by Paul Clemens
Though he and my mother were wed the summer of 1969 (a few months before Richard Austin, a black candidate, would lose that year’s mayoral election by a single percent, signaling Detroit’s new demographics), my father was by no means a child of the sixties, nor was the girl he married. My father had not gone to Ann Arbor for college, as one of his sisters-in-law had; he’d stayed home, in Detroit, and was a commuter student. And he hadn’t dropped out (or tuned in, or turned on); he’d flunked out. His lack of application was strictly apolitical. My mother did not attend college at all but worked secretarial jobs and lived at home, paying rent to her parents until she and my father married.
By the time I was to start kindergarten in the late seventies, it was clear that, by living in Detroit, my parents were increasingly living amid the ruins of the Great Society, for which Detroit had been selected a model city. To my aunts and uncles in San Francisco, the sixties may still have meant protest marches, moral certainty, and sing-along music in the Microbus. At 6 Mile and Gratiot it was coming to mean out-of-wedlock births, drug addiction, Devil’s Night fires, and (what one could hear at night, when the windows were open) gunshot blasts: everything, that is, that kept pushing those whites who still remained in Detroit closer and closer to its borders. For my aunts and uncles, the signature event of the sixties may have been the March on Washington, or Woodstock, or Monterey Pop. For people like my parents—urban whites without college diplomas trying to hang on in deteriorating city centers—it was probably the publication of the Moynihan Report.
The street my father came home to after work was predominantly Italian. The couple next door to us spoke no English, but their children, Dominic and Maria, did, and based on the smells that came from their house, and the sauce that encircled their smiles, they seemed to eat wonderfully. Down the block was Alinosi’s ice cream parlor, owned by friends of my Grandpa Saulino. The Alinosi family had been the makers of premium ice creams and superfine chocolates in the area since 1921—it said so, in lovely script, on the back of their packaging. The Italian Tribune—“La Tribuna del Popolo,” as it said on the masthead—was located at 6 Mile and Gratiot, but moved to Macomb County in 1973.
Across the street lived the Shannons, an old couple whose five children were grown and whose favorite pastime was to make the trip down to Eastern Market each weekend, where Mr. Shannon would buy more produce than he and his wife could possibly eat, most of it from old Italian men who, if asked the price of any item, would point a short, chubby finger and say, “F’you?” Most of this produce was then given away to the neighborhood kids, with a coerciveness we knew well from our own mothers. “If you don’t eat it,” they’d say, the force of ancestral famine and coffin ships behind them, “we’ll just have to throw it away.”
The Shannons had a double-wide yard, so their next-door neighbors, a family of rednecks, were actually two lots down. There weren’t many such people on the east side of Detroit—people who for all the world appeared to hail from the north of Kentucky—but there were many of them on our street, and they all lived next door to the Shannons, where they hung out of windows, huddled around stalled cars, and slammed doors all the hours there are. I lost my first street fight at the age of five to one of their fat daughters, a girl twice my age and triple my weight. She sat on me, and that was that.
On the patch of grass between the Shannons and the rednecks, the boys of the neighborhood, myself included, played our simple, violent games, the fun of which was not to be matched for the rest of our days. The best game, in which the guy with the football runs for his life until he is gang-tackled by seventeen of his friends, went by several names—Smear the Queer, Kill the Man with the Ball—but we’d condensed it to Kill the Man.
My father was not bothered that I came home dirty and bleeding after such outings—this would help make a man of me—but he did not like a bit what I learned to yell when we jumped onto the guy we’d just gang-tackled. “Nigger pile!” we’d all holler, loud enough for the whole block to hear. The night my father finally caught wind of what was being said he came out of the house and motioned from the front porch for me to come home for a minute. “What did I hear you yelling out there?” he asked when I came in, grass stains on the knees of my pants. I knew I’d done something wrong from his tone. “Nigger pile,” I said, my head lowered. “Do you know what that word means?” My father couldn’t bring himself to repeat it, so it was simply “that word.” I shook my head. “Well, it’s a not-very-nice word for a black person,” he said. But even the black kids say it, I said. “I don’t care what they say,” my father said sharply. “You’re my son, and you won’t say it. Do you understand me?” He took my chin between his index finger and thumb and forced me to look him in the eye. I said that I did and tried to remember that when I went back outside, where everyone was still yelling it while piling onto the guy on the ground, who invariably had the wind knocked out of him.
