By Angela Flournoy

I WAS 7 or 8. My parents had divorced. My father had moved out. Perhaps in an attempt to solidify his place in our young lives in the wake of these changes, my father took my sister and me to Detroit.

This is the earliest visit I can recall with accuracy. It was spring, but still too cold out for us California girls. I worried about my father wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off in 50-degree weather. He rented a car and drove us around the east side, a neighborhood already stippled with blight in the early 1990s, and tried to show us where we came from.  . . .

Read the whole article in The New York Times.

Angela Flournoy is the author of the novel “The Turner House.”