A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  At times like those they were loose and willing to drop all their knowledge and I was going to make sure I would pick it up. This wasn’t a chance that most white kids got, to listen to black folks talk freely about racism in such a simple, matter-of-fact way, but also of the pleasure, the special bond of the South and travel and migration and moving away from home.

  It was remarkable that my neighbors and the people of Detroit were so welcoming to the new white people like me entering the city. It was our parents and grandparents who left, and like the prodigal son, it was us who were now returning. And largely we were welcomed.

  What living around black people for the last decade has taught me is less about what it means to be black and more about what it means to be white. That because my family was allowed to build wealth when others couldn’t, they could afford to buy me that furnace. Or why urban renewal never came to my grandparents’ neighborhood but they got the benefit of it, literally building their house from it. How my uncle was able to afford to give me his tools. This didn’t mean they hadn’t worked hard for it, because they had. It meant that now we must work hard to make sure the past never repeats itself, that we must stamp out any vestiges of it today, and that we pay that borrowed time back.

  I realized there were downsides to being white. That all the wealth, all the moves to the suburbs, had separated us from one another, had torn our own communities apart. That by dividing white and black we had divided ourselves as well. That we had separated who we were from who we strove to be, that the difference between what we were now and who we thought we could be was greater than we could bear. That who we are today carries a great debt, the debt of history, and until it is repaid we will never be at peace. If we wanted to be, once and for all, Americans—not white Americans, not African Americans—we had to face the past and its impact on today.

  In some ways I was envious of my neighbors. The unspoken bond they shared was something I felt I was missing, something I’d been searching for all along. Like a lot of people in my generation, I was searching for community. I had found my tribe. The colorful folks on Forestdale and everyone like them anywhere in the world would forever be my people, but if we were to finally create the beloved community we would be able to do so only when all the tribes became as one. Building the house itself—all the bricks lifted, the Sheetrock hung, the elements battled, the sore muscles and blood-soaked Band-Aids—was the easy part. This was the real work. This was the hard work.

  The sons and daughters and granddaughters on the Terrys’ lawn had moved from football to foot races, and the DJ had moved on to playing slower, sadder songs, the Nina Simones and the Curtis Mayfields. The old-timers ruminated, and the children began to get cranky with all the excitement and fun and sugar crash of too much soda on a great day. People began to say their goodbyes and pile into cars or vans as hugs and assurances of future commitments were passed around like a tray of cigars, and every last person was full up.

  People are so afraid of one another. That party could have been anywhere, anywhere in the world, but it just happened to be in Detroit, the most segregated metro area in the United States. If we’re going to make this work we cannot be afraid of one another.

  “Can I fix you a plate?”

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  A Knock on the Door

  The shotgun

  My dream of getting to sleep early was crushed by the infinite entertainment of the Internet. I had just purchased a smartphone for work, and with that one piece of plastic I had joined the 40 percent of Detroiters on the Internet. I hadn’t had it in my home since I’d moved to the city.

  I was sore from the day’s work and turned off the light. I was disappointed I had wasted so much time on nothing. I still had a ton of things to get done in the morning. Gratiot thudded off the bed, frowning at me as I rearranged my legs. I floated into that liminal place between asleep and awake, the space of dreams. A soft knocking came from the front door, knuckles on hollow steel. I wasn’t sure it was real. The knock came again, a bit louder this time.

  I was awake now. The dog and I looked at each other, his ears cocked. The knock came again, softly. Gratiot squared up to the bedroom door. I sat erect.

  I knew this might happen at some point. I’d been in Detroit for years now, and knew it was a distinct possibility.

  CRUNCH.

  Splintered wood.

  A bang.

  My front door was being kicked in.

  The dog howled and snarled in a rage. I threw the covers from my bare legs and put on my boots—if I was going to have to kill another human being I wasn’t going to do it barefoot.

