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recall: “We were heroes of the projects overnight. You were hearing, ‘Hey, Mary lives there.’ You walked by and they yelled, ‘Hey, Mary, right on! Hey, Diane, hey Flo.’ I think it was the best experience I ever had in my life.
    It was probably more exciting than our first million-seller.” But it’s arguable whether that was really the vibe that day in the projects. Look closely and you’ll see that the gulf between the three haves and the have-nots is fairly striking; it is as if the smiling young women weren’t celebrating their roots as much as their impending exodus from them.
    In fact, within the next year all had relocated to Buena Vista Avenue, taking their families with them. They were the lucky ones. It wasn’t the sort of luck that would have seemed anywhere near likely when they had moved into Brewster-Douglass a decade before. But decades later, with homes on both coasts and private jets fueled to fly to Europe on her whim, Ross had injected into her stage act a bit of between-song patter centering on her exodus from the place.
    “Whatever happened to Diana Ross from the Brewster projects in Detroit?” she would ask in her coy kitten voice. “Whatever happened to that girl?” Then, after a pause, instead of answering, she’d merely say,
    “Who?”
    Mary Wilson, who was the first to get there, was the only Supreme who wasn’t a native of Detroit. Born on March 6, 1944, in Greenville, Mississippi, she spent her infancy on the move; such was the drifter lifestyle of her father, Sam Wilson, who took her and her mother with him on work-seeking jaunts to St. Louis and Chicago. Her mother, Johnnie Mae, knew that Mary deserved better and, making a choice between 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 11
    THREE GIRLS FROM THE PROJECTS
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    her man and her daughter, sent the latter at age 3 to Detroit to live with Johnnie Mae’s sister, I. V. Pippin, and her husband, John, who worked on the Chrysler assembly line. Johnnie Mae, meanwhile, returned to Greenville, leaving Sam to bounder on his own, though he came back periodically at first—enough so that Johnnie Mae delivered two more children, a son and another daughter.
    Their older daughter, meanwhile, grew older in Detroit with the surname of Pippin, not Wilson, led to believe that her aunt I.V. was her mother, and vice versa. Then, in 1950, “Aunt” Johnnie Mae showed up for a summer visit and wound up staying. The young girl began to notice arguments and awkward silences among the three adults. A few months later, Johnnie Mae took her aside and broke the truth: She was her mother, and her real name was Mary Wilson. While Wilson had not had an ideal life with the Pippins, at times given frightful spankings and whippings, the news was devastating. “My whole world had been turned upside down,” she wrote in her 1982 autobiography. “I’d trusted these people, and they had lied to me.” Trying to make sense of it, she would wander the streets aimlessly, “crying my eyes out.” Wilson never completely accepted her birth mother, who moved in with the Pippins but created all sorts of psychodramas. She got pregnant and suffered a miscarriage; she also constantly argued with the Pippins over who was going to make the decisions in the young girl’s life, and just who “owned” her. As reconstructed by Wilson, the arguments would usually go like this:
    JOHNNIE MAE: I never said you could have Mary. I just said you could keep her until I was on my feet again.
    JOHN: You know we had an agreement that Mary was ours.
    You promised that she was ours.
    JOHNNIE MAE: No, I didn’t!
    The Pippins, in fact, remained the girl’s guardian, given that Johnnie Mae wasn’t there for long stretches, especially after she took a job as a live-in maid for a white family and was home only on weekends. But over the next three years, their home on Bassett Street filled to the brim when I.V. gave birth to two children of her own and Johnnie Mae sent