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.