 When I teach personal essay writing, I often focus on things like helping writers establish themselves as characters, discover the heart of their story (“the conflict” or “what’s at stake”), and drive the narrative forward with a mixture of scenes and reflection. I use examples like “Three Spheres” by Lauren Slater and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls that are big, sweeping, and dramatic – in “Three Spheres,” the narrator treats a patient in the hospital where she once stayed and must reckon with her own past and keeping it from colleagues, while The Glass Castle tells the story of the author's childhood of itinerant poverty through an adult’s eyes.
Justin Torres’ “It Had to Be Gold,” originally published in The Los Angeles Times Image and included in Best American Essays 2022, focuses on a seemingly smaller moment in the author’s life to render a fine-grained version of the narrator’s emotional drama. Torres starts the essay standing at a window reaching absently for a cross he lost a year ago. He uses this seemingly small thing as a jumping off point to explore being a “chronic loser” – someone who “constantly misplaces everything,” but also perhaps a reference to his status as an outsider in mainstream America. He has discovered this idea from listening to a writer talk about Anna Freud’s ideas. “We wish to possess, to be possessed, and to be relieved of our possessions all at once,” Torres writes. “The hoarder solves the problem of value and attachment by holding on. The chronic loser lets it all go.” Let’s pause here for a moment – I’m still not sure I understand Torres’/Freud’s idea of the “chronic loser,” but I’m interested in reading “It Had to Be Gold” because Torres’ mind and musings are interesting to me. That’s the essence of the contemplative essay, and it’s where the roots of the modern essay lie, at least according to Dinty Moore’s book Crafting the Personal Essay, which explores essays by Virginia Woolf and others to make this point. In contrast to Slater’s and Walls’ writing cited above, Torress’ essay is almost anti-plot, driven only superficially by external events, but more fundamentally powered by the engine of the author’s thoughts, his worrying, looping wondering over what the cross means to him and why he lost it. In the interstitial webbing between his thoughts, we learn that the finding and losing of the cross is a kind of allegory for the narrator’s struggle with his gay identity, As Torres stands by the window reaching for the missing jewelry, we spin backwards into his thoughts and memories. He says the cross “helped me to think, and daydream. I realized, too, how ridiculous this was. I’d never considered myself a fetishist, but as it turns out, I’ve got a thing for chains.” He goes on to talk about how his father wore chains and other gold jewelry for a job and how he was obsessed with this “gangster father” or “shadow father.” Then a few years later, “something happened both mundane and terrible, which altered my relationship to this form of ostentatious, hardened masculinity.” He goes to a party in New York with all kinds of relatives and friends, and “in walks a young man I’ve never seen before. He’s beautiful.” Even as the narrator recounts him in luxurious detail (“the soft luster of his skin,” “everything is crisp: his fade, the lines shaved into his eyebrows,” “jewelry glints all around him”), the man uncovers a homophobic shirt that reads, “Silly faggot. Dix are for chix” (a pun off the old Trix cereal commercials, “Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.”) This triggers a lot for the narrator, who is realizing his own identity, and the man also has a crucifix that’s “an exact replica of the one my father keeps hidden away somewhere in the house.” The cross represents the kind of beautiful masculinity he covets, but also the kind that’s forbidden to him. In his memory, he is overwhelmed by “the sudden double awareness of something burning in me, and a new depth to the ugliness burning out there, in the world.” The double awareness is his own self-perception as a gay man, his internalized oppression. Simply put, he's aware of how he sees, and how others see people like him. It’s also his awareness that the way he views masculinity and male beauty is different from how his straight, male family members view it. To him, the gold cross is sexy and attractive. To others, it’s a symbol of hard, heterosexual masculinity. “How do we survive our own ambivalence?” Torres writes, attempting to resolve this. “One way is to fetishize.” We are taught in essay writing that part of our job as writers is to go deep, to reveal, to tell our stories in rich, cinematic detail, but there’s a flip side to this. In Torres’ piece and other contemplative essays, telling the writer's story in minute, intimate detail is actually less important than exploring the nuances of the writer’s mind, which again provides the internal engine for the narrative. What fascinates me about Torres’ essay is that he deliberately elides, obscures details others might highlight, perhaps to protect people in his life, perhaps simply because he deems them not to be central. For example, he describes, in an almost cursory way, how his parents’ marriage fell apart and he “lost” his father (note the language here returning to the core issues of loss/losing). Without too much transition, the essay then jumps ahead to the present day and concludes with two more memories about finding and losing the cross. These stories are mundane and deep at once, involving drunken outings with friends in two different cities. The first tells the story of how he finds the cross, the second the story of how he loses it. Again, I’m not sure I understand the reason why Torres is a “chronic loser,” but I love the way his meandering, probing thoughts are presented on the page, and how he hints at the fact that the gold cross is a symbol of the father he lost and represents his attempt to reclaim this childhood symbol of masculinity.
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 I’ve been teaching essays from The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, and one of my favorites is “Drinking Story” by Elissa Washuta (originally published as “How Do I Tell My Story of Getting Sober?” in Harper’s), a tightly written piece that tells a story but also has elements of poetry in it (ha – maybe I’m just lazy and like to read shorter stuff). My class discussed how Washuta does what Mary Karr calls “expurgating the false self” in The Art of Memoir. This is when an author holds themselves up to the light, finds what’s wanting or false, and tosses out the superficial self for a truer one. When we tell stories, Karr says, we naturally tend to not only put ourselves in the best light, but also to believe our own obfuscations, to hide behind them to fool ourselves and others. The best writers, Karry says, poke holes in them.
