1970s

The 1970s functions less as a fully dramatized historical period than as a living family reference point. Through the music associated with Julius Crosland and the household in which Nyia Crosland grew up, the decade becomes part of the emotional inheritance connecting parents, daughter, and grandson.

Music and Family Memory

The period appears most directly through Julius Crosland’s musical tastes. When Nyia Crosland calls her father, Earth Wind and Fire is playing in the background. The sound immediately recalls her childhood, because her parents were devoted music fans and songs popular in the 1970s were played constantly around the house. The decade is therefore embedded in an ordinary domestic scene: a phone call about work and collecting Trey, accompanied by music that carries Nyia back to the atmosphere of her parents’ home.

That musical memory also helps define Julius Crosland’s relationship with Nyia. He has called her “baby girl” since she was little, and she still responds to the name as a woman in her thirties. The 1970s thus belongs to a longer family timeline in which music, language, and parental affection survive changes in age and circumstance.

A Generational Backdrop

The decade’s presence contrasts with the newer pressures shaping Nyia Crosland’s adult life. She meets Daeshim at North Carolina Central University, chooses a nursing program, works to help her father manage the financial strain caused by her mother’s chemotherapy, and later supports Trey through additional shifts at Chantel Fifty. Her life is organized by education, caregiving, single motherhood, and employment, while the 1970s survives primarily as a remembered cultural environment inherited from her parents.

This contrast gives the period a generational function. Julius Crosland’s music belongs to the household that formed Nyia, whereas Nyia’s own family story unfolds through an eight-year separation from Daeshim, Trey’s childhood, and the eventual rebuilding of a household. The older decade remains present not as a political history lesson but as a family archive carried through repeated listening and recollection.

Persistence into the Present

The 1970s also illustrates how the story treats time as layered rather than simply past. Nyia’s parents’ music plays during a contemporary phone call; Julius Crosland’s familiar address crosses from her childhood into adulthood; and the emotional force of the remembered home remains available while Nyia is working and arranging Trey’s care. The period is remote in chronology but immediate in feeling.

Its significance lies in this persistence. The story’s central separation lasts eight years, Daeshim eventually takes another month to transfer permanently to Durham, and his parents later visit to meet Trey, but family identity is also maintained through smaller continuities. Music from the 1970s becomes one such continuity: a background sound that preserves the connection between Nyia’s past and present while the younger family attempts to begin again.