by Paul Clemens
“He started St. Bernadette from scratch,” Sister Marcia Saulino, his sister, told the Detroit Free Press in 1994, for Father Hec’s obituary column. (Of my Grandpa Saulino’s four siblings, one was a priest, one a nun, and one a deacon; he himself went on to work at Uniroyal Tire.) “He took the census to find out how many people would be in the parish.” The first services at the new parish, the obituary notes, were held in what had been a grocery store. Though certainly more decorous, this information runs counter to the story passed down to me, which held that it had been a neighborhood bar, not a grocery store, that Father had commandeered in the name of Roman Catholicism. The story, in my mother’s telling, sounds like the opening line to a joke: a young priest walks into a bar, makes the proprietor an outlandish offer on the spot, assures him that the Archdiocese of Detroit is good for it, and, after the owner accepts, promptly puts up a sign in the bar’s window that reads: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. Henry Ford’s Maltese and Italian workers—twenty-five nationalities were represented in the parish, according to an April 1945 issue of the Michigan Catholic—could still get wine in the establishment, but it would now be blessed.
Saulino family gatherings, back when I tugged at belt loops and spent a lot of time looking up, revolved around the figures of Father Hec and Sister Marcia, whose massive authority stood in inverse relation to her slight stature; it increased as she physically contracted, after the manner of Mother Teresa. Their father, Umberto Saulino, had come over from Naples alone in 1904, and then again with his wife, Marianne, in 1905. She would give birth to eight children before dying, while still a young woman, of an undiagnosed form of what my grandfather always referred to as “female cancer,” leaving Umberto with five small children (three girls had died as infants) whom he could not possibly care for while going about the business of earning a living.
The oldest and sole surviving girl, Frances, tended as best she could to her younger brothers, who were eventually placed in the St. Francis Home for Boys, a Catholic orphanage. “She was their mother,” my own mother always said of her. The St. Francis Home was staffed, in part, by the Sisters of St. Joseph, the congregation Frances would join with Umberto’s reluctant permission. Neither my grandfather nor Father Hec ever ceased to call their sister, known to the rest of the world as Sister Marcia Saulino, anything but Frances. I tried to picture Sister, in her oddly named girlhood, wiping snotty noses and smoothing back the hair on the boys’ sobbing heads, but could never quite square such maternal imagery with the nice old lady in the habit who said grace before Christmas Eve dinner. Women with maternal tendencies became mothers, not nuns. She’d taught for thirty-four years in Catholic schools, and that I could picture. I’d had nuns just like her, women whose mania for neatness sent them running for the nearest eraser the second a stray mark appeared on their chalkboard.
The priest and nun were people around whom you had to watch what you said; who asked you, pointedly, if you were still going to Mass (in my case, yes); who sat in armchairs and, even much later on, when Parkinson’s had set in and their hands shook, were able to down glasses of scotch in between bouts of sleep. At the funeral for Father Hec, his eulogy was delivered by a priest who had attended Sacred Heart Seminary with him some sixty years before and who recalled, with the sort of clarity that the very old often reserve for their youthful indiscretions, a sign that the soon-to-be Father Saulino had taped to his bedroom door: WHERE THERE ARE FOUR CATHOLICS, it read, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A FIFTH.
Father and Sister—one married to Jesus, the other his earthly emissary—were the only people with whom I was closely acquainted who lived in Grosse Pointe. Sister Marcia, who had been stationed at St. John Hospital in Detroit when I was born there, later moved to Our Lady Star of the Sea parish, nestled in an exclusive spot a quarter-mile from Lake St. Clair, while Father Hec’s final parish stop was St. Paul—located, even more exclusively, on Lakeshore Drive. The St. Paul parking lot was filled, each and every Sunday, with the Cadillac Coupe DeVilles, the Mercedes S-class, and the Swedish sports sedans of parishioners worth well into seven figures, men and women clearly afraid of neither camels nor the eyes of needles.
