"I received no housing, tuition, or dislocation allowances. On the first day of every month, when the small manila envelopes of cash were delivered to the offices, I would open mine with a confusion of sensations. Seventy-five pounds, around two hundred dollars. In San Francisco, my mother spent that amount on two pairs of shoes. Then I would think, seventy-five pounds, what luck! Many Ghanaians at the university would take home half that much with gratitude. My feelings slid like mercury. Seventy-five pounds. Sheer discrimination. The old British philosopher's packet was crammed with four times that, and all I ever saw him do was sit in the Lecturers' Lounge ordering Guinness stout and dribbling on about Locke and Lord Acton and the British Commonwealth."

"The Ghana Broadcasting office was as to the Timesnewspaper office what a drawing room was to a dance hall. The lobby was large, well furnished and quiet. A receptionist, pretty and dressed in western clothes, looked at me so quizzically, I thought perhaps she knew something I needed to know.
She frowned, wrinkling her careful loveliness. "Yes? You want to talk to someone about writing?" Her voice was as crisp as a freshly starched and ironed doily.
I said, "Yes. I am a writer."
She shook her head, "But who? Who do you want to talk to?" She couldn't believe in my ignorance.

I said, "I don't know. I suppose the person who hires writers."
"But what is his name?" She had begun to smile, and I heard her sarcasm.
"I don't know his name. Don't you know it?" I know that hostility would gain me nothing but the front door so I tried to charm her. 'I mean, surely you know who I should see." I gave her a little submissive smile and knew that if I got a job I'd never speak to her again.
She dismissed my attempt at flattery by saying curtly, "I am the receptionist. It is my job to know everyone in the building," and picked up the morning paper.
I persisted, "Well, who should I see?"
She looked up from the page and smiled patronizingly. "You should see who you want to see. Who do you want to see?" She knew herself to be a cat and I was a wounded bird. I decided to remove myself from her grasp…Her smile never changed. "American Negroes are always crude."
I stood nailed to the floor. Her knowledge of my people could only have been garnered from hearsay, and the few old American movies which tacked on Black characters as awkwardly as the blinded attach paper tails to donkey caricatures.
We were variably excited, exciting, jovial, organic, paranoid, hearty, lusty, loud, raucous, grave, sad, forlorn, silly and forceful. We had all the rights and wrongs human flesh and spirit are heir to. On behalf of my people, I should have spoken. I needed to open my mouth and give lie to her statement, but as usual my thoughts were too many and muddled to be formed into sentence. I turned and left the office.
The incident brought me close to another facet of Ghana, Africa, and of my own mania.
The woman's cruelty activated a response, which I had developed under the exacting tutelage of masters. Her brown skin, curly hair, full lips, wide flanged nostrils notwithstanding, I had responded to her as if she was a rude White salesclerk in an American department store."

"I doubted if I, or any Black from the diaspora, could really return to Africa. We wore skeletons of old despair like necklaces, heralding our arrival, and we were branded with cynicism. In America we danced, laughed, procreated; we became lawyers, judges, legislators, teachers, doctors, and preachers, but as always, under out glorious costumes we carried the badge of a barbarous history sewn to our dark skins. It had often been said that Black people were childish, but in America we had matured without ever experiencing the true abandon of adolescence. Those actions which appeared to be childish most often were exhibitions of bravado, not unlike humming a jazz tune while walking into a gathering of the Ku Klux Klan."

Perhaps one of the most striking passages is the following, "As the flag[United States flag] ascended, our jeering increased…We were scorning the symbol of hypocrisy and hope. Many of us had only begun to realize in Africa that the Stars and Stripes was our flag and our only flag, and that knowledge was almost too painful to bear. We could physically return to Africa, find jobs, learn languages, even marry and remain on African soil all our lives, but we were born in the United States and it was the United States which had rejected, enslaved, exploited, then denied us. It was the United States which held the graves of our grandmothers and grandfathers. It was in the United States, under conditions too bizarre to detail, that those same ancestors had worked and dreamed of "a better day, by and by." There we had learned to live on the head of burnt matches, and sleep in holes in the ground. In Arkansas and Kansas and Chattanooga, Tennessee, we had decided to be no man's creatures…"

Throughout the book she continues to share the stories of the prejudice she encounters even in her own mother continent. Through all these situations and encounters, Maya Angelou has been able to build a stirring personal narrative comparing both the histories of Africans and Americans."