Some of the boys'll be coming over here later.' Even after the slow drag of years, I remember the sense of fear which filled my mouth with hot, dry air and made my body light." - from 1969's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelou evokes natural forces 'Just like moons and like suns, / With the certainty of tides,' to demonstrate strength and the inevitability of her rise ('Still I Rise' lines 9-10). Read through the lens of the speaker’s defiance, then, a clear setting for the. Line breaks in brief quotes for poetry are indicated with a slash (/) and stanza breaks with a double slash (//). A crazy nigger messed with a white lady today. The speaker of Still I Rise speaks to America’s history of slavery and white supremacy, but she refuses to be defined by that history: Out of the huts of history’s shame / I rise / Up from a past that’s rooted in pain / I rise (lines 2932). Like much of Angelou’s work, Still, I Rise contains references to her own life and history, female sexuality, hope, and the struggle of African American people for freedom. From the side of the store, Bailey and I heard him say to Momma, 'Annie, tell Willie he better lay low tonight. How much more capable he would be with Negroes. 1.1 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) 1.2 And Still I Rise (1978) 1.3 Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989) 1.4 I Shall Not Be Moved (1990) 1.5 Paris Review Interview (1990) 1.6 A Brave and Startling Truth (1995) 1.7 We Had Him (2009) 2 Misattributed. Maya Angelou ‘Still I RiseYou may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may tread me in the very dirt But still, like dust. His nonchalance was meant to convey his authority and power over even dumb animals. The used-to-be sheriff sat rakishly astraddle his horse. "Late one day, as we were attending to the pigs, I heard a horse in the front yard (it really should have been called a driveway, except that there was nothing to drive into it), and ran to find out who had come riding up on a Thursday evening. Maya Angelou's letter to her 15-year-old self 04:53