In Grosse Pointe, even the street names were better: Lakeshore Drive, which the priests’ residence at St. Paul fronted and over which the sun rose reliably each morning, was Lakeshore Drive only in the Pointes. A couple of miles in either direction—to the south and the Detroit border, to the north and the working-class suburb of St. Clair Shores—and this street reverted back to its pumpkin form, becoming simply Jefferson Avenue. But in Grosse Pointe it was Lakeshore Drive, with all the moneyed, Jazz Age connotations that attached. Every time I drove by St. Paul I was sure to leave a mental note of my great-uncle’s post in the glove compartment, along with the registration and proof of insurance, in case I had need to explain my rather shabby presence to a Grosse Pointe police officer.
Near the end of his life, when he was living in retirement at the St. John Senior Community across from Detroit’s Balduck Park, we would pick up Father Hec—the only Saulino, aside from my mother, still living south of 8 Mile—and take him out to the suburbs for the holiday get-togethers. His gait was slow, his movements hesitant, his talk could trail off at times, and yet the overall impression was still one of massive purposefulness, here at the hunched, shuffling end of a life dedicated to a single cause. He was always dressed in black, out of a lifetime of habit, and well fortified against the Michigan cold. Ice on the sidewalk posed problems, especially when we dropped him off in the dark after a full day’s drinking. My father and I would each take an elbow and an unsteady gloved hand, help him out of the car, and guide him back inside the nursing home.
At such moments I never failed to feel what I’ve seen referred to as “moral awe”: the simultaneously intimidating and inspiring sensation experienced in the presence of figures of tremendous ethical or spiritual authority. This shaking hand had, thousands of times before, steadily held aloft the host during the transubstantiation, that moment in Catholic Mass when the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. If true (and I couldn’t quite decide whether I believed or not), the responsibility these hands had borne had been awesome.
“He’s slowing down,” I’d say, after shutting his door behind me. “Sure, but his mind’s still sharp,” my father would reply, getting his keys out of his pocket on the way back to the car. “You can see it. He gets frustrated. He can’t quite come up with the words he wants, but his mind’s working all the time.”
The only fault I could ever find with Father Hec on those holiday trips to the suburbs was that he seemed legitimately impressed by them. “This is a very nice area,” he’d say as we made our way inside some relative’s subdivision. “They have a lovely home,” he’d say on our way back out. And I’d think: But he should know better, a man born and raised in Detroit, a man who lived on Lakeshore Drive and whose final room, after a lifetime of reappointments and relocations, was back inside the city limits.
But he wasn’t living in the city out of choice, of course. No one lives in a nursing home out of choice, and not many more lived in Detroit of their own volition, especially if they were white. Both were places where undesirables were kept, those people whose usefulness was an open question. This was certainly the stance of many white suburbanites, in whose minds whites remained in the city for only one of two reasons: because they lacked the wherewithal to live outside it (which carried with it a certain implied stupidity), or because they lived in Detroit deliberately, which was even dumber.
After their moves to the suburbs—and they all moved out, eventually—our relatives were glad that they weren’t in Detroit anymore, a stance that caused some friction around the holidays, when their hesitation to come back for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner at our place brought existing familial tensions to the fore. “Our house is too small,” my mother would say sarcastically, repeating what had been said to her over the phone by a sister or sister-in-law. “Well, that’s
true,” my father would say, acknowledging the point even when he knew that it was beside the point. The same house, north of 8 Mile, would have presented no problem. From my mother’s perspective, the only thing worse than hosting such get-togethers, with their innumerable preparations, was being denied the opportunity to do so.