Ninety-five percent of this story can be chalked up to my father’s inherent goodness; there was simply very little malice in the man. His temper was tremendous, but it was mostly directed at inanimate objects—cars that didn’t run, faucets that dripped, drainpipes that wouldn’t drain—and those members of his immediate family, himself included, whose behavior had been less than bright. “Not very bright, was it?”—this was my father’s worst put-down, his five-word rhetorical condemnation for leaving a screen door open or a bicycle unlocked. But malice for people against whom he had no specific grievance was more or less unknown to him.
I remember standing by his side as a small boy, holding his pant leg, while he talked with guys whose cars he was helping to fix, men who spoke openly and often of spooks and coons and how, wasn’t it something, that you could take them out of the jungle but you couldn’t take the jungle out of them. My father would invariably cut people off before they got too far with such talk, politely changing the subject to something that still invited swearing but was altogether less prickly: gas prices, long-winded priests, those goddamn politicians—anything, really, but jungle bunnies. This was his goodness talking, or not allowing others to talk. But a small part of it, the final 5 percent, was his proficiency at math, which was prodigious. We were outnumbered in the city, and unless he moved us to the suburbs, which he had no plans of doing, we would only become more of a minority in the future. So besides being not nice, this sort of talk was also not smart, which was probably worse.
My father’s dream car, about which he dreamt a good deal, always tended to be an older American manufacture—the kind of thing he could pick up for peanuts and play around with. He favored cars of sturdy and powerful design, with an acceleration that planted one squarely in one’s seat and a rumble under the hood of such sympathy and warmth that he’d need to remind himself that his car was, in fact, not human. But the anthropomorphic impulse was too strong: like the captain of a ship, my father always referred to his mode of transportation in the third-person feminine. “Oh, she’s running real good,” he’d say, his hand resting on the hood. Or, “She seems to be missing a little. Could be the plugs.”
My father turned twenty-two in the summer of ’67 and was on the verge of flunking out of his second of two colleges when, on July 23, a Sunday, he found himself on Woodward Avenue, at the campus of the now defunct Detroit Institute of Technology. As he was leaving the school in the late afternoon, his 1963 Ford Fairlane got a flat. He pulled over to the side of Woodward to fix it, and a couple of black guys—“real friendly,” he always says—came along to lend a hand. As the three of them were crouched down, busying themselves with jack stands and lug nuts, one of the guys pointed to smoke a couple miles to the north, in the direction of Twelfth Street. “You best get out of here, buddy,” he said. By the time it was over troops would be called in, tanks would patrol the streets (part of what Lyndon Johnson, in a radio address, called “a determined program to maintain law and order”), and fires would burn for days. The final tallies: seven thousand arrested, twelve hundred injured, for
ty-three dead. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh would compare his city to a “burning Berlin,” and in the years to come it would have its metaphorical wall: 8 Mile Road.
When my father told this story—I heard it twice—the riot was granted less importance than the car. It wasn’t a seismic event in the country’s social history he was talking about; it was a middling car and the trouble it caused him. My father’s stories had a tendency to fixate on what others would consider incidentals. From the first moment of the riots, many white Detroiters ceased, in their hearts, to be Detroiters. If I followed the story correctly, my father would remain one, but after that Sunday—even though a flat couldn’t be blamed on the manufacturer—he would never again be an enthusiastic Ford man.
