After the divorce of their parents, three-year-old Maya and her brother, Bailey, Jr., a year her senior, tagged like freight, arrive at the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, Momma Henderson's grocery and feed store in Stamps, Arkansas. Daily, field workers pass through the store to buy supplies, impressing the Maya character, or the speaker, with the anguish of their ill-paid labors. From the outset, the author demonstrates a humanistic sympathy for the downtrodden Southern black. Her skilled theatrical eye differentiates black misery as seen by soft early morning glow and later, by the harsher afternoon sun, which spotlights the field laborer's hand-to-mouth struggle against low wages, long hours, and soul-wearying drudgery. As a blessing on this near-slave level of subsistence, the author discloses Momma's simple pre-dawn prayer, a stoic litany which thanks God for one more day of life.
At age five, Maya, later singled out by Momma for her tender heart, is astute enough to realize that Uncle Willie's contorted body lessens his manhood. He appeases psychic pain by concealing his affliction from two strangers from Little Rock. As an adult, Angelou probes a greater denigration by conjuring up the "cement faces and eyes" of Klansmen "covered with graves' dust and age without beauty of learning," which symbolize the hatred of the most rabid of Arkansas racists. Uncle Willie, too lame to ward off the feared night riders, moans his helplessness from layers of potatoes and onions, which conceal his form in the vegetable bin "like a casserole."
