I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

20:29Jeff O'Neal: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. Yeah.

20:39Rebecca Schinsky: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 Time review you have linked in our notes here by Christopher Lehman Hopped. a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir of a black girl's slow and clumsily 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.

21:13Rebecca Schinsky:And this serial comic light and dark element is also a really important thing that I think, if you haven't read this book and you have kind of my sense of what your sense might be of Maya Angelo 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. 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.

21:55Rebecca Schinsky: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 of these kinds of writings. But for someone who spent her life writing, I think it's especially interesting to think about which story 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.

22:24Jeff O'Neal: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.

22:48Rebecca Schinsky: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.

23:05Jeff O'Neal: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 out earlier, the estimated total sales are only two to three 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.

23:44Jeff O'Neal: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 one. But I think if you know the title of one Maya Angelou book, it's probably this one. That sales number seems just surprisingly low to me. I think it's probably banned a lot.

24:10Rebecca Schinsky:It is banned a lot. And I think that has to be accounted for here that in some districts it's still taught, in some 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, you want to be a certain age so you get what's going on here, so you can talk about the issues. You could certainly read this eight or nine. 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.

24:46Rebecca Schinsky:I also think that maybe, you know, memoirs, especially at 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 yeah that's a great a great and

25:24Jeff O'Neal:really important point um 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 going to 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.

25:58Jeff O'Neal: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. Angelou gives her five minutes. But from there, they set off on what becomes a decades long and really enduring lifelong friendship.

26:16Rebecca Schinsky:I have a pitch for you. I was going to save this for adaptation. But since it's not directly an adaptation of this, I think I would be interested in like 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 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.

26:50Rebecca Schinsky:And I think kind of along with Toni Morrison, those combined being her lodestars that have powered her through this.

26:56Jeff O'Neal:It also really complicates the reading of Angelo, or it made this reading very surprising. Because my Oprah memories, and I was an early teen in the 90s when Oprah was at her peak and had Maya Angelou on frequently. So my mental model of Angelo is this softer, grandmotherly woman, always wearing flowing garments. And she had this very 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 oprification of anyone. Toni Morrison resisted this a little bit more, and it's not really fair to compare them.

27:43Jeff O'Neal:But Morrison insisted on being difficult in her personal presentation and in her work. And Angelo'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 you get a huge platform, but it can also really skew expectations.

28:14Rebecca Schinsky: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. It's like, I'm going to pick Faulkner and Morrison. And I know that it's like, that's just that dynamic is hard to reconcile because they seem irreconcilable. It is. Yeah, yeah. We've talked 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 bureaucratic Kafkaesque racist, racist nightmare of just trying to get like a job, taking coins on the on the trolley cars.

28:48Rebecca Schinsky: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 bars her real original name I guess is not Maya Angelou I think I'll save the story of how she got that because that's something that's really wonderful moment with 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 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

29:29Jeff O'Neal:she was at this point and then after that she's a real pillar of the black artistic community and the black political community and the places that those two communities intersect you know like when she's dancing she meets Alvin Ailey the famous choreographer and they have a dance team together. 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. And then eventually, Oprah. 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.

30:15Jeff O'Neal:And 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 no way to talk about Maya Angelo without talking 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 you have to hold that the whole time that you're reading her and remembering, she has this political consciousness by the time she's writing, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

31:03Jeff O'Neal: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 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.

31:31Rebecca Schinsky: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 tambra. 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.

32:14Rebecca Schinsky:One of the great voices that I think that's ever existed in my life of reading things.

32:19Jeff O'Neal:Killed on the Button Poetry YouTube page.

32:22Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, yeah. 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 because I wanted to get a sense of it. But I was like, I can't highlight stuff. But she narrates it is a long way of saying it. How is that?

32:52Jeff O'Neal:It has to be wonderful.

