![]() ![]() Some neighbours saw how Bailey acted in front of white folks downtown and reported to Grandmother. It was a time when if a white person walked down the one paved block in town, any negro on the street had to step aside and walk in the gutter.īailey would obey the unspoken order but sometimes he would sweep his arm theatrically and loudly say, "Yes, sir, you are the boss, boss." When my brilliant brother Bailey was 14, he had reached a dangerous age for a black boy in the segregated south. They soon wearied of the sullen, silent child and sent us back to Grandmother Henderson in Arkansas, where we lived quietly and smoothly within my grandmother's care and under my uncle's watchful eye. My mother and her family tried to woo me away from mutism, but they didn't know what I knew: that my voice was a killing machine. I decided that my voice was so powerful that it could kill people, but it could not harm my brother because we loved each other so much. Out of guilt, I stopped talking to everyone except Bailey. I thought I had caused his death because I told his name to the family. The visit to St Louis lasted only a short time but I was raped there and the rapist was killed. Save for one horrific visit to St Louis, we lived with my father's mother, Grandmother Annie Henderson, and her other son, Uncle Willie, in Stamps until I was 13. I learned later that Pullman car porters and dining car waiters were known to take children off trains in the north and put them on other trains heading south. ![]() We had identification tags on our arms and no adult supervision. I was three and Bailey was five when we arrived in Stamps, Arkansas. ![]() They separated and sent me and Bailey to my father's mother in Arkansas. Neither wanted the responsibility of taking care of two toddlers. They even argued about how they were to break up. My parents soon proved to each other that they couldn't stay together. Vivian and Bailey left the contentious Baxter atmosphere and moved to California, where little Bailey was born. The Baxters said that meant he was just a negro cook. Vivian's parents were not happy that she was marrying a man from the south who was neither a doctor nor lawyer. The Baxter boys could not intimidate Bailey Johnson, especially after Vivian told them to lay off. He had been to war, and he was from the south, where a black man learned early that he had to stand up to threats, or else he wasn't a man. ![]()
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