Visiting Mr. Baines (By guest blogger Libby Johnson)

My name is Libby Johnson. Next week I will be traveling from my home in Ann Arbor, Michigan to visit a grave in Mobile, Alabama. On the grave is written “Unknown”. There is no name. The only date on it is the date of death; April 17, 1963. Every year at this time I pay the grave a visit. I would like to say a few words concerning why I do this, if I could.

I am a 94 year-old black woman. In truth, I am half white. I had a white father. A few years before my parents ever met, up until I was a young girl, my father worked on the piers in Toledo. He unloaded freighters coming in on Lake Erie. My mother worked as a waitress in a tiny diner near those piers. One day my father ate lunch at the diner and in so doing, met my mother. They had a nice, playful conversation. The next day my father returned to the eatery to see if the pretty, colored waitress was as captivating as she had seemed. He found out that she was. The young white man and the black girl soon became infatuated with each other. They would often rendezvous outside of working hours. About a year later they were married, against the advice of everyone they knew. About seven months later I was born. That was February 18, 1920.

In 1934 the Great Depression took my father’s job on the pier. I was 14 years old when one day he came home without a job. We were a little bit lucky in that our neighbor needed someone to work a farm just outside of Calera, Alabama. If we relocated there and worked the fields, my father would be paid $100 a month and receive a percentage of the profits on the crop. The farm was owned by our neighbor’s brother. He had gotten very sick and had moved back north. Times were hard and Father was out of work. We decided we had to go.

We arrived at the farm in the early summer of 1934. I had never seen so much open space. There was this steamy haze that seemed to hang over the fields. I remember the insects being much louder than I had ever heard them. The constant drone was almost deafening.

Our arrival did not go unnoticed in the area. With my mother being black, and my father being white, no welcoming party came to our front door to visit us with peach pies and angel food cakes. But welcoming party or not, make no mistake; word of our arrival spread far and wide.

One hot summer day a week or so after we had arrived at our new home, I asked Father if I could have a nickel so I could go into town and buy an ice cream cone or a soda. He did not see the harm in it and so he pulled a nickel from his pocket and off I went down the dusty road, bound for Calera.

I was about two doors away from the town drug store and its soda fountain when my left arm was grabbed by the big white man who had been sitting on a chair on the walkway outside his barber shop. Seated alongside the man were a couple of his friends. The large man told me that I was walking on his sidewalk and I would have to pay a toll. I asked him what the toll was and after a minute or so of thinking it over, he said I had to stand on one foot until he told me to stop. I thought he was just being playful and that he would make me stand on one foot for a few seconds and that would be it. I soon discovered how mistaken I was. This fat, rotund man forced me to stand still on one leg until my leg became weak and I could not stand any more. I remember all the men laughing as I grimaced in pain.

Finally I fell to the sidewalk, which really made them howl with laughter. Slowly I stood up and the man then said I had to do the same thing on the other leg. I told him that it hurt and I did not want to play the game anymore. In an instant the big man became furious. He grabbed me firmly, painfully, by my two arms, shook me as he shouted, “You little half nigger, you’ll do what I say or you’ll be here doing tricks for us all afternoon!”

I can’t tell you how terrified I was. I can’t describe it. I started to cry as I pleaded for him to let me go. But it turned out I did not have to plead for long. All of the sudden this big angry man released my arms as he was lifted out of his chair and was catapulted out into the edge of roadway, landing on his back. I do not know who was more shocked, him or me.

He slowly climbed to his feet, turned, and glared at the man who had sent him flying. I too gave the man a look. He was a slim white man in worn-out clothing and wearing a battered fedora hat. He was lean but strangely handsome with a rugged, weathered face and a three day beard. The first words he said were. “I think you owe the little girl an apology.” The words were spoken with rage, but they were not spoken loudly but rather in this confident hush.

The big man gritted his teeth, clenched his fists and came charging at his nemesis; the man in the tattered hat. The huge man took a wild swing, but the lean man ducked it easily, putting the larger man slightly off balance. When the bigger man turned around, his fists still at the ready, the lanky but muscular man was waiting. He punched the man in his large, soft stomach and when the giant man doubled-over, his adversary drove a knee to his fleshy face. In seconds blood was everywhere. The big man fell to his knees as the blood gushed from his face onto the sidewalk, creating a crimson puddle. The wiry man in the old hat looked down on the larger man and calmly mumbled, “I would hate to hurt you any more, so you do feel sorry for how you treated the girl, don't you?” The big man was unable to speak, but he was able to nod, and so that’s what he did; he nodded.

