Low Road

by Eddie B. Allen, Jr.

  For a second, the woman was taken aback.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ve always wanted one for a pet.”

  After she’d 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 Evanston’s 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.

  * * *

  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 couple’s seven children. Another daughter, Arelia, died of a snake bite. The Baughs’ 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 figure—who would later be identified to Myrtle as an ancestor—died 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. 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 to vote were a part of the state’s social legacy.

  Many so-called colored folks might have viewed the Baugh family’s mixed ancestry as a blessing in the clan’s relative prosperity. Deceptively light-skinned and silky-haired, they could have easily opted to join that cadre of the black race that elected to pass. In fact, George’s nephew Ford would become a police officer in Little Rock during the civil rights movement at a time when it violated segregation ordinances for him to be a member of the force. Probably more common than was ever discovered, passing was a method of virtual disappearance from the oppressed class achieved by those whose European physical appearance enabled them to join white citizens in their homes, churches, and places of work. Particularly during slavery and in the immediate postslavery era, terms like mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon—all designed as indicators of the amount of black blood in their overall genetic makeup—were used to describe people of mixed descent. Each member of the Baugh household, including George’s mother, Sabre, had been identified as mulatto in the 1910 census, and Myrtle would come to accept the term in describing her family. How ridiculous, then, it would have seemed for a woman who fulfilled the necessary aesthetic criteria for passing to make rage on an unsuspecting stranger who’d unwittingly insulted her baby daughter. If there was any proclivity toward passing in the Baughs, however, it didn’t seem to show itself. Their neighbors in Big Rock Township were black or of similarly mixed descent. They worked, worshipped, and socialized in the areas of Little Rock that found black presence acceptable. And perhaps it was for the best.

  During the last six months of 1919, after the end of World War I, twenty-five race riots erupted in cities, both northern and southern, including tiny Elaine, Arkansas, not quite 100 miles outside Little Rock. That same year, nearly 100 people of color were lynched, commonly by hanging, a number of them veterans still in their uniforms. More than 360,000 black men had entered the military, many of those serving overseas in defense of a perceived American democracy. But, as with previous wars, upon their return and completion of duty, they held onto expectations of increased opportunities for themselves and their families. Instead what increased was the resentment of Caucasian citizens who no more intended to share their rights with niggers than they intended to share their wives. Mobs controlled cities for days, burning, flogging, shooting, and torturing their victims. Black men and women who showed any new inclination to retaliate or defend themselves were only met with an intensification of the white violence. Before the war, soldiers in Texas, located directly to the south of Arkansas, had caught plenty of hell. In 1906, after a group of ten to twenty unidentified men had fired their rifles into buildings near Fort Brown, an army base close to Brownsville, a police officer was wounded and a white bartender was killed. Without a hearing or anything that could be regarded as solid evidence, President Theodore Roosevelt dismissed 167 colored soldiers by means of dishonorable discharge. It would be sixty-six years later when a black
congressman spurred a review of the case that resulted in honorable discharges for all of the men. Yet, by then, only one remained alive: an eighty-six-year-old named Dorsie Willis. He had spent the remainder of his life sweeping floors and giving shoe shines.

  Living for the Baughs was, by comparison, uneventful, and they likely considered it a blessing. Myrtle enjoyed a relatively stable upbringing, in spite of the perils and hindrances of residing south of the Mason-Dixon. Few would have wondered what a railroad worker named Joseph Leonard Goines found appealing about Myrtle after she had matured into womanhood. Like the Baughs, Joe’s family experienced marginalization in a white-dominated society. Their small hometown of Jellico in Tennessee, Arkansas’s eastern neighbor state, bore no true resemblance to Little Rock’s southern municipalism. Situated not far beneath the Kentucky border to its north and 66 miles outside of Knoxville, Jellico’s population in 1900 was 1,283. It served as Campbell County’s banking-post town. Joe, like Myrtle, was of mixed lineage, with ancestors who were African and Native American. But his rearing was not as comfortable as Myrtle’s had been. Born in 1886, Joe lost his father Dudley in a coal-mining accident when he was still a boy. His mother, Julia, primarily raised him and his three brothers.

