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 s...