of the Thing, I said the only words I had been sure would come out of my mouth: “Valerie Graves.” Then, something else safe: “Copywriter.” I looked at my half-drunk colleagues waiting to see if the Thing would drown me, then I listened as the next words tumbled recklessly out of my mouth: “And token.” There was an audible intake of air from both white and black folks, for entirely different reasons, followed by gales of laughter from the agency crowd. My black brethren gave me looks that said, Girl, I hope you know what you’re doing. I didn’t, but whatever it was, the Thing would not take me under that night.
The next morning, the CEO paused as he passed my doorway. “Token, huh?” he said with a beaming smile and an Oh, you’re such a kidder gesture. Two weeks later, I was out of a job. They had other reasons, but reliable sources told me that my quip had sealed my fate. Fuck ’em if they couldn’t take a joke. I had been saying what they wanted to hear my whole damn life.
Part One
Mud Lake Memories,
Crystal Lake Dreams
Chapter 1
Watching the Shimmer from the Shore
In Michigan, it is impossible to be far from a body of water. That pretty much explains Lakeside Homes, the public housing project where I spent the first fifteen years of my life. Lakeside was built on the shores of Pontiac’s Crystal Lake and designed to shelter the great influx of workers who flocked to the auto manufacturing jobs in the Detroit exurb of Pontiac. This public housing project was not the urban nightmare that springs to mind when the term “projects” is used. Instead of the fatherless welfare-dependent families stereotypically associated with public housing, Lakeside was home to many young nuclear families with working fathers and even stay-at-home mothers. Most of these families comprised recently migrated black Southerners, with a smattering of Mexicans and even the odd white family. The renderings in the project offices depicted a cheery tree-filled community of garden apartments with landscaped public lawns, playgrounds, and private, fenced, and gated backyards, all set on a sparkling body of water. It should have been idyllic.
In reality, the lake was polluted, the constant wear and tear of hundreds of young children soon turned the common lawns into patchy, dandelion-dotted turf, and the sapling trees struggled to survive the kids’ constant assaults. The playgrounds were the site of much fighting and bullying, and the small lake, though pretty on sunny days, was surrounded by tall reeds and was rumored to be habited by a green man who would carry off any child foolish enough to wander into the weeds. Occasionally, bigger boys and men would venture onto the lake in small boats and catch huge, inedible, scary carp with scales as big as a man’s fingernails. The housing commission did its best, routinely maintaining and improving the brightly trimmed housing units and protecting the young trees by coating them with thick, tarry goo. Some of the families maintained neat yards, even planting flower beds and growing morning glories in the chain-link fences. Others had to receive threatening notices from the project office before they would mow their ankle-high growth. The sprightly yellow tulips my mother planted on the sides of our front door quickly had their heads snapped off, presumably by the “bad” kids who roamed the projects casually vandalizing whatever struck their fancy.
Our neighbors included the Reverend Morris, his kind, pretty wife Miss Bertha, their tall son Leo, and the good-looking Pryor family at the end of our row, with names like Kirjathous, Kirlather, Mentre Jean, Lady Mae, and Lorisul. In the row behind us was a family of misbehaving kids who I’m pretty sure stole our clothes off the backyard clotheslines after dark. Two doors away was the Gonzalez family, whose parents seemed to speak no English, but whose numerous children quickly picked up black English and became honorary Negroes. In those early days, there was a white family next door to us. I forget their last name, but their pudgy kids Tony and Mary used to talk to my brother and me over the backyard fence. Some of the families belonged to our church, Trinity Baptist, and socialized with us at the occasional potluck dinner. There was always someone to play with, and most days no one tried to beat me up. Until I was old enough to know what I was missing, I was pretty happy.
For my mother, a pretty young divorcée raising two of her three small children alone, the project apartments were a dream come true. When she married my father, she had left her firstborn, my brother Gary, in the care of our great-grandparents. They doted on Gary and were appalled at the notion of his being subject to the will of a stepfather they did not care for. Their fears might have been unfounded, but their low expectations for the marriage were not. Within three years, my mother had filed for divorce. Her ex-husband, my father, was a known figure in town. We certainly knew ourselves to be his children; my brother even carried what I felt to be the burden of his unusual first name, Spurgeon, but our father provided only the minimal financial support the court required him to pay, and gave us nothing emotionally. He was a union steward, a self-made man, and a bit of a blowhard who wielded a small amount of power with a great deal of brio. I remember telling my fellow neighborhood preschoolers that my father was “the president of the world” and not being challenged. He was the kind of man who would drive by in his latest shiny new car, toot the horn, and wave without stopping to say hello or offer us a ride. When we asked our mother why they had gotten divorced, she gave us one unchanging answer: “Because we couldn’t get along.”
Our father quickly remarried, to a Southern homemaker who was almost the opposite of our stylish, striving mother. They lived in a small single-family home not far away on the South Side, with a young brood of two girls and two boys who we occasionally saw at my father’s sister’s house. Having had the audacity to leave him, my mother was pretty much on her own. Finding a nice new apartment with a fenced-in backyard was quite a coup. With the help of her family, Mama completely furnished our small two-bedroom apartment in 1950s décor. In the living room, there was an overstuffed, navy chenille-upholstered sofa and a matching chair, blond end tables with tall geisha-girl figurine lamps, colorful framed prints of birds on the walls, pull-down shades, and snowy sheer curtains at the windows. There was a sunny yellow faux-leather-and-metal dinette set in the kitchen, twin beds and matching dresser for the kids’ room, and a handsome double bed and dresser for her masterless master bedroom. When I recall the first home I knew, I see evidence of the mother who raised me everywhere. Always accentuating the best of her life, she outfitted the place to please herself, not to impress others, and the result was a compilation of items that reflected her idea of what was pretty and her pleasant, unpretentious view of the world.
We weren’t the Cleavers—except for his annual half-hour Christmas visit, my father was little more than a name on checks that arrived from the Oakland County Friend of the Court—but we were a family. I idolized my attractive, smart mother, and it was awhile before I realized that our circumstances were less than ideal. Mama lavished affection on us kids; when I was old enough to visit my neighborhood friends, it slowly dawned on me that not everyone was hugged and kissed daily as we were. Their parents might have been too stressed out to indulge them in the little ways our mother did with us. If I bumped my knee on the couch and cried, my mother was likely to give the couch a whack and a stern, “Don’t you ever hit my baby like that again!” Even as a small child, I knew this was silly, but I loved it that my mother cared enough to attack inanimate objects on my behalf. We had nice clothes, new shoes, and enough toys and books to junk up the apartment that my mother straightened up after we finally went to bed. Having never lived with my father, I was oblivious to his absence. With the casual acceptance that children enjoy, I assumed a father was optional. In those early days, the charming camouflage of new furniture, a clean house, reliable meals, and a peaceful environment shielded me from a harsher reality. Over time, the realization seeped out of the TV that our family and our neighborhood were somehow lacking, and I began to feel deprived, a sensation that would be with me for many years and later be given names like “underprivileged” and “disadvantaged.” When I learned that our side of the lake was called Mud Lake, I felt ashamed and wondered why God hadn’t put us on the Crystal Lake side. When I noticed that the people on that side of the lake were white, I wondered why God liked them better than us. I don’t remember blaming white people for anything; since they seemed to have so much, I wanted to be like them.
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“I