From the start of this piece about recovery from alcohol addiction, Washuta’s voice is seeking truth. “They say the insomnia will end when the withdrawals end, but that’s just a lie they tell you so you won’t pick up, something to hold on to if ‘Don’t quit before the miracle happens’ doesn’t persuade you to hold on for one more day,” she writes. “Early on, I tried late-night meetings at the strip mall clubhouse with low lights and syrup-smelling vape clouds hanging near the ceiling like weather, but all those men and their court orders made me want to drink worse. My home was no place for a soul’s convalescence – the Crow Royal bottle was still in its velvet bag, sleeping while I couldn’t.” The opening introduces the conflicts – she can’t sleep, she’s recovering, she doesn’t like the male-dominated AA meetings or being home by herself. As she tries to stay sober, her mind keeps casting backwards to bars she used to hang out in. Without alcohol to numb her mind and memory, she finds she’s painfully awake and aware all the time, averaging just five and half hours of sleep a night. “Once you get sober,” she writes, “you become fully aware in every waking moment, and without the generous erasure of the blackout, you meet a million details demanding to be sorted.” This “backlog … nags that I’ve missed something.” Here’s where the expurgation of her false self comes in. “Maybe I drank because I wanted to sleep – this is one of those things I tell myself when I’m trying to make a story out of it,” she writes, bravely examining false stories she’s telling herself. “In truth, I remember why I drank. It never stays out of my head long. I remember the first red Solo cup and the self-breaking power of Everclear and Kool-Aid washing through me, back when my liver was still new enough to meet the liquor like a date with a man you don’t yet know you’ll fear.” The last line gives us a hint of what’s going to be revealed. We’re driven to keep reading to hear Washuta’s painful, powerful truth – to watch her root out what’s really bothering her. In the AA meetings full of men, she tells the kind of neat, easy story they expect to hear. Yet her urge to drink is no simple narrative. It has a thousand plot points and stops and starts. It is in fact a powerful kind of denial of the narrative urge to move forward, to reckon with the conflict at the center of her life. “My years there are one long night inside of me … I have some anecdotes, some illustrations with plots, but no meaning,” she writes. “Strung together, they show the chaos I was cataloguing long before I was ready to tell its story.” Washuta says AA saved her but acknowledges its limitations: an emphasis on a God she doesn’t believe in, its formulaic narrative about addiction. AA “saved my life by offering me a narrative form to hold my shapeless despair," she writes, but "once I let the plot sprawl, I couldn’t bring it back there.” The real reason for the sickness that led to her drinking, she reveals to us, is “knowing that men want to hurt me.” She recounts incidents of sexual violence she repressed through drinking because “alcohol was the only tool I had to shutter the memory palace in my head, where all the hallways led to rooms where I was on my back, pressed against a bed or a couch or a floor, suffering.” It’s storytelling, the complicated kind, the kind in which she throws out her false self, that allows her to live again.  St. Adelbert Church in Cleveland. Photo courtesy Bob Perkoski, Fresh Water Cleveland. A few weeks ago, I had a great tour of Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood with Bob Render and Dionne Thomas Carmichael. You can listen to part one of the interview here. In part two, Dionne and I talked with Bob Render (Robert L. Render III) about growing up in Fairfax, his father (a racketeer), what younger generations don't know about Black history, and the neighborhood's evolving relationship with the Cleveland Clinic. Again, it's long but worth the read.
Lee: Alright, let’s hear your story Bob: My story is a little bit different from Dionne’s. My mother was from Montgomery, Alabama. She came to Cleveland via Chicago. My father, on the other hand, came out of LaGrange, Georgia, which is where Otis Moss Jr. and his father and grandfather came out of, along with Dr. Bill Pickard, a multimillionaire in Michigan. He was a partner at the time with Arnold Pinkney. Bill went back and went to Detroit, started several businesses related to the auto industry and became a multimillionaire. My story is kind of different in that I was born out of wedlock. My mother and father were not married. He had a business on the corner of 100th and Quebec. Right now it’s a vacant lot. He had his own store, and upstairs was the apartments, where he and Nancy Render lived. We lived in one of his apartments on East 105th Street. All of that stuff is gone now, OK, because they’re building apartments, they’re building Meyer’s there. My father put my mother and I up in one of his units. We were on the first floor. My father’s wife for whatever reason couldn’t have children, so Nancy came to my mother to purchase me. She offered her money to turn me over to her, and my mother wouldn’t do it. Nancy knew that Bob Render Jr. had me out of wedlock, because I looked exactly like him. I was just a kid, 2, 3 years old. My old man used to work for the railroad, somewhere out of Collinwood. A lot of black folks worked out of Collinwood. He got into it with someone. This was how the story was told to me. My father was fiercely independent. He was a racketeer, and he stopped working for anyone, because he said, ‘I’ll have to kill one of them motherfuckers.’ And then he started his own business, bought property, ran his own store, did the numbers, and was a racketeer. So like I say, he knew the Italians. Now our part of Fairfax was different form Dionne’s. Right next door to us was Ingolia’s Pizza. Yacobucci was across the street. DiVincenzo’s was on 105th, the Cozy Nook is what it was called. Fioritto’s Funeral Home started right there on Frank Avenue which is now out on Mayfield. So you had a mixture of Italians and Blacks. What was so strikingly different was that blacks and Italians fought all the time in Collinwood. That was not the case of the Italians who came up who we lived with on 105th. Most of the Italians (in Fairfax) came up in what we know now as Woodhill. That was all Italians. A lot of them would come and go to St. Marion’s. I went to St. Marion’s School. I didn’t go to St. Adelbert’s. It was right there on the corner. If you come up 105th and take the right to get on Fairhill, there’s a little street there called Petrarca, and that’s where St. Marion’s was located. There’s a church still there. Like I said we came up with the Italians. We’d have our little fights and run-ins but by the time the week was over you was staying at their house or they would spend the