My father’s father worked for decades at Chrysler and the American Motor Company, which would move its headquarters from Detroit to the suburb of Southfield in the mid-1970s, prompting a pissed-off Coleman Young to order, in his words, “a change in the bidding specifications for city vehicles so that they excluded AMC.” Like my Grandpa Saulino, my Grandpa Clemens had been raised in a Catholic orphanage, but he was not “ethnically” Catholic—that is to say, he was not, so far as I know (his lineage is vague), either Italian, or Irish, or Polish. His Catholicism was the result of the Sisters by whom he was raised and perhaps a certain amount of spiritual predisposition, though I doubt this. There was always something slightly coerced about his Catholicism, and I think his piety, such as it was, was directly traceable to his sense of indebtedness to the nuns. A fiercely practical man, he saw education, the importance of which he always stressed, purely as a means to an economic end, not as a window onto the best that has been said and thought. Catholicism, I suspect, he considered likewise: a straight line to an afterlife spent upstairs.
This practicality, as well as his unrepentant bargain-hunting nature, extended even to the Sunday church service that he chose to attend when, while still dating her in the late 1930s, he would visit my grandmother in Toledo, Ohio, where her father ran gas stations. For the first few months of their courtship he attended Mass at her neighborhood church, Good Shepherd, and like many an impatient Catholic he would leave the service immediately after the receiving of Communion. The priest at Good Shepherd noted my grandfather’s early departures and after a few months decided to confront him about it. My grandfather decided to take his business elsewhere, and after a bit of poking around settled upon St. Thomas. Nice parish, pretty church, quick service, so he’d heard, and one other enormous benefit: the priest at St. Thomas was blind.
The last name Clemens begins with him—it has no previous history—and the literary side of me would like to think that my grandfather had spent long, lonely hours in the orphanage leafing through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and took the last name that the chronicler of life on the Mississippi had discarded. But my grandfather, as far as I could tell, never read a book in his life; no one in my family did, never having seen the need. There was enough serious content, enough transcendence, in cars and Catholicism; it wasn’t necessary for them to concern themselves with ideas buried away in books.
The devout Catholics were able, to some degree, to sidestep Detroit’s racial issues with their faith. The city’s demographic changes were less lamentable to such folks than were the changes in the Church after the Second Vatican Council. Men like my father, who worshipped at the altar of the internal combustion engine, could console themselves with the thought that, though Detroit may change, or reduce itself to rubble, the city’s factories would continue to churn out new Camaros, Barracudas, and Dusters. And both groups, born to earlier generations, could counterbalance, in their mind’s eye, Detroit’s black present with its much paler past. My problem later on was that I had lost faith in faith and had never been able, try as I might, to muster up much love for cars. Jesus Christ was less interesting to me, as a literary personage, than Quentin Compson. Ideas were my hobby, not hot rods, and books the garage in which I tinkered with them. And because the Detroit I’d been born into was already black and getting blacker, I’d needed to work out a stance, a strategy, fairly early on, and to continue working on it even after we had all left the city. As I’d suspected, “don’t bother them and they won’t bother you” ceased to work once they began to bother you and yours.
The Lower Sprint
LIKE 7 MILE AND 6 MILE, 8 Mile was so named after its distance from the city center, and referencing these streets as they stood in relation to one’s own home was a shorthand way of making clear just how deep into the heart of darkness one still lived. In a pleasing symmetry, the areas around these roads had begun to “go bad” more or less in sync with the calendar. It was time to move out of the 6 Mile area by the late sixties, when my parents had bought our bungalow there; time to move out of the 7 Mile area by the late seventies; and time to move out of the 8 Mile area by the mid-to-late eighties, when the entire city, all 140 square miles of it, was nothing but one big ghetto, and when the citizens of East Detroit, fearful of overspill, began to think about establishing at least a semantic distance from the city it adjoined.
My fifth grade football team, the Denby Bulldogs, practiced at Heilmann Field on State Fair, which was 7½ Mile; the street got its name because it dead-ended a dozen miles to the west, at the Michigan State Fairgrounds. One block to the east of the field was Burbank, the Detroit public school attended by most of my teammates; one block to the south was St. Jude. In the middle of the field, which was a few streets wide and at least twice that long, was one of the city’s recreation centers; in its indoor pool I’d learned to swim, and in the hockey rink outside, in the dead of winter, I did ovals under the floodlights, skating into the clouds of breath I blew out before me. Above the frozen rink, abandoned, were basketball hoops missing their nets; the nets wouldn’t be replaced until spring, when the ice had melted, the side boards were taken down, and the concrete beneath the rink regained its summertime status as a basketball court. In the corners of the field were the baseball diamonds, where during the spring and early summer I played second base and hit leadoff, to better capitalize on my speed and bunting ability.
