by Paul Clemens
But I was still a Detroit kid to the core. Whatever wonders my reading opened up inside me, I was still the product of an environment none too impressed by clever arguments or a clean prose style. Though my father never wore any of those T-shirts that boasted of the wearer’s Detroit citizenship, I do remember him once telling me, with a grudging smile, that he’d seen a guy with a shirt bearing a message that was more lament than brag. It seemed to me as worthy a longing as anything in Ellison, and as pithy as any passage in Baldwin: I WISH I’D PICKED THE DAMN COTTON MYSELF.
History couldn’t be undone, however. Three houses down from us lived a brother and sister named Lionel and Sondra. They lived in a small aluminum-sided bungalow like ours with their grandmother, a woman who might, years earlier, have been a backup singer under contract to Berry Gordy. Her hair was piled atop her head, sixties girl band–style, and her fingernails grew so long that they curled back in on themselves in a corkscrew. The furniture in her house, to cope with the fact that her home was filled constantly with kids, was covered in plastic—every crinkly, uncomfortable piece of it. All the white kids I knew, with the exception of Danny, lived with both mother and father. But Sondra and Lionel were black, and they lived with the lady with the five-inch fingernails, who lived unattached—and who, in a fit of anger after I’d spilled something on her carpet, had once sent me home, yelling from her front porch that we were white trash. My mother just laughed, and with her hand on my shoulder we went inside. Rarely have words wounded so little.
What did hurt were the punches that this woman’s grandson and I traded. Lionel and I never fought out of racial animosity; we were just engaging in the sort of little-boy roughhousing that any decent adult sanctions. Neither my parents nor Lionel’s grandmother much minded, but in order to keep us from hurting each other—and from bleeding on her plastic furniture and plush carpet—Lionel’s grandmother bought all the boys in the neighborhood a pair of bright red Everlast boxing gloves. The gloves would reduce the risk of broken or bleeding hands and noses and gave our fighting the appearance of sport rather than out-and-out savagery. Boxing matches were then arranged in basements, with victory inevitably claimed by both combatants. I remember the basements better than the bouts: cracked ceramic tiles, cold steel support beams, small pools of standing water in the corners, and washing machines that stood on uneven ground and walked across floors during spin cycles.
It was in such basements that the black kids and the Italian kids and the cracker kids beat the living hell out of one another, all of it done with the easy, he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it camaraderie of young boys. The wisdom of this was reinforced a decade later, when I read a piece of highway graffiti on an overpass above the Lodge Freeway that seemed to have a touch of profundity to it. This was in the early nineties, when Detroit’s position as the murder capital of the world had solidified, a time when more people were being murdered in the city in one year than were being killed over the course of several in Northern Ireland or the Middle East due to troubles I only vaguely understood. But the graffiti I did understand—and so, I think, would Lionel’s grandmother. It said: PUT DOWN YO GUNS AND PUT UP YO DUKES.
There is a picture in one of my parents’ photo albums of Lionel and me sitting together on our basement steps. It’s my sixth birthday party, and we’re both wearing pointy hats, with plates of cake and ice cream resting on our laps. Sondra is on the far left, a step below us. It occurs to me, looking now, what I noticed even back then: that they resemble each other only slightly. Sondra is several shades lighter than Lionel, and her face is an oval whereas his is round. Were they, in actuality, half siblings? In high school I would meet a pair of black kids—brothers in the biological sense of the word—who had different last names and about a foot and a half difference in height. There was no judgment in my so noticing: if black kids who were brothers had last names that were unalike, that was all right with me, because it had nothing to do with me. Same went for kids raised by their grandmothers, like Sondra and Lionel. It was none of my concern why they didn’t live with their mom and dad—as my dad, the one time I asked him about the situation with Sondra and Lionel, had told me. “That’s their business,” he said. “It’s none of ours.”
