Maya Angelou: Stamps, Arkansas and the Silence That Became a Book

Maya Angelou arrived in Stamps, Arkansas, as a small child, sent by train with her brother Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. Henderson ran a general store in the Black section of Stamps, a rigidly segregated town in Lafayette County in the southwest corner of the state. This was the nineteen twenties and early thirties. The store sat at the center of the Black community's informal economy, and Henderson managed it and the family with a precision her granddaughter would remember for the rest of her life.

When Angelou was seven, she was sexually assaulted by a man known to the family. She told her brother. The man was subsequently killed, reportedly by her uncles. The child believed that her words had caused his death, and she stopped speaking. For nearly five years she communicated only through notes and gestures, a self-imposed silence that persisted until a woman named Bertha Flowers began lending her books and reading to her, and something in the language of great literature returned the voice the child had locked away.

Angelou would later write about all of it in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," published in nineteen sixty-nine. The book is one of the most widely read autobiographies in American literature. Its Stamps sections render the texture of Black life in Depression-era Arkansas with a specificity that no secondary history can match: the smell of the store, the names of the neighbors, the particular quality of the fear that structured daily life under segregation, and the particular quality of dignity that the community maintained within it.

Angelou went on to become a poet, memoirist, actress, and national figure of American letters. She returned to the South in many forms over the course of her life. She never entirely left Stamps.