Finally, months later, I finish this preamble to my family reunion excursion...
No Postage Necessary
We became excited fans, anxious and giddy, our cool resolve and muted wonder stolen by the sign that said “Stamps.”
“This is Maya Angelou’s home town,” Rosalyn announced, completely unconvinced about whether Aunt Marian and I knew.
“Oh, chile which writer is that?” Aunt Marian asked. “I know I’ve heard her name before.”
She may have been perpetrating ignorance for the sake of fun, as she had on much of the four-hour road trip from Dallas to our incipient destination, Magnolia, where the Story clan originates. Rosalyn and I, writers to our very core, wordsmiths, verbologists, linguisticats of the world, were thrilled at the opportunity to run down our shero’s resume and literary retrospective. We uncaged the bird, sang it, swung it, got it merry, flung it up to heaven until Jesus got the news and Aunt Marian had no choice but to comply with our lunacy.
“Chile she’s a legend, isn’t she girl?” Aunt Marian asked.
“We have to stop through here,” Rosalyn insisted.
“Of course,” I agreed. “You mean you haven’t before?”
“Well, I’m never driving through here with people who understand how important this place is and who want to take a tour.”
“Until now. Those people are just crazy,” I asserted, my right turn off of Highway 82 underlining my righteousness. We had a lot of nerve, shaking our slightly baffled heads over how anyone could drive past Stamps without going through it. Hadn’t everyone read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, like they were supposed to?
When we ended up in a rural town, we saw houses lounging on cinder blocks arranged by people who just wanted to make it work. In the time it took to decide to trust my sense of direction and reassure Rosalyn and Aunt Marian that I had it under control, we reached a small intersection that opened up into a huge avenue headed by a bank. The bank, a modest, lonesome citadel, forked the road in what had to be downtown Stamps.
“Chile it looks like everything is closed,” Aunt Marian said. “It’s only 5:30.”
“The work day ends early here I guess,” I offered. We drove down far enough to see a store that leased dinettes for $9.95 a month, or so the fluorescent fat lettering promised. The building at the end of the strip mall guarded the block with its faded paint spelling names of old meatpacking companies.
Across from it sat a traditional gas station with pumps too rusted to look willing. The only thing bothersome about the stillness was the lack of townspeople who could answer our urgent questions about Stamps, Maya, her people.
Until we came to a restaurant called the Stamps Café and approached the plainly dressed proprietress to ask if we could take a picture in front of her store.
“How are ya’ll today?” she said.
“We’re fine, thank you,” I greeted back. My cousin and aunt followed suit.
“We’re not open for business yet, but we will be early next week, so ya’ll stop on by.”
“Actually we’re passing through and stopped because it’s Maya’s home town,” I explained.
“Where are the people at, chile?” Aunt Marian asked.
“Gone home to supper by now, probably.”
“Has this always been the Stamps Café?” Rosalyn asked.
“No, we opened it not long ago. It used to be a different restaurant. The building is old though. Sign is the only thing new.”
We talked more with her and, soon after, her husband, finding out that the town used to be full of miners and packed with a population too enormous for such a quaint place.
“The one unusual thing about this town is that there is only one city in the entire country with the name Stamps.”
“Really?”
“Only one.”
Rosalyn and I soaked up this thrilling information. The woman may as well have said the sky would open up in a few hours and rain quarters on the street before us. Aunt Marian heard nothing of the sort.
“Ooooh, chile the mosquitos,” she said. “How do I take this picture? Jamal, honey I don’t know about this digital stuff.”
I gave her a crash course in Fuji snapshotting and then assumed my place beside Rosalyn beneath the café sign.
“Make sure you get the sign in the frame,” Rosalyn blurted.
“Do you see the whole thing in the display monitor?” I asked.
“The sign is important,” Rosalyn mumbled to herself and me.
“Yes, yes.”
We were being quite ridiculous, it occurred to me. Rosalyn and I had each scratched our heads in bewilderment before about idolatry, fanaticism, certainly the deification of human beings. She was, after all, a brilliant writer__the Story name not an accident but an auspice__with an extensive freelance reserve, a comprehensive reference book on black opera divas, and a second (if not first) career as an accomplished violinist at the Fort Worth Symphony. So she related to my confusion about the hordes of people ready to sell jewels, clothes, body parts to obtain a ticket to any one of the several concerts I danced during Madonna’s “Drowned World Tour,” and she understood how unnecessary were the sweat and tears of desperate autograph-seekers hoping to collect one from Cher during the tour I was currently on vacation from.
We had become those people we complained about.