This is, I think, the perfect answer, declining as it does both the usual conservative condemnation (“They can’t even take care of their own kids”) and the usual liberal apologetics (“Familial separation was one of the strategies of slavery”). It’s their business. Lurking in there, too, is the sense that taking care of one’s own is enough to ask of any man, and that there is little need for him to look outside this small sphere. My father kept up the mortgage payments, put food on the table, and kept his kids in clothes and Catholic school. The rest of the world was on its own, and insofar as its desires did not conflict with his own needs or that of his young family, he wished it well.
Cars and Catholicism
WERE WE WHITE TRASH? We were Catholics, first of all—ethnic Catholics, on my mother’s side—and it never seemed to me, growing up, that Catholics could be white trash. The terms were mutually exclusive, with Catholicism possessed of an imposing grandeur that distanced its practitioners from matters as perfunctory as the screaming, dirty-faced children that white trashdom carried under its crooked arm. To be white trash was to live a life of constriction, of intermittent paychecks bearing greasy thumbprints, while Catholicism was elevating, enlarging. As Catholics, we weren’t white trash; we were working class. We worked, while white trash sat on their asses, some mumbled nonsense coming out of their mouths always. Catholics had two parents in the house, while white trash children had mothers, along with enough extended relatives to make your head spin. White trash parents yelled at their kids to absolutely no effect; their entire lives, in fact, were an exercise in pissing into the wind, an endless hokeypokey that, like the cars up on blocks in their driveways, would never get them anywhere. Catholicism, on the other hand, concerned itself with the Last Things—was teleological, as the priests taught me—and led its followers through a purposeful progression, from baptism to communion to confession to confirmation to matrimony to extreme unction, with eyes fixed firmly, and forever, on the afterlife.
And yet there was good evidence of our family’s being white trash, with the incriminating details existing close enough to our basically responsible, working-class Catholicism that it was difficult at times to distinguish between the competing strains. “Hold still,” my mother would say in the morning as she tried before school to smooth down the cowlicks in my hair with a warm wet rag. It was usually still dark when my father left for work and often dark when he got home, so my mother saw to it that he received a formal send-off each morning, dragging my sister and me to the side door, the two of us still sleepy-eyed, to wave farewell. Beth held her Rub-A-Dub Dolly to her chest with one arm as she waved goodbye with the other.
After he’d gone, there was breakfast to be eaten, and school uniforms to put on—clothes that, in the wintertime, my mother warmed in front of the heating vents in the living room, so that I’d be twice burned by the metal on my corduroy pants. My fingertips were singed first as I snapped and zipped myself up, and then my lower belly would be reddened from contact with the pants’ top button. My sister wore a plaid skirt and white blouse, like all Catholic schoolgirls, and had no such problems.
What sometimes preceded the waves and the warm clothes was wholly unworthy of the portrait of the well-functioning Catholic family that I’ve just painted. My father, for reasons known only to God and himself, was not averse to firing up before dawn this or that hot rod of his, and leaving it rumbling long enough in the garage to get a good look at the gauges. This was a length of time sufficient so that every soul within a several-block radius (or so I imagine) sat bolt upright in bed, asking what the hell that was all about. Sometimes he actually took the car out, driving it slowly up and down the street so it could stretch its legs. “I guess your dad took his car out this morning,” the mother of a friend of mine,
with whom we carpooled, said to me once on the way to school, a displeased smile on her reflection in the rearview mirror. I’m not sure, in fact, which was louder: the gingerly trip down the block out in the open air or the reverb produced by a four-hundred-horse-power ’64 Chevelle at full throttle inside a cinder-block garage.
This sort of stunt is, from a good-neighbor perspective, absolutely unforgivable. It also situates itself at white trashdom’s essential core, analogous to, and no better than, the high-decibel stunts black people pulled that set our blood to boiling, and that respectable whites—who often seemed to suffer from bouts of hysterical blindness and intermittent hearing loss when it came to black misbehavior—pretended not to notice.