  I grabbed the shotgun from its special shelf, racked it, and switched off the safety. I’d never removed this gun and readied it to kill another person. I opened the bedroom door and the dog shot from the room.

  “If you come in here I’m going to blow your head off, motherfucker!” I screamed down the stairwell.

  I stopped a few steps from the top where I could see the door. The dog tore at the steel, scratching, howling. I placed the butt of the gun against my bare chest and aimed it, right about where a man’s torso would be. I yelled again and was silent, solid, and looking with one eye down the barrel, my trigger finger resting against the stock, my chest heaving. I said a little prayer and—

  * * *

  Deer are like ghosts. They often can sense your presence, your eyes on them before you even notice they’re there. They can walk through a pile of dead leaves without making a sound. They’re skittish, bounding off, gone in a second. It’s the squirrels that won’t shut up. They make more noise in the forest than anything else, chattering, gossiping, chasing one another. I’d been hunting whitetail deer with my father in the woods back where I had grown up each fall for years. We’d drive out to a property owned by a friend of his, load our weapons, and walk into the timber to kill graceful, peaceful mammals for their meat. I needed it desperately that year, the first I’d spent in my house without any heat.

  The day was clear, and the wind coming from the west, the right direction to carry our scent out of the forest. We’d been unlucky that year, and hadn’t seen anything. Hunting season was coming to a close and if I didn’t get a deer it was going to mean a hungry winter. Even just one deer would feed me and a good portion of my family for months. We used everything. I would eat the organs, use the bones for boiling and stock, and I knew a woman back in Detroit, a hipster taxidermist, who would make a blanket or rug from the pelt.

  The anemic sun was low in the gray sky. My father and I wanted to switch it up a bit and he pointed to a lone white birch tree at the edge of the forest, three hundred yards to the north. He said there was a stand just inside the tree line, set against an oak bigger around than a fat man.

  I headed through the cornfield, the ground hard from frost. My father headed his way. The wind was low, so the day’s sitting wouldn’t be miserable. I entered the forest and it was dead quiet. I was a stranger, and all the animals whose territory I was entering watched me to see what I’d do.

  The leaves crunched beneath my feet, and I found the stand. It was a good fifteen feet up in the tree. I placed my gun in the crook of a sapling and tested the ladder. It had been in the forest all winter, likely for many winters, and now it was part of the landscape like anything else. It belonged there. I climbed a couple of rungs and bounced. Seemed fine. I slung the gun over my shoulder and began to climb. I placed the stock under the seat and lifted myself free of the safety railing into the stand.

  The ground was farther below than I wished. It was great for surprise, but if I fell asleep and fell out that would be it. I swallowed my fear. I needed the meat.

  Once I got settled the forest began to wake up around me. The birds came back tittering and the squirrels resumed their spazzy dance. A path ran from around a bend down a slight decline and I had a good shot at whatever might come walking up. I sat as silently and unmoving as I could. Deer, like most animals, see moveme
nt, not shape. They couldn’t see color either, and I was wearing blaze orange, as regulated by the state to prevent accidents.

  I waited. Even though deer are silent, I couldn’t help but look every time a squirrel made a racket with a jump in the leaves, or a fat little possum burrowed down into his hole. A hawk screamed and I could see her circling above looking for prey. The wind picked up and swayed the tree and the stand with it. I wondered why hawks made that scream, piercing the quiet, alerting all the animals to their presence.

  I began to daydream. I liked the straight barrel of my gun against the crooked lines of the forest—nothing else was straight. The straightness said “made by man.” The straightness was our advantage. The deer have a better sense of smell than humans, better hearing, and can run faster and live leaner. They require nothing but the bounty of the forest. Athletically and sensually, deer are superior to humans in almost every way. What we have is intelligence. It’s what separates us. We have ideas. Sometimes those ideas become a gun, sometimes they become a house—

  There they were. Two of them, does. Their fur was brown and their haunches sturdy, triangular white tails flitting in the breeze. No matter how many times it happens, your heart always pounds, your adrenaline flows. You sit so quietly for hours, no stimulation aside from the show of the animals, and suddenly what you came to shoot is there and you’re holding a gun. It taps into something ancient, primal, that man has not forgotten in all the years of fast food and TV and climate-controlled houses. The does were about the same size, one just a bit larger. Likely it was a mother and a grown fawn. Neither had spots, so it was legal for me to take either of them.