night at your house and y’all was friends again. Completely different dynamic. Racism was still there but it wasn’t the kind of brutal fighting like you’d find out in Collinwood. Like I said, my father decided to go on and work on his own as an entrepreneur because he said he’d have to go on and kill one of those peckerwoods or honkies, which is what he probably called them. So he quit the job. Like I said they owned a number of pieces of property. I was born there on 2222 E. 105th St. For whatever reason, my father decided he wanted his kids to go to Catholic school, so he paid the tuition. I went to St. Marion’s, and from St. Marion’s I went on to Cathedral Latin, and from Cathedral Latin I went to Tri-C, then I went to the University of Dayton. After St. Marion’s closed, all those kids came to St. Adelbert’s. That church also became the home of the first Black museum in the country, which was Icabod Flewellen. Before he went to Hough, he was in Fairfax. That church was his museum. There’s pictures at the historical society. He is considered now the father of African American museums, right here in Cleveland. He was extremely eccentric. Used to do his research at historical society at Case. His collection is now at the East Cleveland library. It all started in the neighborhood. Bob hope was raised off 105th between Cedar and Quincy. The Pla-Mor was the roller rink where African Americans came from all over the city, it was at, like, 108th and Cedar. So my upbringing was a little different than Dionne’s. Then we moved to 2238 E. 100th St., where my mother and I lived with my stepfather, Richmond Jones, I didn’t take my father’s name till I came back out of the military, when I changed it to Robert L Render III. So when we moved from 105th which was a commercial strip, even though there were apartments and businesses there, to 100th street, we were renters but we thought we were in seventh heaven to move on a really residential street. Now if you was really doing something, Dionne, you moved on 89th street. Folks between Cedar and Quincy, folks would say you was in "high cotton" … they'd say you was "steppin' in high cotton." You had really made it if you were on 89th. The unique thing on 89th was the lots were bigger, the houses were huge, and in our mind they were like mini mansions. Your really upscale, upwardly mobile black folks or negroes lived on 89th. Both parents were working, maybe, but sometimes it wasn’t necessary, the father was a professional, they were doctors, lawyers or maybe teachers. A lot of black folks who couldn’t get jobs based on their profession started out working at the post office. The post office enabled many a kid to go to college. Our parents knew some of the lawyers that couldn’t get jobs at the local law firms but started off at the post office, and they made a substantial amount of money or a good living and was able to send their kids to college. So 89th Street today was basically professionals. Today you have 450 years of black history on one block. There’s no other street int he city of Cleveland where African Americans live that has that much history. So, that’s why this project (I'm working on) is important, putting these historical markers in Fairfax where these notable people lived. We’re going to eventually get it off the ground. Dionne: Several years ago, we started taking the names of businesses and printed a t-shirt. It’s the tip of the iceberg. People look at it and say, 'You don’t have such-and-such there.' I think there are so many people that needed to be added to this t-shirt, it’s going to be unbelievable. It’s unbelievable we had so many businesses in that area, such a compact area, everybody thriving and living the American Dream. It was the American Dream. You were working, you had a home. I don’t know if it was just drugs, the influx of drugs, or the impact of media that tells you that you can do better, you should want more You can’t buy one blouse, you need this blouse in every color. Turn on QVC! And everything is desirable. We have turned into absolute consumers. I mean, super consumers. How much is enough? That’s when you really just have to have a serious conversation. How much is enough? Most of these homes, except the homes on Cedar, the closets are small. Every room had a closet. They weren’t walk in closets. And there was more than enough clothes for you who were going to work or school. Now it’s like, let’s knock out these walls and put in a walk-in closet. How many pairs of shoes do you need? It’s terrible for an athlete to tell a young person they need to have a pair of these shoes in every color. Kids these days don’t own a pair of dress shoes. It’s terrible. (When I was growing up) You go to church in a pair of tennis shoes, your feet would be cut off. That would not happen. Bob: My mother, her name was Corrie Lee Jones. She remarried. She married a guy in Chicago before she came to Cleveland. That blew up for a variety of reasons. Then she married Richmond Jones from New York. His brothers lived on the west side. My natural father was in my life for a little while. He reminds me of Don King to some extent. Here’s the irony about my father’s hypocrisy. Even though he had me out of wedlock, he found out that his wife (Nancy) was cheating on him. He set it up for him to meet his wife on 100th Street, and the guy she was kicking it with, he was a well-known entrepreneur himself. He shot both of them. He attempted to kill both of them. Now, the irony was, he was gonna shoot her for cheating, when he had me out of wedlock! And no telling who else he was fooling around with and I may have other siblings I don’t even know! He shot both of them and then he killed himself. Dionne: No he didn’t! Bob: Because he was not going to go to jail after he shot them. They got them to the hospital and both of them lived. Nancy lived and (her boyfriend) lived. The funeral (for my father) was at Boyd Funeral Home. My father knew Mr. Boyd long before I was born. I’m talking about the old man. So when I used to talk to Mr. Boyd, he said, your father sent referrals to me on a regular basis, we were good friends. And then Boyd buried him. OK? That was just the irony of the hypocrisy. He was very authoritarian. People were afraid of him. My mother was even afraid of him. She told me as I was getting older, she was getting ready to pack up everything and move just to get away from him, because he was very abusive. Back then, if there was a domestic problem, the police weren’t going to get involved, back in the 1920s and 1930s, the police were not going to get involved, you just worked that out, between you and your spouse or your significant other. My mother was just fed up, so two weeks before my father shot Nancy and I think Toby and killed himself, she said I think we’re going to go to New York. She was going to get out of Cleveland. She had figured out how she was