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As with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I couldn't put this one down once I started reading. This autobiography picks up where I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ends, with with 17-year-old Maya out of work and caring for her son Guy in San Francisco. In the two or three years covered by this book, she moves several times, even once back to Stamps, Alabama, and holds an amazing number and variety of jobs. She also learns some hard lessons about life and about herself. What a lot of courage and determination she had! And I admire her deep loyalty to her family, for whom she was willing to drop everything and help no matter what her circumstances.

I learned a lot about post-World War II race relations. I can see now how the fact that black people gained a measure of equality in the workforce during the war only to be sent back to pre-war working conditions after the war ended led to the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s.

I must continue this journey and read her third autobiography. I'm very curious to know how she ended up becoming a writer and poet. In fact, at times her prose in this book read like poetry. Looking forward to the next one, and highly recommending this one.