No sport is without its racial component, and Heilmann had its shifting seasonal demographics. Swimming and hockey were white sports. Basketball was a black sport, and the friends I made while sweating shirtless over shared jugs of Gatorade were not to be seen in the winter, when the courts were once again flooded and frozen. Baseball, the greatest of American games, was the most integrated: everyone played it. Ninety feet between bases, someone once said, is the greatest achievement of Western man, and though as Little Leaguers we’d have to wait a few years before graduating to such a base length, we agreed. Parents of both races dragged coolers, lawn chairs, and little brothers and sisters to Heilmann Field and settled themselves along the first or third base lines, holding up BLESS YOU BOYS banners, the slogan of the ’84 Tigers World Series team that began the season 35–5, still the best start in the history of baseball. I didn’t know a kid who didn’t play the game. Not to play it and love it was something like a moral failing.
Football, by contrast, was a minority pursuit in a couple of senses: nowhere near everyone played it, and the football team that practiced at Heilmann Field in the fall of 1984 was all black (excepting myself), as was its coaching staff. “You know the lower sprint?” one of the coaches asked me at the end of an early-season practice, before we’d played our first game. He was my position coach—I played wide receiver—and a semipro player himself. Coach Clyde was tall and skinny, as befits a wideout, and before practice, when he and the other coaches would fool around, punting and passing to one another, I would watch him run with long, loping strides beneath dozens of deep bombs, never seeming to break a sweat. A week or two into the season, when we’d had to pick out our jerseys and equipment, I’d chosen number eighty, the number he wore for his semipro team. Our other wide receiver picked number one, after Anthony Carter, the great wideout for the University of Michigan. Whenever we played pickup games in the street I was always Anthony Carter, as one or another of my friends was always Walter Payton or John Riggins. But to have chosen anything other than eighty under the circumstances would have seemed disloyal. Coach Clyde had selected me as a starter and spent a good deal of time teaching me how to properly run a post pattern. Straight for fifteen yards, then plant hard with your outside foot and go like hell, at a forty-five degree angle, for the goalposts.
The pass will get there; you let the quarterback worry about that.
“The lower sprint?” I repeated, thinking that this was some new drill he wanted me to demonstrate. Despite our mutual fondness, we sometimes had trouble understanding each other: he talked fast, and I had a lisp and a tendency to stutter. “No, no,” he said. “The lower sprint. You know, the ‘Our Father.’ ” “Oh,” I said, “the Lord’s Prayer.” The owner of several rosaries, I nodded to indicate that I did indeed know it. Before each game, then, I stood above the reverently bent heads of my three dozen Denby Bulldog teammates, all of them down on one knee, while up above I recited, and had repeated back to me, the words our Savior gave us.
There were three Denby Bulldog teams, sorted by age, and the organization was overseen by Coach Washington, an enormously fat man whose son was the top high school football prospect in the state that year, a running back with blazing speed who had broken Jesse Owens’s meet record in the hundred-yard dash at a relay in Ohio the year before and who would sign a letter of intent to attend the University of Michigan the following fall. My playing on this particular football team caused my father no end of concern. In his mind, though he would never admit it, racial pride was most definitely at stake, and his worst fear was that his son would prove to be, as he put it, a “candy-ass.” My mother’s fears were more run-of-the-mill: broken bones, dislocated fingers, scar-leaving stitches—all of which would happen, in subsequent seasons. But the worst that occurred the first time around were two chipped front teeth. During a blocking drill, my mouthpiece had fallen out just before I clenched my teeth to deliver a big hit; the coaches blew the whistle, play stopped, and I bent over, spitting out bits of tooth.