  Joe matured and became rather industrious. With his red-brown skin and oily black hair, he determined that he would claim Spanish ancestry rather than endure the treatment blacks received at a time not long past the strained final years of Reconstruction. The federal government had attempted to help the nation recover from the Civil War, in the process providing new opportunities for the formerly enslaved population, often to the continued resistance of white southerners. At least seventy-four black lynchings, which commonly consisted of shooting, hanging, and burning victims, were recorded in the South the year of Joseph’s birth. The Ku Klux Klan had been formed in Tennessee two decades earlier and made its terroristic presence felt there. But by 1892 when Joe turned six, black citizens of the state were responding to racial terror in more ways than one.

  On March 9, 1892, three prominent businessmen were lynched in Memphis, far southwest of Jellico, after defending their store with guns when authorities colluded with a white competitor to close down the black-run establishment by force. “Tell my people to turn their faces West, for there is no justice for them here,” were the last recorded words of Tom Moss, one of the lynching victims. A mass exodus of an estimated 6,000 Memphis residents to Oklahoma, which was among the newly opened Native American territories, followed the incident. Supported by the fiery journalist Ida B. Wells, who had been a friend to Moss, the departure was a major blow to the Memphis economy. But north of Jellico, several weeks before the Memphis residents began walking and traveling the 400-mile distance toward the former Cheyenne and Arapahoe reservations by whatever means available to them, black folks in Kentucky had also started to flee. Similar white terrorism had propelled their emigration, along with the western emigration of scores in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Georgia.

  Joe would later decide as an adult that he wanted no part of this sort of reactionary survival. He legally changed the spelling of his surname, Goins, adding the letter e to give the impression that he was of Spanish rather than African descent. There was a chance, he figured, that it would be read and pronounced as “Goy-nez.” If he were to catch hell as an English-speaking Spaniard, it would be a chance he was willing to take. Joe and his brothers left Tennessee when they reached their twenties, but they weren’t headed farther south like many of the sojourners who evacuated the region in the years before them. Joe and Thomas traveled to Michigan, while their eldest siblings made it all the way to New York before settling. Joe had begun supporting himself by working as a Pullman porter. Now people of color were moving in droves for a different reason. Partly fueled by the start of World War I, industries in the North were experiencing a tremendous economic boost. Wages in the South at that time ranged from fifty cents to two dollars a day, while the northern states offered wages between two and five dollars daily. During the span of 1915–1920, between 500,000 and 1 million black men, women, and children made the trek to this Promised Land that stretched toward Canada.

  By the time Joe met Myrtle in 1929, he had already married once. A son, Ralph Goines, was the product of his first union. Myrtle had not long rejoined her family after leaving school in Baltimore when she found herself in the same city with the man who would become her husband. Her father had added his southern clan to the hundreds of thousands who participated in the Great Migration—the Baughs were now residents of Detroit. Myrtle had fallen in love with a soldier, but somehow their engagement was dissolved. When the goal-oriented Joe, who was twenty-three years her senior, took notice of the debutante, she was still relatively new to courting and relationships. No doubt, he regarded her blonde tresses and beige complexion as physical attributes. She would make a good companion for him. By midyear, George’s youngest daughter had become Myrtle Goines. Joe and Myrtle found a home in a north Detroit neighborhood near the suburb of Hamtramck.

  With Detroit’s burgeoning reputation as the automobile capital of the world, factories created a demand for labor. Henry Ford had begun offering a five-dollar-a-day work shift to all employees, regardless of their color. The career opportunity, particularly as an alternative to sharecropping or domestic service, was appealing to many who remained in the southern states: The city’s black community expanded from 5,000 residents in 1910 to 120,000 by 1930. But it wasn’t all prosperous for the industrial workers as the years of the Great Depression collided with the Great Migration era. In fact, while Detroit was in the early stages of developing a black middle class, others who’d left their farms behind to seek urban stability could secure only low-wage jobs that limited their living options to crowded, low-rent districts that became ghettos. The October 1929 stock market crash devastated the national economy. In 1932, roughly half of the black laborers in Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia found themselves out of work, with one of every three families receiving public assistance.

