Friday, August 8, 2008



When Nora was 15 we went to Dexter, Michigan and found the house I lived in. I took this picture of her in a deliberate attempt to recreate the photo of me that is sitting (or was sitting) on my father's desk for as long as I can remember.

Dexter House had been an antebellum mansion outside Ann Arbor in the small town of Dexter; it was divided into university housing for nearby U of Michgan and had supposedly been a stop on the underground railroad. I have known this fact my entire life although I don't remember when I first heard it. I think it must have been when we lived there, and that my mother explained what that meant. I doubt I understood the concept of slavery, or escape, or race for that matter. I know that when I was in 3rd grade I did not understand what "colored people" were (that was the term used then). I know this because I can remember my friend Dodo (yes, Dodo, short for Dorothy) talking about someone's "colored" gardener and the image that invoked of a person with skin like a book's endpage-- a swirling kaleidoscope of color. I think this is not so much a beautiful evocation of the natural tolerance of children as of the rigid segregation in which we lived, inasmuch as I never ever encountered people of other races. I can remember vividly in fact, because it was so rare, the few non-whites I met growing up. The housekeeper at Aronimink School; the Hindu girl in fourth grade (also the only handicapped child I encountered), the three black girls at Haverford Junior High.

2 comments:

Jade Li said...

"color" is without a doubt a learned designation. So sad you had strict segregation when you grew up. I remember my mom was very friendly and courteous to any non-white person we encountered while growing up, at least to their face. At home, the epithets and stereotyped comments flew liberally. Mixed messages in a child's mind, for sure, and not just about the shade of someone's skin.

Very cool though for you as a kid to grow up in a place that was part of the underground railroad. Born and raised in MI, eh?

Alexandra said...

Hi Jade! Good to see you over here! I only lived there for a year, when I was three and my father was doing a postdoc at UM. Mostly I grew up in Philadelphia, but moved to Illinois as a teen. But that house was always a deep deep part of the family mythology, and one day, when my daughter was 15, it occurred to me that we lived a 5 hour (less?) drive from this place. In the 30 years that I had lived in Illinois it never once occurred to me that Michigan was so close. This amazes me; there's a longer version of the poem that touches on that and so much about that house and my memories of it.