Themes

Themes found in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Identity

It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness (183). 

Just as gratefulness was confused in my mind with love, so possession became mixed up with motherhood. I had a baby (280). 

I was liked, and what a difference it made. I was respected not as Mrs. Henderson's grandchild or Bailey's sister but for just being Marguerite Johnson (98)

Sexuality/ Sexual Violence

He held me so softly that I wished he wouldn't ever let me go. I felt at home (71).

Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot (76).

Femininity 

I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil (4). 

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence (265).

Escape

The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises (174).

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast (218).

A boyfriend's acceptance of me would guide me into that strange and exotic land of frills and femininity (272).