“Let me see if it looks okay,” I said, not trusting that my poor aunt had absorbed the photography session I subjected her too.
“Why don’t I take one with all of you in it?” the storeowner suggested.
Rosalyn and I concurred with this gesture of genius.
Her husband then gave us directions to Maya’s church of attendance and we happily veered off to the right of the bank and made our way to the train tracks. The relative smallness of this part of town (or maybe the whole town) gave us few options for detour. We passed a fish market, which looked promising in light of the long drive, and made mental notes to come back. When we crossed the railroad tracks and saw Lake June, we had to slow down and take it in. We would have to stop back here too.
Then came the long houses flanking the street, modest homes secure on their cinder blocks, sturdy as the memories collected in the trees, the lake, the air of Stamps. Further down the road sat a white church of bricks, its weight augmented by the huge bell that appeared too lazy to ring without major urging.
“I thought the church was made of wood,” Aunt Marian said.
We discussed whether the town’s celebrity had finished the renovation, then we pressed on, mission-bound tourists, impressed that we would pass yet another church before making it to Maya’s.
“Chile these are some praying folks, I tell you, chile” Aunt Marian shouted. I laughed at how only she got away with using “chile” as frequently as most of us use prepositions. “Now, you know there aren’t enough people in this town for this number of churches but chile they are here.”
And so was Maya’s. It stood valiantly in the sun, a citadel standing between the prongs of roads bordering the large grassy welcome mat before its porch. It looked asleep, but alive with spirit, with praise cosigned by the sun. The slats of faded wood looked as if they might invite the saved, the sinning, the loved, the spiritually enlightened, the confused.
We had been all of these things at some point. I parked the car alongside the grass, worried that the noiselessness of Stamps might betray our stealth tourism. Houses were too near, people too obviously in them, Aunt Marian too suddenly excited.
“Go stand there so I can take a picture of you chile, go on!” she ordered.
“Okay but let me get some stills of the church first,” I suggested.
I turned into Ansel Adamas and began a photo session, checking for lighting, reviewing the shots in the playback feature of my camera. This would be helpful when going back to re-read Maya’s debut because now I had my own visual imaginings, her description, and the real thing.
“I wish I had the book with me,” Rosalyn said, getting into my head again.
I walked across the lawn and stood reverently on the concrete blocks that served as steps. I wondered if these steps had changed much since Maya climbed them every Sunday morning with Bailey.
As Aunt Marian took a few pictures, I felt a sensation of familiarity. When I was a student at SMU, I would routinely lock myself in my dorm and watch for inspiration a Ulysses Dove ballet called “Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven.” The six principals of the Royal Swedish Ballet evoked the ineffable angst of losing loved ones, and I always wondered what it would feel like to actually dance this close to God’s penthouse. When I started moving slowly on the porch, improvising to the quietness of the afternoon, I understood.
Rosalyn took photographs galore and left me with the responsibility of the car. I parked it alongside the shoulder of the road while Aunt Marian replaced me on the steps. When I began rummaging through bags in the car for more battery, I heard Aunt Marian’s voice resonate.
“Chile, it’s open! Ooh, Rosalyn girrrrrl I’m in the church. It’s nice.” Her voice trailed outside.
Panic. Were we going too far? Had we encroached on this space with no permission?
“Jamal! Nephew you need to come in here and see this! You two need to know about this church!”
“Rosalyn?” I began, but she was on it, long graceful legs carrying her to the church door.
“Marian I don’t know that we should be in here…”
We were going to be notorious. The residents of Stamps had certainly noticed, slowed the stirring of gravy on the stove, leaned forward in rocking chairs, interrupted themselves mid-sentence to wonder about the woman shouting audaciously in the church. Now singing in the church. Now clapping her hands in solo praise and worship. Now singing in several different keys. I stood there, guilt thick as Alaga, my fist engulfed and molded in the cookie jar.
“I just want to shout JESUS! Ooooooh Lord, Shine on me!” Aunt Marian sang.
Listening to her impromptu song, a stew of several random hymns, it then occurred to me that my aunt had been touched by the Holy Spirit. And as her a capella swung around the evening like a gymnast on high bar, the citizens of this special place would simply understand, continue stirring, rocking, and talking.
I, too, walked into the church and took in its age, the woodsy scent coming from the walls and the nearly nude pews. The remnants of praise and worship, like the reverberation of a strong chord, let us know that people other than my aunt had conducted service recently. Later, we discovered that Beetle, our family preacher, served as pastor at this church, a revelation that solidified our connection to Maya, validated our obnoxiousness, which up until now Rosalyn and I had the nerve to dress in a garment of elitism, stitched with justification that at least our common interest is a poet Laureate with a gorgeous body of work.
