In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, who was born Marguerite Johnson, recounts her experiences as an African-American youth in the United States during the 1930's and 1940's. She candidly explores the complexities of racism, family life, and growing up. The thirty-six chapters of Angelou's 250-page autobiography are arranged chronologically and geographically, following Angelou and her brother, Bailey, from home to home.
             Angelou sets the tone of the autobiography with a three-page vignette preceding the first chapter. She describes herself as a young child standing before a congregation in a church and reciting an Easter poem. She forgets her lines, becomes nervous, and flees the church. Angelou's flight from a traditional sanctuary, where she has found only discomfort, will be one of many flights.
             In 1931, when Marguerite and Bailey Johnson began their moves, she was three and he was four. Their parents, on the verge of divorce, sent the children by train from Long Beach, California, to the home of the children's paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson (Momma), who ran the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store--called the Store--in Stamps, Arkansas, with the help of Uncle Willie, their father's crippled brother. During the next fifteen years, the children moved to St. Louis, Missouri, then back to Stamps, then to Los Angeles, and later to San Francisco. They lived with Momma and Uncle Willie, with their mother and her boyfriend, with their maternal grandmother, with their father and his girlfriend, and finally with their mother and their new stepfather. Angelou even spent a month living in a junkyard. Bailey ultimately joined the merchant marines.
             Despite the transience of her childhood, Angelou brings a coherence to her autobiography by organizing it into a series of sketches and narratives. Some of the sketches will make readers laugh, such as the description of the revival at which Sister Monroe, in her religio...