preview

Maya Angelou Stereotypes

Decent Essays

Stories and tales have risks that some rarely think about. To most audiences, they entertain people and bring smiles. What those audiences may not think about, however, is that stories can be dangerous. A story becomes dangerous when nothing can limit a storyteller’s power to manipulate fact. The difference between legends, myths, and folktales have become lost over the years. Legends originate from stories passed down person to person and contain small fractions of truth, myths come from beliefs shared in a culture rather than hard facts, and folktales originate from different tales or legends that have evolved into different variations. Although each of these have their own aspects, they all share in common the characteristic of lacking …show more content…

Stereotypes are generalized opinions or observations that are usually false, which shows how the perspective of outsiders affects the story. Not only is this stereotype false, but it causes Angelou to feel “inordinate rage,” which leads to controversy between her and the original teller of this story. Angelou feels this rage because she opposes the spreading of false information about her “fellow Blacks” to audiences who would most likely only hear that one side to the story. At the end of this quote, Angelou provides her audiences with imagery that shows the truth in the lives of these supposedly “gay song-singing cotton pickers.” If Angelou were to retell this story, it would not highlight how the cotton pickers enjoy their jobs and lives, but rather the pain and injuries that they are forced to endure as slaves. This shows how different stories would be after hearing from two sides. It also displays the dangers of a story when storytellers and audiences are unable to see the dilemma that slaves in the South face. A metaphor that conveys the difficulty that some may go through in order to repair informational damage caused by storytellers comes from Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She writes, “The odors of onions and oranges and kerosene had been mixing all night and wouldn’t be disturbed until the morning air forced its way in with the bodies of people who had walked miles to reach the pickup place” (Angelou 7).

Get Access