📍Stamps, AR 71860, USA
1931 – 1941“When I was three, my brother Bailey and I were put on a train in California with labels on our wrists and sent to Stamps, a small, segregated town in southern Arkansas, to live with our father's mother, Annie Henderson, whom we called Momma. She owned the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, the only Black-owned store in town, and it was the centre of our Black community. Momma sold everything there, from flour and thread to coal oil and seeds, and cotton pickers gathered on the porch before dawn and returned, exhausted, at dusk. Momma was tall, strict and deeply religious, and her quiet dignity in the face of daily humiliation by white townspeople taught me what courage looked like. Bailey was my greatest friend and protector. When I was eight, after a terrible experience during a stay with my mother in St Louis, I stopped speaking, believing my voice was dangerous, and for almost five years I was nearly silent. Back in Stamps, a gracious, educated woman named Bertha Flowers took me under her wing. She lent me books, read aloud to me, and told me that words mean more than what is set down on paper; it takes the human voice to give them depth. Through poetry, Shakespeare and the Black writers she gave me, I found my voice again. At thirteen I moved to San Francisco with my mother, and later became a dancer, singer, activist and writer. In 1969 I told the story of those years in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Stamps holds a complicated place in my heart, a place of cruelty and of love, and it was there, in Momma's store and on Mrs Flowers's porch, that I first learned the power of words.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today