Truly, I have been working on my book, and if I could just keep editing instead of stopping and starting overwhelmed by my own darn self at times, then maybe LOVE IMAGINED would be off to the publisher.\u00a0 Actually, I can do this, it’s almost finished (I keep telling myself).\u00a0 The problem now is the ending, currently I have three endings!\u00a0 And formatting, I’m not sure where to add the historical facts, but I’m workin’ on it.<\/p>\n
It’s been so long since I’ve posted a blog entry, I didn’t recognize my own Web site.\u00a0 I think a little gremlin has been lookin’ after it, re-organizing it, or else I’m just having too many senior moments, another reason to get this book done, who thought I would be old enough to be so forgetful, and memoir is about remembering and I don’t want to forget the stories of who I am because it’s been 65 years trying to make sense of myself!<\/p>\n
Here’s Chapter Two of LOVE IMAGINED.<\/p>\n
2.\u00a0 NORTH MINNEAPOLIS<\/b><\/p>\n
Recently a friend challenged me about my use of the term South Scandinavian Minneapolis, where I grew up.\u00a0 As a writer, I know it\u2019s important to be specific.\u00a0 Specifically, I grew up in a house on a hill on 26th<\/sup> Avenue and 39th<\/sup> Street, two blocks from Roosevelt High School.\u00a0 My friend, Carolyn was right.\u00a0 Carolyn lived in South Minneapolis too.\u00a0 She went to Central High School.\u00a0 My cousin went to Central High School. Carolyn had a crush on my cousin.\u00a0 They lived in Minneapolis, but they lived with black folk, unlike me who lived East of whatever line divided us.\u00a0 My aunt, my cousin\u2019s mom, lived near 38th<\/sup> and Portland, this sometime after she and her family lived in the row houses in North Minneapolis, the ones just off of Olsen Highway, or was it Plymouth.\u00a0 Another Aunt lived near 4th<\/sup> Avenue and Lake Street in South Minneapolis.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know much about geography when I was little, but I did know my mother\u2019s family could only visit at night, when it was dark, and our neighbors couldn\u2019t see them.<\/p>\n Aunt Grace lived in North Minneapolis.\u00a0 She moved from a Duplex on Emerson Avenue North, though I don\u2019t know how I know this, and maybe I\u2019m wrong, but I remember going there once as a very small child. This is where Grandma also lived.\u00a0 It must have been sometime after Grandma died of rat poisoning or Draino when the cancer was more painful than she could bear.\u00a0 Aunt Grace and her family moved further west, trespassing into the Jewish neighborhood, 16th<\/sup> and Vincent. Avenue North.\u00a0 Streets and Avenues don\u2019t change, but people coming and going do.\u00a0 I remember we visited Aunt Grace, my mom, my sisters and I, taking a bus down Broadway, stopping to shop at the junk stores, then walking to the most beautiful home I had ever seen.\u00a0 At least I remember doing this once.\u00a0 But when I turned eighteen, I let the secret out of the closet, though I don\u2019t know how I knew my mother was passing for white and we, the children were supposed to be white or at least be Chinese like my father, but he disappeared when I was five.\u00a0 I did my best and continue to integrate myself into a family I had been segregated from for way too many years.<\/p>\n My Aunt Grace, my Aunt Marion, and my mother have now passed away.\u00a0 I love them all dearly, they are angels on my shoulder.\u00a0 Wherever I live, and I\u2019ve lived in more than 50 different homes, and five different states, but they are always with me.\u00a0 Recently I bought a home in Oakdale, Minnesota.\u00a0 The 2000 census said Oakdale is mostly white, but it\u2019s not anymore.\u00a0 My women friends have visited me, Asian, Mexican, Black, straight, gay.\u00a0 My cousin has visited, in fact I have a cousin that lives just next door in Woodbury, as well as my sister.\u00a0 No one has to visit at night.\u00a0 I welcome the next census when I can add one more person of color to a neighborhood that was once mostly white.\u00a0 My friend Lori laughs because she remembers being the only black student, well she and her siblings, at Tartan High School, just down the street from where I now live.\u00a0\u00a0 She says where I live used to be farmland.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n NOTE:\u00a0 <\/span>By 1880, there were 362 Blacks in Minneapolis, and by 1930 the Black population numbered 4,176. The Black community tended to concentrate in two areas–on the near north side of the city and on the south side near Fourth Avenue South and 38th Street. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 By one estimate, there were as many as 10 active Ku Klux Klan chapters in Minneapolis in 1923. Their attacks were broadly focused on nonwhites, socialists, Jews, Catholics, and the new Communist threat. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2026Minneapolis later elected a Jewish mayor, Arthur Naftalin, in 1961. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n
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