Growing Our Family and Our Cultural Outlook In Dearborn and Detroit (Part 18)
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As I structured and refined my courses at UM-Dearborn and prepared for campus expansion, Laquita and I were expanding our family and becoming involved with race relations and inner-city ministry as well. Our acquaintance with Bob and Nancy was cultivated anew with our move to Dearborn. When we were with them socially, they introduced us to some of their Black friends, whom we then invited to our house for a meal. I don’t remember their full names, but one was a physician named Tony. It was summertime when he and his wife came to dinner, and his arrival must have attracted the attention of our all-white neighbors. He had a flashy convertible that was not thoroughly muffled. No one said anything to us, but some of them probably kept an eye on the activities of that socially liberal professor who lived in the flat on the corner. That was the first time Laquita and I had been socially with Black people, and it was an education for us.
In addition, we learned of the primarily Black Conant Gardens Church of Christ in Detroit that had a ministry in the inner city. This work eventually morphed into a child care and community support center called The House of the Carpenter, modeled after a similar program in Boston, MA. This work in Detroit was overseen by a white minister employed by the Conant Gardens Church, Maurice Haynes and his wife Clare. We became very good friends with them and they taught us much about the workings of the inner city. Laquita and I volunteered to help staff the HOC and went downtown once or twice a week to visit and help out as we could. I became a member of the Board of Directors and became a part of a group of four men who regularly met with a group of boys from the neighborhood, playing games with them and trying to model healthy male behavior to them.
With all of that going on, as well as my heavy involvement with my faculty job, we still proceeded with our plan to build a family, and we pursued the adoption of another child, this time saying that we would consider one with a handicap, a decision that turned out to radically change our lives. We were informed by the adoption agency that a child was available who had been difficult to place because her maternal grandmother had Huntington’s Disease (or HD), and therefore the baby was 25% at risk to inherit the disease, since it was genetically transmitted. Were the mother of the baby later to develop the disease, the child would then be 50% at risk. We knew nothing about the disease, but what we read about it in our research was scary, because it involved not only physical disablement, but mental impairment as well. Nevertheless, after praying about it and asking friends to do so as well, we were left with a strong conviction that God wanted us to accept this challenge. So in late 1967, we took into our home our second little girl, Cynthia Lynette, aged 9 months.
It was not until 13 years later that we learned Cynthia’s biological mother had developed HD; that meant that the odds were significantly increased that Cynthia had the mutated gene that caused the disease to be manifest. But there were significant problems with Cynthia in those early months that were quite unrelated to her being at risk for HD. She had already bonded with her foster mother, and therefore Laquita had a very difficult time establishing a maternal relationship with her. After a few weeks, Cynthia began to respond more to me than to Laquita, and that was deeply hurtful to Laquita, since she was the one spending the most time with her. Adding to the difficulties was my heavy involvement with and commitments to being a church deacon, a member of the Board at HOC, mentoring the group of boys from that neighborhood, and doing my job at the University. All of this engendered the worst conflict between me and Laquita that we have ever experienced. The bottom line was that I needed to spend more time at home.
One episode during this period has become a favorite with our children—funny now, not so funny at the time. One Wednesday night during the winter I had attended Bible class at church with Rachel, while Laquita stayed at home with Cynthia, who was sick. This was the first season of the original Star Trek TV program, which aired on Wednesday nights, and I was hooked on it. This particular night I came in a couple of minutes before 8 p.m., which was the scheduled time for the program. Eagerly anticipating watching the program, I rushed in and threw my coat, hat and gloves on a chair, dumped Rachel with her winter boots and coat and hat still on, and rushed in to turn on the TV. I must have at least said hi to Laquita, but she had been all day with two little girls, one of them sick, and was ready for some relief; watching Star Trek was not on her agenda. A few minutes after I had settled down to watch, a glove came flying into the room. She asserts that she was not throwing the glove at me, but the fact is, it came into the room with some force behind it. Startled and puzzled, I switched off the TV and went in to her to examine the situation more closely, which she was more than happy to help me do. She was finally able to get through to me the impression made by my coming in with hardly a greeting and making a beeline for the TV, evidently expecting her to take care of hanging up both my and Rachel’s winter gear. I don’t remember any more details of the incident that night, but it resulted in my reassessing my priorities and being at least slightly more available at home.
At the beginning of my second year at UM-D, we were offered the chance to live in one of three cottages which were down the road from Fair Lane, the former mansion of Henry Ford and part of the land donated by the Ford Foundation for the building of the Dearborn Campus. It was a deal not to be passed up, since the house was right on the campus and the rent was reasonable. The three cottages were originally built to accommodate three of the Ford family’s major employees, the butler, the gardener, and the chauffeur. During our stay, the other two cottages were occupied by the Dean of Engineering, Robert Cairns, and the Head Librarian, Edward Wall. The Cairns family were replaced by a Chinese professor of management and his family, Yumin Chou. We were good friends with both families, and the Wall and Chou children were close playmates with our two girls. We stayed there for seven years, including a sabbatical year in which we sublet the house and came back to it for one more year. It was great to have a 3 or 4 minute walk to my campus office.
Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)
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