Lettie Davis

My West End is like two-fold. My parents, which includes their parents and friends and neighbors and going to school and church; and then it includes my experience with the West End.

These two wheels [are] labeled with 45214, that’s the zip code area of the West End area. And we’ve got our home life, and then we’ve got our community life. And together, it makes a Yin-Yang kind of thing. And what went on in the West End at that time was what the people made it to be.

And of course, my dad lived in a home with his parents, and then my mom lived in a home with her mother and my great-grandmother, and that’s a single-parented household. And they all went to school together and stuff—Ted Berry, The Mallorys, Marjorie Parham—all of those people I heard about at the dinner table, you know, when I was growing up in mostly Woodlawn, which is 45215. When I was living in 45213 where I was born, it was mostly about my grandparents and my uncles, aunts and neighbors and that kind of thing. It was a very rich childhood.

Listen to Lettie’s West End story: