by Paul Clemens
It’s tempting to blame Catholicism for my acute awareness of the coffin—all that time on kneelers, staring up at a crucifix—but the truth was that, in some sense, this was not a religious but an aesthetic choice, one that Catholicism simply put forward. Autumn was always my favorite time of year. I liked my happiness not blissful but bittersweet. Perhaps the fact that I was capable of only temporary contentment paralleled the fact that I was my father’s son, and so saw pleasure as something impermanent, unable to compete with the pressing responsibilities of the coming day, and the day after, and the day after that, on each of which there was sure to be plenty to take care of. Life was a slippery slope, and the least bit of slacking off gave failure a foothold. Better not to make the slightest slip in the first place. Better to read some more in my book and then, before it got too dark, take to the trails.
When I tired of my assigned reading but wasn’t yet ready to brave the cold and leave the library girls behind, I’d walk over to the stack of periodicals and skim through the magazines, the names of which were new to me: The New Yorker, the New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books. The only paper we’d subscribed to at home was the Detroit News, the more conservative of the two Detroit dailies; and the only magazines that came to our house were Car Craft and National Dragster and similarly sophisticated fare. The most prized object to appear regularly at our doorstep was the weekly television guide, an insert in the Sunday paper.
Reading, I soon learned, led to more reading. This article referred to that book, and that book referred to this writer, and that writer, it was said, was influenced by writers X, Y, and Z—though the influence of Z, according to one of the critics cited, was decidedly for the worse. Sometimes the publications that I’d started to read would review the same book and disagree completely on its merits. I was surprised to learn that I could read a review, agree with the writer’s argument, then turn to an article in another periodical, which took an opposing view of the book (or political platform, or piece of social policy), and agree with that, too. “Whenever I feel bad,” says the narrator of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, “I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which the one bears the other.”
In Catholic school, anything between bound covers was accorded the status of scripture. It seemed to me now that it was altogether more respectful of writing to try to pick it apart to see how it worked. I began to write in the margins of books and magazines, blending the acts of reading and writing.
This was truest with the black writers I read, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin in particular. I fell for Baldwin—the term is apt—when I read his “Autobiographical Notes” at the beginning of Notes of a Native Son. After discussing the ambivalence with which he approached Shakespeare, Bach, and Rembrandt, he admits to having hated and feared white people all his life. He immediately follows that admission with another: this did not mean that he loved black people. “On the contrary,” he writes, “I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt.” Part of me, as I read on, was beginning to dislike the whites among whom I’d been raised because they had failed to produce, among much else, a Baldwin.
Where Baldwin was all exposed nerves, his writing an attempt to overcome what seemed an ineradicable sadness, Ellison was more relaxed; his essays, which made terrific points, took their time in getting there, and his great novel meandered unbelievably before reaching a finale never bettered in American fiction. Ellison so clearly possessed the strength, moral stature, and meticulous intelligence that tolerant whites always spoke of blacks possessing, but that I’d somehow overlooked during my days in Detroit, that I felt a bit blindsided.
The last line spoken by Ellison’s Invisible Man—“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”—made me blush. Me? I felt like a shy girl who’d just been asked to dance: You mean me? Yes, Ellison admitted in his essays: he was directly addressing his white readership with that last line. After finishing his novel and essays, I was more apt to let Ellison speak for me than any white person I knew.
Above all, I was struck by how important the concept of America was to these writers. I’d never really thought of myself as American. Catholic, yes; someone from the east side of Detroit, certainly. But not an American. I didn’t even consider myself a “Michigander,” the absurd term applied to people from our state that conjured up an image of ten million Midwestern birds always said to be leaving for better-paying jobs in the Sun Belt, as if this were our migratory pattern. But Baldwin and Ellison repeated, again and again, that I had more in common with them than either of us might care to admit. And the link could not be broken; moving to the suburbs, putting distance between oneself and black people, would do nothing to break this bond.
Still, it was Joyce, the Catholic apostate—to whom neither Ellison nor Baldwin, nor anyone else, could hold a candle—who obsessed me, who dramatized, with ferocious linguistic brilliance, those battles “fought and won behind your forehead.” For a junior-year class with Invisible Man on the syllabus I wrote a paper tracing the influence of Joyce on Ellison, building upon the scene in Ellison’s book in which the narrator remembers a black college professor who, with quotes from Joyce on the blackboard behind him, says of Stephen Dedalus’s famous boast that he would go forth to forge the conscience of his race: “Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record. . . . We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture.” I quoted, too, from an interview in which Ellison equated the position of Negro writers with that of the Irish, who’d taken the language of their oppressors and perfected it.
My professor told me the paper was probably publishable; I didn’t pursue it. My roommate, Shane, who edited the campus paper, asked me to contribute articles, invitations I declined. Like a Catholic schoolgirl, I was saving myself. I wasn’t going to write about anything else, I told myself, until I’d first succeeded in writing about Detroit.
