• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

From early morn till set o’ sun

Her tasks of love are never done

She shares our hopes, our dreams, our plans

Believes in us and understands

And even when we’re far apart

She keeps our interests at her heart

Her life’s a perfect symbol of

Enduring and unselfish love.27

Kermit wrote to Genora on April 9, 1943, that he had been reclassified in the draft as One A, making it necessary for Denny to stay permanently with her. (He had lived for some time with his paternal grandfather, Carl, or “Dad,” Johnson, as well as with Genora’s mother, Lora.) As he sent Denny to Detroit, Kermit reminded Genora that “the government is rather slow in making remunerations on collateral dependents.” Kermit had always been derelict in sending child support payments, and Genora thought this letter another ruse to avoid responsibilities. She wrote, “Kermit sure got out of a lot of headaches [by being drafted].” She complained that Kermit made a “splurge” by sending both boys five silver dollars each, making him the hero in his absence and Genora the tyrant for trying to discipline them.28 In a separate postscript to Denny in one of his letters to Genora, Sol asked Denny to see that his mother got three square meals a day and that he continue to obey her.29 But this was the big city, and Genora’s work at Briggs with the union, and living in a house where dozens of people were coming and going on a daily basis, often left Denny to his own devices. He skipped school, was accused of stealing a radio, and sassed Genora to the point that she sometimes used corporal punishment. Concerned about the theft charges, Sol wrote to Genora that “if he took the radio and the police find out there won’t be anything that we can do. They will ship him so fast we won’t know what has happened. If it does, I’ll feel sorry that we didn’t send him away on the charge of skipping school rather than to have let it drift into a charge of robbery.”30

Jody, born in 1935 (Denny was born in 1931), learned from Denny and began playing hooky from school. Genora knew nothing about it, but she suspected when both sons came home with dreadful report cards. When she asked Jody about the bad grades, he began “lying as fast as a horse can trot.” She learned that back in Flint, Jody had a practice of bumming cash from drunks in the beer garden just across from Lora and Raymond’s house. In Detroit he was accused of stealing jewelry at school, and then somehow he came into possession of an unregistered gun.31 Even if it had been registered, as a minor, it was illegal for Jody to have it.

Several unionists and merchant mariners moved into the house on Gladwin Street and not only neglected to pay the rent but also did nothing to keep up the place; repeated requests and even warnings of forcible evictions produced no apparent effect. Genora’s temperament was such that she began to write testy letters to Sol about his lengthy absences and his periodic visits to Detroit. (Did she ever think of Kermit when she was in these moods—that she had left him alone so often?) She wrote to her parents asking if they could take Jody; they could not. Her experiences in wartime Detroit to some extent resembled those of Harriett Arnow’s fictional character Gertie Nevels in The Doll Maker in terms of adjusting to war work, running a household, and raising children all at the same time.32

Back in the Briggs plant, Genora attended to business and rarely let on to coworkers the turmoil of her life on Gladwin Street. She lunched regularly with two African Americans, Thelma Hawkins and Bill Wardlow, both stewards in other departments at the huge Briggs complex.33 Befriending African Americans earned her the enmity of some fellow workers, but she shrugged off their complaints. (Much of the race riot in Detroit in 1943 was caused by bigoted whites, many who came up from the South and objected to what they considered to be equal treatment and benefits to black Americans.) When Genora spoke to Local 212, “several Negro outsiders” were present and they seemed to