A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  The school was just blocks from downtown. As I pulled up in my old Ford, I could see that the building was unassuming, if subtly ornate. Fittingly, it was the only Detroit public high school designed by a woman, and named after Catherine Ferguson, a free slave who made her life’s work education. The facade looked relatively normal. What was in back was striking.

  A horse and a cow grazed on a circular track. Chickens roamed free, and a pair of goats grazed in a pen next to a clutch of sheep. Dozens of cages held rabbits, one for each student. Ducks and turkeys and geese wallowed in a pond, which an aid was mucking out with a flat blade connected to a long pole. Pigs grunted in the mud. A two-story red barn, which the young women had built, held the farm tools and milking stands, and upstairs was the loft where Paul stored the hay we had baled.

  Around the track, arrayed in a circle, lay vegetable gardens, one for each young mother. Beehives sat behind in the orchard. Paul had done all of this. Over twenty years he built up the farm with his students, teaching them to care for their own children by first caring for animals and plants. Nutrition, health, hard sciences, math, construction, and chemistry could all be, and were, taught on the farm. It’s worth noting the graduation rate at CFA was always above 90 percent, sometimes 98 percent, enviable for any school. The national average for pregnant or parenting mothers is 40 percent.

  The produce that the women and staff grew brought in a bit of money at the farmer’s market, and the balance was taken home by the women. It used to be that the gardens supplied a healthy lunch as well as a sense of pride, but because of a new food service contract signed by the Detroit public schools’ emergency manager, that was no longer allowed. Their little farm would cut into the profits of the food service company.

  I walked in the front door and asked the security guard where Paul’s room was. After gently teasing a student walking past about a C on a test, she pointed toward his room. I walked past the gymnasium full of toddler’s toys to his class.

  The lanky farmer was at the front wearing jeans and a Leatherman on his belt, holding a piece of paper and posing a riddle to the young women sitting at long black desks, some of them groaningly pregnant.

  “A father and his son are involved in a car accident,” he read, looking up to make sure his students were paying attention. “Both the boy and his father are horribly injured and are taken to the hospital. The boy’s father dies on the way, but the boy survives. When he arrives at the hospital the surgeon says, ‘I cannot operate on this boy because he is my son.’ How can this be?”

  I waved my hello and sat in the back. Paul’s room was filled with beakers, tubes, and cabinets full of specimens and strange things in glass jars. There was a greenhouse attached to the room and a young woman was watering the fledgling plants the students had grown from seed in milk cartons saved from lunch. I tried to figure out the riddle but was stumped, as was everyone else in the room.

  “Nobody?” Paul said. “”Nobody has a guess?”

  “What’s the answer, Mr. Weertz?” one of the girls called from the back.

  “The surgeon was the boy’s mother.”

  The class gasped and I kicked myself for being so stupid.

  “We’re not taught to think of women as doctors. I didn’t get it the first time I heard it either. I just wanted you to be aware of that, and consider what it means.”

  After introducing me, Paul handed out copies of the New York Times and instructed the women to read an article from the science section and report back what they had learned. When this was finished they all read together from a science textbook, each woman in turn. Paul was at the head of the class the entire time, running back and forth, gesticulating, writing things on the board, doing different voices for the different kinds of cells. It was quite a performance. At one point a girl put her head down to sleep and he ran over and shook her gently.

  “Come on,” he said. “You can do it. Just a little bit more. We’re almost there.”

  The woman obliged after sighing, and Paul was back at the front with his angular energy. Three of the young women were called out of class for dentist appointments with their children. Paul made them take their homework before leaving, and they thanked him in turn. He got back into the cells again, talking about mitochondria, and stopped midsentence.

  He rushed to the back of the classroom. All the young women turned to see where he was going.

  “Come on, ladies. Come here, gather ’round.” He took one straggling woman gently by the shoulders and led her to the front of the pack. One of the chickens in the incubator was hatching. We watched together as new life emerged from the shell, slowly and painfully at first, then free.

  Everyone needs a hero, and Paul Weertz is mine.

  After lunch Paul had the women outside for carpentry class. The inside of the barn was lit with little canteen lights strung from an extension cord and tools hung in neat rows on the wall. The hay from the upper level was pungent, and as we entered, the aid mucking the duck pond was now milking a goat, also pungent. Its head was yoked in a milking stand, a wooden contraption like the stocks at a Renaissance fair, and the aid sat on a stool pulling on its udders and squirting milk into a mason jar. She asked if anyone hadn’t milked the goat yet, and one girl said she hadn’t but didn’t want to. After some encouragement from Farmer Paul and the other students, and with one of the older girls showing her how, the young woman with an enormous belly started milking the goat. When she was finished they passed the jar around for tasting. It was warm and goaty.

  In one of the cruelest ironies the city of bad decisions doled out in recent memory, CFA would be shut down within a year, the state-appointed emergency manager saying it was too expensive. When the time finally came to close the school, a number of students, alumni, their children, and teachers were arrested in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to leave the building. It was awesome, in the truest sense of that word, to watch pregnant women herded into cop cars by riot police and see mothers hand their children to relatives before being handcuffed. They were all taken to jail because they wanted the chance for a good education. Think back to your high school. Would you have been willing to be locked in a cage to keep it running? At the time it was only one of four public schools in the nation for pregnant teens.

