Believing in Magic by Cookie Johnson & Denene Millner

Author:Cookie Johnson & Denene Millner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books

• There’s No Place like Home •

I was born in Alabama, yes, but I spent my formative years in Detroit, where my family moved as part of the Great Migration, the wave of southern black families who trekked north in search of better jobs, housing, education, and respite from Jim Crow. I was only six when my parents crammed all of our things into the upper-level of a two-bedroom flat we shared with another family in Motor City and got down to the business of settling into the new black middle class. In Alabama, my father was cleaning offices, working as a tailor, and picking up as many odd jobs as he could get just to pay the rent and put food on the table. But when we left all that flat, green Alabama land and settled in the towering metropolis, home of Motown, capital of the automotive industry, abundance was finally tangible for Dad. It’s where my father gained a financial foothold for his family. He got a job at Ford Motor Company and even went back to school to earn an education degree, while working that same job at Ford. For a short time, he even held down two jobs, working as a special education teacher in the daytime and then working nights at the automobile factory. But he never could make a transition into teaching full-time because it simply did not pay enough to keep a family of five afloat. Eventually, he gave up teaching altogether and focused solely on his factory gig, which paid well and provided the benefits our family needed.

The transition from Alabama to Detroit was not without its challenges. Those buildings were scary and imposing to a little girl whose height barely reached her mother’s hip. Until then, I’d never seen anything like them and dreaded walking those five long blocks from our apartment to school, with the ring of honking cars in my ears and the smell of all that black factory smoke clouding the air, and those imposing buildings casting shadows, where, in Alabama, there was only sky and sunlight. The hardest part was dealing with our new neighbors, a rumble of mean street kids who made quick work of clowning my sister and me for being unapologetically southern. “Ooooh, y’all country!” they’d yell as we’d make our way home from school, sometimes running up to us and mushing our heads and pulling our hair as they poked fun or playing “smooch the booty,” a game where the bigger boys would, literally, grab our behinds. Maybe they were right about us being “country”: we didn’t have fancy clothes, and a lot of times, Pat and I would take off our shoes and walk home barefoot because that was our way. Our southern twang didn’t help matters. Pat didn’t take any mess; she would protect me by shooing the boys away or threatening to pound them into the concrete. Still, dealing with their daily abuse and the grittiness of the city left

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