going to do it, she had saved the money, and was going to leave town in the middle of the night, take me, and she’d be gone. Two weeks later, he was dead. Dionne: You went ot the funeral? Bob: I went to the funeral. I vaguely remember it. My aunts, my mom. Like I said I was three, four years old. He had an awful lot of resources. I remember him having a scooter. He would take me on the scooter. And I had all these toys. I don’t know who angered him or made him mad, but he took all the toys and threw them away and bought all new toys. I remember him having an Oldsmobile. He had all the things that were popular then because he had the resources to do all that. But everybody was afraid of him. My aunt would tell me, your father was something else. He would either pistol whip you or he would shoot you. So I just remember all that, that was everybody was afraid of him and intimidated by him. I equated him with another Don King of sorts. When we left 100th Street, people thought we owned the house. My parents, Richmond Jones and my mother, took care of that house, and they thought we owned it. We moved to Ludlow. When I came out of the military I gave them enough money for a down payment on a house, because they rented all the time, that’s how we ended up in Ludlow. But I eventually was able to buy the house that I grew up in at 100th and Cedar, I still have the house now. The houses now are costing $400,000, so I’m just trying to hold onto this property. My memory is just like Dionne’s, even though I lived in a different part of Fairfax. It was safe, it was cohesive, family members lived all around you, aunts and cousins close by in the neighborhood. The businesses. You didn’t have to go downtown, and if you did go downtown to May Company or Halle’s or Higbee's or Sterling Linder, that was a treat. But it wasn’t necessary. You know, everything was either on Cedar, Quincy, or 105th. And I mean everything. My mother, she worked, she started off as a beautician. You know where IBM is now? She started off at Beatrice (Academy of Beauty, on Cedar). So she did hair. I got a picture of her, I was going to bring it to you but we gotta go back and look for it, we got tons of albums. She had a picture taken by Allen Cole. You familiar with Allen Cole? Allen Cole was considered in his day the (equivalent of) James Van Der Zee in New York, who took all those historical photos of black life. The historical society has all his prints, like 45,000 or something. My mother had a picture taken with him. His studio at the corner of 100th St. and Cedar. I’m trying to get a historical marker from the Cleveland Clinic. That’s why this historical project is so important. Kids under 40 have no idea about the history of the neighborhood they currently occupy and live in. And I think if they did know the history, they would become stakeholders and contributors. As Dr. Carter B. Woods said, people who have no recorded history are always neglected. I think that is so true. Dionne: You're strangely echoing what a young lady and I were having a conversation about. She said she’s a Gen X-er. I don’t know what that is. She said anyone younger than me never knew that blacks owned anything. She said your generation is angry. I said I’m not really angry, I’m just mystified as to why they don’t know. And she said, they don’t know because they never saw it. Bob: It wasn’t passed on properly. That was part of it. Which is almost shocking, how little Generation X or Generation Y or whatever they refer themselves to now, they have no knowledge. I put part of the onus partly on us, because we did not preserve that history, like they do on Murray Hill, when they have the Feast of the Assumption, you’re celebrating the past, present and future of the Italian community. Dionne: And when we say we’re going to do Juneteenth, even though we know the circumstances around Juneteenth, sometimes they’re reticent about joining in that celebration. And that is sometimes quirky to me. But we need to do a better job of marketing. There has to be an all-out effort. We can’t be subtle anymore, say ok, let’s just wait and let it marinate with them for a minute and maybe they’ll come along. No! We have to take a hammer and hit ‘em over the head. I just think that’s the way it should be done, after seeing other ways of doing this haven’t worked, not to the extent that it should have worked. There should be much more participation. Bob: My mother got a job at Cleveland Clinic eventually. When she got hired at the Cleveland Clinic there was only one building. On 93rd and Euclid, think about it, one building, that was it, that was the total footprint! By the time she retired maybe 40 years later, the Cleveland Clinic was already well on its way to becoming a city within a city. The Cleveland Clinic was already buying up parcels of land as it became available, parcels of land south of Cedar, long before we knew. My mother said she always heard there was a 10-year plan, every 10 years they would update that plan. Back in the 70s they already knew they would go all the way down to 79th, all the way over to what we now know as Woodland, Wuincy eventually. But there was an unwritten agreement the Cleveland Clinic would not go south of Cedar nor north of Chester. As soon as Arthur Woods passed and Fannie Lewis passed, now you see Cleveland Clinic expanding north of Chester and south of Cedar. They had already quietly started acquiring property. There is what I call a subtle anger, it simmers, it has been simmering for decades – Dionne: How is it subtle? Bob: Well, it’s subtle in some respects and then it’s overt in other respects. Dionne: Oh, ok. Bob: But the black community has always been angry with the Cleveland Clinic, for a variety of reasons. They were never good neighbors. To the extent that they could have been I always use the example, if Fairfax was Beachwood, the Cleveland Clinic would have a completely different relationship with the residents of Beachwood. If it was jewish, not just jewish but different demographics, OK? One of the notorious things when we were there was that the Cleveland Clinic’s emergency room was so small you didn’t even know where it was. You didn’t know where the emergency room was, and they would tell you if you don’t have insurance you go to Metro or you go to UH (University Hospitals). They were notorious for that. Dionne: Well, they let a man die right at their doorstep. I can remember the anger that was seething – Bob: What about the lady that got shot? It was a stray bullet. The bullet, I don’t know, it hit her in the chest. They had to take her to Metro and she died. The anger, there was protests and all that. They were marching against the Cleveland Clinic. Dionne: Oh, we marched against the Cleveland Clinic many times. Bob: Did they ever have a trauma center? Dionne: If they did I know the gentleman couldn’t use it, that guy who died right there