Community
This memoir includes many depictions of community. For instance, Angelou finds herself in the community of the Civil Rights movement, largely in response to her discovery that her son had found community in a gang. Her desire for community leads to conundrums about her independence, like when she marries Vusumzi Make. Community has strings attached, she learns, so it is best to find a community that rallies around self-sacrifice.
Art as freedom
Angelou desires freedom from control, but in her life she often doesn't find it. Yet, although this seemed like a detriment in real time, she notices that it pushed her to writing where she found freedom through art. She speaks powerfully about freedom in her art, famously, because she yearned for what she could not have. Art is seen as an expression of her suffering. She is free when she writes, or at least she is free from the meaninglessness of her suffering.
Travel and objectivity
The travel at the tail end of the memoir provides a blank slate to judge her time in America before eventually returning. She contrasts life in Liberia (which means freedom, interestingly) to life in America. For one thing, being Black doesn't mean the same things in Africa as it does in America, showing her the truth about racial reconciliation in America—it's a lot more complicated and sad than many people admit. But, this objectivity shows her many, many things. It shows her the true diversity of the human experience.
Social norms and narratives
Angelou sees the ways that norms and narratives shape the reality around her. Her son doesn't just listen to her advice blindly; he reconciles her advice against the social norms and narratives he observes consciously and subconsciously among his friends. The mechanism for communal ideas is often belief or credence, and she explores that, noticing that there are serious risks. For instance, if people believe common beliefs without scrutiny, they can adopt harmful beliefs. She questions how many social constructs are actually helpful in the first place.