32:54Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, it's unbelievable. Like it's so, I tend to listen to my audio books at like 1.1 or 1.2 speed just because I find a lot of the narration too slow for my attention span. But this one, I was like, can I even slow it down? Can I make this last longer? It is languorous in its way, but 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 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.

33:34Rebecca Schinsky: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.

33:42Jeff O'Neal: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.

34:13Rebecca Schinsky:what is it like to read this what it's all about so we've talked it's ages sort of three 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 connected 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 growing up, and he'd come to JV'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.

35:01Rebecca Schinsky:So there's not, The story is, here are stories from my wild and interesting life told with grace and discernment.

35:10Jeff O'Neal: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 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.

35:48Jeff O'Neal: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 in the Library of Congress as autobiography. So we're going to go with that. But it's also, as we were saying, just so much more complicated and so much darker than the kind of 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.

36:37Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And, you know, as it often happens in 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 Angelo 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 variability.

37:10Rebecca Schinsky: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 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 Ps in a row there. I didn't mean to do all that.

37:42Jeff O'Neal:That's a really good alliteration there.

37:44Rebecca Schinsky:But you do feel that again. But on the other hand, 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.

37:58Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it doesn't have that insufferable quality that teenagers can have where they're like, here's how life really is. Right. Yeah. But 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. And 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.

38:37Jeff O'Neal:And she finds this sense of freedom and acceptance and nonjudgmentalness 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 going to be the other. And that can like being consistently surprised by her is a real pleasure here.

39:10Rebecca Schinsky:She also dramatized that when she meets other people and goes to other places. It's almost never like she think it's going to be.

39:17Jeff O'Neal:That's right.

39:17Rebecca Schinsky:Even 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's are when they're 14, 15, 16, for sure, at the same time.

39:45Jeff O'Neal:She also, I think, really is able to highlight what we would talk about as intersectionality today. 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.

40:30Jeff O'Neal: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 po-white 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 race and class and of where people sit in social structures is on display. But also she's talking about how segregation is dehumanizing, not just for Black people, but for everyone who engages in it.

41:11Jeff O'Neal:because she has so little exposure to white folks that she says, I remember never believing that whites were really real 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 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 without hammering at home too hard. Yeah.

41:41Rebecca Schinsky:And one of the locations in the book, and I think my 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. 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.

42:18Rebecca Schinsky:So anyway, that's something to look out for too. 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. And interesting, it's a very fertile place in the water and it's a very fertile place and 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 it themselves, but it's complicated.

42:49Rebecca Schinsky: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 Angelo 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 it affect all kinds of pieces of her life.

43:30Jeff O'Neal: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 eight 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. Or intimacy or something.

44:04Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

44:05Jeff O'Neal: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'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.

44:57Jeff O'Neal:And having a person hold her close when no one else in her family had at first feels good. And that 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.

45:17Rebecca Schinsky: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 reiterate when you said it's unlike other representations of it. And it's adding different nuance and different understanding. 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. And so it subverts so many of these coming of age tropes.

45:53Rebecca Schinsky: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. There's no grand resolution and it feels like a biographical cliffhanger, a bit of an ending. It really does. 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.

46:28Rebecca Schinsky:And we don't think about adulthood in quite the same ways that this book is thinking about it. But even within the book, 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, 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 is she choosing to show and what are she choosing to withhold here? Because she's for most of this part of her life, a pretty lonely kid.

47:02Rebecca Schinsky: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, and then realizing once she has her own kid that maybe she can do it differently. 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.

47:40Rebecca Schinsky:or your sort of 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 or autobiography. What can I take from this experience and integrate into my own understanding of how the world is put together?

47:55Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it's really powerful stuff.

47:59Rebecca Schinsky: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 the 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.

48:40Rebecca Schinsky: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. Like, how are we going to explore black possibility? Well, initially survival was amazing. It still remains amazing, but going out one further and then building on subsequent generations. I really felt that here to see over the course of these three generations.

49:02Jeff O'Neal: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 like second gen group who their parents have made this move and they have lived not outside of racism by any stretch, but not under the same kinds of restrictions, not under the same painful effects of racism.

49:52Jeff O'Neal:And they are pushing for more options and more expansion. Like 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 washerwomen, 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.

50:30Jeff O'Neal: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. 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.

51:09Rebecca Schinsky:It's interesting 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 can just say, we're talking about the books here. A formidable presence, Maya Angelou. She knocks on the cute kid down the block's door and says, do you want to have sexual intercourse with me? Like, that's what she does.

51:39Rebecca Schinsky: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 that Jedi mind tricked 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 of decades after this book came out and on either side of it, I guess, really, without an sort of innate boldness and willingness to put yourself out there in multiple ways.

52:13Rebecca Schinsky:And so seeing that be put on the page, you get a sense of like, oh, here are the building blocks that would become this formidable person 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 why the church mattered so much to Black people. And 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 pressure of slavery or racism or real injustices of any kind.

52:53Rebecca Schinsky:That's true for a lot of different kinds of people. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.

53:06Jeff O'Neal:Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Enjoy complimentary access to the American Express Global Lounge Collection. and apply to find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300 ,000 membership rewards points.

53:42Jeff O'Neal:American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Welcome offers vary, and you may not be eligible for an offer. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash platinum.

53:56Rebecca Schinsky:Who cares about your poops? Ollie does. That's why Ollie's Science Back to Gut Health lineup helps support your family's regularity. From daily probiotics to fiber gummies your kiddos will love. Find it all on Oli.com. That's O-L-L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. 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.

54:40Rebecca Schinsky:They don't apply on this higher level. In fact, the meek shall inherit the earth, the last shall be first. 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 the importance of the Black church in these moments and still today in many, many places. But if for someone like us that's 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 a clinical understanding of how these socioeconomic forces happen for me.

55:15Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I love that point. 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 considered that 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.

55:56Jeff O'Neal:And there are really moving portrayals of the church, but then also a really funny portrayal of the church.

56:03Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And that, you know, this fundamental representation that you can pull out of the New Testament of like, and 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 it allows 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 that the church becomes such an important part in the grander story of American civil rights movements in the years leading up to Angelo writing this book.

56:39Rebecca Schinsky:Okay. Maybe my favorite part of the show is when we get to do our stray thoughts. Rebecca, where would you like to begin? We can move around.

56:47Jeff O'Neal: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 even 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's it works for her work 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 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.

57:54Jeff O'Neal: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 else. 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.

58:21Rebecca Schinsky:Let me see. What do I have here? I think that we know that she survives the events really matters. Like one reason. Because if this is the bluest eye, 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 tenor of the narration is that of thriving, not of merely surviving, not of like brokenness. That is not the adult. She's trying to relate it as it happens, but it's with a present tense sensibility.

59:01Rebecca Schinsky:and you get a few little asides or a positive, we said like later I would think and my brother would think about this later, that there is some sense of futurity so that you're not spiraling towards like a horrible act of violence, like the end 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.

59:26Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And like some of it is just horrifying. Like she and her brother, when their parents divorce and send them to Stamps to live with their grandma, 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 at the first stop. And they just have their tickets penned 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 1932.

59:57Rebecca Schinsky:You're moving between Jim Crow. Like there's all kinds of wild stuff going on at the same time.

1:00:02Jeff O'Neal:And like 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.

1:00:18Rebecca Schinsky:One of the bits we didn't know we were going to keep doing. But yes, absolutely.

1:00:22Jeff O'Neal: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 just all sorts of classics and classical book references throughout. And they're reading them as kids, like eight and nine year olds by the fire at night. But they're also speaking Pig Latin. And like, do kids still speak Pig Latin?

1:00:48Rebecca Schinsky:I love this point. I'm going to ask my kids if they know what pig Latin is and couldn't they say it? You did as a kid, right? Yeah. You knew pig Latin?

1:00:55Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:01:22Rebecca Schinsky:and didn't seem to be really even thinking about pregnancy as a possibility. Like in that narration of like having sex. She just wants the experience. 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 Others You're to Well-Read Books. Maybe we can 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 interest.

1:01:50Rebecca Schinsky:Like we are interested in this web of books and how they start to connect to each other very much.

1:01:55Jeff O'Neal:So 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.

1:02:04Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And we get Hamlet in this book and we get a lot of other books to get names. Dickens gets name checked. At one point, Bailey comes back for the merchant and brings her Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, which for a while was a really famous book of coming. I don't think anybody reads Thomas Wolfe anymore. I really liked it when I was a teenager. Let's see. The scene where the woman goes buck wild to 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.

1:02:34Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. She's like rushing the altar, beating the pastor with her purse. She's so taken by the Holy Spirit. Preach it, Lord! 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. So real. And they just fall on the floor. They can't keep it together. And that whole thing is, I mean, it is just so funny. And also such a counterpoint to James Baldwin's presentation of it.

1:03:11Jeff O'Neal: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. Yeah.

1:03:28Rebecca Schinsky:So think of this as a chronicle of the radical shift of black person in America from the anecdote where a black woman referred to as 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's 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 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.

1:04:11Rebecca Schinsky: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 have made it. Is she 12 at this age? I'm not even sure what age she's supposed to be.

1:04:21Jeff O'Neal:She's like 12 or 14. One of the great scenes in the book that does that subverting of expectations. Because she's scared because she doesn't know how to drive, but she is not as scared as she should be here. It's like this great adventure and she figures it out and she's so proud of herself that she figured it out. But also her dad has taken her. It's totally unnecessary for him to take her. He's going to go see his mistress. And 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?

1:05:00Jeff O'Neal:Why are we taking our kids with us?

1:05:03Rebecca Schinsky: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. sexual perversion. But it reminded me, I think the closest 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.

1:05:43Rebecca Schinsky: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.

1:05:56Jeff O'Neal:And a lot of confusion, apparently.

1:05:59Rebecca Schinsky:If you 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 puncture, sort of a hermetically sealed understanding of how the world is put together, with real binary and surface and blah, blah, blah.

1:06:37Rebecca Schinsky: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. She wonders. and it's presented quite differently. So that's an interesting one too.

1:06:53Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, she's like curious about it and titillated by it and also really worried about like, are the lesbians going to be okay?

1:06:58Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And she sees her friend take off her shirt and she has breasts. She's like, that's beautiful. She's like, 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 there's not a moral. She doesn't care morally. She's more like, what is it going to mean for me just living my life?

1:07:14Jeff O'Neal:She's trying to figure out if this is a component of her identity or not. Yeah.

1:07:18Rebecca Schinsky: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 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, there are things here for you in these books.

1:07:51Rebecca Schinsky:And that's what these of this show. Interesting to see it here.

1:07:54Jeff O'Neal:Morrison drawing on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf would make the same argument.

1:07:58Rebecca Schinsky: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. I know that is an interesting way to see her biography. You can see it as a I don't know, kind of a 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 cage bird sing? Exactly.

1:09:02Rebecca Schinsky: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 of Bursing might be one of the great titles of all time. I don't think we've said that here. It's an unbelievable title.

1:09:22Jeff O'Neal:It is. Great book title.

1:09:23Rebecca Schinsky:But I will say this as well. A prayer is what? A prayer to whom? because 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 it a prayer to? 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 taking that little piece alone.

1:09:46Jeff O'Neal:You have fun with that over in office hours.

1:09:47Rebecca Schinsky:And the secular 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.

1:09:57Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:10:09Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Emily Dickinson, hope is that thing with feathers, which purses in the soul and sings a tune without words and never stops at all. I think you could do a nice little close reading, you know, undergraduate course or high school course and sort of comparing birds. Yeah.

