Me, at about four years of age, in the living room of the first house I ever knew
Back in the early 1980s, if I recall correctly, when there was controversy among women of color and white women over priorities and tactics, someone (maybe Barbara Smith?) suggested that the discussion would become much more interesting and productive if we had some way of seeing, very concretely, where we all had grown up. What sort of house and neighborhood did we live in? Who was in our family, what kind of education and work did they have, and what sorts of aspirations were encouraged in the younger generations?
Now, through the wonders of modern technology, it's much easier than it ever was to approximate a glimpse into each other's upbringing. Not only are there narratives through which we shape and define that experience, and images through photography (candid or commercial) to represent it, there is now a way to communicate it broadly and freely. (Yes, of course, there are caveats to all of those statements, but for the sake of argument now I hope you'll let them suffice.)
Below, I'll share a few photos of the house where my family lived when I was born, nearly 60 years ago. I'll also describe to a modest extent what my family's circumstances were back then, along with some effort to place their reality in a national context.
Part of the Second Generation to be Born in the U.S.
But first I'll delve a little bit into the background of both sides of my family. If I were a genealogist or if my family had better oral traditions, I'd know more than two generations back. That's all I have, however, and even that information is piecemeal. Three of my four grandparents were immigrants to the U.S., arriving in the years just before the doors were closed to all but the lucky Northern and Western European few in the early 1920s. None of them was particularly sentimental, nor did they have much money themselves to invest in keepsakes and mementoes. My paternal grandfather died ten years before I was even born, so that means his branch of the family history is even more obscure.
As it was, two of the four--my mother's parents--came directly from Transylvania to Detroit, one before and one after the Great War. But even that assertion is short on specificity. A second cousin of mine may have dug up the record of my grandfather's passage to the U.S., but I've never seen it. He was born in 1893, though, we do know that, and the story is that he came as a teenager to join some of his sisters who had already established themselves here with their husbands. That means he just made it out before the war disrupted most of Europe, certainly including his birthplace, and also not long before increased nativism on the part of white Americans forced the cutoff of the major wave of immigration from Eastern and Central Europe that surged between 1880 and the early 1920s.
Transylvanian Roots
My maternal grandfather was a mechanic, fascinated in the early nineteen-teens by the automobile, and for one as obsessed as he was Detroit was the logical destination. The city's population and territory exploded in the early years of the twentieth century, thanks to the car, and by most accounts my grandfather made a reasonable living for himself running a small garage, at least in his early years of business. For what it's worth, my grandfather seems to have been ethnically Hungarian. I'm not sure what that meant in terms of privilege, or lack of it, when he was growing up in Arad.
But that was enough to get him a wife. My maternal grandmother emigrated from Transylvania AFTER the war, when ethnic Germans (Saxons, to be precise) were being pushed out of the region, as control was conveyed to Romania upon the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Seeing no future for his family there, my great-grandfather chose to bring his wife and younger daughter to the United States. They arrived in 1920, and how they survived I have no real idea. My great-grandfather would have been on the older side to do heavy assembly-line work, and it wasn't what he had done at home. Family lore says he was some sort of railroad employee, though whether he worked on trains or in an office I cannot say. They arrived speaking German and Hungarian, neither of which did them much good.
Family lore also says that my great-grandmother soon grew weary of chaperoning her young (nineteen-year-old) and beautiful younger daughter and so she sought to marry her off to a suitable prospect. Apparently, my grandfather, with his little car-repair shop, fit the bill, and they married a year or so before my mother came along, the first of three.
Polish Ancestry
My paternal grandfather, who came to Detroit with his father in the first decade of the twentieth century, had yet a different story. Not long after he and his father arrived in the States, his father had a change of heart, and went back to Poland--without his young son. I don't think my grandfather was even in his teens at that point; he lived as an apprentice with a furniture-maker after his father's return to the old country. Not surprisingly, my grandfather refused to have anything further to do with the family he felt had abandoned him. There is, as I understand it, one piece my grandfather made that still exists, which is in my possession. It's serviceable, solid, but not fancy in the slightest. I have no good way to verify that story, but it is a good one nonetheless.
