National Gallery of Writing

Brothers

(l-r) Alphonso Williams II, Moody Williams, Alphonso Williams, Sr., Lynn Williams

This picture captures so much. It was taken around 1972 in the basement of our home in Detroit. The '70s! What decade compares when it comes to breaking all of the rules? My father, Alphonso Williams, Sr., has on an orange and white sweater set! And my brother, poor thing, has on...well, you can see for yourself.

This picture is worth a thousand words for several reasons, but I've posted it for two reasons. One, here are two men who truly loved each other. (My father is passed; my Uncle Moody is still living.) The two were born in Mississippi two years apart. Can you see the love? They are touching each other, and they are holding each other's son. These two boys, so innocent, are the end of the Williams line. That fact our elders never failed to communicate to my brother and I would imagine to my cousin as well.

The second reason I posted this picture is because I want to do some thinking on this decade remembered as the '70s. I'd like to think about how that decade affected people, its relationship to the 60s, to the 80s, and to the new millennium.

Three Girls

Hale and Joseph Campau

About four years ago, while home in Detroit, I ventured out early on a Sunday to drive to the old eastside neighborhoods. The scene to the left is the corner of Hale and Joseph Campau, off of Mack.

When I took this photo, I was in my car about to leave, as I recall. It seems to me that I was parked in front of a storefront church our family--the Braxtons--used to attend. I was sitting in the car having some final thoughts about the church, when I glanced back to "the Corner" and saw these three girls passing by. I reached for my camera then and snapped the picture. Why was I so moved?

Well, on this corner stood until about ten years ago the home my mother and her two sisters--"Three Girls"--grew up in. They were three years apart in age, and they were born in the late Thirties and early Forties. You will notice that the girls in the photo also are "stairsteps."

The family moved to this home, which contained at least four apartments, in 1945, the same year that the Williams Family (my paternal family) moved around the block on Mack and Grandy (see below). Both families owned their buildings and rented the apartments out to others.

This corner was a popular destination, especially after work for men. My grandfather Richard, multi-talented, could be found in the garage at the end of the property. On a daily basis, he fixed cars there, and anyone who stopped by was also talked into sampling a little homemade wine! Everyone was at home on this corner. Granddaddy's multiple jobs must have provided enough funds to keep a well-stocked kitchen, and he installed a chimney and pit in the garage so that he could offer smoked ribs in the summer. Yes, I would have to say that this northeast neighborhood was a village.

In the early days, that is, right after the second wave of African-American migration, it was an integrated community. According to my mother, her Papa, who Granddaddy brought north with him along with Mama, also made wine. Papa's vintage I have been told was different than his son's and different still than that of the Italians who lived in the neighborhood. They made Dago Red. Winemaking back then, according to my mother, was not maligned. People would share their prized bottles at Christmas.

By the time that I was born in 1965, the neighborhood was pretty much all black, and on every block there were tons of friends of my mother and her sisters. People continued to stop by the house daily, and on Sundays the storefront church that I parked in front of years later would be packed with friends and family. Of course, these were the glory days; the good times would come to an end.

A generation that included Papa passed away in the early Seventies. Those residents who didn't die of old age there had moved farther east or west by the late Eighties. It was then in fact, in 1986, that Granddaddy himself died; he was found slumped over right on the porch to his apartment. It was a couple of months after his seventy-ninth birthday.

In my memory, it seems like the apartment building was torn down right after that, but it may have taken a year or two. I was in college in '86 and in grad school after that. The last time I had been in the house was on a break from school. Granddaddy, my mother and I had sat in a darkened living room, the two of them talking. He had given me money then. Maybe his offering was a sign.

Despite Granddaddy's death, I have no sad memories associated with this home of my grandfather. In fact, in the picture that accompanies my words here, there is a chestnut tree that leads several other trees along what is Hale Street. I always loved that tree. For some reason, I remember it being sun-drenched, and it just seemed that the brown chestnuts glistened. They gave me a sense of peace and longevity even as a girl. This special tree is one of the images I still associate with my grandfather's home.

