Chapter 1The Store

Foreword

For four years a girl in Stamps, Arkansas, did not speak. She read everything the Store and the school and the Texarkana drugstore rack could yield, and by twelve she had read more books than most grown people in the county. She had said them all to herself and none of them aloud. That is where I began — not with the voice the country would eventually know, but with the years in which there was no voice at all, and a child who had decided, on a piece of theological reasoning an eight-year-old should never have had to construct, that her own throat was a weapon she could not be trusted with.

I have written before about women who had to decide what to do with a public self — women who found language early and then found the country wanting a piece of it, wanting to borrow the voice for its own arguments. But I had never taken a woman who arrived at language by first refusing it altogether, who came up out of four years of silence and then spent the next seventy at microphones and lecterns and, at the last, at the West Front of the Capitol. The distance between those two facts — the mute child and the inaugural voice — struck me as the whole of American self-making compressed into a single life. I wanted to close it. I wanted to know what happened in the parlour.

I expected, when I started, to be writing about fame. What I found myself writing about was a store: a general merchandise store in Lafayette County with a kerosene lamp burning on the back porch and a King James Bible open at the cash drawer, and a grandmother who counted the day's takings the way a soldier counts ammunition. I had assumed the poem on the Mall was the destination. It kept turning out to be an echo. Everything the country would later hear in that voice — the weight, the slowness, the ceremony, the sense of a sentence being lifted rather than spoken — had been assembled in silence, in the back room of that store, out of Shakespeare and Dickens and the Psalms and the overlapping Saturday talk of cotton-pickers at a candy case.

The record I worked from was the public one, and it is a large record: the seven volumes of autobiography she spent forty years writing, the poems, the essays, the many decades of interviews, and the press that trailed her from a San Francisco cabaret to a State Department stage to a correspondent's desk in Accra. I did not work court or civic archives, and where the one trial in this book is narrated — St. Louis, in Chapter Four — it is narrated out of her autobiography and says so. I did no original reporting and I claim no secret access. I read what she left and what was written about her, and then I read it against itself, because a woman who writes her own life seven times is a woman making decisions about what the record will say, and those decisions are themselves the story.

What makes her worth a book is not that she became famous. A great many people became famous. It is that she is the rare American who let us watch language perform its oldest office in full view — take a person who has been silenced, first by others and then by herself, and hand the voice back. She is worth a book because she is the argument, made in one body across eighty-six years, that a voice is not a possession you are given but a decision you renew, daily and aloud, to be heard.

I came to her expecting a monument. I leave her having spent three years inside a silence, and I have come to think the silence was the more remarkable thing.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · The Store

In Stamps, Lafayette County, southwest Arkansas, the cotton-pickers came in the dark.

They began arriving at the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store at four-thirty in the morning, the men first, in coveralls that smelled of tobacco and night sweat, their hands cracked from the November frost or wet from the August dew, depending on the season. They came up the dirt path from the Negro quarter and sat on the steps of the porch and rolled their own cigarettes and waited to be carried out to the fields. A kerosene lamp burned on the back porch. The grandmother who owned the store kept the lamp burning all night so that the first man up the path would not have to fumble in the dark for the wick.

The grandmother — Annie Henderson, born 1877 in Mississippi, brought to Arkansas as a girl, widowed by the time she was forty, raising two sons, one of them crippled — was at the counter at four. She had risen at three, dressed in the dark, said her morning prayers under her breath while pinning the bun at the back of her head, lit the kitchen stove, set the bread, set the coffee, fried the salt pork, and walked the twelve steps from the kitchen door of her quarters at the back of the store to the cash drawer at the front of the store, and she had unlocked the drawer and counted the cash in it the way a soldier counts his ammunition. She had said her second prayer at the cash drawer. She had unlatched the front door at four. By four-thirty the porch was filling.

