LORAIN, OHIO

SEPTEMBER 2019

“You listen,” Betty McDowell, Sam’s niece, said on our first call. “Don’t you go bothering my mama. She has had enough trouble with this. Don’t you go bothering my family. They ain’t going to talk to you. If you’re having compassion, you have it for those poor women.”

“No, no, I want to hear what you—”

“He is a blood stain on our beautiful family tree. I speak what I think. Ten years old, he was my favorite uncle. He always showed up with backpacks and school supplies and crayons and shoes for us kids. I found out later he was boosting them. Anytime Sammy showed up, the cops would be three days behind him. We had cops hanging around at family funerals. We are good people and we been bothered long enough. I was ten years old when he showed up at the house. I ran out to greet him. He grabbed my vajayjay and stuck his tongue down my throat. That’s what I call a pervert.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“You ain’t need to be sorry. You know why? Because I told my mama, who took me by the hand and walked me straight to my granddad, Sam’s dad, and told him what had happened. My granddad went to his closet, took his shotgun, and run Sammy off the property. He said, ‘Go on now and don’t come back, Sammy. You family and we love you, but there are too many kids around here, and you ain’t right.’”

I was far more accustomed to hearing stories of abuse disbelieved, denied, ignored, gaslit. I told her I was planning to visit Lorain and would love to meet her. I got a hard maybe and never heard back when I called. If I couldn’t get Betty, I’d make friends with the research librarian, see Lake Erie, take photos of the Palace Theater. I planned a coffee with Carolyn Sipkovsky, who ran the Lighthouse Foundation, as a backup.

I drove first to U.S. Steel, where Henry, Sam’s grandfather, had worked as a pipe fitter, and watched it from across the river. It was one of the two great steel factories that stood side by side on the banks of the Black River, the mouth of which meets Lake Erie. Republic Steel closed a decade before, but these monolithic Mad Max half-empty remains of an empire were majestic, even in ruin. I viewed it from the strip on the other side of the bridge, lined with clubs and bars and liquor stores. Shadows of something once bumping and alive floated behind the boarded windows.

Some had survived as fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck lingerie stores; some had turned into barbershops with hand-lettered signs. There was one functioning go-go bar, with two pickups parked at odd angles in front, in what seemed to me to be the middle of the street. Catty-corner on the same intersection stood an abandoned Mexican restaurant with faded murals and turrets shaped like cacti. Beyond that, it got residential quickly.

Few had cars in 1942. Most walked to work. Sam had followed Henry over the bridge to U.S. Steel for months after he got out of OSR, after he married Jackie and thought maybe a life was the thing. It had only taken weeks before he started stalking the nighttime Broadway crawl.

I crossed the bridge, and a security guard was on me in two minutes. I’d been calling U.S. Steel with no answer, asking for a tour, for two days. The guard slammed his car door and came at me, chest squared. Even as he led me by my arm to the car, I trusted my instinct, sharpened on a whetstone of hypervigilance—not always fun but pretty sharp. This guy was no threat. Furthermore, he was a nonthreat with no health or insurance benefits—they’d cut him off before the hours that would make him eligible. That’s how it works now, if it works at all.

I drove toward the gentrifying waterfront, where the Black River looked different, according to the Welcome to Lorain website. I’d texted Betty twice already that morning. It took a number of tries to find a bottle of wine that wasn’t in a jug. It took even more to find a delightful florist who traveled the few blocks to her closed shop to whip me up a special bouquet for Betty. She even held out a bowl of smooth stones on which were printed inspirational words. I closed my eyes, picked one, and bought that too.

The stone is in my pocket as I write this—the word is for me and the woman who made the bouquet. Choose your own word, picked with eyes closed, from a bowl in the city’s only flower shop.

I looked for the library while I shoved a Taco Bell quesadilla in my mouth and was reminded of why I don’t generally do that. I waited for Betty’s call as I passed soaring bridges, a bandshell by the water. I arrived at Broadway—the charming “main street,” with proper columns in front of the closed-down bank. A cool marquee atop the closed-down theater. A cute hotel, wrapped in tarps, was being renovated. This was a town struggling to build something new on an old blueprint.

I wasn’t sure what odds I’d have given it.

