Low Road (2 page)

To say his offer was unexpected wouldn't accurately capture the feeling. Probably the last thing I imagined I'd hear before returning to Detroit that day was that this easygoing broadcast exec was related to the man responsible for
Dopefiend, Black Girl Lost,
and
Eldorado Red.
I couldn't imagine their seemingly incompatible personas having anything to do with one another. But I guess I processed it all rather quickly.

I had considered writing a biography on another subject prior to our meeting, though under more ordinary circumstances. It moved me that Charles thought enough of my character, not to mention my abilities, that he would trust me to tell his uncle's story. I accepted the invitation and we agreed to get together for as many meetings and exchanges of information as it took for me to create a written account of the Goines legacy. What followed was approximately two years of research.

The work that resulted is largely based on a series of interviews with Charles; his mother, Marie Richardson; his aunt, Joan Coney; and other family members, friends, and associates of Mr. Goines and the Goines family. Investigative research of the author's life was also used but was hindered in many cases because of the destruction of state and federal records, along with delays in compliance with requests for public information. In various places, dialogue is re-created based on recollections given during interviews.

I pray that this work accurately reflects the people, places, events, and accomplishments that characterized Mr. Goines's life. May it resonate in the hearts of his readers and admirers as confirmation of his intelligence and creative brilliance, in spite of his conspicuous flaws. May it be added unto the truth of his significance as one of the most important contributors to urban contemporary literature and popular culture.

Prelude: Death in Retrospect

 

The biggest, baddest, motherfuckin' gangster in history. That's who he'd wanted to be. Young men in his day dreamed of playing in the National Football League. Dreamed of signing a contract with Motown. Even dreamed of leading their people to freedom. He dreamed of being lawless and untouchable.

Eventually, he became the Godfather of display racks, bookshelves, and flashlights under children's bed covers. Now Donnie lay on his back, eyes closed, in a decorated casket, paperback novels tucked beneath his arms. The cause of death was a shotgun wound to the skull, an autopsy report stated. The back of Donnie's head had to be reshaped by morticians so his corpse looked more presentable.

It had been a very long thirty-seven years. Now, he would rest.

Sobs and organ music created eerie sounds around him. Several women buried their heads in the chests and shoulders of their husbands as they filed into the church, down the aisles, and to the place where his body rested. Donnie had touched some of them more deeply than their men previously knew. But absent from the services was Mary, the only woman who'd ever caused him to show himself emotionally vulnerable. A young prostitute, she'd become pregnant and pleaded with Donnie to let her give birth to the child, which she was confident belonged to him. Infuriated by the sentimentalism, he forced her to have an abortion. He believed in putting his bitches to work, and there was no such thing as maternity leave on Woodward Avenue.

She never survived the procedure. Never even left the clinic.

Two lives were cancelled, instead of one. Donnie agonized over his guilt. He hurt inside.

It was not long, though, before he was back on the streets with a vengeance. He went underground, where grief and sensitivity were weaknesses and ruthlessness was tantamount to survival. Raising hell became an art form when anyone crossed him. It was the only way to show nonbelievers who the fuck they were dealing with. It was the streets, ironically, that helped stage Donnie's brief but memorable literary 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 examiner's 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.

—Robyn Ussery, enthusiast

 

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 Myrtle's 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 Ceolia's bronze face.

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.