Sitting on the top floor of the library, reading through those periodicals, I’d run across an article by a black writer speaking of his displeasure with recent books about race in America, criticizing them for their lack of artistic subtlety and the narrow range of reaction they allowed. It’s either the clenched fist of racial solidarity, he wrote, or the hung head of social understanding. I thought: That’s beautifully put, and no less true for the neatness of the formulation. Coming from a corner of Detroit where disagreement with blacks was seen as something of a patriotic duty—one to be demonstrated, in a losing cause, every four years at the polls—it was a relief to discover black writers who were saying things—things about race—with which I agreed.
With Baldwin’s essay “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” I agreed totally. A consideration of Norman Mailer’s infamous “The White Negro,” Baldwin’s essay had tactfully hinted that the Mailer piece was pretty bad. I read it and concluded it was bottomlessly so. Baldwin quotes some of his jazz musician friends, with whom Mailer had hung out to research his piece. “The only trouble with that cat,” one of them says to Baldwin, “is that he’s white.” My response to “The White Negro” was similar, deviating only slightly at the end. That cat’s only problem, I remember thinking, setting the essay aside, is that he’s Jewish. No Catholic could have written it. Catholics weren’t impressed enough by humanity in general to be this bowled over by blacks in particular.
I wondered at the tendency—visible in the Mailer piece, and particularly apparent in the hippie kids on campus—to abase oneself before blackness. These people seemed to me not unlike the old ladies on kneelers in church, asking forgiveness of
a higher power when simple fortitude would have served them better. Despite my admiration for a handful of black writers, I felt nothing of the sort; my reading of Ellison and Baldwin was an intellectual exercise, not a moral one. I didn’t want to be them, or receive their blessing, or lower myself before their greater sense of my own insecurities. I wanted neither to clench my fist nor hang my head. I wanted to learn from them—as Baldwin had learned from Dickens and the King James Bible, as Ellison had learned from Hemingway and Eliot, Melville and Joyce.
I was sick of feeling guilty. As both a Catholic and a white American, I’d been born with original sin—the difference being, in the latter case, that there was no baptism to wash it away. In each case, the historical crime was wrapped into the very fiber of my being, making any further instances of guilt redundant. Enough already. I was born, I told myself, one hundred and ten years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, nine years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, and the very year of Coleman Young’s election, which is to say that I was part of the first generation that not only entered a country where blacks were not enslaved or denied their civil liberties, but was also part of that small fraction that entered a city where blacks were in the majority and in power. My parents, for reasons I could never completely comprehend, hadn’t taken part in the flight, and though my father may not have liked Coleman Young he paid taxes to the Young administration, which was more than could be said of many of the mayor’s most ardent supporters. Guilty I may have been, but I’d have eaten my hat if someone could have explained to me how this was specifically so. The guilt, such as it was, was astral.
It was impossible, of course, to be a good Catholic and a racist; at the same time it seemed difficult to be a Catholic and a good social progressive, and not just because of the many things that were accepted parts of the progressive worldview that the Catholic Church staunchly opposed. The difference ran on deeper currents, approaching the irreconcilable. Where the progressive view of life was predicated, to some extent, on society’s perfectibility, the Catholic Church sought perfection from the individual members of its flock, while taking a frankly realistic view of human failings. Has there ever been an institution that has lasted as long as the Catholic Church, and has had such influence, in which the sense of how limited we are has loomed so large? There were saints who had overcome human weakness, of course—but they were saints. For the rest of us, the Church provided a head-spinning set of rules, prohibitions, and recommendations—and at the end, should such strictures prove insufficient, there was still purgatory.
And there was always an exception to each rigid rule. Over Easter vacation my junior year of high school I flew to France, along with a dozen classmates and the two priests who were chaperoning us. My parents were concerned about the trip’s expense, which Father Hec—happy to support a Catholic schoolboy’s desire to see Notre Dame—offered, in part, to defray. My mother was sweet-talked into covering the rest of the cost by one of the priests, a suave Frenchman who assured her, during a parent-teacher conference, that a trip to Europe would be just the thing for a young man of my talents. (One of the nuns at school, who spent her summers at Lourdes, was always asking for strapping young volunteers to help carry crippled pilgrims to the healing waters, but this trip to France sounded more fun.) We flew out of Detroit on Good Friday, when Catholics the world over fast and fill churches from noon to three, marking the time when Christ had hung from his cross and praying on bended knee for the salvation his suffering made possible. As with all Fridays during Lent, meat was forbidden; but to eat meat on Good Friday wasn’t just forbidden—it was obscene.
When the meal carts began to work their way down the aisle, we could smell it in the air, and we started to whisper among ourselves: steak. The stewardess informed us that filet mignon was one of our meal choices. We looked at each other and smiled. As the best student in the bunch—the most verbal, anyway—I was nominated to walk up the aisle and ask the priests what we should do.
