by Paul Clemens
Neither, it seems likely, would they have smiled upon the course reading list, which featured book after book critical of the Church of Rome. A few of them—Chaucer, for instance—I’d been exposed to during high school, but whereas the critique of the Church was in the background of our high school discussions it was often the focus of my college reading. Things reached their apex second semester when, after plowing through More’s Utopia and Erasmus’s Colloquies, we devoted an entire unit to readings from The Protestant Reformation, a collection of writings by assorted Swiss and German Anabaptists, by Martin Luther (“His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man”: the Edict of Worms), and by John Calvin, whose ideas concerning predestination drove me to begin one paper by saying that, as a depressed eighteen-year-old, I’d yet to resign myself to the fact that this life was unfair; the last thing I wanted to hear was that the afterlife was rigged, too.
But these were Catholic Detroit thoughts, and, though the center of my universe, the city’s northeastern corner couldn’t have been less helpful in preparing me for encounters with the larger world. And that’s how the world outside Detroit now appeared: larger. Visits home, from which I returned to campus with care packages of Little Italy pizza, were an exercise in perspective, the city appearing a little smaller in my rearview mirror each time I left it. Midnight Mass at St. Jude, during Christmas vacation my freshman year, felt, for the first time, precious—as if there might not be an endless succession of them. Everything I saw in the old neighborhood seemed to possess a built-in obsolescence I’d never before noticed.
This was in part because the portion of the city that was ours kept getting smaller. The southern perimeter of our neighborhood, previously at 7 Mile, had moved north to State Fair; the western perimeter, at Gratiot, had moved east to Hayes. “We live in the ghetto,” my mother’s occasional housecleaning partner, Mrs. Kolarski, told me on one of these trips back. Because her husband was a fireman a few years from retirement, he wouldn’t risk losing his pension by moving out of the city. This was the opposite approach of those cops who lived five miles away in Warren and slept at their fathers’ houses the night before their shifts. The Kolarskis were willing to ride it out in the city for a few more years and then, after retirement, relocate—not to southern Macomb County but to somewhere in the vicinity of Newfoundland. This was a common theme among people who subscribed to this school of thought: not moving away until you had enough money to move way away, somewhere well beyond the ring of inner suburbs that, in ten years, would look like the city one had fled a decade before. To such people, the only thought worse than living in a ghetto at age fifty was that of having to move again at age seventy. “It used to be ten blocks away. Then six. Now it’s three. Pretty soon it’ll be here, on this block, and we’ll have bars on the windows. I tell Jim—let’s go. But he won’t do it. After all these years, he’s not going to take the chance.”
While the livable space inside the city shrank, the suburbs that surrounded the already enormous city continued to expand. To the south, they stretched nearly to Toledo; to the southwest, they touched Ann Arbor; to the north, they just missed making it to Flint; to the northwest, Lansing loomed. (The only reason the suburbs didn’t sprawl to the east was because they were blocked by Lake St. Clair and, beyond that, Canada.) Highways were built that, instead of moving people between the city and its suburbs, moved people from suburb to suburb, bypassing the city entirely. One of these, the Walter P. Reuther freeway—named after the former UAW president—became, in the early 1990s, the metro area’s main east–west thoroughfare. It was a few miles to our north, meandering between 10 Mile and 11 Mile, and rendered the stoplights and forty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit along 8 Mile, the former east–west thoroughfare, relics of a former age. “Detroit has had its day,” a prominent antagonist of Coleman Young—the Oakland County prosecutor—tells Chafets in Devil’s Night, a copy of which was back in my dorm room. “I don’t give a damn about Detroit. It has no direct bearing on the quality of my life. If I never crossed 8 Mile again I wouldn’t be bereft of anything.”