The store had been a fixed building for twenty-five years. Before that it had been a wagon, and before the wagon a folding table at a crossroads, and before the table a basket on Annie Henderson's hip, with peanut patties wrapped in waxed paper and pieces of saltwater taffy and the boiled eggs the lumbermen would buy for a nickel apiece. She had pushed the basket from the lumber yard at the south end of Stamps to the cotton gin at the north end and back, twice a day, six days a week, for fifteen years. Out of the basket she had built the table; out of the table she had built the wagon; out of the wagon she had built the store. By 1928 the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store was the largest Black-owned business in Stamps, and Annie Henderson was the second-most-respected Black person in the town, ranking only behind the principal of the Lafayette County Training School.

She kept a Bible at the cash drawer. She kept a King James open to the Psalms when the day was long and to the Proverbs when the day was difficult and to the Gospels on Sunday afternoons. She tithed a tenth of every dollar that crossed the counter to the Colored Methodist Episcopal church on the road to Texarkana. She did not drink. She did not curse. She did not gossip. She had two grown sons and a daughter-in-law she barely tolerated, and she expected very little of any of them and was rarely disappointed.

Her older son, Bailey Johnson, had left Stamps for the navy at twenty and had become, in the way of men who left Stamps, a stranger to her. He worked as a doorman in St. Louis and as a navy dietitian in Honolulu and as something he was vague about in California, and he had the manners of a man who had stopped expecting his manners to be tested. He spoke a kind of pretentious English. He read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch every morning over coffee. He had married a woman named Vivian Baxter — light-skinned, electric, dangerous — and had two children with her, and the marriage, by the spring of 1931, was over.

Annie Henderson had never met Vivian Baxter. She had received two letters about her and one photograph. She had said her prayers about her, twice, and had folded the photograph into the back of her Bible, and had said no more about it.

—

Marguerite Annie Johnson was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the second child. Her brother — born in February 1927, a little over a year her senior — was named Bailey Johnson Jr., and from the day of his sister's birth, Bailey Jr. could not say my sister. He could say My-a sister. The My survived. The a attached itself to it. By the time Marguerite was four, the family called her Maya, and her brother — who had given her the name and who would, for the next sixty years, be the only living person who could call her Marguerite without sounding pretentious — would call her Maya and My and, on the days he was rough with her, Ritie.

She was a tall, dark-skinned, big-boned child, with her father's bony hands and her mother's almond eyes. She did not look like her mother. She did not look like the ideal of Black girlhood that the post-war Negro magazines were beginning to put on their covers. She looked, by her own later account, like an awkward boy in a borrowed dress. The people in the store would say so. The aunts in St. Louis would say so. Bailey Jr. — who looked like a smaller, more beautiful version of their light-skinned mother, and who was beautiful in the way some children are beautiful all the way out to their fingernails — never said so. He said my sister. He said Maya. He said, in the dark of the back room of the Stamps store when she was four and he was five, that she was the smartest girl he had ever met, and that one day she would be famous, and that the people who said she was ugly were stupid, and that anyway he would marry her when he was old enough to marry, so it did not matter.

This, the architecture of her life: a brother who told her the people who insulted her were stupid, and a grandmother who hummed Bread of Heaven at the door of the store while the people who insulted her stood at the threshold.

—

The Johnsons' marriage — the calamitous marriage, as Maya called it long after both her parents were dead — collapsed in early 1931. The reasons were not made known to the children, and the reasons did not appear in any letter to Annie Henderson, and the reasons would not be reconstructed by Maya herself until she was forty years old and was sitting at a hotel desk with a yellow legal pad and a bottle of dry sherry. The reasons, as best she ever reconstructed them, were drink, infidelity on both sides, and incompatibility of ambition. Bailey Sr. wanted to be a man whose suit hung correctly and whose vocabulary impressed strangers; Vivian wanted to be a woman who could make her own money and answer to no one. Neither ambition was easy to forgive in a marriage of the period. The marriage ended.

In the spring of 1931, the two children were put on a train in Long Beach, California, and sent alone across the country to Stamps, Arkansas, care of Mrs. Annie Henderson. Manila tags were tied to their wrists. The tags read TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. Nobody wrote ahead to tell Annie Henderson the children were coming that way; the word travelled up the line ahead of them, porter to porter.