  Because of the community outcry, Detroit Public Schools tried to save face by selling the property to a for-profit charter school. Paul lost the farm, and was transferred with all the other teachers to other schools. A semester away from retirement, he rode it out and never looked back. The school was shut down by the charter within three years and the farm lies fallow, the barn rotting and the animal pens eerily silent.

  The world might not be so cynical if we had more men like Paul, but it’s hard to blame people for not following in his path when twenty years of brilliance and hard work are flushed away by bureaucrats. Paul built the school he wanted to see, that Detroit and America needed, and then they smashed it into the ground.

  Lesser men would have given up. I probably would have. After all the work I had put into my own house—not even a tenth of what Paul had accomplished just at this school—I understood in my bones how utterly amazing was his creation, made from sweat and ingenuity, and how heartbreaking it was to lose it.

  I began to worry that all the work I was putting into my place might not be so permanent either. The city could kick me out for anything it wanted, too. I hadn’t been getting permits—I figured I’d start pulling permits when the city started pulling its weight in the neighborhood. It was absurd to get building permits right next to an abandoned house in an area the government hadn’t cared for in years. But if the city bureaucrats wanted my land badly enough they would use this and whatever else was at hand to take it.

  Farmer Paul seemed all I wanted to be, a Renaissance man with wide knowledge of the world, a citizen statesman, a teacher, a scientist, a frontiersman, the living embodiment of the impossible American ideal. A man who could fix anything, who obeyed on
ly the rules of his conscience and intellect, the twenty-first-century incarnation of the best of the Founding Fathers, the Benjamin Franklin of our age. Paul is a great man and they still took from him what he made.

  That afternoon at the school, I asked him the question I’d been asking myself for years without finding a satisfactory answer. What makes you different? Out of all the things you could have done with your life, why did you come to Detroit and build a home and a community and a farm for pregnant girls and a swimming pool out of hay bales?

  Why didn’t you quit?

  He didn’t have an answer right away, but after some thought he told me, “It takes a long while. You kind of get these bits and pieces and they come together at the end. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time. One thing leads to another.” He shrugged. “But you have to take the first step.”

  * * *

  The day I set to finish the tower of bricks was a sunny one. I enlisted a neighbor, Monk, to mix the mortar and pass it to me in the attic in a bucket on a rope. I had cut the hole in the roof large enough so I could lean a ladder against the chimney as it rose above the ridge. Butter a brick, place it, tap it with the trowel to set it. Butter a brick, place it . . . I was about half done when Garrett called from New York. I was covered in filth from the attic, mortar, and sweat from my own body and the wicked heat of the uninsulated space. But I thought it was odd, him calling me from so far away, so I told Monk to hold the mortar and took the call.

  Garrett was in Zuccotti Park at Occupy Wall Street. I could hear the crowd in the back shouting periodically. The police wouldn’t allow any amplification, as a tactic to slow the participants, so the crowd was using “the people’s mike”: When whoever was speaking would say something, it would be repeated in unison by the crowd, so everyone could hear, a low-tech and brilliant solution.

  Garrett explained that he had just stopped by to see what was going on, and what he saw was incredible. I sat down on my attic floor and looked at the chimney. I listened as he told me about the free libraries, the tent camp, the newspaper they’d made, The Occupied Wall Street Journal. He said he’d bring one home for me.

  The occupiers had been maligned in the media for not having any demands and being a leaderless movement. The media didn’t get the point. Those kids out there wanted one thing: a better, more fair and equal world. They understood all of the issues of our time—poverty, race, gender, the environment, everything—were all too interconnected to be tackled separately. They all needed to be dealt with at once, the solution holistic.

  Those kids didn’t have time to ask for the crumbs of the wealthy gathered around that golden calf, they were too busy making their reality themselves, right there in the park. As the revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square wrote in an open letter to their brothers and sisters occupying parks across America, “We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to?” They were building a new world for themselves, one that reflected their values. It may have been impermanent but it wasn’t naïve. On the contrary, it was the next step.

  People were moving past blind protest. Woodstock—not just a music concert but a miniature city that the hippies said helped prove we could live together in peace—lasted three days. Occupy lasted three months and maybe next time we’d get three years. For a few days, a few weeks, a few months, people saw that another way of life was possible. They lived it, if just for an instant.

  I hung up the phone with Garrett after saying thank you, and called to Monk for more mortar.

  * * *

  Near the end of that first summer in my house I hit a stone with the lawn mower. It bent the driveshaft and ruined the motor, which was already patched up with a discarded license plate and a good number of spare parts. Mowing the lawn had come to be the bane of my existence. I kind of liked when the grass got long and quietly waved in the wind, but the neighbors didn’t. If it weren’t for them I would just let it go. But I had moved into their neighborhood, not they into mine, and I followed their customs.

