Strange Incidents in Stamps

Summary

Hi! My next blogs are going to be about Maya Angelou’s autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” When she was three years old and her brother Bailey was four, they were sent to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother which they, in short time, began to call Momma and their Uncle Willie who was handicapped. Momma owned and worked at the Store were Maya and Bailey spent a lot of their time in. Throughout the years that Maya spent with her grandmother, she saw and heard about many conflicts between black people and white people who she viewed as non-human because of how they treated the Negros and because of their physical appearances. She also talks about Reverend Thomas (that Maya didn’t like so much) who sometimes visited them at the Store and about the experience he had once had in church. It happened on a Sunday,  Reverend Thomas was preaching when suddenly a women called Sister Monroe began to say “Preach it!” at loud and began to follow the Reverend across the church. After that day, they had called the event “the incident”.  

 

Quote 1

“Until I was thirteen and left Arkansas for good, the Store was my favorite place to be. Alone and empty in the mornings, it looked like an unopened present from a stranger. Opening the front door was pulling the ribbon off the unexpected gift. The light would come in softly (we faced north), easing itself over the shelves of mackerel, salmon, tobacco, thread. It fell flat on the big vat of lard and by noontime during the summer the grease had softened to a thick soup. Whenever I walked into the Store in the afternoon, I sensed that it was tired.” (p. 16)

When I read this part of the book, I realized that the author used many literary devices. When she compares the Store with an unopened present, she is using a simile. She is also using personification when she says that the Store felt tired in the afternoon. I think that she used these literary devices to make us understand better how she felt when she was in the Store and how much it meant for her.

 

Quote 2

"But I couldn’t force myself to think about them as people. People were Mrs. LaGrone, Mrs. Hendricks, Momma, Reverend Sneed, Lillie B, and Louise and Rex. Whitefolks couldn´t be people because their feet were too small, their skin was too white and see-throughy, and they didn’t walk on the balls of their feet the way people did—they walked on their heels like horses.

 People were those who lived on my side of town. I didn’t like them all, or, in fact, any of them very much, but they were people. These others, the strange pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren’t considered folks. They were whitefolks." (p. 26)

Black people have been judged and mistreated in many ways by white people. But not only have white people hated black people, but also black people have judged and seen white people in a different way. And in this quote, this is demonstrated. And it’s surprising that even a little girl thought of whitefolks as non-human because of how they looked and treated Negros.    

 

Conclusion

What I like about this book is that it shows real conflicts in which black people are being mistreated by white people but they confront the situation in a calm manner and are able to continue their lives as they normally did. I enjoy the writing style of Maya Angelou because she uses many details to describe her feelings, the settings and the people she is talking about in the book to make the reader have a more clear view of what she is talking about. I look forward to keep reading the book and to know what Maya is going to do if she leaves Arkansas.  

 

This is a picture of downtown Stamps, Arkansas around the years when Maya Angelou lived there.