career. It was the streets, ironically, that gave him the only legitimacy he ever enjoyed during his adult life.
In the end, however, as his mother, sisters, and a sanctuary filled with other friends, relatives, and admirers of his writing gathered in the east-side building to say good-bye, it was painfully obvious that the setting in his arena of experiences had changed. His corpse had been moved from a crime scene to a county medical examinerâs office. From the church, it would be taken for burial at a sprawling cemetery in Warren, Michigan. With no headstone to identify it, even his place in the earth would become an obscurity. Weeds and untended growth would reach up to smother the tiny, concrete grave marker, just as demonlike distractions, temptations, and vices reached up from hellish places to smother his brilliance and potential.
Maturing
I remember that I was much too young when I first started reading his books, probably in the second or third grade. I recognized people in my neighborhood who were like the characters in his books.
âRobyn Ussery, enthusiast
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Wham!
The shocked woman was stung from a blow to her face. A pretty, brown baby lay blanketed safely nearby in the snow, completely oblivious to the rage her mother directed at an unfortunate passerby who had stopped to admire the infant.
Wham!
Myrtle struck the bewildered woman again. It surely was not a scene one would have expected to witness in Evanston, Illinois, during the winter of 1934. Two white women fighting on a public street over a Negro baby? Actually, only Myrtle was fighting. The stranger was being thrashed. And actually, contrary to appearances, there was only one white woman. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Myrtle was, perhaps, even more European in appearance than Claudette Colbert, the Paris-born movie star whose Imitation of Life was in theaters that year. It was entirely understandable, then, that the passerby made the mistake of commenting about Myrtleâs firstborn in such an unflattering way. As Myrtle carried the baby wrapped tightly in a blanket to protect her from the extra chill blowing off of Lake Michigan, the woman approached her, thinking that the three of them shared a common racial heritage. When she asked Myrtle to see the infant, Myrtle proudly parted the blanket to reveal her daughter Ceoliaâs bronze face.
For a second, the woman was taken aback.
âOh,â she said. âIâve always wanted one for a pet.â
After sheâd gently placed the baby to the side, Myrtle commenced beating the hell out of the stranger. Under different circumstances, mother and daughter might have found their safety further jeopardized had anyone seen or gotten word of a nigger woman attacking a member of Evanstonâs more socially privileged class. As things resulted, though, the stranger was left simply stunned and in pain. Myrtle lifted her daughter off of the soft, white ground, brushed flakes from the blanket and continued on her way.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
The son of a farmer, George Baugh married Clairette Ford in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1899. They were both twenty-two years old. Born in 1909, Myrtle Baugh was the youngest of the coupleâs seven children. Another daughter, Arelia, died of a snake bite. The Baughsâ combination of European, Native American, and African ancestry gave Myrtle and her siblings their fair, often misleading complexions. Across the state line east of Arkansas, Mississippi held a connection for the Baughs, whether real or imagined. Approximately 400 miles from Little Rock was the city of Biloxi. It was there, ten years before her birth, that a venerated and reviled figureâwho would later be identified to Myrtle as an ancestorâdied on the Beauvoir plantation. One of the key figures in the Civil War, Jefferson Davis had returned to Mississippi, following two years of imprisonment at Fort Monroe, Virginia, after his 1865 capture by Union Army troops.
Jessie Lane, Chelsea Camaron