Our French teacher, Father Racine, seemed surprised I’d asked—surprised and pleased. He was a great mix of the pious and the worldly himself, the crucifix around his neck nestled in the chest hair exposed by his unbuttoned black shirt. “You’re growing boys, you’re traveling, you need your strength,” he said, waving away my question with a smile. This unexpected dispensation emboldened us, and since ours was an international flight we started, shortly after requesting the fillet, to buy drinks from the stewardesses. The priests, drinking themselves up ahead of us, didn’t seem to much care what went on in the plane behind them.
For all its bluster about premarital sexual abstinence, natural birth control, and the hair-palmed perils of beating off, there was within the Church a strong, indirect acceptance of life as it is—an acknowledgment, in the sheer amplitude of what it told us not to do, that we are all traveling, and need our strength, and so probably can’t help but leap headlong into whatever has been forbidden. That’s what confession was for.
Baldwin ends “Notes of a Native Son,” which he’d begun with his father’s death and the ’43 Detroit riots, on a similar note of conciliation. After describing his father’s funeral, where he reflects on the racism that had poisoned that man’s life and was beginning to infect his own, Baldwin speaks of the need for “acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are.” This poses a problem, for if one accepts life as it is and men as they are, then “it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace.” Baldwin asserts, however, that “one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.” He finishes: “This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.”
The Church, too, accepted people as they were, knowing that sin could never be anything but commonplace; yet it insisted that one fight the tendency with all one’s strength. As for freeing one’s heart of hatred and despair, Church teaching and Baldwin agreed. Despair, according to Catholicism, was the unforgivable sin, as was its logical end, suicide, both being evidence of a loss of faith in God’s grace. Hatred, according to enlightened folks everywhere, was a disease, one especially widespread in Detroit. I’d do my best to avoid both.
My time away from the city had made clear that my Detroit upbringing was unique—singular, almost—and sullied if it produced nothing more than the same lazy prejudices available to everyone else. I couldn’t stand those suburbanites who characterized the city, and the blacks who populated it, as hopeless. Such a stance was racism, pure and simple. As for me—someone who had seen the crime, corruption, and lack of common sense that was everywhere in the city, and who had noted the complexions of those acting nonsensically, corruptly, and criminally—I thought the city and many of its inhabitants hopeless. Such a stance was not racism; it was an accurate apprehension based on the available evidence, and neither could I tolerate those misty-eyed suburbanites whose kindheartedness prevented them from acknowledging, or even noticing, the obvious.
What was never quite clear to me, no matter how much I read, was whether or not I could expect the same sort of understanding, the same acknowledgment of life’s extenuating circumstances, from blacks that I received from the Catholic Church. The Church was family; blacks were strangers, and no amount of reading, no number of basketball court friendships, no backlog of Detroit experience would ever change this. If, like all white people, I was a racist, I could pin the blame in part on an upbringing few whites shared. Whether or not this distinction would mean anything to blacks themselves was another matter, and I had a hunch that, unlike the priests, they would pay altogether less attention to the fact that I was traveling and needed my strength.
City Workers or Something
THE FIRST PIECE of creative writing I tried my hand at, the summer after freshman year of college—the summer East Detroit became Eastpointe—was a strictly factual account of my morning drive along the Ford Freewa
y, heading downtown from Detroit’s east side. The graffiti along the westbound lanes of I-94 featured prominently, as did the highway advertising—limited, by and large, to billboards for fast food chains and Baptist ministers, middle-aged men in sweater vests whose signs carried vastly unsubstantiated claims regarding salvation. A few miles farther along, where the Ford Freeway rises to meet the Chrysler Freeway, there was an enormous garbage incinerator, positioned so that its thick stream of smoke would be carried by the prevailing winds into the airspace of our Canadian neighbors, with whom we shared the world’s longest-standing peaceful border. It was ten minutes to seven when I drove past the incinerator each morning, half asleep behind the wheel.
I tried, too, to write a scene set in an east side barbershop. I had a first line: “Though the sign on the wall behind him said By Appointment Only, the barber took no appointments.” I didn’t know how these scenes connected, but figured I’d find the narrative thread eventually.
My summers home were a reality check, a way to test the relevance of what I’d spent the past eight months reading in that invitingly warm library on the other side of the state. I got back to Detroit, after freshman year, on April 28. The next day, four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of a black motorist. For the next few days, along with the rest of the country, my family watched the riots on television, and we were stricken by the repeated image of a white truck driver being pulled from his rig by a group of black men and hit in the side of the head with a brick. We’d seen the video of the police brutality over and over, and had felt less and less with each viewing, eventually feeling more frustration with the news broadcasts that seemed to take a masochistic pleasure in wearing the tape thin than with the officers whose actions the tape had captured and who had nonetheless—incredibly—been acquitted.
