I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Point Of View

Maya Angelou’s occupation Conductorrette from I know Why the Caged Bird Sings is written in the first-person point of view. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old black girl. She wants to find a job that will suit her age but that will also be one the really has an interest for. The narrator decides she wants to be the first Negro on the San Francisco streetcars. Getting the job, however, wasn’t an easy task, and neither was having to deal with the discrimination of her co-workers. In the beginning, we see the protagonist struggling with the rejection from her mother as she tells her what she’d like her job to be. Her mother tells her that colored people would not be accepted on the streetcars. The protagonist begins feeling disappointed, and this quickly escalates into the feeling of anger. These feelings motivate the main character to wanting to break the tradition of black people not being allowed on the streetcars. However, even though her mother was not very supportive at first, the narrator is focused on her goal of becoming a conductorrette and even describes how she would look like and what it would be like if she became one.
As the protagonist walks into the offices of the Market Street Railway Company she seems disillusioned by the appearance of the lobby and the reception, but says she will not judge upon the first impression. The narrator then tells the receptionist about how she is there to apply for a job. The receptionist seems to act clueless about what the girl is talking about. This makes the protagonist feel a bit uneasy about the receptionist’s attitude. She puts the pieces together and realizes that the receptionist was only being hard on her because she was black and the receptionist was