Maya Angelou Adversity

American business man, Howard Schultz, once said, “In times of adversity and change, we discover who we are and what we’re made of.” In the novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Maya experiences many different forms of adversity. Maya was a very troubled as a child due to her abandonment problems, being placed in unsafe environments, and a problem of reliance on her older brother, Bailey. In the novel, Maya and Bailey are sent from their parents to live with their grandmother, Momma, who lived in Arkansas, at very young ages. Maya says, “Why did they send us away? And what did we do so wrong?” (Angelou 53). She felt as if her parents did not care enough about she and Bailey because she starts to realize that anything could’ve happened to them on that long …show more content…
Family members would call her ugly, and she would not stick up for herself,but Bailey would. She says, “When our elders said unkind things about my features (my family was handsome to a point of pain for me), Bailey would wink at me from across the room, and I knew that it was a matter of time before he would take revenge” ( Angelou 22). Bailey sticks up for Maya by talking about one of their children. By him doing so, he helped Maya build her confidence, but at the same time, he is making her have dependence issues because he did not allow her to fend for herself. She already depended on Bailey because she felt like he was all she had. Maya learns to overcome her dependence on Bailey. In the novel, Bailey goes through a mute period when a girl that he really liked, ran off on him. Maya says, “So I let him be, and after a while Momma had let him alone too” (Angelou 196). Any other time when Bailey was upset, she would bug him to try to get him to talk to her. She learns to just leave him alone when he is not talking to her. This shows her growth as a person and her shedding of her dependence on