“They think Mama’s sickness was the start of something,” Dune projected in the voice she used with Mama Vivian, which worked sometimes if the hearing aids were on and the angle was right. “They don’t know if it’s OK that I cremated her here.”

No answer. Her grandmother hadn’t spoken a word since Dune’s father died.

“We couldn’t afford to have them do it.” It would have cost three months of earnings to have Kama cremated through the hospital, not including an urn. “We don’t have any money.”

No answer.

“They weren’t helping. No one was helping me.”

Mama Vivian held questions on her face, but she wouldn’t speak, dropping her eyes. How could Dune explain that she had loved her mother’s body, and been scared of it—what can make a person stop living while they still breathe?

Was it contagious?

Were they next?

Did it hurt?

Who do you call to bury your dead when you have no money?

Mama Vivian looked up again, her mouth tightening into a deeper line, a slight nod. She wouldn’t ask more of Dune, not even in her own wordless way.

chapter three: Holding Vivian

“Hello? Hello?”

Two days after Kama died, Bab came by.

For years, those who generally couldn’t give themselves to any of the formal gods, but still needed to offer worship and devotion to someone, had come to sit with Mama Vivian. They had faith, and when she’d had words, Vivian had had the best questions.

Vivian first came to Detroit in the 60s to support the work of the Black power movement, leaving her professor husband, Roger, at their small flat in San Francisco. Their marriage was a meeting of minds, it didn’t matter so much where their bodies happened to be.

Vivian had spent her early Detroit days reading and studying, her nights going to various meetings with union leaders, community members, Detroiters who longed for something different. There was one particular worker, a brilliant Black up-south man with an Alabaman twist on every word out of his mouth. His name was Wesley, everyone called him Wes. Vivian loved working with him, and together they began pressing into some new intellectual territory.

For Vivian, it was the philosophies of Hegel that gave her a foundation to walk on. She saw what was happening, the crisis of joblessness, not as something at odds with economic abundance, but as a phase the city needed to self-transcend to achieve abundance.

Wes would respond, “Abundance comes through meaningful work, the opportunity to be somebody who means something to other somebodies.”2 Vivian found his vocabulary pedestrian, accessible; his concepts thrilling. They stayed in touch as she went home, comrades. She became a mother and a formidable translator.