The simple sadness of walking a street of empty midwestern storefronts was almost a relief by then—something shared and human. One ideal dying, another rising. A social contract rewritten again and again throughout history. It is hard to bear witness to what we don’t yet understand and harder still to ask the questions that might point us in the right direction.

I sat on the steps of Lakeview Park under a crescent of iron that read East Beach as I watched my phone and lost the battle to keep my hair out of my lip gloss. Ripples in the water caught knife edges of light.

There was no way to be simply sad facing the Sam Little story. It was a puzzle and a war.

I looked out at the lighthouse, about ready to cash it in and go bring my flowers to Carolyn instead, when I got a text from Betty: yeah sure.

I pulled up to a 1970s bi-level in a neighborhood of well-manicured lawns, about the same size and era of the house in which I grew up. A gardener cleared a path under the crab apple tree with a leaf blower as I approached with my flowers and wine.

“You looking for Betty? She left!”

“She what?!”

“She left!”

He turned the leaf blower off.

“She’ll be back. Garage door still open and she ain’t paid me.”

The gardener continued blowing as I rang the bell a few times just to confirm that she had indeed left. He weed-wacked as I sat on her stoop like a jilted prom date for about half an hour before he took pity on me.

“How you know Betty? You a friend of Hollywood?”

Trick question? Inevitable irony? I took a shot in the dark. “Hollywood her boyfriend?”

He fell out laughing, and I noticed he wore a halo cast on his left leg with visible screws.

He got Hollywood on speaker.

“No, she right here. She looking for Betty. Her name is Jillian, like that secretary at my doctor. Jillian. With a G though I bet.”

“Um, no, it’s a J. Jillian. Hi. Nice to meet you.”

“She nice looking?”

He took me off speaker.

“She pretty enough, if you like that kind of figure. Hurry over if you want to see.”

“Hey! Hey, can you ask Hollywood, does he know where Betty is?”

On cue, a Betty I did not expect pulled into her driveway and walked straight by me to her front door, waving her hand. She wore sweats with stripes up the side and a sports bra. Multicolor sister locks hung to her waist, and she was pierced and tatted to the teeth.

“I apologize for the delay,” she said. “My baby ran out of gas. She’s fine. She’s barely weepin’, but anyway. I apologize. That won’t happen no more.” She opened the door. “You can see I like plants.”

The walls dripped with spider plants and philodendrons and lilies. A black rock fireplace mantle that would have made the fanciest interior designer in LA swoon dominated a living room full of nothing but plants, blocked off by upended chairs—because they had a new puppy.

“Such a pain, right?” I said. “I had, like, nine baby gates around every rug in the house.”

“Right? We hang in the kitchen and den anyway. But this here is my own beautiful little world.”

“You like green things.”

“I like plants, flowers, anything that got life. That why it crushed me. I knew my uncle wasn’t good. I mean he’s still my uncle, but I would never let my daughter around him or anything like that. You can’t pick your family. It just… He was shady. I learned when I was a little girl, he wasn’t right. And it wasn’t a big deal, because I told.”

“It sounds like your family listened.”

I trotted behind her into a house at once alien and familiar.

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah. My mama said, ‘You okay? Do I got to take you to the doctor?’ He probably won’t never say that because I know he cared for me. Or he would have never gave you my number. Li’l Scooby.”

“Is that what he called you?”

“When I was born, I looked like Scooby-Doo. That is what my mama said. My mom still call me that. It’s a term of endearment. And he was like a good uncle because he always had gifts. I was a little kid. He always had stuff.”

Betty pulled a tray of salmon out of the oven. She tidied as she went, wiped down every counter.

She was touched by the flowers, put them in a vase.

“I’m a Capricorn. I’m of the earth. Hey, what you writing down over there?”

“I wrote ‘Capricorn.’ Would you prefer I not take notes?”

She put the wine in the fridge, grabbed a Colt 45, sat down smack in the middle of the couch, and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights.

“Sure, write. So what? This is the end of my day. I do elderly care and I’m doing the night shift and she’s a hundred and three years old for real. I love her. So this is my after work. I clean too. Like deep crazy clean. Hoarders and shit. I have a bit of that OCD, and I love to clean.”

She showed me a few photographs, and she had transformed some scary hoarder shacks into sparkling, hygienic homes. I hovered behind her and bummed my first cigarette in about ten years, took a sip of her beer.