Parched and hungry, we drove around the church to a shack of a building with “Gilkey’s” posted on it. The three men sitting in the front were happy to answer our questions.
“No, this ain’t no store no more,” the fattest one said.
“Oooh, well as you can see we’re not from here. We came to visit Maya’s hometown chile,” Aunt Marian said, flirtation in her grin.
“She did a movie here or something back when. Family’s store used to be right on over there ‘cross the street where them trees stand.”
Our heads darted behind us in unison to survey the huge patch of grass behind the church.
“Where ya’ll from?”
“Well, we’re coming from Dallas, but we our family is in Magnolia, Arkansas, not too far from here,” Rosalyn answered.
The man continued right on pulling with his four or five remaining teeth as much chicken as the grease would enable him to. It deterred Aunt Marian none.
“Well do you know where we can get some food? We sure are starved chile.”
As the plump, but kind native gave some options, I asked one of the other men if I could empty my trash. He said yes, and while I did so, an old Cadillac bumped down the street slowly, blasting Jay Z, who was terribly out of harmony with the ditties that cradled this neck of God’s woods. I thought little of it until five minutes later, when they were driving the same direction on the same street, a de ja vu save the different song selection.
“Is this what the youth do to pass the time around here,” Rosalyn asked.
“Yes ma’am. They come cruising around here playing music loud, never too late though and they not trying to bother nobody really,” the thinner man answered.
Rosalyn, Aunt Marian, and I agreed that toting music of any sort was a far cry better than guns, anger, violence. We were relieved these things were missing from the energy of the ancient, sturdy vehicle. Indolence maybe. Aimlessness perhaps. But not violence.
We thanked the plump man, and something in the expert way he toothlessly polished the chicken bone made Aunt Marian beam.
“Well honey chile you have a good day now alright?” she said, the line of her cleavage dark as tree sap.
When we drove back to Lake June, Rosalyn and I pretended not to see the sign on the road.
“It says we can’t park here!” Aunt Marian said.
“I doubt anybody will mind too much.”
“Besides,” I said, “there’s a train crossing ahead so we’d have to stop anyway.”
Our disobedience justified, we pulled over and got out. I poised my camera, looked at the digital display of the sky, and realized it would be impossible to capture on film. The water, still, deep, and thick with silence had its own private agenda with the random things in it. The wind sent bits of long-ago energy to hopscotch on the skin of Lake June, which looked restless about what songs it would use to tease its lazy, floating vegetation. On the bank facing the street sat the façade of a house with curtains frozen at the point where they screamed through the windowless panes. From the riverside, we could see the fright itself; the entire house had been severed, halved as if the sky one day took its fingernail and sawed it down the middle during an emphatic complaint to the too-hot sun. Only the lake, the rocks and the lonesome museum-worthy tree trunk_tall as its pulverized neighbor but more beautifully disfigured__know the story.
I wondered as I looked at Lake June if these very sacred inhabitants of Stamps, as important as the people there, stayed with Maya Angelou when, after Clinton’s presidential win, she beckoned us to respect the rock, the river, and the tree. Of course I knew, even while standing in the generous mystique of Stamps, that rocks, water, and trees populate the world like words. But it occurred to me that if right here in her quiet hometown, I could be affected by their puissance, so could Maya Angelou.
. Too breathless from the moment to explain why I didn’t think pictures would do it justice, I snapped them. The train had long gone and our appetites ushered us into the car. I drove toward the highway, sure of where I was going and unafraid to get lost.
“Chile that was fun. I’m kind of glad we did that,” Aunt Marian said as we walked out of the store.
“Are you kidding?” Rosalyn asked, unsatisfied with my aunt’s even tone.
“It was incredible,” I blurted.
“Everybody should do this at some point in life.”
“Oh yes, certainly. It’s a must,” I said. And then, “I’m a better person than I was 45 minutes ago.”
“I can’t wait to tell everybody about this,” Rosalyn said with almost Broadway enthusiasm.
“Yeah,” I agreed, oblivious to the possibility that people might meet our excitement with courteous, closed-lipped smiles and concern that we might be losing our minds.
“You two are too much, chile,” Aunt Marian said.
“The rock calling the pebble hard,” I said.
But as we turned on to I-82 again, and I figured Aunt Marian was right, I knew Maya Angelou’s hometown didn’t mind. I’m sure Stamps was smiling back.