As I crossed 8 Mile, going the other direction, and drove back to campus through the Macomb, Oakland, and Livingston County suburbs to which half of Detroit’s goddamn population had fled—subdivisions behind cornfields, horse farms alongside highways—it was clear that my upbringing belonged to a different epoch. Black cities still made sense, as did white suburbs—there was an obvious symbiosis between the two—but urban whites, with all of our working-class bric-a-brac? As the black cop had wondered: What were we doing still hanging around the joint? Metropolitan Detroit was now four million people, with less than a quarter of that in the city itself. To most people, “Detroit” now meant everything but.
I was struck by the strangeness of things actually sent to me from the city. Our return address, in the upper-left-hand corner of letters in my campus mailbox, struck me as odd. Even stranger was seeing my father’s signature on the birthday or Christmas card inside. I was used to seeing numbers in his handwriting, his notebook calculations, but not his script. My mother always wrote a longish message on such cards, then “Love,” then “Mom,” and she would finally add the ampersand, so that all my father had to do was sign “Dad.” Three hours from Detroit, and those three letters—“D-a-d”—looked lost, completely out of context.
Fast approaching his fiftieth year in the city, my father was now working full-time as a draftsman for the Detroit Public Lighting Department, in a building down the block from City Airport. Public Lighting, where the kindhearted father of my high school locker partner had worked for decades, had the distinction of being the city department Detroit residents complained about most to the ombudsman: the streetlights, in some areas, were simply never on. The lights in our area were intermittently illuminated, and they could be checked, since ours was a corner house, by simply looking out the kitchen window. One windy night years before, my father had called Public Lighting to complain about the lights being off. “Sir,” he was told, “it’s very windy out.” “Windy?” he replied. “What the hell do you have in them—candles?” He was now a department employee.
He couldn’t not work; and though the plan had been to go to school exclusively, he’d decided to work and study simultaneously, hoping against hope to beat his son to a college diploma. “How’s school going?” my sister asked in one of the chatty cards she sent to me freshman year. “School’s fine for me. Dad starts tomorrow.”
Dontrelle, it turned out, was from Flint, and so liked talking with me about Detroit, the even bigger, blacker city one hour to the south. He’d appreciated my comment, at the introductory meeting for our floor (which, as RA, he’d organized), about my never having seen so many white people. That, he thought, was funny. He was thin, almost frail, and had not the least interest in intimidating anyone, despite the clenched fist and strident music. He possessed that strain of enthusiasm common to college students who believe that the four years spent on campus will be the most important of your life and that the most important thing about those four important years is getting involved. Never much of a joiner, I begrudgingly accepted Dontrelle’s invitation at the beginning of the winter semester to attend one of the school’s Martin Luther King holiday events, during which he would be reading a portion of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Dr. King struck me as a little too accommodating for Dontrelle, who seemed more the Malcolm X type, but he said several times that he wanted me at the memorial. My days in Detroit have often served to legitimize me, during the initial stages of friendships with blacks, as a white person whose opinion might—might—matter. “Where you from?” “Detroit.” “Which suburb?” “No suburb—Detroit.” “Really.” Where things went from there was another matter, but I felt a connection with Dontrelle. Shane attended as well, so I was the sole representative neither of my people nor of the first floor of Copeland Hall.
There weren’t many attendees at the event of either race. We sat in a small circle and,
after some preliminaries, Dontrelle stood in the middle, clearing his throat, a little unsure, as everyone is at first, what he should do with his hands. It dawned on me almost immediately that he wasn’t going to be reading a portion of the speech, as he’d said; he was going to be doing all of it. And he wasn’t reading the speech; he was reciting it, and doing so without the slightest stumble.
One doesn’t get the full impact of the speech from the snippets one usually hears, and as Dontrelle got into the spirit, sweeping his listeners along with him, his hands now doing more or less what Dr. King’s had done, the sheer forward momentum of those words was enough to knock me back. Shane, whom I could see peripherally, was crying.
“Did you cry?” he asked me afterward, back in our room.
“No.”
This was not to be mistaken for a lack of emotion on my part. Like my father, I was beginning to admire, not the finished product, but the hard work that went into things. The part of the deal where people applaud and pat you on the back is nice, but not nearly so important as the enormous preparation that makes such a moment possible. Instead of being touched by the speech’s sentiments, noble as they were, I was more impressed by the thought that Dontrelle had studied that speech, word by word, line by line, until, as one of my English teachers always put it, he had it by heart. Hour upon hour of dull, dreary work had occurred in that room next to mine, completely unbeknownst to me, at the end of which—my father’s philosophy of life—there was a little something to show for it.
Never have the congratulations I’ve given to someone after a public performance been so sincere. “You were great,” I told him, shaking his hand.
Some years ago, in one of my alumni newsletters, I came across a death notice that caused me to gasp: Dontrelle Dell had been killed, it said, in a car accident along a two-lane country road. Years later, digging through boxes to write this book, I found an old Christmas card (“Have a beary merry Christmas!”) with a teddy bear in a Santa hat on the front. Inside, Dontrelle had written: “Thanks for helping to make our floor the best. Your personality is the greatest. Your RA, Dontrelle Dell.” At the top is the yellowing tape I’d used to stick it up on my dorm room wall, next to the Christmas cards sent up from Detroit.
Hatred and Despair
ON THE 29TH OF JULY, in 1943, my father died,” James Baldwin writes at the beginning of “Notes of a Native Son.” “On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century.” This was what I liked: Detroit, a race riot, a birth, and a death, all in the first paragraph. As reading went, it seemed applicable. That my own father would be conceived in Detroit a year after those ’43 riots, and had nearly been swept up in the city’s 1967 encore, merely served to strengthen my belief that Baldwin’s essay about blackness was also, however indirectly, about me.
I had a lot of time for such reading, and for the sort of thinking—profoundly, adolescently self-centered—that it engendered. Thanks to a handsome four-year scholarship, I didn’t need to work during the school year. The university gave me a check at the beginning of each semester for room and board, which I was free to spend as I wished. Since such expenses were calculated at campus rates, and off-campus living was much cheaper, I was able, after my first year, by living a few blocks from campus, to bank a substantial portion of these checks. When, as a freshman, I saw others in my dorm receive their midterm grades in the campus mail but did not myself, I suspected an oversight and feared that I was somehow to blame. But no: midterm progress reports, I learned, were sent only to freshmen—and, because of my AP credits from high school, I had sophomore standing. By my senior year I had only a handful of required classes left to take.
I worked out my thoughts and mentally wrote my papers during long runs on the trails and ravines around campus. The stress fracture in my left hip suffered during track season my senior year of high school had more or less healed by that fall, but it was still helpful to run on soft dirt instead of the concrete that had contributed to the fracture in the first place. Unlike in Detroit, there were no bus stops to run by, no exhaust fumes to inhale, and none of the urban distractions—including, on a few occasions, a Detroit police helicopter that had shone its searchlight on me at night—to intrude on the mental solitude that was my main reason for running. Occasionally, deep in the trails, I’d see a pack of deer. One Saturday night that first October, with all my friends away for the weekend, I ran fourteen miles in the dark during a fall thunderstorm. Though I could sometimes hear rifle shots in the distance, I was never fired at by hunters out poaching on college property, about whom one sometimes heard stories. I averaged between sixty and seventy miles a week, logging my daily totals in a journal at the front of which I’d written a quote from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. I’d read the book during high school and had loved the simplicity and truth of the protagonist’s statement—his credo—“I’m a long-distance runner, crossing country all on my own no matter how bad it feels.” It was like Catholicism—redemption through physical suffering.