1:10:27Jeff O'Neal:If you're listening to this because you have homework, here's your paper idea.

1:10:30Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, here's your paper idea. Yeah, do some birds. All right, notable quotes, Rebecca. Bunch, where would you like to begin?

1:10:36Jeff O'Neal:Well, let's start as we always do with Goodreads' favorite quote. There is no greater agony than burying an untold story inside you.

1:10:44Rebecca Schinsky:Nice quote. I have to believe there are greater agonies, but that's me.

1:10:49Jeff O'Neal:And by far not the best quote in this book.

1:10:52Rebecca Schinsky:No, it tends to be the most Hallmark card friendlies gets the number one Goodreads' favorite.

1:10:58Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, if you could live, laugh, love it onto a pillow, that's what Goodreads is going to go for. This book is low-key, maybe not even low-key, a mother's and daughter's book. Yes. Her relationship with her mother, her relationship with the grandmother who largely raised her, complicated, but especially with her mother. And she says, to write about my mother would be to write about a hurricane and 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 doesn't understand you and how is it possible that they don't understand you?

1:11:42Jeff O'Neal:Really nails it there.

1:11:44Rebecca Schinsky:Do you think, though, I mean, I guess this goes back to my point about 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 having had this experience or thinking about your own experience? Like, I don't think my sense is maybe my hope as a parent is this is not a necessary and unavoidable condition of parents relating to those children. It's something that definitely does happen. But is it inviolable that this is inviolable that this is a truth of humans?

1:12:22Jeff O'Neal: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 knew that I never knew Mama. And she wants to be known and seen 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, 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 unwanted by formal education.

1:13:11Rebecca Schinsky:A poet, you can tell, but not flowery in a way that 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. 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.

1:13:57Rebecca Schinsky:It's like to a kid that, to many kids, I 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. And 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 orange is 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 would do that.

1:14:32Rebecca Schinsky: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. 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 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 in 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.

1:15:20Rebecca Schinsky: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 – 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. Heady stuff.

1:15:54Jeff O'Neal: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. 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 wits 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.

1:16:40Jeff O'Neal: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. 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

1:17:06Rebecca Schinsky:it made sometimes it's pretty simple um her own her own word you know this is something i'm always interested is how do authors portray journeys to a new consciousness or opening of a critical conscious or understanding that the world is just one among many 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.

1:17:48Rebecca Schinsky:Without willing it, I had 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 quotations? No, I think that hits. I mean, we could do, you can do quotes from this book all the live long

1:18:10Jeff O'Neal:day. It's wonderful.

1:18:12Rebecca Schinsky:All right. Rebecca, is this for you? How do you know if it's for you or if it's not for you?

1:18:16Jeff O'Neal: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 pass. They are pretty detailed.

1:18:40Rebecca Schinsky:And I don't know that there are scenes of racial violence as directly narrated is that sexual assault, but their intimations, overtones, stories from the past, and then the imminent possibility of that 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 as a special 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 to, 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.

1:19:18Jeff O'Neal:I'm pretty resistant to mothers and daughters stories for my own complicated reasons, but I really love this one.

1:19:23Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Do you hear that? Sounds like breakfast is ready because Quakers coming in hot with morning nutrition, 100 % whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day. And that sounds absolutely delicious. Fuel to start whatever's next. Quaker, official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26. I, oh, let's go! Where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I've been liberated. I'm gonna take this city back. Over Medicaid. In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney+.

1:20:11Jeff O'Neal:They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with them.

1:20:18Rebecca Schinsky:This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil, Born Again, now streaming only on Disney+. This Father's Day, when you ship UPS Air at the UPS store, your items arrive on time with your money back, guaranteed at no extra cost. It's like the father of all shipping services. It shows up to the airport way too early just to play it safe. It's overprotective about all the things that truly matter. And it's always prompt, especially to be with family. Make it your first choice to celebrate your dad. Ship UPS Air with our money-back guarantee. Exclusively at the UPS Store U.S. retail locations.

