Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  Detroit’s intelligentsia took offense to Moore’s exhibit. In late 2008, when the auto industry nearly went bankrupt, Detroit was lousy with American, French, and British journalists seeking signs of hope in a downtrodden city. (They all ate at least one meal at Slow’s Barb-B-Q, a popular restaurant near the old Tiger Stadium with a 90 percent white clientele.) Since then, it has been an artistic law that any portrayal of Detroit by a writer or photographer from outside Detroit must be rebutted by a blogger, journalist, or academic from inside Detroit. The most well-thought-out reaction to ruin porn is the essay “Detroitism,” by Wayne State University professor John Patrick Leary, in the online magazine Guernica. Leary identified the three types of Detroit stories: the Metonym (about the auto industry), the Detroit Lament (about “derelict buildings”), and Detroit Utopia (generally about white hipsters planting community gardens next to their $5,000 homesteads).

  Detroiters often react testily to this kind of attention (as I do), even when it is done skillfully and with good intentions, as much of it is … Ruin photography, in particular, has been criticized for its “pornographic” sensationalism … So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with these United States.

  Of course, using the term “ruin porn” can also be a way to evade responsibility for the city’s shabbiness by scolding outsiders for noticing it—which is what Bartosz was getting at when he called me “some asshole from Chicago.” After that, I told everyone I met in Detroit I was from Lansing, which at least made me a fellow Michigander.

  (When I asked a Detroit journalist to review this chapter for accuracy, he corrected a few errors, then criticized me for spending all my time in a tumbledown neighborhood. “Ruin porn in text form,” he wrote. “Visiting [East English Village] or Palmer Park or University District or Green Acres would have screwed up [your] whole outlook.” In East English Village, a well-preserved middle-class neighborhood near the Grosse Pointe border, a sturdy, five-bedroom Tudor-style brick house sells for $89,900. So I should point out that the neighborhood surrounding the Packard plant no more represents all of Detroit than the South Bronx represents all of New York City.)

  WHEN WE DESCENDED to the alley, a white van, with a lawn mower lashed to the top and the legend “Peacemakers International” on the sliding door, had arrived.

  “Uh-oh,” said Eric, a scrapper who had emerged from one of the buildings. “It’s Pastor Steve.”

  “Maybe I can pretend I’m not here,” Joe said.

  Pastor Steve was a reformed junkie and unreformed biker who preached in a storefront church on Chene Street. He wore his gray hair thin on top, long in the back, but the mullet was more Andrew Jackson than nineties hockey player. In sunglasses and jean shorts, he looked ready to attend a picnic for retired Hells Angels. After meeting Joe through a prison ministry, while Joe was doing time for drunk driving, Pastor Steve brought him to the East Side, adding a parishioner to his flock.

  “This place is the heart of hell,” Pastor Steve told me when he found out I was writing a book. Pastor Steve loved publicity. He ran back to his van and fetched me a photocopy of a cover story on his church that had appeared in Metro Times, Detroit’s alternative weekly. It labeled him “Desolation Angel.” “Even the cops will tell you that. This neighborhood is Detroit in a handbasket. The people around here are involved in everything: drugs, prostitution, you name it. I started getting high in the early sixties. Then, it was marijuana, speed—beatnik stuff. The heroin started coming in in the mid-sixties. That was the bomb. That destroyed Detroit. Before that, drug dealing was just out of someone’s apartment. You had to go to Black Bottom to get it.”

  Pastor Steve invited me to his church. That Sunday, he was visiting land he owned up north. But the Sunday after …

  “I don’t believe in denominations,” he said before driving off. “I want to start a movement of all Christians in Detroit.”

  At the party store, I bought Greg a forty of Keystone Ice: a malt liquor bomb in the shape of an artillery shell. Bartosz bought Joe a pint of vodka. Both bottles were passed around, and once they were empty, the entire alley chipped in for pizza. Joe rode shotgun, directing me to the pizzeria, but he was so drunk he nearly dropped the pizza box in the parking lot. Back in the alley, Joe wouldn’t get out of my car. For the rest of the afternoon, he sat stupefied in the passenger seat, looking like a crash-test dummy, and equally insensible. When I asked for directions back to Perrien Park, he answered in a sleepy mumble, as though not even he knew what he was trying to say.

