Many of the works of Maya Angelou present characters that display an indomitable spirit, enabling them to triumphantly go on even in the face of various obstacles. Most of the characters are people who are close to Angelou, or even Angelou herself.
"Willie," is just one of the many poems written by Angelou that I enjoyed. This poem is a character sketch about a crippled man named Willie. The whole poem is very positive. Willie talks about that after he dies he will live on in many different ways. People would tell Willie "You cant live through this another day." Willie's reply was "I"m living in the games that the children play." To me, this was one of the most positive lines in the poem. In today society it is hard for handicapped or crippled people to be positive. Others always put them down. Willie has a lot of will power to live but when he dies he wants people to remember him.
Along with all the poems Angelou wrote she also wrote a series of books that sum up her life. " I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," published in 1970, is the first book of the series that describes the first seventeen years of Angelou's life. In "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Angelou describes her coming of age as an intelligent but insecure black girl in the American South during the 1930's. This is a time where segregation is still big. The main character in this story is Maya Johnson or in another words, Maya Angelou. Maya goes threw a lot of trouble in her life. When Maya is three years old her parents divorce and ship Maya and her older brother, Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie, in Stamps, Arkansas. Annie runs the only store in the black section of stamps and becomes the central moral figure in Maya's childhood. As most young children, Maya struggled with the pain of having been rejected and abandoned by her parents. Maya also find herself tormented by the belief that she is an ugly child who will never measure up to the well-mannered, white girls.
