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.