Superbly told, with the poet's gift for language and observation, Angelou's autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas - a world of which most Americans are ignorant. In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant." If your originals of these two popular titles (LJ 9/1/78, LJ 3/15/70, respectively) have seen better days, these reprints offer affordable, high-quality replacements. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Praise for I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS "I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved." -James Baldwin Praise for GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME " Gather Together in My Name is part of a select body of literature that includes The Autobiography of Malcolm X , Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land and Ernest J. Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman . Maya Angelou regards the world and herself with intelligence and wit; she records the events of her life with style and grace." -William McPherson, The Washington Post Book World Praise for ALL GOD'S CHILDREN NEED TRAVELING SHOES "This is a superb account by a great women who has embraced a difficult destiny with rare intelligence and infectious joie de vivre." -The Boston Globe Superbly told, with the poet's gift for language and observation, Angelou's autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas - a world of which most Americans are ignorant. Praise for I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS "I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved." -James Baldwin Praise for GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME " Gather Together in My Name is part of a select body of literature that includes The Autobiography of Malcolm X , Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land and Ernest J. Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman . Maya Angelou regards the world and herself with intelligence and wit; she records the events of her life with style and grace." -William McPherson, The Washington Post Book World Praise for ALL GOD'S CHILDREN NEED TRAVELING SHOES "This is a superb account by a great women who has embraced a difficult destiny with rare intelligence and infectious joie de vivre." -The Boston Globe Prologue "What you looking at me for? I didn't come to stay . . ." I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember. Other things were more important. "What you looking at me for? I didn't come to stay . . ." Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and the air would cool my palms. "What you looking at me for . . . ?" The children's section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling over my well-known forgetfulness. The dress I wore was lavender taffeta, and each time I breathed it rustled, and now that I was sucking in air to breathe out shame it sounded like crepe paper on the back of hearses. As I'd watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I put it on I'd look like a movie star. (It was silk and that made up for the awful color.) I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world. Hanging softly over the black Singer sewing machine, it looked like magic, and when people saw me wearing it they were going to run up to me and say, "Marguerite [sometimes it was 'dear Marguerite'], forgive us, please, we didn't know who you were," and I would answer generously, "No, you couldn't have known. Of course I forgive you." Just thinking about it made me go around with angel's dust sprinkled over my face for days. But Easter's early morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway. It was old-lady-long too, but it didn't hide my skinny legs, which had been greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and powdered with the Arkansas red clay. The age-faded color made my skin look dirty like mud, and everyo