“This book is so full of laahs,” Keli Garrett says, laughing, putting an exaggerated drawl on the word lies. “Funny laahs. Story laahs. Laahs black people tell. Laahs we tell to make our stories funny.”
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She says her father was a butcher with a “real flair for embellishing stories.” He and her mother, who worked for the CTA, sent her to Robertson Academy, a small private school in Morgan Park founded as an alternative for black children to Catholic and public schools.
Eventually her reading brought her to Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing, which interweaves African American folktales and sad historical facts, running parallel to the tail end of the Great Migration from the rural south to northern cities. The setting resonated for Garrett, the daughter of “‘working-class parents with middle-class aspirations” who came to Chicago from Memphis looking for a better life.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Jim Alexander Newberry.
