, Marguerite is raped at eight by her mother's boyfriend, and stops speaking for years, memorizing the Bible and Shakespeare in silence until the teacher Bertha Flowers coaxes her voice back. The volume ends in San Francisco with the birth of her son. It is regarded as the first nonfiction bestseller by a Black woman in America.
Author: Maya Angelou ยท Original publisher: Random House (New York), 1969
