Selling Food to Laborers
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Poet Maya Angelou was born in 1928 in St. Louis be she spent the majority of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas where she lived in the rear of the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store with her grandmother and uncle. Her grandmother saved the capital necessary to start the store selling food to laborers in the town’s saw mill and cotton gin located at opposite ends of town. “Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time assured her business success,” says Angelou. “From being a mobile lunch counter, she set up a stand between the two points of fiscal interest and supplied the workers’ needs for a few years” until she had the capital to build a store in the center of Stamp’s black section of town. The store provided black residents an escape from the often hostile public spaces and a place to relax and share.
