The standard struggle of an eight year old girl is choosing which doll to play with, not choosing to hide her rape. Maya Angelou was cruelly molested and raped by her mother’s live-in boyfriend; he told her that if she told anyone what he did to her, he’d kill her brother. Maya was devastated into a withdrawn shell of herself. Eight years later and two thousand miles away, Angelou becomes pregnant with the child of a stranger (Angelou 77, 279). Parents object to the book “raising sexual issues without giving them a moral resolution” (Sova 212). The explicit scenes led to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings landing third of the top one hundred banned books on the American Library Association’s 1990-2000 list; it has been challenged publicly 39