Somehow--and this part of the story is lost--he and my paternal grandmother met and married. She is the only one of the four to have been born in the U.S., to Polish immigrants who lived for a time in New Jersey, then in Pittsburgh, before coming to Detroit. If I have this part of the record right, my grandmother came to this area with her mother and younger brother after their father had died in a work accident. All I've ever known about that great-grandfather is that he left a small life insurance policy, which sufficed for his work buddies to throw him a good wake. (That's not entirely far-fetched, from what I've learned since, nor that rare, in terms of the mutual aid that laborers arranged for themselves.)
There, too, I have no real idea how that family survived, a widow with two relatively young children. Piecework, maybe; laundry; boarders, if they had a house (which is unclear). At any rate, my paternal grandparents married around 1910, when they were both still quite young, about twenty.
The Prospects for the First U.S. Born
Let me jump ahead quickly here to address their marriages and their offspring. My mother was the oldest of three, and the only girl. Both her parents suffered from what my mother dismisses as the "Old World belief" that girls weren't very important or desirable. I doubt that any of the kids had an easy childhood; my grandfather was brutal, often drunk, and after the Depression hit he was always struggling to survive financially. For a while, my grandmother, her sister and a cousin ran a little diner, which was spectacularly unsuccessful as a business venture. (They all were very good, if traditional, cooks, but none of them was entrepreneurial.) Later, my grandmother took in laundry and worked as a nanny, particularly after her own children were grown.
My grandparents divorced when my mother was in her middle teens, and my grandmother remarried a few years afterwards, to a stern Scots-Canadian who was significantly older than his wife. My mother was the odd child out, given her parents' preferences for her brothers. There are only a few photos of her as a child; she looks scruffy and cross in most of them.
My father was third of four, the youngest boy. His family life also was not easy, but his own life was most difficult of all. He contracted polio during his first summer, in the same epidemic that afflicted FDR, and his life was irrevocably changed thereby. He was not paralyzed completely, but he had a pronounced limp and cross-body weakness. To compensate, he developed exceptional upper-body strength, and he also came to rely upon his wits.
The physical handicap kept him out of WWII. He and my mother married, in fact, only a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. Both of his brothers served in the military, however, and the second one definitely made out well thanks to the GI Bill.
It's also noteworthy that my paternal grandparents divorced before their four children were grown. My father was about nine, and the kids all stayed with their mother (who, I believe, sought the divorce). The oldest son left school to help raise money, but as the family dissolved just as the Depression hit, they were hard-pressed to get by. My grandmother worked selling ads for the Polish Daily News, among other jobs. They moved from place to place, just ahead of the eviction notices.
My mother "married up," a disagreeable but descriptive term. They had a very short courtship, and my paternal grandmother was not pleased by her son's choice of wife. My grandmother apparently said, aloud, that my father and my mother married for the sake of sex and money, respectively; that was an insult that neither one of them forgot or forgave.
I won't say that my parents had a happy marriage. It was a long one, though, over 70 years, lasting until my father's recent death. Since my mother and my siblings are still alive, I won't post any of my parents' wedding photos. However, in contrast to their own parents' marriages, it is clear that theirs was a love match, for better or worse.
After the bouquet of orange gardenias, I'll jump ahead to explain how I happened to be born where I was, almost twenty years after my parents' marriage.
Why Not Stay in Detroit?
My parents had several reasons for leaving Detroit. First, housing in the city had become scarce during the war, and afterwards the building surge happened outside the city far more often than within it. (Especially in the 50s, but already right after the war, there were several public policies that encouraged such residential expansion, which were accompanied by discriminatory practices in lending and insuring.) They, like many young couples in the area, wanted to establish their own independent household as soon as they could. While my parents never openly expressed any desire to leave the city for the sake of living in a segregated community, the fact remains that when they left, in the mid-1940s, residential segregation in metro Detroit was commonplace. Restrictive covenants, written to preclude sales of single-family houses to black people (and often to Jewish people as well) were fully legal until 1948, and even afterwards were implemented de facto.
