I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing

A turning point in the novel occurs when Marguerite and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears at their home to send them to live with their mother in St. Louis. While there, eight-year old Marguerite is raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, which traumatizes her. Mr. Freeman is later murdered after escaping jail time, which burdens Marguerite with guilt and causes her to withdraw from everyone but her brother. Even after moving back to Stamps, Marguerite remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets "Black aristocrat" Bertha Flowers, who supplies her with books to encourage her love of reading, and coaxes her out of her shell.

As Marguerite grows up, she experiences many other instances of racism, including an old white woman who shortens her name to "Mary," hence reducing her name to a more common one; white speakers at a graduation ceremony who disparage the black audience by implying their limited job opportunities, and the white town dentist's refusal to operate on Marguerite's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him of a previous loan. As commentator Mary Jane Lupton states, "She knew even then, from her experiences in Stamps and St. Louis, that she was black and female, someone with the cards stacked against her".[3]

Finally, when her brother Bailey is disturbed by the discovery of the corpse of a black man that some white men took pleasure in seeing, Momma decides to move the children to live permanently with their mother in San Francisco, California. Marguerite visits her father in southern California one summer; she drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from a short excursion to Mexico and experiences homelessness for a short time, after a fight with her father's girlfriend.

Marguerite, now more frequently called "Maya," enters adolescence, but not without awkwardness. She becomes worried that she might be a lesbian (which she equates with being a hermaphrodite), and initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy she knows only vaguely to dispel this fear. She becomes pregnant, which she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school. Marguerite gives birth to a baby boy at the end of the book and begins her trek to adulthood by accepting her role as a mother to her newborn son.