  Despite the state of the national economy, an enterprising local group of Jewish young men were literally making a way for themselves. Detroit’s near northwest side was known as Purple Gang territory. The fifty or so thugs who composed this mob earned their keep through contract murders, kidnappings, bootlegging, and selling their protection to businesses that looked to secure commercial assets. During the ’20s and early ’30s, Purples became notoriously familiar throughout the country as the goons who preyed upon the gangsters. When broadcaster Jerry Buckley had nerve enough to start naming members on the radio he got popped at the LaSalle Hotel. Chicago cops suspected Purples had served as the hit squad that whacked seven members of Bugs Moran’s cartel in the blood-drenched St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 as a professional service to Alphonse “Scarface” Capone. But the charge was unproven. Still, few would have disassociated the gang from the dozens of bodies that kept turning up in the Detroit River. That same year, federal agents reported that 85 percent of all illegal alcohol had entered the country along the same water route. Joe, who’d been making plans to go into more legitimate business for himself, determined that he and Myrtle would relocate to Evanston. The city’s proximity to Chicago would likely reflect an urban environment well suited to his plans for building a customer base in dry cleaning. There, Joe and Myrtle began their family. On July 20, 1934, at 2:00 A.M. their first child Ceolia Marie Goines was born. She was named after an aunt on the Baugh side of her lineage. It had not been an easy birth for Myrtle. Clairette, who had joined her for the presentation of her granddaughter, complained to the hospital staff that they left Myrtle in labor for too long. But finally, Marie, as she would be called, was delivered following a cesarean procedure, as would be all of Myrtle’s babies. Marie was a blessing to her mother, and Joe even treasured the little brown-skinned addition to their household, despite the fact that her appearance more closely resembled his than Myrtle’s.

  Within a year or so, th
e family moved again, this time to Chicago proper as Joe and Myrtle continued working to become successful in dry cleaning. Occasionally, Clairette would take the train from Detroit and fetch her grandbaby for visits while Joe and Myrtle operated the store, which was located in Chicago’s South Side section. In 1936, Myrtle became pregnant again. This time, however, Clairette wasn’t taking any chances with the hospitals or doctors who hadn’t seemed to know what they were doing in Cook County. She apparently convinced her daughter to return to Detroit before having her second child. There, Clairette and George could see after her and help care for the newest Goines. That year, at 1:49 P.M. on December 15, Donald Joseph was born. Myrtle was twenty-seven. Joseph was fifty. Myrtle was thrilled to have a son. On the other hand, while he was much more fair in complexion than Marie, a middle name would prove to be nearly all he held in common with his father.

  * * *

  The Goines children would enjoy the same relative privilege that Myrtle and her siblings experienced in Little Rock. Marie was glad to have the company of a baby brother. The boy, who was given the nickname Donnie, would refer to her as “Wee Wee” when he was old enough to speak. In the earliest stages of their relationship Marie eased into her new big-sister role. One particular day, she was outside the house pushing Donnie in his carriage. In the span of a moment without supervision, her attention was distracted and the baby went rolling toward the street as a Chicago fire engine roared ahead. She never knew why, but though Marie was herself just a toddler, she suddenly had the presence of mind to turn around and quickly retrieve her brother. She gradually became a tiny yet reliable helper for Myrtle whenever Donnie needed watching. Meanwhile, the Goines family wasn’t the only one expanding. Myrtle’s sister Elsie D and brother George began bringing their children to Chicago from Detroit for regular visits with their cousins. Doris and Catherine were among the younger relatives who kept Marie company, though Doris thought Marie to be a “selfish little bitch” where their conflicting play habits were concerned.