at the emergency room. They would not let him come out of the truck. Out of the EMS truck. They’ve done a lot of things that have not been good. They put that incinerator there to pollute the whole community. We had to march on them many times and we even burned Dr. Cosgrove in effigy right at the front door. Hey - we take it to them! Right on Euclid. Bob: The only trauma center you had was the Huron Road Health Center then that closed. The only trauma center was metro. I think under the new president (Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic), I’ve seen things I never saw even when my mother was working there. He actually has been in the neighborhood, he’s walked the streets, some of the doctors employed there I’ve seen them with Vicki Johnson they walk the neighborhood to take a look firsthand. That was unheard of. Unheard of. Dionne: That’s very true, very true. Well, it was a very adversarial relationship. Bob: Right, historically there’s been a hostile relationship, it’s like benign neglect in Cleveland. Dionne: Well, it’s because they don’t see us, they don’t see us as people, they don’t see us as quality, they see us as pebbles in their way. I’m quite sure when they sit at a table, they say, we can wait them out. Just start buying up the land and displacing them and they’ll be gone in 50-60 years. They figured they can wait us out. I tell it to you like this, I’m not going anywhere. I’m on the corner, I ain’t goin' nowhere. Bob: One of the things, if you look at the buildings on Cedar, all those buildings have their entrance facing Carnegie. They have their backs to cedar. With the exception of the emergency room ... There was a guy who owned a building who wouldn’t sell to the Cleveland Clinic. Dionne: I tell you his name, he was a friend of … oh my goodness, it’ll come to me. Anyway, to make sure they didn’t say that was an abandoned building, he kept it open. Of course, he paid the gas bill and the light bill. But his friends would come in there and they would play cards, and they would watch TV or whatever every day in order to make sure that everyone knew that they were open. They even had candy, a box of candy (they would leave out). Bob: Basically what Dionne is saying is they waited them out. The guy died... Lee: And then Cleveland Clinic got the building? Bob: Then the Cleveland Clinic got the building.  From L to R: Bob Render (grew up in Fairfax, now lives in Buckeye), Dionne Thomas Carmichael (grew up and lives in Fairfax), and Reverend Carla Jo Howlett and Rev. Dr. Napoleon Harris V from Antioch Baptist Church. Last week, I had a great tour of Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood with Bob Render and Dionne Thomas Carmichael, who talked about their family history and what the area was like when they were growing up in the 50s and 60s. We drove around looking at old houses, checking out historic churches, visiting with artist Tim Willis and his amazing, flamboyant robots, and stopping at the corner of E. 79th and Central where Dionne lives and owns several buildings including Josephine's Bar (Cleveland's oldest African-American bar) and Central Roots gallery. At Bob's encouragement, we stopped to get a pic with Senior Pastor of Antioch Baptist Church Rev. Dr. Napoleon Harris V and Reverend Carla Jo Howlett, Operations Manager (shown above). These folks were wonderful. I recorded the interview and will use some of the material in the family memoir I'm working on, since my grandfather lived in the neighborhood as a young boy a generation or two before from 1910-1918 (he was part of the white migration out of the area into the Heights in the 1910s and 1920s). Below is an edited version of the interview along with some photos. I'm going to figure out how to edit and post audio, as well, but I'm not there yet. Here's an edited version of the Fairfax interview, part 1 (it's long but it's worth reading the whole thing). We opened with some chitchat, including talking about how Dionne's family came to Fairfax and their property at E. 79th and Central Ave. What is now called Josephine's Lounge was originally called Thomas Tavern. They later named it Josephine's after Dionne's mother and grandmother, who were both called Josephine. Lee: Your grandfather was the first one to move into the neighborhood? Dionne Thomas Carmichael: Yes, my grandfather came from Tuskegee … oh, this is too much story. My grandfather was in the Tuskegee syphilis study back in the day. On my father’s side. Jesse Thomas. We were all housed in the same place. Same place. Then he went back and forth to Tuskegee because we still had family there, and we still have family there, still in Tuskegee. Lee: Tell me a little bit about what the neighborhood was like when you were growing up. Dionne: Oh my goodness, it was just wonderful. We had everything we needed. I don’t know anything that we did not have. I’m giving you this from the perspective of looking back now, you know. Because at the time it seemed ok. But now looking back I realize we had grocery stores … and when I say grocery stores, I mean stores where there was a butcher. We had butchers. As a matter of fact, a portion of my property where the driveway was, that was Bill Bryant’s grocery store. Wait a minute ... it was Bryant’s Stop and Shop grocery store. Bob Render: These were all minorities that owned these businesses. Dionne: Yes. So later, when we wanted to get a house, it’s a ranch style, so my house now sits on three parcels of land. The lots were short but deep. The lots go back almost to Golden Avenue. We had everything. If you wanted something from the grocery store, your mother would tell you to go have Mr. Bryant cube you some steaks. And then he would bring up the half a cow on his shoulder. I can see him slam it on the big butcher block, chop with the big chopper, whatever they did, then run it through this machine that would put the holes in it. Then they’d wrap it up in paper and give it to you. Bob: Brown paper or white paper? Dionne: Mr. Chapman had brown paper. Bill Bryant had white paper. No bags, just give it to you like that, and you’d just trot off. Now that’s two grocery stores within 100 feet. Bill Bryant’s grocery store and Mr. and Mrs. Chapman’s grocery store. Same thing. They lived upstairs, their business was downstairs. Their business now is the gallery (Central Roots Gallery). Fruits and vegetables would line Central and 79th with a scale. Because I lived across the street, sometimes when he got busy, I would go and weigh up the fruits and vegetables. I just thought that was wonderful. Bob: There was no such thing back then, we didn’t live in food deserts, as you know them now. Because you could go anywhere and get fresh fruit. Dionne: Oh no. And everybody had gardens. Everyone had backyards and the backyards had something in them, they weren’t just cute, they were utilitarian, they had to serve some function. You