Pandemic no obstacle for Sumter ‘Flying Fingers’ friends

Longtime bond thrives amid hearing impairment despite forced separation

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Two longtime friends have not let the COVID-19 pandemic stop them from spending time together.
Peggy Baird, 91, and Leroy Pinckney, 65, have known each other for more than 50 years, having bonded through an American Sign Language class Baird taught at Sumter’s First Baptist Church.
Baird, who cannot hear at all and prefers the term “deaf,” and Pinckney, who prefers “hearing impaired” and can hear some with a hearing aid, no longer sit side by side. Instead, Baird sits just inside her front door, while Pinckney sits just in front of her on the porch, a clear storm door separating them.
Linda McIntosh, Baird’s daughter, with whom she lives, serves as interpreter for hearing visitors. She said Leroy and his wife, Ophelia, were both in Baird’s Sunday School class; Ophelia sometimes accompanies her husband on his visits to Baird.
Watching the friends talk non-verbally to each other illustrates how Baird’s class got its name — First Baptist called it “Flying Fingers” — and their fingers do fly, animated and quick like a hummingbird at a feeder.
Baird’s classes over the years were almost always full, averaging about two dozen students. The Pinckneys were among them.
It was not strictly an ASL class; she also taught them about “Jesus, God and the Bible. She wanted them to know God and Jesus loved them and that they were beautiful, that God made everyone the same,” McIntosh said, adding that her mother taught the same values to her own four children.
Pinckney, now retired from construction work, still does some landscaping and general yard work. He also assists Baird “with anything she needs to have done.”
Baird was a full-time homemaker, a talented seamstress and gourmet cook, along with parenting her four children.
A bout with meningitis at 9 had her doctors certain she wouldn’t make it. Instead, she thrived, but she gradually lost her hearing. She attended the Virginia School for the Deaf, where she was head of her class and an athlete, playing basketball and running track.
McIntosh recalled that her mother’s hearing loss “made her other senses stronger. She can see whether you’re sincere or not. She’s very perceptive.”
“She could sense what my children wanted when they were just babies and they turned their heads toward her,” McIntosh said. “They knew she was saying something.”
Known as the “cornerstone” of her family, Baird was a disciplinarian, but she didn’t administer corporal punishment.
“When we did something wrong,” McIntosh said, “Mama would sit us down and let us know about it. That was all it took.
“We couldn’t get away with anything. She knew when we were whispering with our heads turned away from her, and she’d ask us what we were up to.”
Pinckney said while he’s glad he can still visit with Baird, he misses “being in the house with her, hugging her.”
Mostly, he said, he misses holding her hands, so important to their communication.
“Taking her Sunday School class was like a gift from God,” Pinckney signed to McIntosh to interpret.
Baird’s eyesight is fading because of macular degeneration, but she has no trouble communicating with Pinckney or McIntosh yet. She’s always upbeat, her daughter said.
A smile never leaves her face as she and Pinckney sign to each other. They laugh often.
McIntosh said, “Every night at bedtime, she says, ‘Thank you and Larry (Linda’s husband) every day for all you do for me.’”
There’s a nighttime ritual Baird repeats when she goes to bed. McIntosh knows it by heart:
“I love you with all my heart. I love you with all my soul. I love you with all my blood. I love you with all my breath. I love you with my everything.
“I love you up to the moon and stars and down again, and all the way back up.”
It’s love, she believes, that makes all the difference. That, and observing the Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“If she could,” McIntosh said, “she’d give you a hug.”
From behind her clear storm door, Baird signed “I love you” instead. And smiled big.