I am Baybie

The stories of the Rev. Baybie Hoover and her Deaconess of Music, Virginia Brown, have haunted me since I first met them singing on the streets of New York. Baybie had few, if any, reasons to be grateful about life. Her childhood was marked by a succession of tragedies. Blinded at birth by a drunken doctor, she was later molested by a foster father, became pregnant and her daughter was sold into adoption against her will. Yet the few people in her life, those she met on the street and the six who attended her small church in an abandoned storefront in Brooklyn brought her joy. Baybie was always grateful for the little she had and rarely judged those visiting misery on her. I had never met anyone who saw life and the people she encountered with such generosity of spirit. Just being in her company made me ashamed of any self-pity I had ever felt or expressed.

Only by putting her story into words could I ever hope to fully recall the grace and gratitude this woman brought into peoples' lives. I Am Baybie though based in fact it should be understood as a work of fiction. For readers, a website of their music and images from their lives is available from within the book.