  I clicked off the safety. Slowly, so they wouldn’t hear. I moved it to my shoulder. The deer trotted down the path, stopped to sniff or nibble, and seemed to enjoy the sun behind them, the last few minutes of warmth on one of the last days of autumn. A mother and daughter on a stroll before bed just outside their home.

  I hesitated. I needed the meat. I looked through the sight on my gun, the cruel, straight crosshairs trained on the chest of the larger deer. They were so peaceful. They do us no harm. I hesitated. I took my eye away from the glass and thought. Maybe I didn’t have to do it. Maybe I was doing this only because it’s what you’re supposed to do. If you’re a man you go out in the woods and you kill things.

  I needed the meat. But did I really need the meat? Was there some other way I could get my food? This was natural, ancient, I reasoned. If I’m going to eat the flesh of animals I have to be willing to kill them myself, take upon my own soul killing something better than me so I can live in turn. I put my eye to the glass and again found her chest.

  I hesitated again. I had been a vegetarian just a few years earlier. I pulled the trigger.

  The roar of the gun cut through the forest, disturbing everything. I saw the orange flash of the muzzle. I saw the powder propelled from the barrel. I hit the deer. The shot knocked her off her feet. She was up running, gone, her fawn in tow. I watched them run until I lost them, and climbed out of the tree. I picked up the one spent shell from the forest floor.

  Stupidly, I began running. I should have followed the blood trail, but I was too excited. I ran, stumbling and holding my gun in the direction the doe went. I lost my bearings and the deer. Had I in fact missed? Had I, worst-case scenario, wounded her and she was able to run off somewhere to die a slow, painful death? I might never find her, and I would have killed something living without even being able to honor it by nourishing myself from it. I stopped. I went back to look for a blood trail.

  Sure enough, it was there. I followed the trail spotted on leaves, the grass, a smudge on a tree. I was lost in it, and I looked up. The fawn was staring at me standing next to her dead mother.

  We locked eyes. For a moment we stood and contemplated each other.

  She was in for a long, cold night. She would have to make it on her own now. All I could think of was the first twilight she would spend by herself and the jolt she would feel in the morning waking up alone, forced to remember what had happened. She bounded off. I forced it out of my mind.

  When I came to the carcass, I poked the body with a stick to make sure she was dead. Then I got down on one knee and said a prayer. I thanked God, asked forgiveness, and prayed. I prayed hard for the other one, the one that had run off.

  I went and got my father and we dragged the deer from the brush and gutted it, leaving the insides for the scavengers. I had made a perfect shot. Right through the heart.

  * * *

  “I’m going to blow your head off, motherfucker!” I screamed down the stairs again. The gun began to get heavy in my rigid arms, aimed at the door. “Whoever the fuck you are, you better get out of here or I’m going to kill you.”

  The dog was going insane with snarls, biting the door.

  We existed like that for some time, me poised on the stairs, holding the same gun I had used to kill the doe, ready to pull the trigger; the dog in primal fury against the unknown; whoever was out there with their reasons and desperation: the perfect tableau of fear and rage and self-preservation, enveloped in the dark.

  And then silence.

  I gathered the courage to walk to the window and peeled back the bedsheet I used as a curtain. The side yard and streets were empty. I couldn’t see out of the front of the house, because I had no windows, still plywood. I walked to the living room. I could see nothing. I checked the rest of the windows where I could, and the dog snorted, clawing. Nothing.

