YMMV / I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• Values Dissonance:
  • The three kids being informal with and interrupting Maya's grandmother (and the eldest girl flashing her by doing a headstand while wearing a dress and no underwear), makes the protagonist EXTREMELY mad is this. It's shown as a sign of the town's racism by having the children hold absolutely no respect to an elder, while modern readers (especially ones who live in the city), will see at worst as a bunch of kids being sorta rude to a lady with a granddaughter who hides in the store for some reason and hates on them.
  • Maya gets switched by her grandmother when the former says "by the way." Her very religious grandmother assumed Maya was taking the Lord's name in vain (thinking that it was short for "By the way of God"), but Maya only used it in the completely casual and secular sense to inform her brother of something she incidentally learned that day (that he had been sent some cookies).
  • Related to the above, Maya and her brother get beaten quite a bit by their grandmother and uncle. While it would raise concerns of abuse today, there really wasn't anything unusual about that back in the first half of the 20th century.