My dad had faith in his own utility. It was a point of pride. Which is why at home during our fire drills he had little interest in being a passive prop, even in a pretend crisis. He had no intention, under any circumstance, of being a liability—of winding up the unconscious guy on the floor. But still, some part of him seemed to understand that this mattered to us—to Craig in particular. When we asked him to lie down, he’d humor us, dropping first to his knees, then to his butt, then spreading himself out obligingly, faceup on the living room carpet. He’d exchange glances with my mother, who found it all a little funny, as if to say, These damn kids.
With a sigh, he’d close his eyes, waiting to feel Craig’s hands hook themselves solidly beneath his shoulders to start the rescue operation. My mother and I would then watch as, with no small amount of effort and a good deal of awkwardness, my brother managed to drag 170 or so pounds of paternal deadweight backward through the imaginary inferno that raged in his preadolescent mind, hauling my father across the floor, rounding the couch, and finally making it to the stairwell.
From here, Craig figured he could probably slide my dad’s body down the stairs and out the side door to safety. My father always refused to let him practice this part, saying gently, “That’s enough now,” and insisting on getting back to his feet before Craig could try to lug him down the stairs. But between the small man and the grown man, the point had been made. None of this would be easy or comfortable if it came to it, and there were, of course, no guarantees that any of us would survive. But if the very worst happened, we at least had a plan.
* * *
Slowly, I was becoming more outward and social, more willing to open myself up to the messes of the wider world. My natural resistance to chaos and spontaneity had been worn down somewhat through all the hours I’d spent trailing my father through his precinct visits, plus all the other weekend outings we made, dropping in on our dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins, sitting in thick clouds of barbecue smoke in someone’s backyard or running around with neighborhood kids in a neighborhood that wasn’t ours.
My mother was one of seven children in her family. My father was the oldest of five. My mom’s relatives tended to gather at Southside’s house around the corner—drawn by my grandfather’s cooking, the ongoing games of bid whist, and the exuberant blasting of jazz. Southside acted as a magnet for all of us. He was forever mistrustful of the world beyond his own yard—worried primarily about everyone’s safety and well-being—and as a result poured his energy into creating an environment where we were always well fed and entertained, likely with the hope we’d never want to move away from it. He even got me a dog, an affable, cinnamon-colored shepherd mutt we called Rex. Per my mother’s orders, Rex wasn’t allowed to live at our house, but I’d visit him all the time at Southside’s, lying on the floor with my face buried in his soft fur, listening to his tail thwap appreciatively anytime Southside walked past. Southside spoiled the dog the same way he spoiled me, with food and love and tolerance, all of it a silent, earnest plea never to leave him.
My father’s family, meanwhile, sprawled across Chicago’s broader South Side and included an array of great-aunts and third cousins, plus a few stray outliers whose blood connection remained cloudy. We orbited between all of them. I quietly assessed where we were going by the number of trees I’d see on the street outside. The poorer neighborhoods often had no trees at all. But to my dad, everyone was kin. He lit up when he saw his uncle Calio, a skinny, wavy-haired little man who looked like Sammy Davis Jr. and was almost always drunk. He adored his aunt Verdelle, who lived with her eight children in a neglected apartment building next to the Dan Ryan Expressway, in a neighborhood where Craig and I understood that the rules of survival were very different.
On Sunday afternoons, all four of us normally took the ten-minute drive north to Parkway Gardens to eat dinner with my dad’s parents, whom we called Dandy and Grandma, and his three youngest siblings, Andrew, Carleton, and Francesca, who’d been born more than a decade after my father and thus seemed more like sister and brothers to us than aunt and uncles. My father, I thought, seemed more like a father and less like a brother with the three of them, offering them advice and slipping them cash when they needed it. Francesca was smart and beautiful and sometimes let me brush her long hair. Andrew and Carleton were in their early twenties and dazzlingly hip. They wore bell-bottoms and turtlenecks. They owned leather jackets, had girlfriends, and talked about things like Malcolm X and “soul power.” Craig and I passed hours in their bedroom at the back of the apartment, just trying to sponge up their cool.
My grandfather, also named Fraser Robinson, was decidedly less fun to be around, a cigar-puffing patriarch who’d sit in his recliner with a newspaper open on his lap and the evening news blaring on the television nearby. His demeanor was nothing like my father’s. For Dandy, everything was an irritant. He was galled by the day’s headlines, by the state of the world as shown on TV, by the young black men—“boo-boos,” he called them—whom he perceived to be hanging uselessly around the neighborhood, giving black people everywhere a bad name. He shouted at the television. He shouted at my grandmother, a sweet, soft-spoken woman and devout Christian named LaVaughn. (My parents had named me Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in honor of her.) By day, my grandmother expertly managed a thriving Bible bookstore on the Far South Side, but in her off-hours with Dandy she was reduced to a meekness I found perplexing, even as a young girl. She cooked his meals and absorbed his barrage of complaints and said nothing in her own defense. Even at a young age, there was something about my grandmother’s silence and passivity in her relationship with Dandy that got under my skin.
According to my mother, I was the only person in the family to talk back to Dandy when he yelled. I did it regularly, from the time I was very young and over many years, in part because it drove me crazy that my grandmother wouldn’t speak up for herself, in part because everyone else fell silent around him, and lastly because I loved Dandy as much as he confounded me. His stubbornness was something I recognized, something I’d inherited myself, though I hoped in a less abrasive form. There was also a softness in Dandy, which I caught only in glimmers. He tenderly rubbed my neck sometimes when I sat at the foot of his reclining chair. He smiled when my dad said something funny or one of us kids managed to slip a sophisticated word into a conversation. But then something would set him off and he’d start snarling again.
“Quit shouting at everyone, Dandy,” I’d say. Or, “Don’t be mean to Grandma.” Often, I’d add, “What’s got you so mad anyway?”
The answer to that question was both complicated and simple. Dandy himself would leave it unanswered, shrugging crankily in response to my interference and returning to his newspaper. Back at home, though, my parents would try to explain.
Dandy was from the South Carolina Low Country, having grown up in the humid seaport of Georgetown, where thousands of slaves once labored on vast plantations, harvesting crops of rice and indigo and making their owners rich. My grandfather, born in 1912, was the grandson of slaves, the son of a millworker, and the oldest of what would be ten children in his family. A quick-witted and intelligent kid, he’d been nicknamed “the Professor” and set his sights early on the idea of someday going to college. But not only was he black and from a poor family, he also came of age during the Great Depression. After finishing high school, Dandy went to work at a lumber mill, knowing that if he stayed in Georgetown, his options would never widen. When the mill eventually closed, like many African Americans of his generation he took a chance and moved north to Chicago, joining what became known as the Great Migration, in which six million southern blacks relocated to big northern cities over the course of five decades, fleeing racial oppression and chasing industrial jobs.