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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fawlanionese W hen my dad was little, he worked. He helped his father to strip furnaces in the basements of the wealthy and gathered scraps of metal and coal off the streets to sell. But even though he learned to work doing physically exhausting, menial tasks, his expectations for himself had nothing to do with the expectations that the world had for black boys in 1950s Detroit . High school counselors prophesied his future with words like plumber, electrician, and trade and pursed their lips in amusement when he said that he’d like to go to college. They didn’t know and probably wouldn’t much care that this deeply creative child taught himself how to develop film in the bathroom at nine years old. He and his friend Rodney offered to do odd jobs shoveling snow and mowing lawns in a wealthy nearby neighborhood called Indian Village. One day, he turned to Rodney as they stood on the lawn of a historic white and brick home on Seminole street, and said, “One day I’m going to own a house here.” And it didn’t take too long before he did. But his vision of the future soon began to push past the best that Detroit had to offer. He defied his guidance counselors by working seven times harder than anyone else, and graduated high school at age sixteen. After attending Wayne State University, he convinced CBS to allow him to be the network’s first black cameraman. And then, in an unlikely burst of bizarre luck, the riots came. Newsweek magazine was desperate for photographs because their all-white staff of photojournalists feared braving the streets, so he got a job that may not have otherwise availed itself by simply walking the avenues near his own home with a camera. Not long after, he had a job waiting for him in Los Angeles. He hoped eventually to work in cities around the world. 12 Fawlanionese Life happened alongside the hasty realization of his ambitions. He married young, had a daughter named Lisa, and got divorced. He worked as a manager at the public library, where he met my mom—an Italian girl who still lived with her parents near Eight Mile Road. The two of them decided to move to Los Angeles, and eventually they had me. My half sister remained in Detroit and became emotionally distant for a whole host of reasons that range in nature from obvious to profound. We visit Detroit frequently to see family, but the house on Seminole has become a dream unrealized, a possible home that we decorated in our minds whenever the apartment we shared in Los Angeles seemed too small. As the years have passed, it has become a loaded notion, this house. It has been flooded and gnawed at by the dogs of neglectful renters, ransacked for its claw-foot bathtubs by thieves, and targeted by bigoted neighbors who complain about upkeep with only a thin smile covering their racism toward my father. These obstacles, like all the others he’s faced, have made the house into an obsession. He cannot afford to refurbish the house in one fell swoop, but he tends to it slowly over time, like the soldier who keeps watch overnight while periodically stoking the fire. Whenever we go to Detroit for Christmas, the house must be wrestled and tamed in order to accommodate our basic needs for food, bathing, and warmth. Far away from Detroit, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a man named Michael Faraday. When he was young he experienced obstacles similar to those my father faced. He was born to a blacksmith in South London, and he educated himself. A passion for chemistry grew out of the reading he did as an apprentice to a bookbinder and bookseller. His introduction to the world of science began when he approached a famous chemist at the Royal Institution in London with a book of rigorous notes and observations, and he eventually became the man’s secretary. On his travels as an apprentice , he was forced to take the role of a servant, his body traveling and eating separately, though his mind was treated with admiration and respect. In order to push through to success, he had to convince the men and women around him of his basic human worth. Long after he’d made a name for himself, he walked to the front of a lecture hall at the...

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