Second, the Tier One auto supplier for which my father had started to work as an engineer just before the end of the war moved its operations out of the city. Their relocation was likely motivated by the allure of cheaper land for expanding their manufacturing base. But their move wasn't race-neutral in its impact either, since it meant the city would lose a profitable business to a near suburb, and its remove to some distance from the residential center meant a longer, more awkward commute for those who remained city-dwellers. Please note that I specify impact, not intent, because I have no way to determine the motives of the company owners. In any case, the opportunity that they took became another element in the economic abandonment of the city proper.
Likewise, my parents were perfectly able to take advantage of this opportunity to set themselves up in ways that their black peers could not. In an era when homeownership was heavily promoted as a way to secure one's family's status as middle class, this was a very big deal. It meant, among other things, that they could, if they chose, take advantage of the new suburban school districts that were growing by leaps and bounds during the 1950s and 60s. This was a mutually-reinforcing cycle: based on property tax as they were, the more affluent suburban districts could afford newer buildings, more highly-paid teachers, better equipment and more options--thus further privileging the children who were able to attend them.
My sister and then my brother were born while my parents lived on the far east side of the metropolitan Detroit area. My parents had another child, too, a boy who was stillborn several years before I came along.
Playing croquet, about age four
By that time, the late 1950s, all but one of my relatives, on both sides of the family, lived outside of the city limits. My paternal grandfather was dead, so there's no telling where he would have been then otherwise. But all of my mother's family--her mother and stepfather, her father, her two brothers and their wives and children--were living in northeast suburbs ten years after the end of the war. Now, they didn't necessarily live in large or elegant houses; my grandmother's 4-room house was made of cinderblocks, and I don't think it was larger than 600 sq. ft. Still, it was on a very large lot, of over an acre; my step-grandfather was an amazing gardener and had wonderful profusion of flowering plants throughout. I can smell the peonies that lined their long driveway if I let myself drift back. And their little inner-ring suburb had many amenities close to hand.
Loved this dress!
Interestingly enough, my father's mother lived in Detroit, on the west side for that matter, until she died. I recall visiting my grandmother and stepgrandfather (rarely) in their modest faux-Tudor bungalow and loving the half-lot that adjoined their house. That garden was sunken and lush, surrounded by well-grown trees, with a couple of lovely shaded places to sit. The house wasn't luxurious either, but it was comfortable, with plenty of room for two. Her other two sons, my uncles, were on the east side, one already outside of Detroit and the other to follow him to the Pointes while I was in my teens. Neither of those sons had children, and both of them were very comfortable financially. It may or may not have been coincidental to their success that each of them Anglicized their last name.
Why Royal Oak?
I'm sorry to have to report that my parents' relocation to Royal Oak, where I was born and lived till I was sixteen or so, was motivated in part by motives I find disappointing, angering, and painful to acknowledge. One of their rationales was rather benign; as quiet as that little town was then, apparently it was still more interesting, and closer to the hustle-bustle of the downtown area, than where they lived with my older siblings. But the other was not. Some of you may already have the association of that suburb's name with its most notorious resident, the man who put it on the map: Charles Coughlin, the so-called "Radio Priest."
I'd prefer not to have to mention him and his history at all, but it is directly relevant to my life and upbringing. In his early days, back in the 1920s, Coughlin was a populist who strongly opposed the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that had a very strong and large following in Detroit during that era. I am confident that the largest part of his opposition was undoubtedly based in the KKK's hostility to Catholicism; Coughlin was never particularly altrustic. In 1926, the KKK set a cross alight in front of the first church building in which Coughlin was the pastor. In defiance of that gesture, Coughlin dug in his heels. He started broadcasting a weekly show at about that same time; a few years later, when the show was aired nationally, he started to request donations from his radio audience for the sake of building a massive, fireproof church. That campaign was wildly successful, and in the depths of the Depression the limestone and granite structure--with a cross of stone that could not be burned--was one of the few major construction projects in the whole area.
Shrine of the Little Flower Catholic Church, Royal Oak MI
I'll spare you the trouble of reading any more details about the church, but it is essential to know, if you don't already, that Coughlin became a major apologist for fascism by the late 1930s. An early supporter of FDR and his New Deal policies, and a strong anti-Communist, Coughlin soon became convinced that FDR's administration was beholden to Wall Street interests. In the early versions of his criticism of FDR, Coughlin used terms that were already well-understood to be thinly veiled anti-Semitism. By the late 1930s, when the threats posed by Nazism and fascism to the citizens of Europe, particularly European Jews, were impossible to deny, Coughlin doubled down with his assertion that an international Jewish conspiracy was to blame for the Depression-era collapse of the world's major economies. Astonishingly enough, it still took several more years and the threat of defrocking to get him off the air altogether.