His was a shifting automotive faith. The Big Three were churches, their divisions denominations, and from time to time he sampled one of the competing strains in Christendom. General Motors cars were the constant of our life, like Catholicism; Ford was the major Protestant faith; and Chrysler was an oddball Evangelical strain, especially after Iacocca came aboard. He tried foreign makes from time to time, the way an undergraduate might spend a semester dabbling in Eastern mysticism. But GM was home base, and he was quickest to criticize the used Chevys and Pontiacs he had paid good money—that is, next to nothing—for. “There it is,” he’d say, pointing to the oil stains that dotted our driveway. “The General Motors mark of excellence.”
Like my father’s riot story, our eight-millimeter home movies possess an automotive fixation that excludes any sense of social change. If one puts aside the unfortunate fashions and the flickering quality of the film itself, these movies would seem to exist in a certain stratum of white society’s eternal present: smiling and waving young mothers, their sinewy-armed husbands, fat babies, and scores of skinny kids, belonging to God knows who, running around in brown-edged tank tops, peeking inside people’s coolers at the drag strip on a clear Fourth of July weekend. In many of these movies my sister and I have been plopped in playpens with our cousins, the lot of us wearing outfits passed back and forth between the families. A pair of pajamas featuring “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, driver of the dominant Top Fuel dragster of the era, went through several wearers. My mother, hand on hip, is standing around, talking with our aunt, and my father and uncle, in the next reel, are splattered with mud from head to toe, now racing dune buggies somewhere well outside Detroit, where there are trees and hills and cows in the distance. Someone waves to the camera—people are always waving to the camera—the film goes black for a second, and when it comes back up there I am, a couple years old, wearing my uncle’s flame-covered racing helmet, steering his hot rod.
This was that hard-bellied stratum of white America where, to borrow from Heller in Catch-22, the men were possessed of a variety of useful, necessary skills that would keep them in a low-income group all their lives. There was nothing these men couldn’t build, nothing they couldn’t fix, no problem they couldn’t solve—and it would never do them a damn bit of good economically. They could fix other people’s cars, but such work couldn’t be relied on to provide enough money for them to fix their own, let alone trade up to a nicer one. Though largely uneducated, they were skilled enough to go into business for themselves, running towing services, bump shops, and pinstriping places, only to find that being self-employed meant long hours, huge headaches, a lack of health insurance, and—when one’s clientele is also working-class—being entirely at the whim of an economy in which very little ever trickles down.
Interactions with blacks were rare, and not to be relished. But they would quickly become, at this rung of the economic ladder, increasingly unavoidable. When a black guy came into Pete’s Pinstriping and wanted racing stripes painted on the side of his Buick, he paid half up front and half upon completion. “You’re good for the rest, right?” Pete’d ask. The guy would nod. “Right?” Pete asked again, upon which he’d get a song and dance about how this guy’s uncle, or cousin, or half brother would be coming through real soon with some cash that he’d been counting on, but that he hadn’t been able to get his hands on it yet because, you see— “Yeah, yeah, all right,” Pete would say, waving him off. When he finished the job a few days later, the guy would look it over, all smiles—and, sure as shit, he’d be twenty bucks short. Never fucking failed. “What’s this?” Pete’d ask, looking in his cupped palm at the shortfall, only half listening to the litany of excuses he was being offered. Despite my father’s efforts, figuratively speaking, to plug my ears, I more than once heard these Petes, Leos, and Lennys voice sentiments not unlike those spoken by Jason Compson, the cruelest and most bigoted of all the Compsons, in the third section of The Sound and the Fury. “I never found a nigger yet,” a similarly annoyed Jason says, “that didn’t have an airtight alibi for whatever he did.” Fifty years after Faulkner wrote that, working-class white Detroiters—many of whom, like the crackers across the street from us, had moved up from the South—were saying much the same.