I was often approached by dogs during my runs and carried rocks in my hands to ward off the worst of them. During the last stretch of one winter run I’d been followed by a friendly black Lab from a house at the foot of an icy hill about a mile from campus. Before crossing the busy two-lane highway that bordered campus, I stopped and packed a snowball about the size and weight of a baseball, and threw it as if I were trying to hit the cutoff man from deep in the outfield. I was happy to have had the dog’s company—I’d never had one growing up—but didn’t want him crossing with me. I’d thrown the snowball back toward his house (“Go get it!”) and crossed the highway while he ran off in the other direction.
Seconds later I heard the thud. When I turned around I saw him on his side in the middle of the road, cars swerving around him. I ran into the traffic, scooped him up—he was still breathing, with blood dripping from the side of his jaws—and left him on the side of the road with a friend who had stopped to help. I ran back to campus and hailed an acquaintance in a pickup. We put the dog in the back and drove to its owner’s house, at the bottom of the hill.
The dog was in shock. After the owner had taken it down from the bed of the pickup, the dog suddenly came to and began to run wildly around their yard, encircling the family’s horses, all the while letting loose a high-pitched bark as if its tail were being continuously stepped on. The owner went into his house, returning with a rifle. “Don’t shoot it!” I said. “I nearly got killed saving him!” It seemed like something out of one of Hemingway’s Michigan stories, set not far from where I was: a man killing the animal he loves because it’s what he must do.
Moments later the man’s wife and kids came running out, begging him not to shoot. He put the rifle down and, after several minutes and much swearing, managed to catch the dog, which he put in his pickup and drove hurriedly to the vet. It was icy, but the truck managed to make it up the hill. A couple of weeks later, the dog was back running alongside me.
I did most of my reading on the fourth floor of the school’s library, the womblike warmth of which contrasted with the cold outside, lasting from October to April and through which I once ran seven miles on a day when the windchill was fifty-five degrees below zero. The library’s warmth encouraged the sort of muddled, half-asleep thoughts that bookish college students collect like beer cans, and that resemble nothing so much as fumbling intellectual foreplay.
Because I’d gone to an all-boys high school, I wasn’t used to seeing girls in an academic context. As they sat down at the tables around me, taking off first their hats and gloves, then their scarves and coats, and finally rubbing some warmth into their small hands before opening their backpacks, I understood the parochial school suspicion of coeducation. Concentration was difficult. And when these girls, after another half hour in the library’s h
eat, lazily slipped out of their sweaters and began to sprawl out on the tables in front of them, putting their heads down for a spell of rest that could easily turn into an hour’s light sleep, I often found it impossible to resume my reading. The backs of the T-shirts they wore under those discarded sweaters—CLASS OF ’91 RULES!—revealed which small-town Michigan high school they hailed from, the letters in the name of their hometown curving forward along with their delicate spines: Edwardsburg and Vicksburg, Webberville and Greenville, Zeeland and Holland. Everyone, it seemed, was from a Burg, a Land, or a Ville.
I persevered with my reading. Just as I did when I ran repeats on the hills around campus, I forced myself through books despite the pain. “One more chapter,” I’d say, urging myself through not only all eleven hundred pages of Don Quixote but each footnote in the back of the book as well, where I kept a finger to mark my place. On the verge of sleep, I’d vow to finish The House of Mirth, not only to see what happened between Lawrence and Lily but to be able to check another book off the required reading list. Edith Wharton: done.
Why I was in such a rush—what the mental to-do lists were for—I have no idea. At times it felt, in its very lack of specificity, something like mortal fear. Whereas the great benefit of adolescence is the assumption that it will last forever, I was burdened with the foreknowledge that it would all quite quickly be over—before you know it, as older people, who knew it, always put it. I carried with me, at all times, a sense of an ending. During dinner conversation in Joyce’s “The Dead,” talk turns to the monks of Mount Melleray, men who “never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins.” One of the dinner guests, Mr. Browne, who is not Catholic but “of the other persuasion,” professes not to understand this last part. “The coffin,” the hostess explains, putting a stop to this religious talk, “is to remind them of their last end.”