either had some chickens back there – Bob: You had some greens, tomatoes, onions. Dionne: Yes. And of course our parents hunted. So there was always squirrel, rabbit, pheasant. They hunted everywhere. As a matter of fact my nephews still hunt. There was a club my dad and his buddies formed. There was a group of men that hunted together. They went to I guess Iowa. It would always be a week, week and a half trip, and they drove, and would come back with deer and whatever else. At one time I even had the deer lamp, the deer foot, the deer feet, the pelt that they cured themselves with the salt. I was real cute, that was my room, I had my own deer stuff (laughs). And crazy enough, the head. Now, where are those things? They’d be worth a fortune now. How did I let that get away? Bob: Where did you go to school? Dionne: I went to Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. Lee: Did your whole family live at the corner of E. 79th and Central? Dionne: Yes, we lived upstairs on the second floor, and we rented out the third floor. My grandfather, my parents, and me and my brothers and sisters. My sister got married out of there, I got married out of there, my brother got married out of there. We never lived anywhere else. There were two storefronts. There was the bar and there was a unit next to it, it was a cleaner and then it was a pool hall. Back in the day, directly across the street was the Black Panther party, that was one of their headquarters. and we had several, 1-2-3 breweries right between 79th and 105th. Lee: It sounds like you could walk places to get things, you went to the local Catholic school, and you could walk there. Dionne: Yes, you could walk there. Bob: There was walkability, like when your grandfather was here. Most people didn’t have cars, those who did were fortunate to have cars. But there was walking. You had public transportation, trolleys and the bus, and you could walk everywhere. Dionne: This is what made this wonderful. The Central bus, when the RTA took the Central bus off the line, they said it was too short, we didn’t need it. The 33, I have the last schedule for the 33, showing how often it ran. We could stand out there and in a half an hour, less than 20 minutes be downtown. Take public transportation, and if I wanted to come from Euclid, get on the bus. You could go anywhere. Lee: What was the community like? You had a lot of friends in the neighborhood? Dionne: Oh yes. Bob: They didn’t use the term then - village. We lived in a village; we just didn’t refer to it as such. It was very cohesive, very safe. Dionne: And our playgrounds were usually in churches. Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament had a playground because it’s a school also. You guys would say, 'Meet you at the rec center' ... well, there was no rec center. We played basketball or whatever in the church parking lot, the church playground. There is another Baptist church, and it had a playground. Then there was the Salvation Army down the street, and it had a playground. If you went to Cedar where New Canaan is, there was St. James and Antioch. You could play anywhere. There were playgrounds everywhere. Lee: What did people do for work? Dionne: Right about here started the Ohio Buckeye Garment Company. We called it the overall factory. Bob: You remember at the turn of the century, 1910s, 1920s, blacks were not allowed to work just anywhere they wanted to work. You still had ... you know, Cleveland’s still one of the most segregated cities in the country. But there was an awful lot of entrepreneurship on the part of Negroes … Negroes, Blacks. African Americans. Like she said, you had a number of small grocery stores, a number of small cleaners. A lot of entrepreneurism. Ownership by African Americans, or Negroes then. And people knew how to hustle. Dionne: The overall factory was not African-American. Nor was Reliable Steel Company, which is directly across the street from this house, and it was a massive structure. Lee: Like blacks weren’t allowed to work there? Dionne: Back in the day, there were only one or two. There were always blacks at the overall factory. But there wasn’t blacks at reliable steel. And then of course you had Wellington come back this way. That building is still there. Blacks didn’t work there. Nor did they work across the street. Some of these buildings are still there because they were brick buildings, very well constructed. Bob: What you don’t have now that you had then, there were a number of black banks. Dionne: Oh, the empire! Bob: Dunbar. Quincy Savings and Loan. Dionne: When they tore down Quincy Savings and Loan, and this is so funny … they could not implode the safe with whatever their technology was at the time. Bob: It was built that good. Dionne: It stayed there as a skeleton until they mustered up whoever could bomb this thing and take it down. Yes, yes. Absolutely. And I don’t mean a month or two, I mean a year or two before they could get enough dynamite, strong enough dynamite, the A bomb, whatever, to drop on this thing to implode it! Bob: The other lending institutions wouldn’t loan black folks money. Dionne: And Cleveland Trust was around the corner on 79th. Bob: And 105th and Euclid. Dionne: And you couldn’t get a loan. Bob: Couldn’t get a loan. That’s why many of the black folks too their money out of Cleveland Trust and put their money in Society which is now Key Bank. Lee: So, how's the neighborhood changed over the years? Dionne: Oh. Per se, we don’t have a neighborhood. A neighborhood in my estimation is just a place where you have families, intact families, who have children that are in school, most of the time the mother worked in the home and not outside of the home, the fathers they were laborers, we didn’t have bankers or doctors. Only a few. Dr. Gunn lived in the neighborhood, Dr. Starling, but they were farther down on Cedar. Eventually we had some lawyers. And strangely enough, Father Wilson, one of the first Black priests, he was from the neighborhood, and so was Sister Juanita Sheeley. Bob: Here’s another interesting fact they seldom tell you. I had to learn it myself. By the 60s at least 70% of the black households were two family households. The mother and the father was there. And back then if they weren’t married it was called common law, ok? But there was a male and a mother in the household. Uncles might live down the street. There’s a misnomer that Blacks or Negroes come out of all these broken homes, that was not the case back when we were coming up. All the way into the 60s, in the majority of families, there were two parents there. Mother and father. Or a common law marriage. Dionne: Modern technology is good for some people, I don’t think it was really good for us. It gave you unreal expectations. The expectation is the grass was greener if you leave this area, this situation. If you leave this living situation you can do