The Making of a memoir (the process)

Author's notes: This is not in story form yet. I've just collected data and research together here. I've loosely pulled together information for 11 chapters so far. I'm posting some of the information to see if readers and writers think a story of this nature would be interesting. I've already started writing this chapter as a story and will post it as soon as it's complete enough for a first draft. I really don't have a title yet for this chapter. Please bear with me. Thanks to all who are taking a peek. I have a specific system I use for writing larger works and a lot of it involves letting the story emerge on its own.

My Mother and Father Meet and Fall in Love
Info to be used in  Roxie Alfred and Me
a work in progress

My mom, the flapper: 1928

      My parents met in Detroit when my dad was booked into the Webster Hotel as a musician with the band. My mother had a small hair salon on the lower level. She had come up from North Carolina with her family (Roxie, Alfred and my aunt, Florence, whom we always called auntie Flo.) at age seventeen. My aunt was three years older.

     When they arrived in Detroit in 1925, they moved into the Webster Hotel where Roxie had gotten a job as housekeeper and Alfred became the engineer. My grand parents had the good sense to send both of their daughters to trade school, my aunt to secretarial school and my mom to beauty school. When my mom finished beauty school, the people who owned the hotel let Alfred build a nice little beauty shop in a spare room on the lower level. Soon, my mom was in business cutting and styling hair and doing manicures.

     Once he discovered the hair salon on the lower level, Daddy would wander down often to have his nails done and talk to the cute owner. I guess the band was staying in the hotel. The way it turned out, they were there long enough for my parents to fall in love. I don’t know if daddy left town and came back or if he just stayed after meeting my mom. Either way, they ended up getting married. That happened in 1928. Two years later, I was born.

     Prior to meeting my father, my mom dated a member of the Purple Gang. Of course, she didn’t know he was a gangster until he started taking her to places where his cohorts hung out and then made the major mistake of giving her an expensive fur coat with a huge diamond ring in the pocket. When Roxie saw that, she and Alfred forbade mom to ever go out with him again. Roxie was smart and knew a man flaunting that kind of money could only be up to no good. Mom broke up with him immediately. She was only nineteen and, besides you didn’t cross Roxie. No way. No how. I remember mom telling me years later how handsome he was and how nice he was to her. But I kept thinking wow, that’s pretty scary, never mind the handsome and nice part.

My mother: 19 years old

     I can’t imagine my mother with a gangster. She wasn’t the type you would think a gangster would be attracted to. She was very naive and sweet….a darling little girl from the south, with the most adorable face and dimples. She was soft spoken and not particularly flirty, nor did she ever wear overtly sexy clothing. It’s still puzzling to me to this day. Maybe I just have  a stereotypical idea of what a gangster would be attracted to. 

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