(ThySistas.com) Miss Josephine kept her copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings pressed right up against the Bible, and I didn’t take that placement for an accident. She carried a lifetime around in her, and most of it the folks two streets over never thought to ask about. They had opinions, plenty of them. What they didn’t have was one single afternoon at her table, a plate of her cornbread, a look at her face on the evening the light bill came due and the arithmetic would not stretch. So Maya put a girlhood like that on paper, and something in women such as Miss Josephine came loose that had been clenched up tight a good while.
That is the thing about a life. Somebody is always going to describe it. The only question that matters is whether the describing gets done by the person who lived it or by a stranger who watched from across the road and decided they already knew the whole shape of things.
For so long, the shape of us got decided elsewhere. In minstrel drawings, in advertisements for pancake mix, in sociology papers written by men who studied our neighborhoods the way you might study weather patterns, from a safe and clinical distance. We became a set of masks. The mammy who lived to serve and asked nothing back. A temptress with no inner weather at all. The bitter one, mouth perpetually twisted, furious over nothing anybody could name. None of these were portraits. They were storage. Somewhere for the country to set its guilt and its fear so it could go on about its business.
Angelou understood the quiet part of all this. A cartoon doesn’t just insult you. Given enough repetition, it takes your place. Folks meet the flat version so many times that the real woman, standing right there in all her contradiction, starts to look like the exaggeration. You go in for a job interview and the man across the desk is already halfway into a version of you that you never got a say in. Try speaking up in a meeting, put a sharp idea on the table, and watch it come back to you as an attitude problem instead. Whatever they had decided about you got there ahead of you. It was shaking hands and pouring the coffee while you were still finding a chair.
I have felt this personally more times than I care to count. Years ago I sat in a doctor’s office describing a pain that had kept me awake for weeks, and I watched the physician nod without hearing a single word. Later I learned that research has repeatedly documented racial disparities in how Black patients’ pain is assessed and treated. My pain was real. His picture of me was more real to him than I was. The chart he carried into that room had been drafted long before either of us was born.
This is what happens when the pen belongs to somebody else. Not just misunderstanding, which any two souls can stumble into. Something heavier. A whole architecture of assumption that you have to dismantle brick by brick every single day, in every new room, before anyone will grant you the ordinary dignity of being complicated. Of being a full person with contradictions and tenderness and a bad temper on Tuesdays and a gift for making people laugh at funerals.
Maya refused the container. That refusal is her great inheritance to us, larger even than the poems. She sat down and wrote her childhood as she remembered and understood it, including the parts that decorum begged her to leave in the dark. The assault she survived at eight. Her muteness in the years afterward, when she was convinced her voice had killed a man. A lesser writer, or a more frightened one, would have sanded those edges smooth. She did not. What she knew was that a testimony with the shameful parts removed is not really a testimony at all. It is a performance of respectability, and respectability has never once kept a single one of us safe.
Here is what the sanitizers fail to grasp. When you speak the hard thing plainly, you take its power. The silence around that little girl in Stamps, Arkansas was doing violence to her long after the original wound had scabbed over. Saying the thing out loud, in language that belonged to her, was how she clawed back the years shame had been parked on top of. And she put it in print, out where a stranger could trip right over it, which meant the work wasn’t only about setting herself loose. Every reader stuck in that same hush got handed a way out. A good many of us had been shut up in that room, and each one figured she was the only tenant.
And the sound of her sentences carried as much as the content, maybe more. She wrote the way the older women on my block ran their mouths on a Saturday, that slow unhurried roll that could make a grocery list ring like the book of Psalms. Nobody sat her down and taught her that. She built it herself. It was hers, drawn from the church pew and the porch and the beauty shop, all those spaces where we sistas have always narrated ourselves to one another when the official record had no place for us. Every time an outsider tried to translate that music into flat academic prose, something essential leaked out. The truth of a people lives in its particular sound. Strip the sound away and you are left with a report, accurate maybe in its facts and dead wrong in its soul.
Testimony carries a weight that argument cannot. Anyone can debate a statistic. You might wave away a study, claim the sample was too small, insist your cousin’s situation proves the opposite. What you cannot easily do is argue with a person standing before you, saying this happened to me, here is exactly how it felt, here is the smell of the room and the color of the sky that afternoon. First person closes the escape routes. It takes the big vague argument and pins it to one body, one afternoon, one kitchen, and now you can’t wave it off or fold it into some trend piece. A woman telling the truth about her life, flat out, moves something in a reader that a whole stack of think pieces leaves cold.
Which is exactly why we get talked out of the telling, sometimes sweet, sometimes with a real edge underneath the voice. Keep it to yourself. Don’t air dirty laundry. Be strong, meaning be silent, meaning carry it alone until it wears down a piece of you that nobody will ever have to see or answer for. The pressure to perform an unbothered strength is its own kind of gag. We have put too many aunties in the ground and stood there at the repast praising them for how well they held everything in. Some of them might still be here if they had hollered about it good and loud, and started years sooner.
So I catch a young sister today putting her unvarnished truth online, no polish on any of it, the mess sitting right next to the glory, and I know precisely what she is carrying forward. She is doing what the poet did on the printed page. The definitive version of her life, she insists, will issue from her mouth and no other. That insistence is not vanity. It is survival dressed up as plain expression.
The narrative about us will keep getting written whether we participate or not. That much is certain and always has been. The powerful will keep composing their tidy summaries, and the culture will keep reaching for its worn old masks whenever it needs somewhere convenient to place its fear. None of that is within our control. What sits in our hands, the same thing that sat in Angelou’s, is the refusal to let their draft stand as the final word.
Tell it yourself. Say it crooked and true, in the rhythm your people gave you, with the shameful parts left in and the tender parts protected. Speak because the alternative is letting a stranger decide who you were. Miss Josephine did not write a book. But she read that one until the spine came apart in her hands, and I believe she knew, more surely than any critic could, that a life shaped like hers had at last made it onto the page and come out true. That is the whole gift, and it is why we sistas can’t afford the quiet. The caged bird sings, Maya told us, and not because the singing bends one bar of the cage. She sings because the sound itself is proof that some part of her was hers alone, not theirs to buy or to break.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.