“You know, write your thing. I’m a straightforward kind of person. My family, I don’t want to hurt them.”

I invited myself to sit at the dining room table and faced her. It was hot as hell. She apologized for the air-conditioning being broken. I rolled up my sleeves.

“I usually hide my tattoos, but I think I’m good here,” I said.

“My mom drove a Harley! I’m still trying to be that MILF. Don’t you write that down now. I had the blue glitter helmet and the blue glitter boots. I was the coolest thing in my Catholic school.”

She led me to a picture of her mother on the wall. They were a family of lookers.

“She was the coolest thing in the world. Wasn’t until I got older I learned she was dead broke and it was cheaper. Had to fill up the tank. Had to get you to school. Had to get to work. Six dollars. Yep. Oh my goodness. If I could be a third of her, I would be… I would be…”

“She sounds like a neat lady.”

“Brilliant. I was gonna say brilliant. Not too many you come across. Not like her.”

Vintage family photos lined the walls. Betty gave me the tour: this one was mean as a rattlesnake, this one was beautiful as a porcelain doll until her last day, this one was a saint with a genius IQ, this one was my little homey, this one had fantastic gams—all the women had fantastic gams, ran in the family—this one got run out of town for supposedly messing with a white lady, these had the cheekbones, these had the famous lion eyes. The blue-green-gold slaveowner’s eyes.

“This one right here, see. She has the eyes. The hateful eyes. You’ve seen the eyes?”

“Yes.”

“They change, right? Like with the blood pressure, with the liquor, with the rage or whatever. I was an only child like my daughter, and I only hope I have traits like my mother, not like those niggers. Oh shit. I’m sorry.” Betty doubled over laughing.

“It’s really okay.”

“No, some things ain’t proper. And that’s offensive.”

“I’m not here to judge.”

“I don’t think you judge me. I’m in my own home, so I have a different comfort level. That’s why I’m glad I invited you here.”

Betty’s eighteen-year-old daughter, named for Sam’s sister Inez, walked in, looking remarkably fresh, considering she was wearing a McDonald’s uniform after what I could only assume was a long day. She took her name tag off and put it in a dish on the counter.

I hadn’t been prepared for her arrival and didn’t know how much she knew about her uncle, if anything. She looked at me like I was from another galaxy, but she was far more excited about a makeup palette she’d gotten in the mail from a blog giveaway. Betty told her to eat some salmon, please, next time, instead of the garbage at work.

“Who is this?” asked Inez.

“She writing about your uncle.”

“Oh.”

Inez sat and opened her palette. We oohed and aahed over the colors.

Betty took her daughter’s chin in both hands, tilted her face to the light.

“We got everything in my family—Choctaw, Italians, Spanish, Jewish, Black. We got no racial tensions here. But me? I found a silverback. Because all my family members look like Sammy.”

“Mom! You cannot say that.”

“He’s a good dad, a good man. I’m saying he had calluses on his hands. You seen that on your green-eyed uncles? They hands softer than a baby’s bootie. They can’t even take out the garbage, eyes like that. I don’t want no pretty Ricky up in my hair products. We got enough of those I’m related to. We were married for a long time. We were just better as friends. Look at her. She’s Black as the ace of spades, Black as train smoke in the wintertime. I did it on purpose. Look at this beauty.”

“Are you writing about what goes through a man’s mind when he does something like this?” asked Inez.

“Oh, honey, if we understood, we’d be as nutty as he is,” said Betty, smoothing an invisible bit of frizz from her forehead. “I paid a therapist one hundred twenty dollars an hour for a year to tell me that. But I can tell you what my cousins say. They say his great uncle smacked him around. They say he was never right again after he came back from that reform school.”

“What’s reform school?”

“Where you got to go when you ain’t acting right and they didn’t care back in the day. You got your ass beat, molested, teeth knocked out, mentally, anything went. There was no regulations and he was never right again. They also say he was already acting a fool before that anyway, and he was nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble. Every time Sammy was around, someone went to jail. Oh, he broke my mom, skipped out on her bond. Three thousand dollars or something. Couldn’t pay her mortgage. We wound up here, and she’s in Kentucky.”