  “How am I gonna get him home?” I appealed to Eric, the scrapper.

  “Just follow my truck.”

  In front of Joe’s house, we each grabbed an arm, dragged Joe across the street—his flailing feet taking one step for every two strides we covered—and chucked him into his grassless yard. Joe stumbled past his dogs and crawled up the steps.

  “I was in there once,” Eric said. “You do not want to go in there.”

  “Do you live down at the plant?” I asked.

  “Naw. I grew up around here, but I live in Hazel Park”—a suburb just north of 8 Mile Road. “I come down there every day, though. You can still make some money out of that place. I sold two pipes for thirty-three dollars. I need to get some money to pay a lawyer. I’ve got a marijuana case. Have you ever been across the Mackinac Bridge?”

  The Mackinac Bridge joins Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas. Since Eric mentioned it in the context of a legal hassle, I guessed he hadn’t gone elk hunting in the UP. In that most isolated salient of the Midwest, entire counties subsist on guarding prisoners from Detroit. Michigan’s drug sentences are some of the harshest in the nation, and the maximum penalty for murder is life without parole, so Detroit contributes permanent residents to Marquette, Newberry, and Munising.

  “Crossing the Mackinac Bridge is no fun when you do it in belly chains,” Eric said.

  I HAD DISCOVERED CHENE STREET, and from there Perrien Park, and from there the Packard plant, through Gary Wozniak, an entrepreneur attempting to transform the East Side into an agricultural homestead. I had discovered Gary through one of my old high school classmates, who was doing his PR. That’s networking, Detroit style. It’s a city of 713,000, but the professional class of architects, city planners, journalists, publicists, and urban agriculture advocates is small enough to fit into an auditorium, which it often does, at symposia titled “Detroit by Design” and “Powering Up the Local Food System.” At one such function, Wozniak ran into Mayor Dave Bing, the former Pistons basketball star who had been elected to succeed ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, thrown out of office for carnal, fiscal, and criminal offenses that violated too many provisions of the Ten Commandments and the Michigan Compiled Laws to enumerate here. Within two weeks, Gary had a meeting in Bing’s office. Forty-five minutes after that, he had the mayor’s support for a network of garden plots and tilapia farms in the vacant lots and vacant buildings of the East Side. He planned to call it Recovery-Park.

  Gary was the chief development officer of SHAR—Self Help Addiction Rehabilitation—which had started as a halfway house for drug addicts. A recovering addict himself—from a little bit of everything: crack, heroin, alcohol—he planned to employ ex-junkies and ex-cons at his farms, because nobody needs an education to pick tomatoes. The grandparents of today’s East Siders could have told them that. They’d moved north to escape from sharecropping, and now their descendants were about to end up right back in the dirt.

  Gary was already
operating a pierogi bakery based on a Polish grandmother’s recipes, in the kitchen of an old elementary school. His two employees, both addicts with criminal records and mouths as gapped as any East Side street, earned $8 an hour plus benefits to turn out 150 dozen pierogis a week, in such all-American flavors as jalapeño and strawberry cream cheese. They were sold at the People’s Pierogi Collective in Eastern Market, Detroit’s weekend farm-to-table emporium.

  “Our biggest challenge with our client base is jobs,” Gary explained. “Seventy percent of our clients can’t read or write on an eighth-grade level. Seventy percent are felons. The official unemployment rate in Detroit is thirty percent. The unofficial rate is fifty-five percent. It’s more challenging here than in other cities. Farming is something that is teachable. You don’t have to read and write. It doesn’t matter if you have a record.”

