Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store (c. 1900)

The William Johnson General Merchandise Store was the home of Dr. Maya Angelou from the time she arrived in Stamps with her brother, Bailey Johnson, Jr., in 1931 to the time she and Bailey, Jr., left Stamps in 1941. This site serves as the primary setting for the majority of the first 25 chapters of Angelou's autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The store appears on the 1913 and 1919 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, where it is marked "Confy [confectionary, candy store] & Soft Drinks." It was standing as recently as 1988, when Bill Moyers visited the site with Dr. Angelou for his television show Creativity, but it has since been torn down.

According to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Annie Henderson, the grandmother of Dr. Maya Angelou (then Marguerite Johnson) and Bailey Johnson, Jr., had owned a store on this site for approximately 25 years before the two Johnson children arrived in Stamps in 1931, placing the date when she acquired the store to be around 1906. Unfortunately, the 1908 Sanborn maps do not include this area of Stamps; however, in both the 1913 and 1919 Sanborn maps for Stamps, this area appears on page 7, where the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store is marked "Grocery and Restaurant."

Angelou gives a lively description of a day in the life of the store in Chapter One of I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings, which also describes the merits of the site for Annie Henderson, its proprietor, and for the Black citizens of Stamps:

"Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the lawmen in the lumberyard (east Stamps) and the seedmen in the cotton gin (west Stamps). Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time, insured her business success. 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. then she had the Store built in the heart of the Negro area. Over the years, it became the lay center of activities in town. On Saturdays, barbers sat their customers in the shade on the porch of the store, and troubadours on their ceaseless crawling through the South leaned across its benches and sang their sad songs of The Brazos while they played juice harps and cigar-box guitars."^[1]

The Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, referred to as "the Store" throughout Angelou's writings, has been torn down and is no longer extant.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Originally Published, 1969. The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou. Penguin Random House, 2004. Ebook.^[1]

Moyers & Company. "Going Home with Maya Angelou." Grubin, David. USA. Public Affairs Television, 2014. Accessed February 2nd, 2024. Web. <https://youtu.be/GY4w1qW1L6w?si=rmQowqxr1LA7IzTA>.

Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Stamps, AR (October. 1913), Library of Congress. Accessed February 2nd, 2024. <https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn00346_002/.>..

Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Stamps, AR (July 1919), Library of Congress. Accessed February 2nd, 2024. <https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4004sm.g003461919/?st=gallery>.