The Stamps Arkansas

She died at her Winston-Salem home on May 28, 2014, at eighty-six, having published seven volumes of autobiography and spent nearly five years of her childhood not speaking at all.

Her name at the start was Marguerite Annie Johnson, born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second of two children of a Navy dietician and a real-estate-agent mother. The parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother Bailey were raised in Stamps, Arkansas, by their paternal grandmother. At eight, in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, Freeman. He was tried and convicted; four days after his release her uncles kicked him to death. The silence lasted nearly five years. Her son Guy was born when she was sixteen.

The work took every form available to her: streetcar conductor in San Francisco, calypso singer at the Purple Onion, actress on the European tour of Porgy and Bess, journalist in Cairo and Ghana, SCLC coordinator, Pulitzer-nominated poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of the seven autobiographies, came in 1969, when she was forty-one. On January 20, 1993, she recited On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's inauguration.

Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier than any of that and follows the arc at the pace the catalog rewards: the grandmother's general store in Stamps, the Freeman trial and the muteness, the early San Francisco years and the Porgy and Bess tour, the Cairo and Accra years, the close friendships with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — the April 4, 1968 assassination fell on her birthday, and the book treats it as the central wound — the long Reynolds professorship at Wake Forest University from 1982, the seven autobiographies and the long catalog of poetry, and the 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Marguerite Annie Johnson of Stamps and St. Louis left seven autobiographies that the African-American literary tradition has spent fifty years writing into its centre.