  We drove around the East Side in Gary’s truck. Past entire blocks that were rectangles of grass. Past an empty elementary school on which a world-renowned Detroit street artist had painted square faces that looked like African masks. Past the site of Northeastern High School. It was as eradicated as thoroughly as Carthage, but unlike Carthage, the land beneath was still fertile. Gary planned to grow lettuce in hoop houses there. We drove past a public school for pregnant girls, where a chestnut horse galloped around a paddock. Then to the Chene-Ferry Market. A farmer’s market closed twenty years, it is near collapse because scrappers have cut away so many supporting pillars. On the other side of Ferry Street, men sat in lawn chairs outside a party store, beneath a mural of the Scooby-Doo gang in the Mystery Machine. They drank from paper bags and talked. It seemed that these refugees from Alabama and Tennessee had, over time, transformed the neighborhood into a replica of their native villages. The only difference between the East Side and the rural South was reliable cell phone service. The twentieth century had simply been an urban interlude here.

  “The neighborhood that we’re in was one of the most densely populated in the city,” Gary said. “At the height of its residency in the 1950s, it had eighty-nine thousand people. It now has four thousand.” (I did a little research of my own on that. In 1980, the census tract that includes the Chene-Ferry Market contained 2,571 residents, of whom 58 percent were white. By 2009, it contained 623 residents, of whom 90 percent were black. The ratio of occupied to vacant homes went from 9–1 to 2–1 and the average property was worth $11,200, half its 2000 value.)

  At the end of the 2000s, Detroit supported nearly 250 community gardens, producing 330,000 pounds of food. It is the world’s leading agricultural city, and not just because it has so much empty land per person. The flat, humid farmlands of southeastern Michigan are capable of growing over two hundred fruits and vegetables—the usual apples, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, carrots, and beets, as well as such exotica as bok choy, curly kale, collard greens, and mizuna.

  Farming is also the solution to a social problem. Detroit, in commercial if not horticultural terms, is a food desert. It’s hard to buy a cantaloupe after dark. In all of Detroit’s 140 square miles, there’s not a single chain supermarket. No Kroger. No Meijer. No Farmer Jack’s. One night, I got out of a meeting at nine P.M. and wanted to buy oranges and bananas for the next morning’s breakfast. I had to drive all the way past 8 Mile Road, passing several fruit markets just closing their doors. The trip took me five miles out of my way. Detroit has 1.5 square feet of grocery space per person—half the industry standard. As a result of paying markups in convenience stores (following the principle that everything should be more expensive for the poor), Detroiters spend 13 percent of their income on food. The average American spends 9.4 percent. (Although 30 percent of Detroiters subsist on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan, what used to be known as food stamps.) Also, Detroiters get crap for their money. In most corner stores, the only vegetables are potato chips, the only fruit is a Little Debbie banana flip, and the only meat is beef jerky. That’s why Americans in the top 20 percent income bracket eat seven times as many fruits and vegetables as those in the bottom 20 percent. A program called Detroit Fresh is attempting to bring the orchard to the inner city by placing fruit baskets in gas stations and party stores.

  Detroit also has a tradition of growing food to get through hard times. During the Panic of 1893, Mayor Hazen Pingree encouraged his constituents to plant gardens, which became known as Pingree’s Potato Patches.

  Detroit’s largest and most successful urban garden is D-Town Farm, a seven-acre plot in Rouge Park, on the city’s far west side. It’s run by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, a neo-Africanist movement that sees agriculture as a form of independence for Detroiters. (In Detroit, every issue, especially issues as elemental as where you live and what you eat, has a racial angle.) On one of my few trips away from the East Side, I spent a morning raking soil and planting collard greens at the farm. The compost bins were painted red, green, and yellow, the colors of the Ethiopian flag. A tire tread decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphics was marked “Quad 3.” A sign by the gate said simply “KAZI,” the Ashe-Yoruba word meaning “life force.” A tiny plot grew medicinal herbs: burdock, red raspberry leaf. The city donated the land. Michigan State University donated the deer-and-rabbit fence that kept out the pests who’d nibbled away most of the first season’s crop. From the United States Department of Agriculture came four hoop houses, inexpensive greenhouses covered in milky plastic sheeting, which added a month to the growing season for the farm’s specialty crops: bok choy, mizuna, and lettuce whose earthy flavor is startling to anyone who has only eaten chilled leaves from the grocery.