The actual house is gone, but this tree and the others remain. What a nice grove of canopy and sunlight the tree and its sky above provide for the three girls walking by, who were not born when I was their age looking up at the glistening chestnuts and who cannot know of the family that lived at the now empty corner.

Mack and Grandy

Mack and Grandy

When I was a kid, I used to hear my father, his brothers and sisters, refer to these two streets on the east side of Detroit all of the time. They had lived with their parents in a building, storefront and apartment, on the opposite corner from the sign in this picture. My grandfather bought that building in 1945, when the family arrived in Detroit from Mississippi.

My father's family lived in the building until the early Sixties, when they chose, for a reason not entirely known to me, to move farther east into a two-family flat, which housed grandparents and two of their sons on the first floor and my mother, father, and four children on the second floor. The apartment building on Mack and Grandy, as far as I know, stood empty for many years.

I vaguely remember the building on Mack and Grandy. I know it was big, covering a fourth of two blocks--a fourth of Mack and another fourth of Grandy. I think I only saw the building once. I was about thirteen years old, and my mother's sister had moved temporarily into an apartment building across the street (on Grandy). While visiting her there one day, someone called my mother's attention to the fact that the building was still standing. At the time, I didn't know that my grandparents or my father and his brothers and sisters had lived there. I remember glancing over at the yellow-brick and wood-sided building, which held no meaning--that I knew of--for me. I had no curiousity about the place; I asked no questions, which is I think now as it was supposed to be. But whoever it was who called my mother's attention back to this place seemed to have broken a rule, her rule. The building belonged to a past that was full of both joy and sorrow though the emotions experienced in the place were not the sole reason why the structure was kept from my and my siblings' present lives. For my mother at least, that chapter, the years that she herself had first lived around the corner from the apartment in yet another building with her own parents and later lived at Mack and Grandy with her in-laws were a closed chapter. This was her way of living in Detroit, of living for the city. Things may have been somewhat different for my father.

Perhaps thousands of houses and other buildings have been torn down in Detroit, an attempt to ease the ugly face of blight. This is of course not unique to this city though it is doubtful that in the last thirty years any other city has experienced an equal amount of deconstruction. Whole neighborhoods, even ones that I remember from my own childhood of the Seventies, are now gone. There are very few homes left in the northeast side neighborhood where my grandparents lived, this one bordered by Chene to the west and Mack to the north or the second one, bordered by Van Dyke to the west and Forest to the north.

It is almost unspeakable how these neighborhoods disappeared. I do not blame city government, Detroit's mayors, or even white flight though many people have. The explanation is just so complex. It includes each of these factors and others, as well as the possibility that, like fallen houses, some of the families that used to occupy the spaces also have fallen.

The house on Mack and Grandy was torn down in the early Eighties. None of us went to see its destruction. Those with attachments are usually either dead, in prison, or otherwise relocated. One day when my family was again visiting a relative on the Eastside someone just dropped into a conversation the news that the building was no more . That time, I think I heard a sound of lament in someone's voice, but they may have been lamenting the passing of a time more than the loss of a structure as though the two hadn't gone hand in hand. With this second mention of the apartment, I began to feel that I had missed knowing a part of my family. I was born in 1965, a few years after the move to Norvell.

Unfortunately, our family's first home in the city, the apartment at Mack and Grandy, was not the last home to be destroyed. The second home, at 8103 Norvell Court, on the corner of Maxwell, was torn down in the late Nineties, almost twenty years after my grandparents had died and right around the time that my father died. I don't think Daddy had seen this second home in at least five years, and I myself had stopped going there long before it was torn down. Though it took a few years after my grandparents' deaths for me to stop going to the house, I did eventually stop, yet what was no longer conscious became subconscious. I've dreamed about the house for at least twenty years. In those dreams, the house, where I sat so comfortably in the evenings with my Big Mama and my Big Daddy, where she rocked near the front window dressed with fancy home-made curtains, where she hummed and watched her husband of fifty plus years get up from his recliner to draw the shades after another day drew to an end, is perfect again. Only, I sense a threat from within; I sense that someone wants to steal not the home but our family's honor. I am angry then, and I am there to defend the family's memory and our truths.