  I’d finished only half of the lawn. It looked like a feral child, and I needed to leave for an errand that would take a couple of hours. What to do? I still felt on probation with the neighbors, but didn’t know them well enough to speak to them regularly, enough to explain the situation until I could get a new mower. It needed to be taken care of now.

  My neighbor King was sitting on his porch smoking a cigarette, and I walked over and asked him if he knew anyone who would cut my grass for a few bucks. He mentioned a white guy living with Sawtooth Betty who would do it, but he hadn’t seen him around. I thanked him and told him if he saw the guy to have him get in touch with me, and left for my errand.

  When I had come back the grass was cut just as pretty as could be. Someone had even gotten out the weed whacker and done all the corners and up against the fence, under the tree. It was a professional deal. I got out of the truck and walked around in the cut grass, surprised. King saw me and walked over.

  “Hey, King. Did you end up talking to that guy for me? You know how much I owe him?”

  “Nah, man, I just went and did it. I see you helping people around here. It’s no big deal, really.”

  “Well, how much do you want for it? I think I’ll have to run to the ATM.”

  It also meant he had spent a few hours in my yard, visually vouching for me to the whole neighborhood. He hadn’t just mowed my lawn, but had told everyone that I was okay by his presence. It was a long way from what had happened with the previous owner of my house.

  King laughed at me. “Nah, man, you don’t have to give me nothing.”

  I was about to protest, but was reminded of something that had happened earlier that winter. My mother had come up to eat lunch on her way to take care of my grandmother. She had parked in the driveway, which was really my yard, and her small car got stuck in the foot of snow on the ground. We rocked it back and forth, and I got out to push, but we were stuck. Before I could go back to get a shovel, a big, rusty scrapper truck stopped and two giant men wearing oil-spotted overalls stepped into the snow-packed road. The three of us pushed the car right out, just like it was a go-cart. I said thank you, and I appreciated it.

  “It’s no problem,” the driver said, and turned back to his truck. My mother called from the window.

  “Hey, wait a second, guys.” She was digging in her purse. “Let me give you something.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, ma’am. It’s not a problem, it was our pleasure to help.”

  “No, no, wait,” my mom called. She had a few dollar bills in her hand. “Here, this is for you.”

  “It’s fine, really,” they said. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and got out of the car.

  “Mom, they said they didn’t want anything. It’s cool, let’s go.”

  She didn’t listen to me and ran over to the truck window and made the driver take the money.

  I was humiliated, and got back in the car, sinking low and hiding my face.

  We began to drive in silence. “What were you doing back there?” I finally asked, fuming.

  “If I want to pay them, I can.”

  “Mom. You just ruined their good deed. Who the hell are we? Just because they drive that truck doesn’t mean they don’t take pleasure in helping other people. It’s not all about money, and I know you like to do things for others. It makes you feel good. You just took that away from them.”

  Standing in my freshly cut yard, I thanked King.

  It’s the kind of thing you don’t see on TV about Detroit, little acts of kindness from people just like anyone else trying to live normal lives. It’s all fires or hipster bike shops, but rarely the little unsexy moments that make a healthy community, the long meetings, little gardens and lots of space, mowing grass that isn’t yours. It’s baling hay.

  It’s having a terrible day and going to the post office only to have the lady behind the counter not take no for an answer until you accept the can of Coke, paid for with her own money, she hands you in h
opes of brightening your afternoon.

  It’s going to the chicken-and-waffles restaurant and hearing a table of high-school-age girls singing in joy to a song on the radio, oblivious to anyone listening, and having the entire restaurant applaud at the song break.

  It was King mowing my grass.

  It was showing up to the Labor Day party at the Terrys’ after missing the Mother’s Day one. Tents were erected on the lawn and the cooking utensils fired up. The DJ brought his gear and his crates of funk and blues and soul. Children ran around shouting or dancing in a line. The girls would twirl with their fathers, their hair freshly braided and tied with new bulbous rubber bands that looked like candy. The mothers sat around eating from heaping plates of ribs and greens and macaroni and cheese, salad, more ribs drowning in sweet sauce, fried fish, bread, steaming meatballs, lasagna, iced tea. They sat gently scolding anyone’s children running about, as fathers played football with their sons on the cut grass, and women clucked and ran around “fixing plates,” always fixing plates, “Can I fix you a plate?” “Let me fix you a plate,” “Sit down, son, I’ll fix you a plate,” as if the flatware were broken if it wasn’t heaping with food.

  I found Mrs. Terry and paid my respects.

  “Hey, Drew! Come on over!” She gestured for me to give her a hug, and I did. She called into the kitchen from the porch. “Jessica! Fix Drew here a plate.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, thank me nothing.”

  I sat with the old-timers while they passed a jug and told me stories about growing up in the South, about the time they had gotten lost in the forest and told the dog to go home and followed him back to safety, about the red dirt roads, the overflowing vegetation, the food. They spoke of leaving home and of work in the Detroit factories, how beautiful the city used to be, who lived in what houses, and the women who were stone-cold foxes in their day. Of a city that had allowed for an unprecedented amount of black wealth and homeownership, and the historical forces that stripped it all away.