The lean, handsome man looked my way and in an almost kindly voice told me I could go, that the man was done bothering me. I was so terrified that I ran all the way home. I rushed in the door, fell to the floor and started crying. I was terror-stricken and trembling wildly. Mother and Father did not know what to do. I tried to explain what had happened but the words just would not come out of my mouth. All I could babble was something about “white men in town”.

An hour later I was still in the grip of panic with my mother trying to comfort me. My father had gone outside to do some repairs on the front steps. Then, suddenly, I heard this man’s voice coming from outside; the voice was calling out to my father, asking him for something to drink. This voice, its tone, instantly soothed me and lifted my spirits. But my father was angry about what had happened to me and I heard him shout at the man to “keep on moving down the road”.

I jumped up, threw open the front door and ran out onto the porch, and there he was; the lean, handsome man in the sad hat and old clothes. He was obviously a transient, on foot, and at that moment headed down the road. I quickly shouted a “hello” and gave him a wave, shocking both my father and my mother in the process. My puzzled father asked me if I knew the man and I said that yes, he had helped me in town. The man turned, smiled, took off his hat and sang out a friendly hello. I’m sure my father and mother were utterly dumbfounded.

He came back to the gate and introduced himself. His name was Jason Baines. Because he had come to my assistance, my father felt indebted to the man so he asked him to stay for dinner, an offer Mr. Baines could not refuse. Over dinner he admitted that he was traveling around looking for any kind of work he could find. If no work was available -and usually that was the case in those days- then he would settle for a meal. Mr. Baines also stated that he had been a professional boxer, but had since worked as a hired hand on farms. At the end of our dinner, as the men were drinking coffee, my father asked our dinner guest if he would like to stay on and help work the fields, after all, my father knew little about farming and could use both the physical labor, and any farming advice. Father told Mr. Baines that all he could offer was room and board and a few dollars every month, but if that was good enough, then he was more than welcome to stay. I still remember this handsome man glancing to each of our faces in search of his answer. He finally smiled and nodded. My day had gone from terror to joy in the course of six hours.

All through that summer I had this wonderful friend named Mr. Baines. In his spare time he taught me how to build a kite, and how to fish in the stream that ran near our house. He helped me identify the birds in the trees, and with his aid I started my own garden. Whenever we were near each other my heart would go a little wild. Other times I would think of him and daydream.I could say that this girl had an infatuation but such a confession would be a terrible understatement.

But I soon discovered that Mr. Baines could do even more. Back at that time I had an utter hatred of my hair. I thought it was frizzy, unruly, and I despised its reddish hue. One day I was examining my kinky thatch in a mirror. The loathing came out verbally, and in no uncertain terms. “Why had God cursed me?” I barked in frustration. “Why couldn't I have silky hair instead of this heap of ugliness?”

One evening a few days later, I was seated at the kitchen table reading a book when Mr. Baines came in, sat at the table across from me and with a needle and thread in his hands, began sewing a torn shirt. Very casually, very offhandedly he said, “Libby, I don’t want to overstep my bounds or sound too assertive, but I feel I need to tell you that I absolutely love your hair. I think it’s the naturalness of it. It reminds me of the beautiful hair of Jane in the Tarzan movie.”

My heart went wild, but yet what he said confused me. "But Jane is a white woman," I muttered.

Mr. Baines smiled and replied, "Libby, beautiful hair is like a beautiful person; it doesn't matter whether they are white, black, or a lovely combination of the two." He then stood up and left the room.

For weeks this 14 year-old girl was floating on a cloud. Mother and Father wondered aloud what had come over me. Never again did I see ugliness in my reflection in a mirror. And I was forever after proud of my not just my hair, but the light brown color of my skin. It took me several years to figure out that Mr. Baines had overheard me in front of the mirror, but I have no doubt that is what happened.

One day somewhere in the middle of the summer two well-dressed white men came by the house. Father did the polite thing and asked them to come in. The men stated that they were members of a “civic organization” and were given the task of offering our family $500 to leave the area. One of the men stated in no uncertain terms that there were citizens in the area who found the racial make-up of our family offensive. My father immediately became furious. He told the men that his family would not leave for $500, $5000 or even $50,000, and he wanted them out of the house. Father stated that they were offending him. I had never seen Father so angry, and I had also never been so proud of him.

One early evening in late September of that year, 1934, a frantic man came rushing up the porch steps and pounded wildly on the front door. My father had not yet returned from the south field where he had been working all day. But my mother was there, and in the barn behind the house was Mr. Baines. The man began telling some crazy story to Mother while I called in Mr. Baines.

