“ If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.” (Angelou 4); is one of many vivid metaphors throughout Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that likens the experience of growing up as a black girl in the segregated American South to having a razor at one’s throat. In contrast to Angelou’s vividity, Lorraine Hansberry’s magisterial choice of words in the play A Raisin in the Sun convey important messages about family and worth such as, “[W]e have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he or earned it for us brick by brick. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or…show more content… Maya conveys in one passage that, “[Her] race groaned … another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. . . . This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations ... Only a little higher than the apes.” (Angelou 135). The image of “...yet another black man hanging… one more woman ambushed and raped.” (Angelou 135) almost shakes the reader to the core, just to think about how thin the line between salvation and despair is in the black community. This quote also further emphasizes her message against social injustice: that even though “the Black Bomber” may not win them the upper hand in the social order but the victory, proves to blacks in the Store that they are the most powerful people in the world and enables them to live another day with strength and vigor in the face of