Right after my grandparents passed, within months of each other, their youngest son changed the locks on the doors, barring all other family members from entering. For years, we were all wounded by that act. I like to think today, so many years having passed, that I am over that. I have my own house. I no longer live in Detroit, haven't since I graduated from high school. From miles away, one simply does not think of this type of loss that regularly; only in dreams. One summer though despite having vowed never to grace Norvell Court again in this life I drove slowly into the neighborhood, down Van Dyke. I prepared to make the all too familiar turn onto Norvell. At the last minute, however, I panicked. I was betraying something. What? Nothing, I thought, but my own resolution not to feel too deeply the loss, not to force my eyes to see that which was no more, told me to continue down Van Dyke. Within a second I both thought to turn west away from the house and, then, to go east toward it. My stronger self won out. I flicked down my car's blinker and turned onto Canfield. Down to Maxwell I went and crawled toward Norvell. I parked on Maxwell, across the street from where the house once stood, and hesitantly raised my eyes. The space where the house once had stood was transformed. In its space was only a small patch of grass that could not have held the lives I thought we had lived there. Where was the basement where Big Ma had cleaned starched cotton sheets on the wring washer to dry before hanging them on the lines? Where was the basement where there had been a well-lighted front room and a dank and dark back room though which we kids had run playing Hide and Go Seek and House. Were our uncle's Nehi sodas, dozens of cases from his failed store, still in the locked cellar into which we somehow managed to sneak? Had the bulldozers, the ones that chop up houses like children knock over building blocks, noticed Big Ma's preserves that lined the shelves of the basement pantry?

I suppose the house had to go. Like so many other houses, it would have fallen down upon itself anyway. My uncle did not take care of it. I'm not angry with him for that. Taking care of the structure had not been his purpose. He had simply wanted to keep it. He held on to that house when he thought that there was nothing else to hold on to, and it might have fallen down on him had my father not saved him from that fate. For both of them though, one--childless and wifeless--more so than the other, time had not moved on, and this is how these two brothers had lived for the city.

I haven't been back to the house on Norvell, so I don't know if the store at the back of the house, still standing when I visited, yet remains. Who can say why the city chose to leave it standing. I must admit though that I was happy to see it. Simply put, it was the last physical remain of my grandparents' lives in Detroit, of our family's life there together. There used to be a sign on the back of that store, "Germaine's." It was the name of a short little white man who lived one street to the north. Big Daddy had rented the store to him. I'm sure that Germaine's family left the neighborhood long before my grandparents passed. That name, that store, holds memories not just for us then. Whites who fled to the surburbs left a whole city. They too have had their ways of living for the city, for this American culture and what it demands of us all. I wonder the cost of so much practicality, so much moving and masking.

1974

House on a Hill

My father, Alphonso Williams, Sr., lived in this house built in the late '30s with his parents and sisters and brothers. The family left this home and the land on which it stood, three hundred and forty six acres, in 1945. My father was then thirteen years old. It wasn't until 1974 that he would return to the old homestead. He had been gone from it nearly thirty years. Pictured (left to right) are me, my father, and my brother.

Our family traveled to DeSoto County, Mississippi, the site of the homestead, when I was nine years old. It was a memorable trip for many reasons, not the least of which is the effect that the return had on my father. Returning south was not easy for him.

As I recall, it was morning when we arrived at the house. It was still early when this picture was taken. There are of course other photographs including one taken a few yards from the porch, my father pretending to get water from a rusty red pump. I remember a platic-covered window on the side of the house, a broken-down pickup also on the outside, tomatoes overripening on its hood. I remember also patches of grass and red, red dirt surrounding the house and, farther in the distance, tall grasses that moved softly around the facade of a shed barn. My father and, as I recall, my sister were the only two to venture that far back. The younger seemed to survive the journey; my father maybe should not have tried so hard to remember.

