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The surrender of Davis’s best general, Robert E. Lee, a month earlier in Virginia had effectively ended the struggle between North and South. Davis, a former Mississippi senator who was elected president of the Confederate States of America in 1861, continued to advocate the right of eleven territories to secede from the Union until his death in 1889. Another right he advocated, like countless numbers of other southerners, was that of white landowners to maintain slaves as property. Davis continued believing in Caucasian racial superiority long after his northern nemesis, Abraham Lincoln, issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
    Myrtle and her siblings were told, however, that an enslaved woman called Fannie had been taken by the twice-married Davis as a concubine. They learned few details of any sort, whether Fannie had been taken by force or willingly, but were informed as fact that she bore a son and a daughter by the statesman. They were told the daughter, also named Fannie, was Clairette’s mother. It was a curious thing to believe since no record of the servant Fannie appeared to exist in any of the Davis estate documents or in the will he left behind. Nonetheless, it would not have been the first time in the history of American chattel slavery that a plantation owner conceived with one of his servants. The absence of Fannie’s name in Warren County, Mississippi, slave schedules or other property lists did not necessarily rule out her existence at the Davis estate, particularly since servants often were only identified by their numeric presence at the slave owner’s residence. Neither proud, nor ashamed of their purported relation to one of the most infamous racists in history, the Baughs simply accepted his ancestry as a part of who they were. Myrtle would later tell her children about “old Jeff Davis” when discussing their lineage.
    During Myrtle’s childhood, Little Rock was not unlike many other southern cities. Segregation was the law of society. Arkansas Baptist College was the choice for advancement in higher education among the “colored” students of the city, while whites had various options. Agriculture was largely a way of life. Sharecropping was common in the black community. Often, farmers in the region tended what were called “truck patches,” crop gardens designed not for distribution and profit but for the sustenance of individual families and households, which frequently contained hungry children. It wasn’t uncommon for boys to be pulled out of school in the early grades, like third or fourth, in order to help work the soil at home. Girls generally attended classes a bit longer but were also required to assist with the crop gathering. Cotton was a primary source of the economy of the land. It had to be picked and chopped.
    Life was a little different, however, for Myrtle and her siblings living in the Big Rock Township section of the city. George worked as a boilermaker and a porter, and Clairette, as a cook at a Little Rock Catholic school, then later a maid. Catholicism became a significant force in the lives and education of their children as well. Sadie, whom the family called Regina, Myrtle’s oldest sister, found her way to Baltimore when she was about sixteen or seventeen years old. There, she joined a convent and eventually became a boarding-school teacher. George and Clairette put aside money to send Myrtle to attend classes there. It was a relatively stable existence the Baughs had managed to create for themselves and their offspring, considering that the parents were just one generation removed from slavery. Living in a former Confederate state that held folks like old Jeff Davis in great esteem made their modest achievements all the more remarkable. Like much of the region, Arkansas would demonstrate plenty of unbridled racism, some deadly, for years to come. Segregated streetcars and poll taxes designed to hinder the ability of blacks