I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Mrs. Henderson's Store is full of families from Stamps, and everyone is listening to a radio broadcast of a boxing match between a Black boxer, Joe Louis, and his white counterpart, Primo Carnera. The visitors listen to the broadcast so attentively, rooting for Louis, that Maya and Bailey don't even dare to ring up sales. When it seems as if Louis might lose, Maya sees his defeat as if "it was [her] people falling" (135). In her eyes, Louis's defeat would confirm the stereotype that Black people are "stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated [them] and ordained [them] to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end" (135).

However, Joe Louis wins the match, and the people in the Store are jubilant and celebrate his victory as the triumph of a Black man over a white man. When the festivities are over, it is too late for those visitors, who live far from the Store, to go home. Knowing that they will have to leave the Store after dark, they had made arrangements to stay in town because that night it is unsafe "for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road" (136).