I have a grave waiting for me, for when I die and go back home to be with the ancestors. Situated close by Grandma and Grandpa Shrake’s graves, my headstone is simple and small, it just says

SCOTT MICHAEL SHRAKE
1970 –

It’s reassuring that even though I don’t know when I’m going, I know where I’m going. This is THE graveyard to be in, if you’re a Detroiter. J.L. Hudson, the Dodge family, all these big imposing tombs with famous family names on them.

When I went home to Detroit the last time I found the handbook at left among Grandma Shrake’s things.

Grandma and Grandpa bought their plots in the 1960s, I believe. Someone has used a red pen and a blue pen to make some changes to the first page (see below).

Then someone has crossed out one other paragraph with the same red pen:

The pamphlet is not dated. I assume the crossing out was done post-1964. I don’t know when cemeteries were desegregated. I do know the wording is brutal, especially the part about the burden of proof being on the lot owner to prove the body interred is a white body.

Well, this here white body is proud to report that my future final resting place, Woodlawn, hosts the remains of Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. As well as Aretha Franklin’s father and siblings. Someday Sister Re herself will join them. We’ll all be together. In our long old quiet home among the trees and tombs and headstones. All Detroiters, all the way through.