Among such men, my father, with his Catholic education, retiring demeanor, and genetic predisposition for tolerance, seemed something of a scholar. He wasn’t a big man, his voice wasn’t the loudest, he never made a spectacle of himself, he wore his automotive knowledge lightly, he kept his cards close to his chest—and all this had the perhaps unsurprising result of making those men who were big and loud and brash treat my father with a good deal of deference. I remember one argument, over what the initials BMW stood for, that grew increasingly heated until it was agreed to turn the question over to my father, the final arbiter of all things automotive. One party claimed (correctly) that it was Bavarian Motor Works; the other, British Motor Works. The deciding vote would be my father’s. He smiled evasively. “It’s Brazilian Motor Works,” he said, and walked out of the room.
My father was always circumspect, sometimes hilariously so. After looking through the Sunday classified ads, he would frequently call about some car he’d seen for sale. He had a conceptual artist’s eye for what hunk of junk just might prove useful to him, for the “found object.” Spare parts, backup pieces, something to play with: these were among his oft-stated reasons for picking up the odd pile, heap, or rattletrap. “Can I speak to Steve?” he would say, telephone balanced between shoulder and ear, looking down to check the name in the ad. He was, it so happened, speaking to Steve. “Hi, Steve, this is Bob Clark, and I’m calling about your ad in the paper.” Sure—what do you need to know, Bob: shoot. My father would then ask a few questions, and nod his head while listening to the answers, with vast understanding. It sounded good, good. Could he come see the car? Absolutely—did he need directions? That he did. Well—where was he coming from? “I’m located in the Toledo area,” my father would say, and by the time I’d overheard the third untruth in ten seconds—his first name wasn’t Bob and his last name wasn’t Clark—I’d start to laugh and be waved impatiently from the kitchen.
Even as a parallel construction—I’m located in the Detroit area—it was still bullshit. He wasn’t located in the Detroit area; he lived in Detroit, the city itself, a distinction that made a difference. People took pride in this fact, played it up on T-shirts: DETROIT: WHERE THE WEAK ARE KILLED AND EATEN. I’M SO TOUGH I VACATION IN DETROIT. And, with the image of a sniper’s crosshairs in the background: COME BACK TO DETROIT: WE MISSED YOU LAST TIME.
White Detroiters, by definition, were those who had not taken part in the flight, and so on the whole were more comfortable with the possibility that they might someday have to exercise the other Darwinian option: fight. My father had no interest in either. He would stay put and mind his own business, showing an abiding faith in the logic familiar to those deathly afraid of dog bites and bee stings: don’t bother them and they won’t bother you. You keep telling yourself this, believing it less each time, knowing that such a plan can only work until, all of a sudden, it doesn’t. This, anyway, was our family’s stance toward Detroit’s black majority. It wasn’t antagonistic, but it was skeptical and inherently static: no
t much was going to change this point of view.
When I read my way through the black canon in college, my interest always peaked when I came to those passages in which the writer discussed how he had arrived at his stance toward the white world, and how this stance, in turn, shaped his identity. There was such a passage in every book. It was news to me that black folks spent as much time thinking about us as we had about them, that they too needed a strategy. Though tinged with skepticism, this stance was never fixed, as ours had been back in Detroit, and so the writer’s identity was fluid—like jazz, to use the inevitable analogy, one that, if I had to find fault, I felt was leaned on too heavily in black writing. Regardless of where the writer had started out—Mississippi, Oklahoma, Harlem—there was almost always a progression toward a greater subtlety of worldview, a cogent explanation of the complexity inherent in American identity and the possibilities that this presented for self-creation. Catholic school, for all its benefits, had never been big on self-making.
The mental and emotional experience that I underwent while reading such books mirrored what was before me on the page: my feelings toward blacks, and toward my own whiteness, shifted, became less willfully fixed, as I worked my way through the successive paragraphs, accepting some insights and rejecting others. I hadn’t the sophistication of an Ellison or Baldwin, couldn’t articulate what I was undergoing with half their craft, but I knew what I felt, and that was that the world was more complicated—somehow bigger—than my upbringing had led me to believe.