The distraught man stated to us that four Klansmen were planning to beat my father to death as he crossed the bridge over the creek that leads from the south field. According to this agitated man, these men were planning to kill my father, soak some clothing in his blood, and then plant the clothing in the shed of a neighboring black farmer. The reasoning, said the man, was not only that our “offensive” family would be ruined, but the black farmer, who proudly owned his own land, would be tried and executed for murder.

Naturally my mother and I went into a panic. Mother was ready to rush across the fields to the bridge in the distance to warn my father, but Mr. Baines would not let her. He told her if she got there too early, they may kill her instead of, or even including my father, and if she got there too late, well, she would not want to see the aftermath. Mr. Baines told us to stay inside, that he would go.

I anxiously watched Mr. Baines run across the field to the small wooden bridge out of sight in the distance. I could not know it at the time, but I never saw the man again.

My mother and I waited anxiously for my father and Mr. Baines to return, to walk through the back door. It seemed like we waited forever. Two hours later the local sheriff knocked upon our door. He told my mother and me that three bodies and been removed from around the bridge. The sheriff stated that my father was not one of them, nor was Mr. Baines. Both my mother and I began crying in relief. The dead were all Klansmen, one of whom was the town barber; the man who had grabbed me on the sidewalk months earlier. It was later determined by a medical examiner that the three men had been beaten to death by, most likely, simple clenched fists. Later that evening my father returned home, alone, without Mr. Baines.

A few days later I asked my father why Mr. Baines disappeared; after all, he had done nothing wrong. Father said that Mr. Baines, a stranger to the area, had killed three people and he very possibly would not get a fair trial, but even if he did, he was now the hated enemy of the Ku Klux Klan, who would do everything in their power to get revenge.

Ironically, the Klan left us alone from then on. It was almost as though we had earned our place in the community despite our family’s racial make-up. Over the years we actually had a few neighbors stop by for friendly visits. I even found a friend; a white boy who lived down the road.

As the years went by I thought often about Mr. Baines. I wondered where he was and what he was doing. In 1943 I graduated from Cornell University. In 1946 I married Robert and we moved north, to Ann Arbor, Michigan where he was a college professor. On the way there we drove by our old house in Toledo. It was still there, though in desperate need of paint. In 1948 I gave birth to our first baby girl. We named her Leanna. Fourteen months later I gave birth to our second girl, Shauna.

The years continued to pass by, and so did much of life. The girls grew up while Robert and I grew older. In 1957 Father died of leukemia and in 1961 Mother followed him. Then came a Saturday in June 1963. I was sitting at our breakfast table with a cup of coffee in front of me, reading the newspaper. Upstairs Leanna was listening to something she said was soul music, The Impressions I think was what they were called. Outside in the driveway, Robert was washing his car. I turned to the newspaper’s third page and began reading an article about a white man who had been killed in Mobile, Alabama by a group of white supremacists. He had been there supporting a civil rights rally. The man was 66 years old, and was carrying no identification, but a coroner was able to determine by the calcification in his hands that he had likely once been a boxer.

My heart skipped a beat. I jumped out of my chair and ran out the door to Robert in the driveway. With words pouring out of my mouth in a panic, I told him that I had to go to Mobile, Alabama. I frantically showed him the article and reiterated that I had to make the trip. It was something I simply had to do. Robert could do nothing but smile knowingly and nod.

Two days later, the following Monday, my Greyhound bus arrived in Mobile. Before finding a motel, I traveled straight to the county coroner’s office. I nervously told the man in charge; an assistant coroner, that I was from Ann Arbor, and that I might be able to identify the man who had been killed following the civil rights demonstration. I explained that the deceased man loosely fits the description of a man I once knew. The assistant coroner shook his head and quietly said that the man had been beaten beyond all recognition and it would only be distressing to look at him. He then said he was sorry that I had traveled so far needlessly.

That night a bittersweet feeling came over me as I rested in my motel room. I was relieved that the man beaten to death may not have been Mr. Baines, but I was a strangely disappointed that I had not gotten the closure I was seeking.

The next morning I was set to travel back to Michigan when I suddenly realized that there was something I very much had to do. I returned to the coroner’s office and I asked the same man; the assistant coroner, if it would be possible for me to pay for the unknown man's funeral, as well as a grave marker. The assistant coroner looked at me as though I were crazy, but he slowly began to nod his head. He told me that if no one could identify the body and claim the deceased as kin, then my request could be granted.

As I was going out the door, the coroner asked me why in the world I would spend several thousand dollars on a man I may not have ever known. I turned around, smiled and said that I did know the man. That is; I knew him in spirit. And he was my friend, and he was, and always will be, my hero.

Now 51 years later, it is time for me to visit my hero once again.