By Deirdre Guthrie
Five years ago he thought differently. He was living at Oakdale and Broadway, sharing rent with his companion Madeleine Floyd, and working at a public health clinic nearby. One night he came home from work, lay down for a nap, and woke with half his body numb. He’d suffered a stroke, and his left side has remained somewhat paralyzed ever since. “Now I need a cane and can’t make a fist,” Baker says, curling his fingers slightly to demonstrate.
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Mike Nonah, owner of the Apple Bite Mart on Broadway, remembers Floyd and Baker as “beautiful people” who came down to his store frequently for coffee, milk, pop, and conversation. “In my home country,” he says, “older people are not cast off or stuck in an institution. I think it’s shameful the way they are ignored here, and I welcomed their company.” But last year Floyd fell ill; Baker cared for her until she died last summer. Without her income, he couldn’t afford his rent and faced eviction. “After the stroke he had to quit his job,” recalls Nonah, “and that was already tough on him.” Ed Kelly, a beat cop who’s known Baker for eight years, agrees: “He used to come up to me with tears in his eyes, but slowly he rehabbed himself.”
Baker moved in last June. He says he feels safe now, and he enjoys bingo night and working out at the YMCA. There are adjustments: the residential street is strangely quiet. “It’s a ghost town,” he says. “Sometimes I look out the window for 20 minutes and don’t see a soul.” Sometimes he confuses the names of his housemates, particularly the white ladies who look so much alike, and he worries about slipping on the ice when he walks for exercise. But most of all he wonders what became of his old neighborhood. Baker hasn’t seen his childhood home at 43rd and Cottage Grove for 50 years. One afternoon we decide to find out.
Baker says Mosely was a rough school, full of gang members from the Deacons, the Hornets, the El Rays, and the daddy of them all, the Four-Corner gang. But Baker carried a .38, so they left him alone.
“Well no,” he says, “I came to see what it is…and it ain’t! That’s life in the big city for you.” He lets out a throaty laugh.
