Robert Stepto and his family used to spend summer vacations in Michigan at their pink-and-white cottage in the all-black resort town of Idlewild. Not that there were many choices for African-American families on holiday. “Today people wouldn’t think twice about taking the kids to Disney World or whatnot,” he says. “I grew up in an era in which the whole idea of going to Florida for vacation was the furthest thing from our minds.”
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Blue as the Lake, a history of his family, focuses on the relationship between place and identity, and indignities are part of the story–in the early 1940s his mother commuted two hours to Northwestern University because African-Americans were not allowed to stay in the dorms.
“Part of the great geographic story is that her great-grandparents had been slaves in the Washington, D.C., area in the 1860s,” says Stepto. “Here Ina comes along and she is a professor in the Washington, D.C., area, with a building named after her.”
So far the response from the rest of the family has been positive. But, says Stepto, “sometimes I think the reactions would be the same if I had scored a basket in an NBA game. ‘Oh, that’s nice, Bobby. That’s nice.’”