I asked to see a painting Betty had mentioned to me on the phone. Sam painted it for her when she was a little girl, and it had hung over the bed in her childhood room. Before.

“That’s going to stir up memories right there, because that’s when I loved him. He didn’t do that then. I realized my finger was broke when I was born, so it’s always been like this, and in that picture, he captured this little crooked pinky. You very nosy. You’re going to send me into rapid heartbeat.”

She left and reentered, holding a framed acrylic painting on canvas.

“There’s that crooked little finger. I look at this now, the little braid come out, my little ponytail, and I had the pink barrettes. But was he thinking nasty then? That’s what I think now. That was an Easter picture.”

“I don’t know.”

“My baby and her friends, I had to tell them the other night, ‘All, y’all are the shit.’ Because all four of them are in college and then working. I said, ‘Y’all over here in my house, doing homework all crinkle face. Y’all the shit! Y’all want some pizza? I’ll order y’all some pizza, because you are the shit!’ I blow the girls’ heads up. I gas them up. I give them that. I’m telling you, ‘You perfect. I don’t care what you feel, what the world say. Look at you!’”

“Scary to have a girl,” I said.

“Period. And especially a pretty, dumb girl. I told my daughter, ‘You are not going to be that.’ There’s too many thumbs-up, beautiful women that became victims because they’re not smart.”

“Remember when that coach got handsy with me in my junior year?” Inez said.

The two busted up laughing.

“What did I say?”

Inez side-eyed Betty for smoking and I bummed another. I’d forgotten how much I like to smoke.

“I said, ‘We are going back there right now, and if they won’t lay him out, I’ll do it myself. Like my mama did for me.’ See, this is what I mean when I said I learned. I told my baby she could tell me anything and I would always believe her and always have her back. I would have laid that man out. I don’t give a shit. I’d be mad cute in prison.”

“And she did! Laid him out! Fired him. It was in the papers and everything.”

“No one is touching my child.”

“Tell me about your tattoos.”

“You don’t plant bad seeds. If me and her dad would’ve never got married, we might still be together, because he was like, ‘We married now. You my wife.’ It was more like a possession thing. Like if you get your man’s name tattooed on you. You get what I’m saying? I seen people got their husband’s name, they went ziggity boom. I’m not marked like that.”

“Here we go,” said Inez.

“So instead they’re all peaceful flowers, butterflies, hummingbirds, leopard spots. But they’re all also pussies and dicks and tits. If you don’t know me, it’s a flower. If you know me, that’s a clit on my arm.”

“He got them funny eyes too, Sammy?” asked Inez. “I’m mad I didn’t get them genes. Everybody’s got blue eyes except me.”

“Girl, you might have children with blue eyes. You better love Boston baked beans. There are more girls, aren’t there?”

“I think so.”

“I just blacked it out, I think,” said Betty. “He’s like two completely different people. He loved his family. My mom, he was trying to get to her, right before he got locked up. That’s where he got caught. She’s like, ‘Uh-uh, no. You on the run, aren’t you?’ She wouldn’t give him her address, and they ended up getting his old ass, diabetes, half a foot, seventy-something years old.”

“Like how many more?” asked Inez, still looking down at her makeup palette.

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh, shit. Oh, my poor mom,” said Betty. “I’m glad my granddad’s dead.”

She showed me the door.

“I admire you because you’re moving and shaking. We strong and we be fine here.” She put her arms around me, then turned her back and began straightening the already-immaculate house. “You tell that motherfucker to call me. I have a few things to say to him. You be careful in your travels. I bet your mom’s a nervous wreck, you running all over the place like this.”

As I let myself out, I heard Inez say, “Yah, her mom probably got over it.”

The Sipkovskys’ living room had freshly vacuumed stripes on the beige living room carpet, seasonal fall decorations, a La-Z-Boy recliner and matching flowered sofa upholstery in dusty rose and blue, a rocking chair, and a dark wood hutch with commemorative plates.

And lighthouses. Tiny wooden lighthouses. A shelf over the couch with a mini village of the town of Lorain—like my mother-in-law’s Christmas village, but year-round. Lighthouse-embroidered pillows. Brass candlesticks with candles that looked like lighthouses so adorable I noted: check etsy lighths cndls CUTE.