There’s a long, debatably noble tradition in this country, on the part of respectable whites and those who aspire to such a station, to assert that white trash are actually worse than the black equivalent. “There’s a heap of things worse than a nigger,” says Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s great short story “Revelation,” a character with just such social-climbing aspirations. She debates which she would have chosen, if Jesus had said to her before her birth, “You can either be a nigger or white trash.” “All right,” Mrs. Turpin decides, “make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” Concerning white trash: “There was nothing you could tell Mrs. Turpin about people like them that she didn’t know already. If you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy.”
My mother, no Mrs. Turpin, strove toward very little, and worried about whether we were white trash not at all. Her laughter after the mild slur that Sondra and Lionel’s grandmother had lobbed our way wasn’t in the least nervous. She knew she was working class. She took in typing from a fat businessman named Mr. Wade, for which she was paid by the word; she clipped coupons out of the newspaper inserts for hours at a stretch and stocked our cupboards full during double-coupon days at Chatham’s grocery store; she planned the meals for the week well ahead of time and treated leftovers with the respect due old friends of proven worth, giving them pride of place in our refrigerator. It was a pleasant, stable life, and if in photo albums from the late seventies my sister and I are often to be seen in our muddy backyard in nothing but dirty Fruit of the Looms, one of our father’s go-carts in the background behind us—well, that was all right. She knew what her family was, and, certain evidence to the contrary, it wasn’t white trash.
She grinned and bore my father’s fixation on cars; that the man who was, in most ways, so conservative and cautious, so exacting about getting things right, thought nothing of starting up his dragsters at dawn—that he got this so absolutely wrong—was part of his charm. The fact that, on those mornings when the three of us waved goodbye to my father, my sister was dressed in a pair of footie pajamas that bore the red, white, and blue insignia of the National Hot Rod Association—this was no great cause for concern, either. Not very girlie, not what my mother would have picked out maybe, but they did match the T-shirt that I wore to bed. Bought for me by my father at the Mid-America Championship meet at Milan Dragway, it pictured a mean-looking rear-engine dragster, great billows of smoke coming from its back tires.
The poet of this slice of American life in the late seventies was Springsteen, of course, whose early albums—on which he sang about girls, cars, and boys whose ghosts haunt the skeleton frames of burnt-out Chevrolets—sat beside the stereo in our basement, Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town at the top of the stack. It wasn’t just that the lyrics on these albums struck a working-class chord, or that the guy on the cover looked a lot like the men I saw on a daily basis. The resemblance was in the details: the crummy flowered wallpaper Springsteen stands in front of, in his white T-shirt, on the front and back covers of Darkness; the dusty, off-white blinds that are closed behind him in these shots, as if there was nothing worth looking at outside anyway; the way his voice cracks in the song “Backstreets” when he sings the line, “Blame it on the truth that ran us down”—his voice breaking so completely on that “down” that it’s always a wonder he can get out the next line. But with early Springsteen there’s the inescapable sense that the song he’s singing is a job, just that, and that he’s got to see it through.
The names of the guys in the band (to sneak a peek at the liner notes) were good, too: besides Bruce—vocals, guitar—there was Max on drums and Danny on organ, Garry on bass and Steve on guitar, Roy on piano and Clarence on sax. These were strong urban names, the names of guys you’d trust to fix your brakes or tow your Malibu, nothing like the Jasons and Joshes, Chads and Brads, and Brents and Kents who populated the subdivisions north of 8 Mile Road. Working-class whiteness was all over these albums, so much so that they came to define, indelibly, that whole stratum of American culture. The sociological impact of these albums was not at all diminished by the fact that Clarence, the black saxophone player, was pictured prominently on the back of Born to Run. On the contrary, I felt an affinity for him. His last name was Clemons: close enough.
