Maya Angelou’s 1969 novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the autobiographical coming-of-age story of Marguerite Johnson, a young black girl living in Southern United States in the 1930s, growing older with much more than the typical issues of adolescence and self-identity. Angelou begins the novel with a striking scene, wherein an extremely young Marguerite (often called Ritie, My, or Maya) is mocked and brought to tears in church, and eventually runs out, peeing all the way home, but “laugh[ing]