About my notes—I don’t look at the page when I’m writing them. I look people in the eye until they forget my hand is moving. It takes decoding later. I never did find those candles.

Carolyn welcomed me with warmth and a hint of wtf are you doing here? Not many Los Angeles journalists knocked on their door at three o’clock in the afternoon asking about the Jewel of the Port. She ushered me through the kitchen, back to the garden to meet Frank. No matter how lighthouse tchotchke–stuffed your living room, you don’t live to have a hallway packed with generations of family photos and not know when something is up.

Frank held court at a café table in the middle of a backyard garden. It was the tail end of summer but still hot as a greenhouse, regardless of the fall decorations, and there were still tomatoes. The Sipkovskys were starkly white haired, and both wore khakis and sensible layers. We talked kids and grandkids. There were a lot—a bunch lived just around the corner this way and a bunch more just around the corner the other way. They gushed about the Lorain Lighthouse, the Jewel of the Port, in use from 1918 to 1938. It was so decrepit it was about to be torn down, and then someone bought it for a dollar. For the last ten years or so, they’d been restoring it, detail by agonizing detail. They’d even gotten a historical plaque.

“Oh, and Admiral King and General Gilmore and the tornado of 1924. The fifties and sixties, the steel plant hustle and bustle. We were an American crucible, U.S. Steel, Lorain products,” said Frank. “My wife is the real historian. She’s the expert. You tell her about it, Cookie.”

“Dear, what did you say your book was about exactly?”

I could have said I was writing about the current state of industry in the Midwest and made a quick exit. I decided not to sit in the backyard of these generous people, have them show me their handmade book about their lighthouse, and lie to their faces.

“Ooooh, a killer!” said Carolyn. “Finally, someone exciting came over. Tell us all about it, dear. Maybe we can help you. Of course, you’ll be visiting the library and looking through all the old phone books. We have a wonderful collection! Oh, Frank, let’s just show her. There are only two areas of town a Black person could have lived in at that time. Drive.”

We pulled over next to a gray-clapboard two-story house, neat but could have used a coat of paint, with a peaked roof, a white-fenced front porch, and a satellite dish. No paved walk to the door, just grass worn to dirt.

“2245 Elyria Street,” said Carolyn. She clapped her hands together. “At Twenty-Third?”

Was I supposed to know where I was?

“It’s the house where Toni Morrison grew up!”

Well, take me to church.

The first Toni Morrison book I’d read had been The Bluest Eye, her first novel, set where I was sitting, in 1941. It’s about a Black girl consistently regarded as ugly and confronted with poverty, abuse, incest. She wishes for the blue eyes she believes will solve her problems. The eyes to which Betty said, “Hell no, not me. Not if I can help it.”

Morrison would have been ashamed by the wave of sentimentality that hit me like blunt-force trauma.

“There is no time for despair,” she is quoted as saying. “No place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

We drove past closed storefronts, empty lots. Frank pointed out clubs: the Campdale, the Republic, the Shell, the Bop Shop, the Shovel.

We drove through the center of town on our way to the lighthouse, past a cluster of enthusiastic new shops, a microbrewery. A soaring bridge spanned the Black River. A still-green park with a bandshell waited for the inevitable decay of winter.

“We’re looking at concerts, small businesses, the lighthouse. We’re looking forward. Ain’t that right, Cookie?”

We reached the pier. The Ohio Historical Marker dedication plaque was all Cookie’s doing—print on both sides. One of the fun facts: part of the renovation in 1990 was funded by pennies collected by kids in the public schools in town.

I only saw the Jewel of the Port from the shore. It was way out on a jetty and looked intrepid and windblown. It was too late in the day to call the one guy they knew who might have a boat to make it there, and even so, I had missed the season by two days, and rules are rules.

The Sipkovskys made hope out of kindling with sunset wine tastings, concerts, and cruises to the Jewel of the Port all summer long.

I spent my last hours in Lorain on the floor of the public library, making friends with the research librarian and getting addresses from directories dating back to 1940. I already knew the structures had been knocked down, but I drove by them on my way out of town all the same.

When I got home, I sent Betty a card with a Georgia O’Keeffe orchid on it.

Thank you for your generosity and kindness. It was a pleasure to meet you. This was my grandmother’s favorite artist. She also painted clits in flowers! Love, Jillian