Unfortunately, for some reason, almost two decades after he went off the air, the presence of Charles Coughlin at his church was still a draw for my parents. It’s an acknowledgement that gives me no pleasure, and a fair amount of shame, to make here. But it is the reality from which I came, and as such it would be dishonest to deny or omit it. No doubt, my mother had the zeal often expressed by the convert: she had become a Catholic to marry my father in his church, even though neither one of them was ever active in the daily life of the parish or especially devout. My mother strongly identified, and still does, with the pre-Vatican II approach to Catholicism, in which the priest’s authority was unquestioned and communal worship was inconceivable. It’s no justification in the end, merely an attempt to explain the appeal of a autocratic and harsh man.
Sadly, it's also quite likely that my parents shared at least some measure of Coughlin's anti-Semitism. It wasn't unusual, even though it was and is deplorable. All I can say in their favor is that compared to three of my four uncles (thus, the members of their generation) they were generally less hostile and mean-spirited. It's a low bar, to be sure.
For the record, I do recall hearing Coughlin preach from the pulpit. It’s worth being aware of the grandeur of that church, which is much closer to a cathedral in size and ornamentation than to an ordinary Catholic church. So for him to thunder down from a stone lectern jutting out from the balcony created a strong impression, though not a good one. When I was little, not knowing why, I found his noise and bombast to be scary. What I’ve learned since has only reinforced that early impression.
My house, from birth to age six
This is a really long setup for a punchline, I suppose. (It’s why my daughters always roll their eyes and tell me they want the short answer, TYVM.) But here is a recent photograph of the house to which my parents brought me, after I was born in a Detroit hospital.
As houses go, it was pretty nice. By the standards of the era of my birth, it was remarkably well-designed and well-appointed. My parents were only the second owners, if I recall correctly, and it was under ten years old when they bought it. The subsequent owners appear to have made only cosmetic changes; the sunroom/den was in place when we lived there. My parents weren’t much for yard work or gardening, so the minimalist landscape was very similar to what I knew. The people who bought the house from us put a large flag pole in the middle of the front yard, which is gone now.
My first house, fifty years after I left it
The house had (and has) three bedrooms, which meant that I shared a room with my much-older sister (who did not like that very much, nor do I blame her for that). We had a small kitchen, with a tiny table in one corner. I think we had most dinners in that room, when we were all at home. It had a lavatory on the ground floor, which meant that we had some flexibility, helpful in a family with a teenager, a tween, and a toddler. The three common rooms besides the kitchen on the main floor meant that we did not have to be on top of each other when we were all home. My brother had his own room, and I probably had a fairly large toy stash in the den. We all loved having a fireplace in the living room, a feature which still appeals to me despite its environmental drawbacks.
When I was very young, my father worked full-time and took the family car to work. My mother did drive, so if she wanted the car for some reason, she would take me along to drop him off and pick him up. I remember spending many an afternoon with my mother, her mother, and several of my grandmother’s lady friends playing pinochle. I started keeping score for their games when I was very young; I definitely enjoyed being fussed over by the older ladies.
Any flat surface would do in a pinch.
For some portion of my preschool years, my mother worked afternoons at a local department store, which she could get to on foot. It’s long gone now, but I have a vague memory of visiting her once or twice on the job. My mother was in and out of the work force during my childhood, which made her anomalous for most of the wives/mothers in our middle-class milieu. I don’t remember much about my early childhood in that regard, but I do recall that by the time I was in grade school, very few of my peers’ mothers worked outside the home—unless they were divorced. It was a classic suburban lifestyle, minus the picket fence.
It wasn’t entirely idyllic all the same. My brother, who is also several years older than I am, has told his children, now grown, stories of his discontent during those years, stories that he’s never shared with me to any degree. Let's just say that he was lucky not to have any encounters with the law as a result of his conduct. He and my sister were witnesses to a fatal, high-speed crash that happened across the street from our house, in which at least one of the car’s occupants was decapitated. My sister, and I think my brother also, testified in court about the accident. I prefer not to go into any detail about it on a public forum, but there were instances of domestic brutality that I observed and experienced in this house and in later ones as well. That’s part of my history, too.