better. Television showing the mother baking cookies in her high heeled shoes and pearls and that’s not the case. Mothers had to get a job once the father moved out, well, your living conditions change, they have to change, your economics change, everyone takes on different roles, different responsibilities, children have to fend for themselves. That’s when you get latchkey kids, you know, no one was home and kids start getting in trouble because kids start congregating in the house or on the front porch and say, 'Now, oh look, let’s see if we can take that, let’s see if we can do this.' Different things that would come into their heads as children, as young people, and they’re not really knowing the extent of the devastation that they’re getting ready to unleash by getting involved in these different activities. Then everything just started deteriorating. Lee: It sounds like there was a Black middle-class community. Dionne: Oh yeah! I never knew. Did anyone tell me I was poor? I didn’t know I was poor. Well, I didn’t know I was middle class. Bob: I would say on the scale it was probably low middle class. We didn’t have the earning power that your white counterpart did. Dionne: But you didn’t know that. You had enough to eat, you had clothes, your daily needs were taken care of. You usually had a vacation once a year because we would always go back down south. Y'all tell me I was poor? OK! I didn't know that till I was in college. Bob: We never heard that word. Dionne: I never heard that. Bob: The most striking difference from the 90s up to now, compared to the 40s, 50s, 60s, everybody knew everybody on that street. Everybody. Dionne: Oh, too much! Lee: Too much in everybody’s business? Dionne: They didn’t even get in your business, but your business would get back to your house before you could get back to your house. We had a two way telephone. A party line. Bob: That was the fascinating thing. Your parents knew everything you were doing before you got home. Whether you did something at school, or on the way home … the neighbors would tell them. It was astonishing. There was no cell phone. There was no iPad. And yet they knew. And they knew exactly. They were notorious for saying, 'Are you saying that Ms. so and so is lying? Are you saying they're telling a lie on you' Dionne: Oooh … I didn’t get whoopings but let me tell you with my smart mouth, we had a drunk lady, what you would call an alcoholic, she just drank a little too much. Her name was Princilla. I can see Miss Princilla now. And I better be calling her Miss Princilla because that’s how I got that whooping. Miss Princilla told mama I did ... I don’t know what she said I did. And I was smart, I said, 'Are you going to listen to old drunk Priscilla?' Bob: You got sassy, that’s what they would have called it, you got sassy. Dionne: And you didn’t just get an isolated whooping, or an isolated thrashing, the sisters would get involved. She would call Nanny, Aunt Easter, Aunt Ossie … you just never lived it down. That’s after you've gotten a whopping. How much punishment... Bob: Do I have to endure (laughs). Dionne: And I mean, I was a good kid. Bob: But they did not tolerate being sassy or disrespectful. No matter what. That was taboo. You a child. The other thing I would say is so different, the stark contrast, was the respect factor. There were just certain things you did not do and if you crossed that line there’d be hell to tell the captain, as old folks say. You was gonna pay dearly. And the discipline was a part of coming up. In loco parentis … I went to Catholic school like she did, and if you got out of line, teachers had a right to discipline no matter what. Then when you got home you got it again. I remember once, Dionne, I got it three times, I got it at the school, and my mother knew about it before I got home. I must've sassed somebody. I could see her at the end of the street, I could see her all the way down there with that belt. You know, it took me forever to get there from where I was because I knew what I was gonna get. And she started on me right in the street. That was just a no-no. That was a complete no. The other thing they didn't tolerate, the criminal element did not solicit children to do anything. That was another no-no. There’s always been crime. That was among adults. You didn’t solicit children. Dionne: They would tell, you, boy go home. Get out of here. Bob: They knew who your parents were. Dionne: And if they were talking about something they didn't think you needed to hear, they would stop talking, even if you didn't know what they were talking about. When we came home from school, we would have to go through the bar to go upstairs. Listen, they understood that after I said 'Hello, everybody' I needed to be making myself through that bar to go upstairs because there was no lingering. No lingering. No listening. And if things got really hot and heavy, we'd go down the back steps and stand at the door to see what's going on. Most of the time there was nothing going on. But it was just the idea. You knew you could not come into the bar and hang and listen and get into adults' conversations. It's so much fun to think about now. How come I couldn't be taking notes then? I worked in the bar. When I was 21, I loved working in the bar. I loved working in the bar on Saturday morning, because you could find out what went on Friday night. If I served them and they were down here, they wouldn't talk. I knew, how am I going to do this? I took my book and went over to the other end of the bar. Most of the time they weren't talking about anything, but if they were discussing something, they would say, 'You need to go upstairs.' Now, I’m 21 years old. But they would say, 'You need to go upstairs.' And I'm like, what are you talking about that I need to hear? Oh boy. That is funny. Bob: Before integration ... Dionne: Oh yeah, we had no white children in our neighborhood. Bob: Well, there were no whites in your neighborhood. Dionne: Oh, you had whites in your neighborhood? Bob: Yeah. Same neighborhood, just a different part of it. Dionne: Our church was founded because the other churches did not want us to come there. I mean, they gave us a hard time. The Catholic churches. As a matter of fact, the priest would tell people like Aurelia Elliott, 'You need to go down to the church down the street.' She was trying to go to St. Agnes, and they sent her up to Blessed Sacrament. The Sanders, even though the school was founded for Negroes and Indians, I've never seen a Native American in Our Lady of Blessed Sacrament, but Katharine Drexel founded it for Negroes and Indians. We're the first Black Catholic church in Cleveland, and the second only to Xavier in New Orleans. Katharine founded both. She later became a nun and a canonized nun. She was from a wealthy family, a philanthropist, you know, that kind of thing. She has a fascinating story also.
