When Angelou was three and her brother Bailey was four, their parents divorced. They sent the children to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, and her son Willie in Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom the children soon began to call "Momma," was the proprietor of the only store in the black section of Stamps.
             During the cotton harvest season, Momma awoke at four in the morning to sell lunches to the crowd of cotton laborers before they began the day's grueling work. In the morning, the laborers were full of hope and energy, but, by the end of the day, they barely had energy to drag themselves home. They always earned less than they hoped, and they often voiced suspicions about weighted scales. For her whole life, the stereotype of happy, singing cotton pickers enraged Angelou. The laborers never earned enough to pay their debts, much less enough to save anything.
             . What is the significance of the sermon delivered at the annual revival?
             The black Southern church constituted an avenue for subversive resistance. At the revival, the preacher gave a sermon that criticized white power without directly naming it. He never mentions white people, but his diatribe against greedy, self-righteous employers was clearly an attack on the miserable wages white farmers paid to black field labor. He criticized people who give charity with the expectation that the recipient would be humble and self-belittling. The implicit meaning of his statement was a diatribe on so-called white charity. Often, white people would expect the black recipients of their "charity" to avoid all signs of having pride in themselves or their identity. The people at the revival could entertain fantasies of their oppressors burning in hell with the support of divine will. For the most part, they shouldered the burden of their disadvantages of poverty and discrimination with resignation, attributing their suffering to God's will. However, the black church provi...