That was my last day.
The next week, I walked into the office of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a nonpartisan group that works to get women elected to public office, and asked the communications director to hire me.
She did, but only after a closed-door meeting where she told me to strike the Traficant internship from my résumé.
“He’s a laughingstock,” she said. “This will follow you.”
Nearly a decade later, while doing graduate research, I found myself interviewing mostly women, simply because they tend to outlive the men in my family. I tried to get them to tell me more about the people they knew who factored into Youngstown’s criminal past, but instead they wanted to tell me about what their lives were like in the forties, fifties, and sixties. They told me about baking pizzas in outside brick ovens and the dangers of hanging your clothes out to dry on the clothesline in Brier Hill. (If the ash got on them, you’d have to wash them all over again.) My grandmother’s family was so poor they lived off fried potatoes and whatever they could grow in the garden. Still, they prided themselves on raising good kids. Once, when my great-uncle stole a chicken, my great-grandmother said nothing.
“She just looked at him in a way that made him feel so guilty that he took it back,” Grandma told me.
These family stories were entertaining, but what about the mob? The corrupt politicians? The thugs that wired car bombs and shot people? I inched the recorder closer.
“They never bothered us,” she told me. “They knew we didn’t have nothing.”
I understand why Youngstown’s wives, sisters, and daughters would want to forget the city’s criminal past. It isn’t really theirs; few women have emerged as perpetrators of the Crimetown USA image. In newspaper articles, they have been inconsequential characters, lightly sketched into the background, cooking or grieving. That’s not to say they didn’t know what was going on in back rooms and boardrooms, but you don’t take too much ownership of the power structure when you’re just greeting people at the front desk.
Here were those two Youngstowns again. Instead of the free and the scary, however, I saw distinct male and female views emerge in our much-maligned city. The male view resided in the realms of collapsed industry and crime. It is the one known and vilified by the rest of the world. The female view centered on family. Though loosely referred to in references to the city’s ethnic roots, its strong loyalties and family values, that is not the story of Youngstown everyone else knows.
Despite the shame and defeatism many of us from Youngstown have felt, there is no badness in the blood here, no moral inferiority. There has been a historic lack of opportunity for half of us to speak for ourselves. Money and a room of their own? Few women in Youngstown had either.
To write a creative work, according to Woolf, writers should strive for “incandescence,” the state of mind in which “there is no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.” You can only get to it if you’re free, even temporarily, of the emotions spawned by dependent relationships, “grudges and spites and antipathies.” Yet while we don’t have to let our families in our rooms where we write, we must let them into our writing. Otherwise, no one will know our past. Steel and crime do not reflect our experience. The things we want to talk about in our eighties, those are real.
As much as I disliked going to my grandparents’ house on Pearl Street, it always smelled good. I often ended up in the kitchen, where there were hard Italian cookies that never seemed to get stale and pots of sauce or wedding soup on the stove with my grandparents bustling around them, dropping handfuls of this or that into the pots, stopping only to let us kiss their pudgy cheeks and urge us to have something to eat. My grandparents’ kitchen was as loving, happy, and gender-equal as any place I have ever been, definitely worth crossing the bridge for. I am sure it was just one of many oases in a turbulent city, but not recorded or celebrated as the special thing it was.
It’s a small memory, but it feels good to write about it. Finally, I can breathe.
MARSHA MUSIC
The Kidnapped Children of Detroit
IT HAPPENED SUDDENLY.
One day, we’d be outside with our friends, black, brown, and white, on the warm summer days before the start of the next school semester, playing jacks and hopscotch, riding bikes.
The next day, our white friends would be gone. One of my friends might have said, “Hey, we’re moving,” in the middle of a game of kickball, but there were few real goodbyes, or promises to keep in touch, at least not of the type associated with the farewells of kids who had been together all or most of their lives.
In the jumbled mishmash of childhood memories during those transitional years, I recall worshipers leaving the neighborhood church after Sunday service, descending the dark oak staircase from the sanctuary. In their hurry to get on with their day, it looked, from my kid-level gaze, like a stampede, during those late-summer days when our integrated neighborhood was disassembling before my eyes. I will forever associate the Sunday-dressed hemlines and dark-suited pant legs with their rushing, running to get away—from us—the worshipers with whom they had just fellowshipped before God.
White parents were grabbing their kids and escaping from Detroit—and from its enclave Highland Park, where I grew up, a then solidly middle-class community within Detroit’s borders, “a city within a city.” Often, it appeared as if they left in the dark of the night; the moves seemed so clandestine. This sense of them leaving virtually “overnight,” packing up and disappearing, was likely due to the white parents’ reluctance to speak to their black neighbors—whom they often treated
