When people die, their good can inflate to fill the sky, fill the screens, and so they are everywhere for a few days. Which is how we've been learning so much about Maya Angelou this past week, how the glorious tribute from her son, Guy Johnson, also a writer, is in many links. He said the kind of thing you might hear from a child in a eulogy but in this case he said it while she could still hear it: How was it growing up in your mother's shadow, Oprah asked? I grew up in her light, he said.
His tribute matters most but the others are remarkable too, including "Maya and Me and Maya" by Charles Blow in the May 28, 2014, NY Times. "The news of Maya Angelou’s death arrived with the abruptness of a great twister — violent, without warning, tearing things up and flipping things over." And that's just his lede.
It got me started on a search for Stamps, Arkansas. Stamps, as in my children's last name, as in my late husband's. Late? As if he's just behind schedule?
Charles Blow was from a small town about 50 miles from Stamps, which was where Maya Angelou (née Marguerite Annie Johnson) lived with her grandmother from the age of three to seven and again a few years later during the period when she did not speak (rendered mute after being raped at age 8 by her mother's boyfriend who was subsequently murdered--"[a] breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart," she wrote, none of which should be in parenthesis).
So I looked Stamps up and, yes, the Stamps for whom that little town (pop. ~2000) is named is descended from Thomas Stampe, who arrived in Jamestown, VA, in 1635 from Oxfordshire, England, the same ancestor of said husband and those children.
In any precise mapping, it's not really a connection at all but it's the way my mind works, always searching for another anchor, another way to tie everything to everything. And so in the subtle world, where faint lines reach across generations, across boundaries, in the vessel that contains all that is and was, a hamlet in Arkansas connects my daughters, their cousins, my grandsons, my in-laws to Maya too.
A distant cousin (someone with a genealogical bent could do the math) likely knew of Maya's grandmother in Stamps, extrapolating from this line in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings:
Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the sawmen in the lumberyard and the seedmen at the cotton gin. 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.
The races were segregated and without a lot more research I cannot find the clickable link, the node that connects the Stamps family to her directly, but they breathed the same dust in that corner of Arkansas, just across the Texas and Louisiana borders.
