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In the fifth chapter of Maya Angelou's autobiographical novel / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, first published in 1970, a gang of white schoolgirls descends on the country store owned by her grandmother.
Before the girls got to the porch I heard theirlaughtercracklingand popping like pine logs in a cooking stove. I suppose my lifelong paranoia was born in those cold, molasses-slow minutes.
Earlier in the novel the grandmother was warned that a lynching was in preparation because "a crazy nigger messed with a white lady today," prompting the entire family to go into hiding. I would have thought the ever-present but usually unspoken threat of lynching a likelier source of the author's paranoia than the pranks and insults of schoolgirls.
But something else about the author's avowal of lifelong paranoia sits strangely. After all, paranoia ordinarily suggests a profound distortion of vision, an injury to one's very sense of reality, a habit of elevating trifles to fantastic heights of significance, a drowning of the mind in delusional fear. Normally, a confession of paranoia would discredit the report of a witness; but the 1960s were not normal times. By declaring herself a lifelong paranoid, the author did not undermine her own narrative by raising the possibility that it comes from a disordered mind; or if her mind was disordered by paranoia, it was a disorder from above, like blindness in a poet. By a stroke of paradox, the confession of paranoia even certifies the story's truth, authenticates it. One thinks of Rousseau in the Confessions citing a universal conspiracy against himself as proof and measure of his own authenticity.
In the cited passage from / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, "paranoia" catches the mood and idiom of the moment of the book's appearance, a moment when the fear of arrest ("being busted") was on the lips of a generation, and when the image of the System as a vast conspiracy-all the more sinister because this System had a life of its own, independent of human will and agency-was widely held. But one also heard that it's always darkest before dawn, that the gods of history were preparing the overthrow of the capitalist state even in the hour of its triumph. If paranoia as...