  The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s director was Malik Yakini, a dreadlocked schoolteacher who began every work session with a spiritual circle.

  On the Saturday I farmed, a group of students from Puerto Rico and Argentina also showed up.

  “We should be glad for our international visitors,” Malik said as bird-song chipped at the morning. “Some of us don’t realize the magnitude of what we’re doing. In two or three years, we’ll be saying, ‘I was with D-Town Farm.’”

  Malik ended with the invocation “Imara,” a Swahili word meaning “strong.” After three hours of hoeing and planting, he told me more about the farm’s mission.

  “The fact that Detroit has so much vacant land and the dire economic condition caused people to look at gardening as a way to feed themselves,” he said. “Detroit has the potential of growing a much greater proportion of its own food. What a lot of us talk about is trying to reach the 10 percent benchmark. Part of what urban agriculture has to prove is it can be an economic growth industry, not just that it’s cute.”

  The network sold its crops at farmer’s markets that called in neighborhoods where it was otherwise impossible to buy fresh food. But D-Town Farm could not sell its produce as cheaply as the grocery store chains. Its $1 pound of greens cost 30 cents at Kroger. Urban agriculture’s only competitive advantage is that Kroger refuses to do business in Detroit.

  “We’ve done a pretty good job of learning how to grow crops,” Malik said. “Now the business end has to be viable. Our penetration is very small. This battle to provide greater access, to get people to utilize the consciousness they have, it’s a tough struggle.”

  MALIK YAKINI HAD BEEN ABLE to talk the Detroit city council into giving him seven acres of a remote park. Gary Wozniak was having a tougher time convincing East Siders that their neighborhood ought to be plowed and cultivated for the first time since the French habitants abandoned their riverfront strip farms in the eighteenth century. Every month, SHAR held a meeting in the basement of a Catholic church. Along the walls, Gary set up aerial photographs of the neighborhood, outlining exactly where he planned to plant his crops. Dozens of black folks filled the folding chairs, including the state senator Coleman Young II, bastard son of the bachelor mayor.

  Gary gave a speech about a Community Benefits Agreement that would guarantee East Siders got jobs on his farm. The audience regarded Gar
y skeptically. He could not have looked whiter. He was Polish. His white flesh covered a three-hundred-pound body and glowed on the crown of his shaved head. He lived in Utica, a 94 percent white suburb in 93 percent white Macomb County, far beyond 8 Mile Road. Despite his good intentions, Gary represented one of black Detroit’s deepest fears: that one day, the white man would return and repossess the city the blacks had struggled to keep going for forty years. Some statistics: Detroit’s population loss since the early 1950s would constitute the tenth-largest city in the United States; its white population loss would form the sixth-largest city.

  “We have endured,” one woman declared, rising to make a tribal claim for her neighborhood. “We’ve been here through fires, robberies, dilapidated houses. We’ve been here and we’re going to stay. If you’re coming into our community, you need to get with us.”

  Gary protested that he’d been holding community meetings for over a year and had conducted a door-to-door survey of two thousand residents. In Detroit, though, it was hard to determine who represented the community.

  “We’ve been here all our lives and we don’t have block clubs,” proclaimed a heavy man in blue jeans and a work shirt. “I got the only house on my block, so I am the block club.”

  The residents’ chief complaint, besides the fact that a suburbanite was making decisions about their neighborhood, was that they didn’t want to live next to a farm. Farms meant manure and pesticides. Farms belonged in the country. Accepting one would mean giving up their notion of themselves as city dwellers and of Detroit as a city.

  Janice Harvey, a lifelong East Sider, tried to defend the project to her neighbors.

  “There is a question, do you want to live near a farm, in a farm?” Janice asked the audience.

  “No,” they chorused. “No! No!”

  “And if not, what do you want to live near, besides housing, because everybody wants to live near housing.”