Morningside

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in the early 1980s. By that time, my city had been in decline for decades. The population of this once great city began to fall in the 1950s, when my parents were children, but the tipping point was the 1967 riots. My father grew up only one block away from the epicenter, and from what I was told, an uncle, my birth mother's brother, was killed in the urban unrest.

Over the course of the 1970s and into the 1980s, white flight, the decline of the auto industry, economic divestment, and the loss of the city's tax base plagued Detroit. Rampant poverty and the infiltration of hard drugs into the poorest areas, along with the drug war, didn't help.

My father and my birth mother divorced before I was a year old, and I ended up with Dad. He then remarried when I was two years old, and the woman he married became my mother. Shortly after their marriage, my family left Detroit, and for the next six years, we moved around the United States. During that time, my sister came along, so we became a family of four - my parents, myself, and my sister.

In that six-year period, we would occasionally visit Detroit. Dad would remark that every time we were in town, he would always see a funeral procession.

Eventually, we moved back to the city of my birth.