Yvonne Baptiste

At 61, Yvonne Baptiste walks through the world like someone who has nothing to prove. A former schoolteacher from Baton Rouge, she left her job and the South after losing her husband to illness and deciding she didn’t want to spend her remaining years standing still. Since then, she’s been traveling west, one bus stop at a time, writing down her thoughts in a leather-bound notebook and sending postcards she never mails. She stopped at the Newton Motel for a night and stayed for three. The quiet suited her. She says little, watches much. Her presence carries weight, like the last line of a poem.