For me, the trip was the beginning of my deep interest in the history of this side of our family. Though some of the trip is foggy, the pictures that we took have helped me to create stories about who we once were, what we have tried to become, what we have wanted to escape--to leave behind--and relationships between all of these.

I love this picture because I am standing with my father--even matching him in the color of my outfit. I find interesting the way my brother's and my hands are somewhat dangling at our sides. We did not, it seems, know what to do with them. We were not posing but allowing the picture-taker to capture an image of us in what someone, either the picture-taker or my father, thought an important scene. As unaware as my brother and I were, however, I also see the dangling arms as an act of submission. To what I would in time learn.

I want to say something about the house itself. My memory is that someone was living in it in 1974. Unbeknownst to me (and possibly to my father and his family) at the time, our family still owned the land on which the house stood, about eight of the original three hundred plus acres. There is a complicated story connected to this. I tell that elsewhere. The only point that may be worth mentioning now is that my grandfather, the seller of the majority of the family's land, intended to sever most of his ties with the South when he moved his family north to Detroit. The small parcel that was left symbolized the fact that despite the eight hundred or so miles that separated DeSoto County, Mississippi from Detroit, Michigan, not one family member had really overcome memory of the South.

The family's history in this north Mississippi county goes back much further than the decade this particular house was built. There was another house, likely on this same spot or nearby, that burned down in the late '20s. That is the house that the family or at least my father and his siblings prefer to remember and talk about. That house, a hybrid Victorian farmhouse, was the home of slave owner James F. Walker before my great grandfather Robert Walker Williams and his two brothers bought Walker's land in 1882. Two or three of my father's siblings were born in and lived in the earlier house. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather both died there. I have no knowledge of how that house burned, only that by 1932, the year my father was born, it was gone. Not only that, but my father was the first child to be born not in a home at all but in the hospital, John Gaston in Memphis. For some reason, the family relocated temporarily to this city a relative few miles away in the early thirties. The Depression perhaps provides an answer to this mystery, yet my grandfather managed to hold on to the land in Mississippi through the '30s, and I believe the family moved into the house pictured here no later than 1936 or '37.

In terms of architecture, the structure would be classified as a farmhouse. Its condition in 1974 created a sense of poverty. However, my father's family was not poor. Certainly, they were not untouched by the depressed economy, but my grandfather's various doings, which included raising and selling bulls and keeping a store, which also used to be on this land, allowed the family to maintain itself fairly well. I have taken the specific quality of this structure as a symbol of the family's financial wellbeing. The dwellings of many farmers, particularly black ones, were at the time smaller and much less sturdy. I have studied the length of the beam supporting the porch's gable. Though it may seem a trivial thing, this piece of lumber did not likely come at small cost, and it is to be noted that it was purchased before the end of the Depression. The porch, low to the ground, spanned the entire length of the house, perhaps measuring as much as thirty feet. The porch, as a general feature, is as characteristic of a shot-gun house as it is of antebellum mansions with their enviable verandas.

Two other features--a set of double, double-hung windows, a cement porch, and a door with a large single light--make this something more than a sharecropper's cabin. The porch's foundation departs from common wooden ones set atop bricks, creating an open crawlspace. Like the wooden beam, the laying of the cement may have called for the services of someone outside of the immediate community, and my grandfather's ability to employ such a person speaks both to the family's situation at the time and to his position within and beyond the county.

One cousin, who still owns land in DeSoto, has remarked, "That was a big house at the time." He remembers it painted in a warm yellow, which he says lasted for years after our family was gone. Whether my grandfather could have afforded to build an even "better" house remains unknown, but I like to think that he built this particular style to provide a nice home for his family not too far above or below those of his neighbors, many of course who were also blood relatives.

The house was torn down in the 1980s. I suspect at that time no one was living in it nor had anyone for several years. With the house went also a way of life and a community but not memories. I am glad that my mother and father took my brother, my sisters, and me south in 1974 and that we took a picture of the homestead, an important part of our family's history. Though I wasn't fully conscious of it, I submitted then to telling the stories that can no longer be told by the material but that survives both in picture and memory.