1:20:50Rebecca Schinsky:Visit the upsstore.com slash air shipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply. The immortal questions that 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.

1:21:14Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, deals with a lot of them. Primary, what is the good life? And... Does she get a representation of the good life?

1:21:25Rebecca Schinsky: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? Bertha?

1:21:37Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:21:50Rebecca Schinsky:Just eating oranges and laughing in your face in your dreams.

1:21:53Jeff O'Neal: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 there is? And what else might there be? More in the mortal plane. Yes, mortal coil. Yeah, she's not really concerned with questions of the soul or is God real or what happens after you die or any of those things.

1:22:35Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:22:53Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think for me, how do I know what I know? The quote I just did before in the couple I said, I think 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.

1:23:44Rebecca Schinsky:That makes her so nuts. And are we sure this is about art and writing, Rebecca?

1:23:49Jeff O'Neal: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. Yeah.

1:24:06Rebecca Schinsky:Could you get the most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation?

1:24:10Jeff O'Neal: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 portrays all of that, but I 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.

1:24:49Jeff O'Neal: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. This feels ripe for a re-adaptation, but I think I would do it as a movie if you're going to do it.

1:25:08Rebecca Schinsky:I agree with you, movie. My note here is a modern, full-budget version of this would win some folks an Oscars.

1:25:13Jeff O'Neal:Yeah.

1:25:14Rebecca Schinsky: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 of the major figures in Black American life from like 1951 up and through she died. so is there like a the Maya Angelou 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.

1:26:12Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know. I found myself more interested in that than a direct abolition 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 was talked about at some point. I'd be curious to hear what projects did not happen. It's a great question.

1:26:46Jeff O'Neal:I also thought about the technique that Ramel 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.

1:27:12Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Trivia adaptation rumors, misattributed quotes, and more. This is our junk drawer for other interesting stuff that we found. Yeah.

1:27:18Jeff O'Neal:I mean, just go to the Wikipedia page about Maya Angelou and go down the rabbit hole is really my recommendation. Just a fascinating life. But in addition to the book taking its title from Paul Lawrence 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. If you Google that, you will find her giving interviews about getting up in the morning, leaving home, going to the hotel room she had rented for the next couple of months, and being in silence and surrounding herself with her typewriter and her books and doing the thing.

1:27:58Jeff O'Neal: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 Mourning, which is one of her poems, at Bill Clinton's inauguration.

1:28:35Jeff O'Neal:And when that happened, her book sales went up 1 ,200 % in 1993 over the previous year. So a real inflection point. 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 superstardom.

1:28:57Rebecca Schinsky: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 at 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.

1:29:22Jeff O'Neal:Yes, probably. Especially now that Colbert is off the air.

1:29:25Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. But even that is not, I don't think. It's a big stage. 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 will lie on the floor with half her. She knew what she worked and worked for her. She sprawled out. Yeah. M.A. would have loved a WeWork. That's my hot take about this particular situation. I didn't have hot takes here, Rebecca. I mean, I struggled to come up with one.

1:29:53Jeff O'Neal:There's something about this book that resists the hot take, so I'm fine with just letting it stand.

1:29:58Rebecca Schinsky: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.

1:30:17Jeff O'Neal:Did you look at the book club questions in the back of our paperback? No, I couldn't bring it.

1:30:20Rebecca Schinsky:I should have done it. I can, it's good content, but like, I can't, it like burns my eyes.

1:30:26Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, no, don't. It just, it hurts the soul.

1:30:29Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Further reading, read-alikes, books inspired by this one, and more. So many.

1:30:34Jeff O'Neal: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. And I got to say, I feel pretty good about having all of those in the can inside the first year of this podcast.

1:30:56Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

1:30:57Jeff O'Neal:Great stuff there. And then you've got an interesting array here. Tell me about your picks.