The children rode the train. They were three and four. The porter who had been charged with their welfare got off the train the next day in Arizona, and after that they rode on alone, the manila tags swinging at their wrists. Bailey Jr. was four. He held his sister's hand. He did not let go.

They arrived in Stamps days later. Maya remembered the buggy that carried them from the platform. She remembered the smell of the horse. She remembered the dust. She remembered, in particular, the manila tag pressed against her wrist like a piece of warm wet paper.

—

The first day in Stamps, Annie Henderson took the children behind the counter of the store and gave each of them a stick of saltwater taffy and a glass of cold buttermilk, and she set them on the store scale to find out what they weighed. Bailey Jr. weighed thirty-eight pounds. Marguerite weighed thirty-four. Annie wrote the weights in the back of her Bible, beside the dates of their birth, and shut the Bible, and went on with the business of the day. She had a store to run. She had two grandchildren now, in addition to a disabled grown son to care for and a roof to patch before the November rains, and she did not have time to mourn the marriage that her absent son had failed to keep together, and she did not have time to be sentimental about the manila tags.

—

The store had two rooms. The front room held the merchandise — the flour barrels, the salt pork, the cracker tins, the bolts of dress cloth, the kerosene lamps, the jars of penny candy, the patent medicines (Black Draught, Cardui, Sloan's Liniment, Castoria), the work boots, the burlap sacks of cornmeal, and along one wall the post-office boxes for the Black quarter of Stamps. The back room held Annie Henderson's living quarters and the children's bed.

The bed was a narrow iron bed under a quilt that Annie had sewn from feed sacks. It slept Bailey Jr. and Marguerite head to foot for the first eighteen months. Then Annie added a second bed against the opposite wall and the children slept apart. The children slept with the smell of the store coming through the door — kerosene, peppermint, lard, hoop cheese, leather. For the rest of her life, Maya would say that the smell of any general store anywhere in America was the smell of being safe.

She was safe in Stamps.

She was safe in the store.

She was safe behind Annie Henderson, and she was safe beside Bailey Jr., and she was safe under the quilt sewn from the printed feed sacks of the Stamps Cotton Oil Mill, and there were three things in her life of which she was certain, and they were the kerosene lamp on the back porch, the King James Bible at the cash drawer, and the hand of her grandmother on the back of her neck when her grandmother walked her up the road to the CME church on Sunday morning in a starched dress with a sash.

She would not be safe again — not until she was forty years old, in a hotel room, with a yellow legal pad and a bottle of sherry and a stripped box spring — and even then she would only be safe for the four hours she was writing.

—

That was the architecture. That was the inheritance. The store, the kerosene, the scale, the Bible, the brother, the grandmother humming at the door. Everything else she became — the streetcar conductor, the calypso dancer, the State-Department-sponsored Porgy and Bess alto, the SCLC desk clerk, the Cairo propagandist, the Accra correspondent, the friend of Malcolm X, the friend of Martin Luther King, the diner-host of the suckling-pig party that was never eaten, the writer of the autobiography that was banned in school districts across the country, the woman who in 1993 stood at the West Front of the Capitol in a black coat and recited a poem in a voice that tens of millions of Americans heard live and many more would come to know — everything else she became was built on top of the porch of the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store in Stamps, Lafayette County, Arkansas, in the spring of 1931, when she stood beside a four-year-old brother who would not let go of her hand, and a manila tag was at her wrist that read TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

The grandmother counted the day's cash in the kerosene light. The cotton-pickers waited on the porch in their coveralls. The first wagon left at four-fifty in the morning. The second wagon left at five-fifteen. The fields were waiting. The day was beginning. The kerosene lamp burned on the porch. The Bible lay open at Psalm 121: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. The grandmother hummed under her breath. The brother slept in the back room. The girl who had arrived with the manila tag at her wrist would, at four-thirty the next morning, get out of bed and walk on her bare feet through the door of the back room and stand beside her grandmother at the cash drawer and watch the kerosene lamp burn on the back porch and feel her grandmother's hand on the back of her neck.

That was the architecture.

That was where it began.