“Motown Betty” is part of incarcerated author Ramelle Kamack’s Black Sheep Collection of short stories. The story follows the life of Betty Sanders, the 73-year-old matriarch of the Sanders family, as she attempts to keep her family and her community from fracturing amidst a traumatic car accident and a rapidly changing world. Central themes within “Motown Betty” include the after-effects of deindustrialization, modernization, alcoholism and drug abuse, gentrification, and family disintegration. Kamack also uses the story of Betty and her family to demonstrate the importance of maintaining familial and communities’ ties in Black urban communities as a form of resistance to racial capitalism.
Kamack asks the reader to engage with the question of how we value our elders in our community. Betty provides childcare for her son Patrick and his wife Jessica’s son Patrick Jr. However, Patrick and Jessica have decided to place their son in day care where they believe he will get “to be a little more…independent.” Part of their concern is that Betty is unfamiliar with modern technology such as tablets that can help their son learn. Betty, who still keeps an old photo album rather than converting her photographs into digital copies, is upset about this and feels betrayed. She blames Jessica for this decision and drives off, only to get involved in a near fatal car accident.
While Betty is in the hospital, Patrick, Jessica, and Betty’s daughter, Brielle, all confront emotional and mental health issues that each of them has been hiding for years. Jessica is forced to confront her depression, work-life balance, and the increasing distance between herself and Patrick. Patrick must deal with the guilt he feels about abandoning his mother by placing his son in day care against his her wishes. And Brielle comes to realize that her dependence on alcohol is ruining her life, work, and relationships. Ultimately, Betty’s recovery helps to bring the family together and allows them to open up about their individual issues. Additionally, word of Betty’s accident spreads throughout the community, even reaching those that had left Detroit.
Through the near death experience of one 73-year-old women, Kamack’s story demonstrates the belief that communities never truly fracture. Kamack’s story puts a human face to what historians call the “urban crisis,” where “shifts at the national level in economics, race relations, and politics interacted with local forces to cause” economic decline and racial segregation in primarily Black urban areas. Kamack situates Betty, her family, and her community as representatives of how the urban crisis negatively impacts Black families. Betty’s hospitalization not only brings her family closer together, but as an elder in a Black Detroit community, her presence helped to maintain the community’s history and identity in the face of gentrification. Although you may leave home, home never leaves you. You can always come back to heal, grow, and find family. Kamack also demonstrates the need to cherish the older generations in our communities and families as they are the links to the past, and they have the wisdom to guide us into the future; a rapidly modernizing future.
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