In “Racing in the Street,” Springsteen sings, over a melancholy piano:
I got a ’69 Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
“He gets that wrong,” my father once said as we were out driving in my Pontiac, Darkness on the Edge of Town in the tape deck. “There was no such thing as fuelie heads on a big block, which is what the 396 was—a big block. Now, with the small block Chevy engine, the 327, you could have had fuel-injected cylinder heads. But with the big block, no.” “How about a Hurst on the floor?” “Sure, you could have a Hurst gearshift with either the big block or the small block. That’s an after-market thing. That doesn’t matter.” He explained to me, quickly, that he had once gone to Pittsburgh, when the Hurst Corporation was still headquartered there, to interview for a job. “The Chevy wouldn’t have come from the factory with a Hurst,” he said, finishing the train of thought, “but the Hurst was compatible. Now the big block,” he said, getting back to the point, “even though they called it a 396, was actually a 402. We had a ’70 Nova, back when you were a little guy, that had the big block in it, and that had 396 decals on the side and back. But it was really a 402.” “Why’d they call it a 396, then?” “I’m not really sure,” he said, “but it was the first new car I ever bought. Twenty-seven hundred bucks.”
I knew that, aside from inaccuracies regarding cylinder head capabilities and inflated cubic inch displacements, he had problems, too, with the song’s very title, “Racing in the Street,” which reinforced the unjust stereotype of car folks as irresponsible sorts who endangered not only their own lives but those of innocent drivers and pedestrians as well. My father let it be known that he never raced in the street; he raced far from civilization, out at Milan Dragway, on a quarter-mile strip of asphalt where his elapsed time and his mile-per-hour readings were taken electronically and all appropriate safety considerations were observed. DRAG RACING IS NOT STREET RACING: this was the only bumper sticker my father ever owned, the only principled stance that he sought to publicize through the medium of his car’s rear fender. And because he was too modest even to draw this much attention to himself, he simply put the sticker up in our garage.
It wasn’t just that Springsteen sang about cars; it was the way that cars were coupled, in song after song, with a pervasive sense of guilt and a desperate need to make amends. Springsteen ends “Racing in the Street” with a wish to wash these sins off our hands.” The song “My Father’s House” ends with the narrator looking longingly at his childhood home, which shines “across this dark highway, where our sins lie unatoned.” In “Badlands,” we’re told that “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” Catholics sometimes need to be reminded of this.
In a shoe box in my basement I have two letters that my great-uncle, Father Hector Saulino—Father Hec, as we near blasphemously called him—received within weeks of each other in 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination into the priesthood. One is on Whi
te House letterhead and signed by Ronald Reagan (“Nancy and I join with others to commend you for helping to preserve the traditional and moral principles that made America great”); the other, postmarked Rome, is from Pope John Paul II. After Father Hec’s death some years ago, I inherited several articles of his clothing, all of them impeccably cut. His black cashmere trench coat, tailored by Rimanelli’s of Detroit, I still wear during the wintertime, particularly on sad occasions in cold weather, when a certain solemnity seems required.
After leaving Sacred Heart Seminary in 1938, Father Hec served as an assistant pastor at the Patronage of St. Joseph—“San Giuseppe,” as it was known to the Italian faithful—on Detroit’s east side, near Gratiot and Harper Avenue. Five years later, in the late summer of 1943, shortly after the race riot on Belle Isle that would leave thirty-four dead and more than a thousand injured, Father Hec was asked by the Archdiocese of Detroit to start a new parish a few streets outside the city limits in the suburb of Dearborn—“a citadel of racism,” according to Coleman Young, and home to Ford’s River Rouge plant, the mammoth factory Henry Ford had built over the course of a decade, beginning in 1917, and where Young himself would briefly work the night shift at the plant’s pressed steel facility. The parish-to-be was located just blocks from the factory, once the largest industrial complex in the world, in a residential area where many of the Rouge’s Maltese and Italian workers—part of a payroll that, at its peak, had numbered some seventy-five thousand—had settled. “A man checks ’is brains and ’is freedom at the door when he goes to work at Ford’s,” a former Rouge worker, an Englishman, is quoted as saying in The American Earthquake, Edmund Wilson’s account of the Roaring Twenties and Depression. “Some of those wops with their feet wet and no soles on their shoes are glad to get under a dry roof—but not for me!” The thirty-one-year-old Father Hector Umberto Giuseppe Saulino was asked to gather and tend this flock.
