A New Song from the Silent Years

In 1969, Random House published a memoir that would reshape American literature. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings told the world what had happened in Stamps, Arkansas, decades earlier — how, as an eight-year-old girl named Marguerite Johnson, she endured sexual assault at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. When the man was found dead shortly after, young Marguerite believed her own voice had caused his death. She stopped speaking entirely.

For nearly five years, she lived wrapped in silence. Not a word to her grandmother. Not a whisper to her beloved brother Bailey. The pit was deep, and the mud held fast.

Then a woman named Mrs. Bertha Flowers — the woman Angelou would later call "the aristocrat of Black Stamps" — stepped in. She invited the mute girl into her home, offered her tea cookies, and read poetry aloud, insisting that words were meant to be heard, not just seen on a page. Slowly, painstakingly, Marguerite began to speak again. And decades later, she gave that silence a voice the whole world could hear.

The psalmist knew this journey: "I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth" (Psalm 40:1-3).