  I was too scared to go outside. I didn’t want to find anyone. I didn’t call the police, I didn’t want anything. Just whatever was out there to go away and never come back.

  I sat on my couch, the cold steel and walnut of the gun on my bare legs, my hands shaking. I rolled a cigarette and lit it. I looked out the back window again. The house I’d bought for $500 was still not even half-finished.

  There were gaps in the drywall, some walls uncovered. The kitchen needed to be cleaned. The floors were spattered with mud, out of joint, dim. Trim needed to be stripped, the room needed a coat of paint, the shower tiled, and on and on until I lost my mind or my body.

  I knew that man outside wasn’t my enemy. My enemy was the poverty that drove him to it. My enemy was the addiction stunting my community and the lack of help for it. My enemy was the desperation we’ve allowed to ferment within our brothers and sisters. My enemy—

  Whether I liked it or not, whoever was out there was part of my community. And whether or not you like it he’s part of yours, too. It seems like every week a new massacre is confirmed, reported on, and ultimately tolerated. Now we all live in Detroit.

  It’s very American to try to make a better world. It’s even more American to do it with a gun. I know that ignorance comes from society and cruelty from pain. And I know fear comes from the same place. I had come to Detroit to help, to try to do good, and this seemed like the opposite. The danger, of course, was becoming a beast myself. The real danger was injuring my own humanity.

  Had whoever was outside come in, I would have killed him. And if that deer in the forest could have defended herself, she probably would have tried to kill me, too.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  Progress Gallops

  My kitchen, built from salvaged parts

  Someone had started a neighborhood soccer league, and hundreds of young Detroiters were on the pitch at Belle Isle. It was the whitest group of people I had been in since moving to the city. I had joined the Poletown team with Will, Jake, and some others from Forestdale, our squad a motley crew in handmade uniforms next to teams with jerseys printed with local sponsors. The teams weren’t exclusively white, of course, but it was undeniable that the vast majority of the participants hadn’t grown up in the city. One could think all of young, white Detroit was on the pitch, a sea of white faces such as I hadn’t seen since college.

  The demographics of the city reflected this. Detroit proper gained 14,000 white residents between 2010 and 2014, i
ts first uptick in sixty years. And the numbers were growing. The vast majority of the newcomers were like me: educated, relatively well off, and having the ear of the government and foundations. This new bloc of Detroiters had outsize political power. Whether we would use that to support and amplify the community ideals already present, or go the way of gentrification, remained to be seen.

  We were looking for the opposite of the pain and alienation and social pathology we had grown up with, and didn’t know if we would bring some of it with us, unintentionally or not.

  One group crowd-funded a Kickstarter campaign, and received tens of thousands of dollars, mostly from out of town, for a larger-than-life-size bronze statue of Robocop to be displayed publicly. Some folks thought this was impertinent, considering the poverty of the city and a historical relationship with the police that was tenuous at best, a slap in the face and a flexing of power by a newly forming Detroit class that was educated and savvy with the Internet. Sixty percent of Detroiters lacked even basic access to the World Wide Web. A friend of mine once described the statue as a “litmus test” of what one thought of the direction of the city, a good indicator of when someone arrived in Detroit and from which class they came.

  Meanwhile, new restaurants were opening daily and new art galleries were sprouting out of the cracks in our concrete. There was an undeniable buzz forming around the city, but it seemed most of the new business and media attention centered on a few neighborhoods near downtown, with the rest of Detroit left to burn as it always had.

  Just as the city was closing the Catherine Ferguson Academy, the narrative of Detroit as the “comeback city” began to flower. Chrysler aired a commercial during the Super Bowl declaring its cars were “Imported from Detroit,” playing upon the city’s grit and determination to sell cars we barely made. I found it ironic that a commercial, the form of communication that teaches people they need products to be happy, vaulted Detroit into the American consciousness as something other than an apocalyptic hellhole.