I have a hunch my real estate agent, Miss Jesse Yolanda James, is on her fourteenth or fifteenth reincarnation as a Nubian oracle high priestess whose fingertips are without prints and glowing with generations of hoodoo. Her skin is as dark and smooth as obsidian glass, her cheekbones high and angular, and her eyes shaped like large almonds. The fact that she’s still tall and straight-backed at nearly ninety years old further fuels my supernatural speculation, as does how swell she looks in a flowing gold, orange and rust-colored silk caftan.

Truth of the matter is, she’s nobody’s “magical Negro.” She’s just another example of the mental and spiritual acuity, tenacity, fearlessness and fathomless hope it takes Black folk to live a long life in a country that, in every vein of its deformed body, prefers we die with their knee on our neck.

“Tell me why I knew you was soon to be here, son?” she said at the ornate oak-and-brass door of her Indian Village home. I very much doubt she knew I was coming to see her. But it’s just good manners not to question an elder’s self-woven mythology. With her hair up in a complicated purple silk wrap, she looked like a million World War II savings bonds. “Come on in. Let me put the kettle on.”

It was always a pleasure to visit Miss Jesse in her home, where grandeur and intimacy waltzed in a design by legendary architect Louis Kamper. She fixed herbal tea, preferring to carry the large silver service herself to a drawing room where the light of a warm fire gave the fireplace’s silver-blue and seafoam-green Pewabic Pottery tiles an otherworldly shimmer. Perhaps that was the portal from which she emerged every day. The room’s tall leaded glass windows gave the ebbing and flowing winter landscape outside a Currier & Ives coziness instead of showing it for the ravenous frigid beast it truly was.

We sat in floral Jacquard-upholstered wingback chairs facing the fireplace, the tea service between us, listening to a recording of Detroit’s own Xiao Dong Wei’s ethereal erhu music. While she poured, I took in her numerous pieces of art: montages by Carole Morisseau and Carol Morris; paintings by Madge Scott, Peter Williams, Paulette Gassman, Bowen Kline, Tylonn Sawyer and Gail Borowski; found-art creations by Nancy Rodwan; and photography by Rachel Timlin and Lesa Ferencz.

While Miss Jesse may have possessed some extraordinary pieces of art, only one commanded my full attention: a portrait of Miss Jesse done forty years earlier by my mother. Miss Jesse sold my parents our Mexicantown family home at a time when no other real estate agent in Detroit would touch a brown or Black neighborhood.

“That was when I looked a whole lot different, young Snow,” Miss Jesse said, handing me a cup and saucer. “She was a beautiful lady, your mother.”