Most important things about themselves are a choice

I didn’t watch a Sunday movie this week. I knew my time would be interrupted (and the interruption would be a good thing). So I took the opportunity to see a few shorter things. A week ago the Detroit Free Press noted the death of Fred Hill, who had organized the Briefcase Drill Team that appeared in in several holiday parades and even Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade several years ago. I never saw this group perform live, so I figured it was time to see them online. This is the best performance I found, only a minute long. A few years ago the Detroit Symphony Orchestra announced a performance of Igudesman and Joo, who have fun with classical music. I couldn't attend that performance so kept the announcement card to check it out later. That card got ignored for a long time. And I finally watched some of what is online. They are quite fine musicians and quite good comedians. Here are my favorite clips of what I watched. Joo, the pianist, says his hands are too small to play Rachmaninoff and he comes up with a solution. A long segment from a concert. A Klezmer version of Mozart's Turkish March. The two listen to a CD and fight over the remote control. This must have been some interesting rehearsals by the live orchestra. Doing a Riverdance while playing the violin In this map see the highway marked I-375. It is about a mile long and connects I-75 to the Detroit riverfront. When the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed in Ford Auditorium on the river (now gone) I used it frequently.

The position of I-375 is where Hastings Street used to be. And Hastings St. had been the vibrant main street of Black Bottom. Yes, I-375, built in the late 1950s was designed to eliminate the black neighborhood adjacent to downtown as an urban renewal project. The area to the northeast of I-375 is now Lafayette Park and filled with townhouses designed by famous architect Mies van der Rohe. In the 1960s black people didn’t live there. I mention all this because I just finished the book Black Bottom Saints by Alice Randall. It is a novel narrated by Ziggy Johnson. Most of the book is more than 50 profiles of people Ziggy considers most important to Black Bottom life and culture. I hadn’t heard of most of them, though I had heard of Night Train Lane, Joe Louis, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., and Moms Mabley. The beginning of the book explains that there was Harlem as the capital of black culture and right behind it was Bronzeville in Chicago and Black Bottom in Detroit. As Ziggy is recording all this in 1967 he refers to Black Bottom (no longer a place) as the Caramel Camelot. The book profiles two people of interest to me as a gay man. One is Ruth Ellis, for whom the Ruth Ellis Center for LGBTQ youth is named. I used to volunteer here (and once the virus permits plan to again). The other is Valda Gray, known at the time as a “female impersonator” or who we would now call a drag queen. About Valda Ziggy wrote:

Valda doesn’t believe many things are one thing or another.. She thinks everything is just like her – mixed. I want my students to know Valda. I want them to know that most important things about themselves are a choice. They can choose their own names. Choose to know and announce their true sex. Choose who they work with. Choose a life of art. Choose to see when politics is failing. Choose to build community. Choose to be as vibrant as Valda. Or not.

The cover says this is a novel and the copyright page has this standard bit:

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

After a while that began to bother me. This book doesn’t read like a novel. It reads like a series of profiles, though there is a background story of how Ziggy wrote these profiles while in the hospital in 1967 and yet not published until 2020. As for whether it is fiction, Ziggy really did exist and really did run a School of Theatre in which he taught young black girls how to dance and take charge of their lives. Also, all the people profiled are real (though I didn’t personally check them) and most events in their profiles happened as stated – Sammy Davis Jr. really did start performing at age 3 with his father and godfather. Besides, what good would it do to profile more than 50 completely fictional people? The power of this book is telling about real black people who prospered and made great contributions in the face of white people’s racism. I get the disclaimer needed to be made. There is no way to verify whether Ruth Ellis visited Ziggy in the hospital and what she said to him while there. In spite of that little bother I highly recommend this book. It is a warm and wonderful glimpse into the humanity and culture that were in Black Bottom and what was lost when it was razed. It is also a tribute to “the breadwinners” – the ordinary men and women who worked the auto industry factory jobs that provided a stable living, allowed them to be the bedrock of their community, and gave them enough extra they could support the vibrant Black Bottom culture.