Spring has sprung and we've bought the house next door. Contractors are hard at work fixing it up, bringing the electrical up to date, repairing the broken plumbing, adding insulation where there was none at all, and more. Right now, we're planning to remove the cement board siding and restore and paint the original wood siding underneath. Ironically, instead of ruining the house it's acted like armor all these years (it's been there since the 60s) and protected the wood. We haven't yet decided on colors, but right now the choices range from muted browns and beiges to "irresistible" pink. When it's done, the house will be good for another few decades at least and we'll have another nest egg.
This house project reminds me of when we bought and fixed up our house next door for the first time, back in 2010, in the midst of the Great Recession. While it now seems laughable that we fretted over whether that was a smart move, since our neighborhood is now expensive with a rehabbed home on our street recently selling for more than $600,000, at the time things were a lot more uncertain and wobblier. Here's a pic of the house we just bought and something I wrote from that era, more than a decade ago, when we first moved onto our street in Detroit Shoreway. Oh, I remember those days when we were living in the city with little kids and we felt like we were the only ones, when we felt lonely and special.  Since the beginning of April, I've been teaching a class through Literary Cleveland called Writing About Dead Relatives: Turning Family History into Story.
In prepping for my class this week, I wanted to do some research that would show my students how they could access information about people, places, homes, and neighborhoods from the past. So, I reached out to Olivia Hoge from Cleveland Public Library about finding a historic photo of my great-grandfather's house at 2229 E. 80th St., which he built and lived in from 1910-1918. It fell into foreclosure and was torn down about 10 years ago, and though I visited it, I don't have a photo of it. She told me to email photos@cpl.org for help, and within a few hours, Mark Tidrick had hooked me up with a photo. I've pasted it above. It's from 1961. I learned a lot from seeing this, since the only time I viewed the house was in the early 2000s when it was covered in vinyl siding. This photo gave me a sense of what the historic home looked like. It was built as a single, so I'm also fascinated by the fact that there are two front doors. I think maybe it was turned into a double or a triple sometime after my great-grandfather sold it and moved to Cleveland Heights, which wasn't uncommon at the time. The students in my class have some fascinating family stories, and I love learning about them and helping them do research, come up with ideas, and write their stories.  In 2020, I helped to start a local news organization. Wee! It's been a wild ride so far, and we hope to work collaboratively with others to improve our local media ecosystem. Check out our mission and work below.
Our Mission The Land (www.thelandcle.org) is a local news startup that reports on Cleveland’s neighborhoods and inner ring suburbs. We deliver in-depth stories that foster accountability, inform the community, and inspire people to take action. What We Do In 2021, The Land’s focus will be:
We’ll use the following programs to achieve these goals: On-the-ground reporting
Civic engagement
Collaboration
 For Cleveland Scene, I recently wrote about how Cleveland CDCs, forced to collaborate and merge in a time of diminished, are working together to bring equitable development to neighborhoods left behind. "We're not going to succeed as a city if we have three places that are vibrant and the rest of our communities are still being left behind," Jeff Verespej of Old Brooklyn CDC says. "We've raised our game to make all of us better."  For Fresh Water Cleveland, I wrote about how the two-year-old nonprofit LatinUs Theater is filling a gap in the community, bringing more awareness of Latino culture and theater, and creating opportunities for Latino artists.
“There is a want in the community for theater that is outside English speaking and representing other cultures,” actress Rocky Encalada says. “They’ve been asking for it, but up until now, it’s been offered in little pieces. Cleveland is a more diverse city. If you have a diverse city, you need to be able to feed people their own culture.”  Starting the New Year off right: I've spent the past couple weeks launching some new programs with nonprofit partners Literary Cleveland and Lake Erie Ink. I'm excited to share what I've learned so far. To me, this work feels like a continuation of my journey as a writer and teacher with a passion for helping people express themselves and develop their craft.
Last night, I taught the first session of Advanced Poetry with Lit Cleveland, and eight participants spent a couple of hours going deep into the poetry revision process, talking about the poems "Butter" and "Brutal" by Andrea Cohen, and then performing surgery on their own work. Be careful when trying this at home! In this revision exercise, writers are invited to use scissors to cut up printed versions of their poems and then rearrange the lines -- and line endings -- for different effects. The results were interesting. Some folks hardly changed their poems. Others surgically removed a line or word here and there to nice effect. And others ended up with radically pared down versions of their pieces. (There were no paper cuts and only minor injuries, mostly bruised feelings.) The photo above is what I came up with when I cut up Andrea Cohen's poem "Butter" and made my own found poem. But wait, there's more! I've also been working with Lake Erie Ink on a program at the Mandel Jewish Day School. Last week, I taught a poetry lesson to a group of seventh graders where we identified some key poetic devices, completed a Mad Libs style exercise based on Seamus Heaney's poem "Blackberries" where they had to try to fill in some of the blanks with their own creative ideas, and then listened to the author read the classic poem. Tomorrow, I'm attending a panel discussion with two community change makers who will discuss how and why they do the work they do in Northeast Ohio. The students will have a chance to ask questions of the nonprofit leaders and will learn about how to take interview notes and develop their own questions. In the coming weeks, I'll be working with the students to complete more interviews of change makers and write profiles. Finally, I'm excited to be working with Lake Erie Ink and Cleveland.com to help coordinate Write About Now, a student journalism and writing program launched in memory of arts reporter Nikki Delamotte, who died tragically. Nikki had a passion for youth and was an avid volunteer with Lake Erie Ink. For 10 Tuesdays this winter, students in grades 8-12 will work with writers at Cleveland.com to learn about and engage in journalism projects, ultimately working to publish original work on their site. They'll also receive a stipend after completing the session. I can't believe it's already January 15th ... Meg and the Magnetosphere / Mike St. Jude and the Valentines / The Bad Garfunkels at the Happy Dog12/22/2019  Join the Bad Garfunkels at the Happy Dog for a night of singer-songwriter rock n roll!
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