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father. While most white children of his generation dreamed of soaring through the sky like Superman or swinging vine to vine like Tarzan, Curtis knew from an early age he’d never be quite like them. No hero looked like he looked or lived where he lived—he was black and poor in a world that wouldn’t let him forget it. If those prospects seemed glum, just across the ocean a maniac goose-stepped through Europe, hell-bent on conquering the Earth to assert the primacy of the white race.
    While Marion adjusted to the rhythms of her newborn boy, she became pregnant again, this time with a girl. A mere nine months and eight days after Curtis’s birth, Judith arrived prematurely. Now my grandmother had two lives to protect with the same money that often couldn’t cover one. Even though Annie Bell’s finances allowed her to take special care of her only son, her largesse didn’t extend to Marion and Mannish’s family, so Marion had to go on relief—known today as welfare. She lived hand to mouth, never sure she’d have enough to feed her babies or that her husband would provide support.
    When Mannish came home, which wasn’t often, his belligerence ruled. He had a temper like his mother and fought Marion constantly. He wasn’t even twenty years old and couldn’t provide for his family, which often brings the worst out of a man. Still, he’d soon desert his wife and children, leaving Marion to do the hard work the best she could.
    The second Great War opened opportunities for Negroes the same way the first one had, so Mannish joined the service and was stationed in California, giving him a steady salary. The money helped, but Marion now had to negotiate the internal anguish of watching her husband leave without knowing when, or if, he’d come back. He shipped out for duty as millions of Negroes shipped in from the South, the Great Migration still flooding forth.
    As the new arrivals sought jobs, food, and shelter, racial passions ran high. In June, roughly three months after my aunt Judy’s birth, race riots rocked Detroit. Unlike the Chicago riots of 1919, Detroit in 1943 represented a turning point. As Wilkerson wrote:
    Until the 1943 uprising in Detroit, most riots in the United States … had been white attacks on colored people often resulting in the burning of entire colored sections or towns. This was the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites and in which black residents, having become established in the city but still relegated to rundown ghettos, began attacking and looting perceived symbols of exploitation, the stores and laundries run by whites and other outsiders that blacks felt were cheating them. It was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urbanphenomena, ultimately centered on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them.
    This subtle shift in the nature of riots would have massive and destructive repercussions in the coming years, but at the time it only caused Marion to worry for her children.
    Two thousand miles away from the riots, Mannish had plenty of room to live wild and free, leaving his marriage behind on the cold banks of Lake Michigan. At some point, Marion decided to visit him. She dropped Curtis at her mother’s house—he loved Grandma Sadie’s sweet potato pies—and left Judy with Annie Bell, perhaps because Judy had also been born severely nearsighted. Whatever her reasoning, when Marion returned to pick up Judy, Annie Bell refused to give her back.
    Marion found a way to get along with just about everybody, but losing her daughter strained her gentle soul until it almost burst. Worse still, Annie Bell had money, which meant no government agency was likely to force little Judy to return to live with her mother in abject poverty. So, in a bizarre way, Judy was stolen. No one talked much about it. Judy grew up calling Annie Bell