Years later, we still gush about those summers. From late spring through Labor Day, hundreds of black doctors, lawyers, teachers, corporate executives and their families eagerly shed titles and salutations, at least temporarily, for the down-home pleasures of fishing, hunting, sunbathing and lots of eating and drinking in the so-called Black Eden. Louis high-tailed to Idlewild for sanctuary from beleaguered big city lives. Walker and so on.Īs a kid, in the late 1960s and early 70s, I witnessed a similar catharsis each summer as black families in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and St. DuBois, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Madam C.J. Most people, if they’ve heard of Idlewild at all, are familiar with the vintage celebrity of the place, the black luminaries who once flocked to the northwestern Lower Peninsula for summer jaunts during the early 20th century: W.E.B. “Lazy bones/Sleepin’ in the shade/How you spect to get your cornmeal made? … Sleepin’ in that evenin’ shade.” Happily barefoot, bucket in hand, I’d stroll along the dusty road outside our cottage, her voice fading in the distance. “Lazybones/sleepin’ in the sun/How you spect to get your day’s work done?/ Never get your day’s work done/Sleepin’ in the noonday sun …” An old Southern diddy famously crooned by her favorite baritone, Paul Robeson Jr., “Lazybones” was my grandmother’s signature taunt for me to finish my chores, which invariably included searching the roadside for pretty stones to decorate her never-quite-finished rock garden. Inevitably, my afternoon dozing would be interrupted by my grandmother’s a cappella. IDLEWILD A DISTANT HISTORY RARE FULLBelly full of fried catfish, Jones Homemade Ice Cream and ZotZ penny candy from Lee-John’s Novelty and Soda Bar, I would curl up on a lounge chair by the lake and snooze for hours to the sound of waves gurgling along the shore, the purring of fishing boats motoring by, the crackling of the Detroit Tigers radio broadcast wafting down from the family cottage. My slumbers in Michigan’s densely wooded, all-black resort started as a kid.
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