Stacey now stopped and looked at Dee clutching the pants in her arms and quietly said, “I am going, Dee. Even if I don’t take one thing with me, I’m going. There are plenty of factory jobs up in Detroit. When I get one and get settled, I’ll send for you and the girls, but today I’m leaving here.”
Dee, stunned, just stood there, holding the pants to her chest, her back against the dresser, guarding it to keep Stacey from taking anything more. Stacey, eyes on her, stood silent a moment, then, giving up the packing, moved past her and toward me.
“You sure about this?” I asked.
He gently cupped the baby’s head with his hand. “I’m sure.” His eyes met mine. “I want to see the folks and Rie. I’m going down, let them know I’m leaving.”
“Stacey, it’ll crush them, all of you gone.”
“No, it won’t. They’re strong and they know how long I’ve been talking about going.” He glanced back at Dee, then looked at me again. “Cassie, talk to Dee.”
“You talk to her,” I said.
“I will. When I get back. But, Cassie, know this. Come this night, I’m out of here.” He kissed ’lois and left. True to his word, Stacey left Mississippi that night.
Now all my brothers were gone.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
One week later Stacey called and said he had a job. Although headed for Detroit, Stacey had stopped over in Toledo to see a family we knew from the Great Faith community, the L.D. McClaires. The McClaires had moved north at the start of the war, and Mr. L.D. now worked at Willys Overland in Toledo, where jeeps were being manufactured for the Army. Mr. L.D. told Stacey jobs were still plentiful at the factory. Stacey applied for a job and was hired as a welder that same day, exactly a month after ’lois was born. In late August, Stacey sent for Dee and the girls. I went with Dee on a segregated train to help with the babies. I helped Dee get settled in the one room she and Stacey and the girls would share at the McClaire house, then returned to Jackson. Ola and his wife, Sarah, and baby boy had already moved into the house on Everett and I continued to stay there with them. In the spring when I graduated, I too headed north.
PART
I
TOLEDO, THE GLASS CITY
(1945–1946)
Dorr Street.
It was the main street of our community, it was a street in transition, and we lived in the heart of it. At one corner of our block, on the same side of the street as our house, was a small grocery store owned by a Jewish family. At the other end of the block was a much larger grocery store known as Roman’s, owned by Polish immigrants. At that end of the block there was also a café, a pool hall, and a drugstore. On the other side of the street on the corner was a bar and next to it an apartment hotel. A quiet residential street divided that side of the block. That was Wheeler Street. One block down Wheeler was the elementary school. On one corner of Wheeler and Dorr was a fish market, and on the other corner, a beauty shop, and a little farther down was a shoe repair shop. On the next block going west were clothing stores, a shoe store, a cleaners, and a barbershop. On the block to the east were a gas station, a furniture store, a cafeteria, and, best of all, the neighborhood movie theater. At the end of that block and right around the corner two blocks down was the church we attended. Initially, there was a trolley line on the street, but it had been replaced by buses to take a body to downtown Toledo. There did not seem to be all that much need to go downtown; just about everything anyone needed was right there on Dorr Street. It was a busy street, a main corridor in the city, and there was always something to do, with people walking up and down the street all through the day and early evening.
There were hardly any trees on the block. Sandwiched among all the businesses was a stretch of residential houses, including a large house known as the Colored Working Girls Home, where single young women working in the city boarded under a strict Christian discipline and were watched over by several elderly matrons. It was one house removed from our house, which was in the exact middle of the block, directly across from Wheeler Street.
541 Dorr Street.
Ours was a house of note, mainly because of its location and maybe also because it was freshly painted white and stayed that way. Maybe it was of note too because the sidewalk was shoveled in winter or because the grass was cut and neat in summer and petunias were planted in a front flower garden. Dee loved petunias and Stacey had created beds for her as soon as they moved in, both in the front and backyards. Maybe people took note just because we lived there, a rising young family in the community.
It was obvious as heads turned to look at the house that many people were impressed by it, and we took pride in that. The house was large, a duplex. On one side of it was a rundown ramshackle house with unpainted wooden siding blackened with age and a huge barn in the backyard filled with rats. On the other side was a neat house, a side-by-side duplex, but smaller than ours. When we moved in, families in both those houses were white.
That did not last long.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Despite having been in Toledo less than a year, Stacey and Dee had managed to buy the Dorr Street house in the spring of 1945. They had managed this by both of them working. Once Dee arrived in Toledo, she had left Rie and ’lois with Mrs. McClaire and gotten a job at a tool factory, and she and Stacey had saved their money for a down payment on the house. Stacey and Dee had good heads for business and they figured to pay the mortgage by renting the upper portion of the house. Their decision was a smart one. In May 1945, the war ended on the European front. In September 1945, the war ended in the Pacific. With Christopher-John and Man soon coming back from the war, Stacey and Dee figured they would need a house.
By the time I arrived in Toledo, Stacey and Dee already had the house. They and the girls and I stayed on the first floor, where there were two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, sun parlor, and what we termed the front or “Sunday” room, where we sat on Sundays with all the folks who came to visit. Dee furnished the room with her best furniture and sheer white curtains that draped across the only window, a large picture window that looked onto Dorr. The house was the finest in which we had lived and had more space than any of us had ever experienced. Even though I shared a bedroom with the babies, I felt the enormous size of the house and shared Stacey and Dee’s pride in owning it.
We learned that the house had not always been a duplex, but once had been a one-family house. The room that was now Stacey and Dee’s bedroom was evidence of that. Once most likely another common room for the residing family, the bedroom was adjacent to the dining room and had two sets of stairs. One set of stairs, closed off by a door, led to the basement. Inside the bedroom closet, another set of wide stairs with a heavy carved banister led to the second floor. At the top of the stairs to the right of the hallway was a large bathroom, then the hall turned and along the rest of it were four rooms, presumably once all bedrooms, one of which had been converted into a kitchen. A door near the end of the hall opened into the upstairs sun parlor, a room with windows lining the exterior walls and stairs going to the downstairs sun parlor and the front door. In addition to the front door, there were doors opening from the downstairs sun parlor into the living room and the Sunday room. Both the lower and upper sun parlors as well as the downstairs bathroom had been added to the house years before.