Marguerite (Maya) age three and Bailey, age four are traveling on a train to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their father's mother. The move is the result of their parents' divorce. Their grandmother runs a store she has owned for the past twenty-five years and the children live with Momma and Uncle Willie in the rear of the store. The William Johnson General Merchandise Store is the center of the Negro community in Stamps.
During the cotton picking season, men gather at the store and wait for wagons to pick them up and take them out to the fields. Momma (Maya's name for her grandmother) gets up at four a.m. to open the store. The men laugh and brag about the amount of cotton they will pick that day. The man who had picked.....
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