1:31:02Rebecca Schinsky:Well, I was thinking about just, OK, some other memoirs by people kind of of the similar, like black people that 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 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 Neale, 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.

1:31:43Rebecca Schinsky:Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son, his own story, his memoir of growing up. They're all tremendous at the same time. 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. Central Middle Asian by Gustave Flaubert, 1869 portrait of his obsession with an older married woman and their social upheaval. And it's funny and satirical and very biting about the society of its day. It's clearly not the same as being black and white racist America. But all of these stories, a coming of age story needs a canopy of something to push against for it to be a coming of age story.

1:32:24Rebecca Schinsky: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 Cageberg 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 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 as well as we can do

1:33:07Jeff O'Neal:i saw candide in your notes here and i have been waiting to hear about how you were going to bring that did i do it did it make sense to you at all okay thank you very much um cocktail party crib

1:33:16Rebecca Schinsky: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 yeah and you i was even wondering about the cover 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 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.

1:33:52Rebecca Schinsky:I'm not a cover designer. Am I wrong? Maybe that's my hot take.

1:33:55Jeff O'Neal:No, 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.

1:34:00Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

1:34:01Jeff O'Neal:That it makes these books that are spiky and difficult because 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. To put a floral cover on it says, this isn't going to be as hard. 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 the book, okay, trick them. Do whatever you got to do on these book covers. If it will get more people to just be open to picking it up. If it lowers the at an intimidation level at all.

1:34:42Jeff O'Neal:But as a representation of the book's contents, I don't care for it either.

1:34:48Rebecca Schinsky: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 are. And I hate that. I don't like that.

1:35:23Jeff O'Neal:We've got to shave the edges off to make these stories palatable to the publishing industry's imagined reader, which is a middle-aged white woman. My other cocktail party crib sheet really is, you could just say that Angela was 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.

1:36:07Jeff O'Neal:It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect, if not enthusiastic acceptance.

1:36:17Rebecca Schinsky:Final beat, our zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. Historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read credit, and oh damn factor. Historical importance, fascinating. It's relatively new, so that's always a factor we take into the account here. It has sold a lot, but I think it outkicks its coverage in importance at the political moment comes out in a long history of Maya Angelou. Seven? Seven and a half?

1:36:44Jeff O'Neal: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 10 more years. Right.

1:36:51Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. 50 years of 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 nine.

1:37:05Jeff O'Neal:The language itself is really accessible. We can go eight and a half.

1:37:08Rebecca Schinsky: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 the world we're in. So I'll let you float a number there if you want.

1:37:33Jeff O'Neal:Eight or a nine. It's still pretty high. Yeah.

1:37:37Rebecca Schinsky:I maybe would do eight, but yeah, eight, five, sure. That looks good to me. Book nerd read cred is a really interesting one.

1:37:45Jeff O'Neal: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 around five 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 written 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

1:38:16Rebecca Schinsky:i'd say eight and a half or nine pretty high i like that oh damn factor i think this one's deceptively high. 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 you're like, oh, damn. Oh, damn. There's a lot of little ones. But then if I say it's one of the funniest scenes I've ever read, attention must be paid 8 and a half? sure

1:38:52Jeff O'Neal:pretty high score pretty high score

1:38:55Rebecca Schinsky:not a huge surprise but I guess coming into it just looking at it and maybe I'm proving my own thesis it's underrated now somehow at this point alright Rebecca thank you so much you can go to patreon.com for guided readalongs free newsletter membership options You can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read Podcast. Shoot us an email, zerotowellread at bookriot.com. Thanks to Thrift Books 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 going to do in office hours? We're going to figure it out. We're going to 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.

1:39:38Rebecca Schinsky:Rebecca, thank you so much.

1:39:40Jeff O'Neal:Thanks, y 'all. Have a good one.

1:40:13Jeff O'Neal:We'll see you next time. Pandora Jewelry's new summer collection in-store or online at pandora.net and let your summer unfold.