My little-girl self became aware of the wider world around me through newspapers and TV news. I learned to read when I was very, very young, and I have a distinct memory of reading the newspaper stories of Marilyn Monroe’s death. The assassination of President Kennedy occurred when we were still in that house, and though I don’t recall a lot about that event and its sequelae, I do remember watching the funeral, and seeing John John’s salute. It struck home because Caroline was only a little older than I was, which made it easier to empathize while making it harder to imagine.
The deck is new, but I remember the tree.
What That House Represented
This house would prove to be the nicest one that my family of origin would ever own. For reasons my mother herself finds hard to understand, they chose to sell this house for the sake of moving to a smaller one. It was a decision they would both regret. But it was their decision; they weren’t forced into it, and they didn’t lose their equity. Now, as one of the oldest old, my mother is still more financially secure than most women her age, despite having no liquid assets to speak of. Because she was married to a relatively high-earning worker, my father’s Social Security benefit was significantly higher than the average, and she still collects her widow’s portion. Furthermore, both she and my father retired with pensions, and both of them are still in force even though the associated benefits have been reduced. They were able to create and conserve a modest amount of capital through their homeownership. All this means in turn that we three siblings are less encumbered by responsibilities for our elders than we might have been, had all these work- and house-associated payoffs not been in place.
There are many, many, many other ways in which I have been insulated from major hardships by my upbringing, my class status, and my white advantages. My father was never out of work, never. My mother seemed to be able to get jobs that were adequately paid, when she wanted them (admittedly she worked in the pink-collar sector exclusively). They both had a reasonably broad set of practical skills as well that permitted them to do a fair amount of house, car, and yard maintenance without paying other people to do it. My brother and I both attended a four-year public university, not as commuters, though my parents would have preferred me to stay at home and commute. While we both worked during the school year and summers, neither one of us had to shoulder major debt to get our undergraduate degrees, and my parents paid off both of our modest loans, from what I recall.
Some of these advantages are generational, since we grew up in a time when post-secondary education was not prohibitively expensive for those without sources of aid. As a late Baby Boomer, I’ve lived my whole adult life in the shadow of increasing austerity, since the disconnect between wages and productivity started just about the time I graduated from college. All the same, I had some structural benefits, and they continue to pay off for me.
Just over a century ago, my grandparents arrived on this continent, three of them anyway, with virtually nothing, it’s true. That their descendants have achieved what we have is astonishing, a huge testimonial to their hard work and their doggedness. But it’s also evidence of their – our— ability to benefit from the massive structural inequities in place, given a playing field rigged in their – our – favor through deliberately designed and implemented racist programs and policies that helped them, and us, too.
As a result, I and most of my family have experienced many benefits derived from the hidden “wages” of growing up white, middle-class, Christian, and cisnormative. I'll list a few: Access to reliable private transportation. Access to health care, consistently and without much anxiety. Access to affordable orthodontia. Access to good schools, and the skills by which entrée to good colleges can be secured. Access to a large margin of error, financially and professionally. Access to knowing how to eat according to class-based norms; how to present oneself in a formal gathering, under similar norms; how to negotiate terms successfully with employers, lenders, doctors, other experts and authorities. Access to being given the benefit of the doubt in almost all situations.
On top of those: Security from homelessness. Security from hunger. Security from police harassment and brutality. Security from being misread, most of the time—or of having to worry about the consequences if it happens. Security of having only a few people to help out, instead of needing to be available to an extended family on the edge. Security of being part of the dominant culture in many circumstances of everyday life.
Relatedly: a certain confidence that I can post a memoir about my family and early childhood and find many readers here who can relate to it, one way or another, because it's more or less reminiscent of their own experience.
I'm sure I've forgotten many other important ones, too.
I do hope that my long essay here supports a deeper conversation about not only where we’ve all come from, but also where we’d like to go. Thanks for reading; thanks for commenting.
SpiritSisters
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Beautiful graphic used with permission of artist Michelle Robinson.
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