BAIRD, Margarite Frances (1890 - 1970)
From Gauss and his Children
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- a.k.a. Peggy Johns, Peggy Cowley
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Biography
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Obituary
Our Peggy who was so much a part of our lives these last ten years, died peacefully Sept. 23 around supper time and was buried in our parish cemetery not far from the Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli. I was in England when she died and did not get home for the funeral.
She had said to me before I left, "It takes so long to die." It was nearest thing to a complaint she ever made. She was much beloved by all the community at Tivoli. I had known her since I was twenty years old when I went to Washington with her to picket with the suffragists in front of the White House, more because of our interest in the treatment of prisoners than any interest in the vote. We were both anarchists in our own ways, even then. She was seven years older than I, knew all the literary crowd around Greenwich Village, had been married to Orrick Jonns who died before I met her[1] and was not yet married to Malcolm Cowley.
She was an ideal cellmate and we spent sixteen days at Occoauan Workhouse and the Washington, D.C. jail, sentenced to thirty days, but pardoned by President Wilson after we had served sixteen of them. We were on hunger strike for the first ten days. I have written about this in more detail in my book, The Long Loneliness.
There were long lapses of time in our friendship. Peggy had a timeless quality which meant that coming and going, as I was, from Chicago and New Orleans, and various other places, I usually was her guest when I arrived back in New York. It was she who persuaded me to buy a beach bungalow on Staten Island after I sold my first book to the Boni Brothers.
The movie rights were bought by Pathe for five thousand dollars which the publishers, a struggling firm, and I shared.
I can never forget the spring day that we found the little house which was the scene of my conversion to the Church. Peggy wandered up and down the beach collecting not only shells but also the clams which the bait diggers dug up.
That was a new aspect of Peggy to me. Knowing her in jail, in the coffee house of the old Brevoort, in Greenwich Village, and now on the beach, I found in her a quality which remained with her through life--an intense love of nature, and so personal a contact with it that she made others see this beauty. It was a beauty which she integrated into her life. For instance, we washed and stewed those clams for supper that night, we enjoyed the earliest spring flowers she found in the woods on our way back to New York. If anyone ever lived and enjoyed the present moment, it was Peggy. With her happy temperament, she savored every moment.
She was by that time married to Malcolm and they too found a little house on Woodrow Road from which Malcolm could commute to work, and where he had the quiet to do the reviews and essays which brought him fame as a man of letters within a few years. Peggy was a tumultuous housekeeper but a very good cook and a perfect gardener. She had been making plans for gardens ever since we had that spring day on Staten Island, and I was amazed to see the garden materialize. Within one summer she had made what was practically a wasteland adjoining the house she and Malcolm lived in, into something which rivaled the botanical gardens in beauty. It might have come out of the House and Garden magazine. Herbs and flowers--everything grew under her long able fingers. She was surrounded there, as she was at our farm in Tivoli, by her beloved cats, her books, her flowers, and of course her friends.
I do not remember how long Peggy and Malcolm lived on Staten Island--maybe three years--and I saw her often of course. But when they moved upstate New York, life began to change for both of us; for me, because of my conversion to Catholicism, and for Peggy because of her divorce from Malcolm, her life with Hart Crane in Mexico, and a subsequent marriage that took her to Washington, D.C. and later Atlanta. It was not until the Catholic Worker had been in existence for over twenty years that I saw Peggy again. For the last fifteen years, she lived with us, first on the Peter Maurin Farm and the last five years at Tivoli. She was the same Peggy, happy, serene, lover of beauty. She bought flowers for the altar of our little chapel for feast days, and saw to it that we had a well-planned and well-tended flower garden. Just yesterday I picked a lovely little bouquet of marigolds and asters and put them on the altar while we said Compline.
Once while I was travelling she wrote me a letter thanking me for not trying to convert her. I noticed that she joined saying the Angelus before meals as we used to do when we were a smaller group and more of a family than a hospice on the land. The concluding prayer of the Angelus is this:
"Pour forth we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts, so that we to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an Angel, may by His passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection."
"Better be careful when you say that prayer," I told her. "God takes us at our word." I was quoting two people actually. John McKeon once said, "Does anyone mean what he is saying?" And Fr. Roy said, "God takes us at our word."
Once she said to me that she would like to be buried with the "rest of the Catholic Worker crowd" in the little cemetery on Route 9G where Monsignor Kane has given us a plot. It was Fr. Jack English who confronted her with the question as to why she did not receive communion with us. She had decorated our chapel with flowers every Christmas and Easter for a good many years. "Why not?" was her answer to that, and Fr. Jack got her baptismal certificate from the church in Babylon, L.I. where she had been baptized as a child. After preliminary instruction, she received communion with all of us at the farm, from then on, until she died. As often as she could, she came to the chapel, but towards the last she had to sit in her wheel chair up near the altar.
It seems often that for the younger one, babies and little ones, there is no generation gap. All her life Peggy babysat for her friends. Children loved her and her cats. She loved to dig in the dirt as they did. But the older young ones loved her too. Jeff Rudick, a twenty one year old Bard student who some months ago wrote one of the best articles we have had about Delano and his two months work there, used to visit Peggy often. He serenaded her with not only his guitar, but his mouth organ, dropping the latter occasionally to sing in a voice that could be heard all over the house. She loved it. In the spring when she wanted to buy plants for the garden in front of the old mansion, he picked her up bodily and carried her to his car and took her into the greenhouses so that she could pick out the plants she wanted. He was one of the pall bearers at her funeral.
During her last months she set us an example of uncomplaining endurance, and always she rejoiced in life, appreciating Gods bounty, His loving kindness and mercy. She did not go in for "spiritual reading." One was much more apt to find James Joyces Ulysses, a detective story, or some poetry in her hands than the lives or writings of the saints. She did not read Charles Peguys God Speaks to understand Gods mercy. It is a wonderful thing to see how Gods grace strikes one or another of us down.
Source
This text is reprinted from "Dorothy Day Library on the Web" at URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/ and is not copyrighted. However, if you use or cite this text please indicate the original publication source and this website. Thank you.
References
- ↑ Actually, Orrick Johns died in 1946.
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