by Paul Clemens
The video of the truck driver was another matter. We hadn’t been desensitized to it, as we had been with the first video during the long buildup to the officers’ trial. And though it was the wielding of their batons that sickened in the first instance, it wasn’t the brick to the head that was most bothersome about the second video. The violence, however vulgar, could be countenanced. It was the taunt that followed, the two-handed point by the man who’d thrown the brick as the truck driver fell to the ground unconscious—that “Gotcha!”—that did it. Oh, that sick-ass sonuvabitch. Did you see that bastard? How he pointed like that? I’d thought, with my bookish interests, that I’d left behind the opinions of white Detroit. Watching this video the day after returning from my first year of college, I thought: Maybe not. Freeing one’s heart of hatred and despair, clearly, would be no mean feat.
Everyone in our family worked in the city—my dad worked for the city—and there was much talk, among whites who’d witnessed the ’67 riots, that another was possible. Los Angeles had just surpassed the records Detroit had set twenty-five years before, and could now lay claim to the title of Worst Riot in American History. Would Detroit sit silently by? Watts had gone up in ’65, after all, and Detroit had bettered it two years later. It could happen again. A good deal of advice was dispensed about locking car doors on the drive downtown, a drive that my mother and I made each weekday. “Good morning,” my mother had said to a black coworker the day after the verdict that precipitated the riots was delivered. “What’s so good about it?” the woman snapped back. When I dropped my mother off downtown at the Detroit Medical Center, where she was a secretary, I recalled Camus’s line about Algeria: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”
When we found ourselves a car short that summer, I’d have to drop my father off before work at the Public Lighting Department building next to City Airport. To get there I’d turn off Gratiot onto French Road, which dead-ends almost immediately at a set of railroad tracks just beyond a steel processing plant. French picks up again on the other side of a small airfield about a quarter of a mile wide, and then runs straight for a mile or so until it dead-ends again at 6 Mile, where Mt. Olivet Cemetery begins. For that mile between the airfield and 6 Mile, French Road is wide and free of traffic, and runs parallel to the airport’s landing strips; much of the illegal racing in the city—the sort of racing in the street that Springsteen sang about and that my father frowned upon—occurred here. Huge bets were said to be placed on the outcomes of races, and occasionally, when a bet went south or a car lost control, the eleven o’clock news dutifully reported the loss of life.
Our family had flown in and out of City Airport on a few occasions, taking advantage of the twenty-nine-dollar flights to Chicago occasionally offered by a discount airline. Because the runways were short, takeoffs and landings could be terrifying. “Any landing’s a good landing,” the pilots said, a bit shaken, each time we touched back down in Detroit. The city had plans to expand the airport, but there were those who opposed expansion, including the Polish mayor of Warren—the largest suburb in Macomb County, the third-largest city in Michigan—who cited flight patterns and noise pollution. “I can’t believe that the mayor of Warren is so stupid,” Coleman Young said. “He’s opposed in the latter decade of the twentieth century to having airplanes fly overhead.” The airport never did expand, however, and the last major carrier left the airport shortly after my wife and I flew out of City near the end of the nineties on our honeymoon.
“Biggest crowd I ever saw in my life,” my father once said as the two of us drove past City Airport, “was when Kennedy flew in there during the 1960 presidential campaign. I was in eighth grade. Someone got impaled on a post from the crowd pressing in to see him. See the lights around the football field?” he asked, turning his attention to the other side of the street, looking at what was once De La Salle Collegiate. “On top of them, and on top of the school itself, were landing lights for the planes coming in. Are they still there, on top of the stadium lights?” He leaned forward in the passenger seat. “Oh, hell, I can’t see.”
The running track around the football field was overgrown with grass, but the stadium lights, the stands, and the scoreboard—bearing the words BROTHER GEORGE SYNAN ATHLETIC FIELD—still stood. The school building had been sold by the Christian Brothers at the beginning of the previous decade and was now in the hands of holy men of a different persuasion. Barbed wire surrounded the building.
Like Coleman Young, I, too, had escaped the Christian Brothers’ discipline. The old school had closed its doors by the time I came of age, and the school’s new suburban campus, out in Warren, was just far enough of a drive as to be inconvenient. “I used to run to that track,” my father said, pointing to the grassy quarter-mile oval as we pulled away, “run a couple miles around it, and then run back home. Used to do that a few times a week when I was feeling good.” None of this was said with much sentiment. It was a fact, one that could be checked in the running logs in my parents’ basement, the mileage totals recorded in the same spiral notebooks that he used for his horsepower calculations.
Growing up, we identified people with the church they lived nearest. So-and-so’s family lived next door to St. Raymond. What’s-his-futz lived over by St. Jude. You know, that girl, from Guardian Angels. This was how people talked, as if street names and points on the compass were unnecessary. Everything could be oriented by one’s proximity to a particular parish. But the people who spoke this language had long since left the city, leaving behind the schools and churches (over a third of which were closed in the late 1980s, a scale unprecedented in American Catholicism), and the result was an uncomfortable layering of civilizations, an unspoken, aesthetic argument between Detroit’s white ethnic past and its nonwhite present. The peeling sign that sat in front of my father’s old high school may have said DOVE ACADEMY, but the concrete scrollwork still said DE LA SALLE COLLEGIATE. Which was it? I still call the place where my cousins went to school St. Matthew, but it was closed by the archdiocese a while back. On the side of the building that faces Outer Drive, at the top, are block letters still identifying the structure as the BISHOP DONNELLY ACTIVITIES CENTER. In the ground below is another sign, identifying it as the MAYA ANGELOU ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.
In grade school I had learned, from some lemon-scented nun, that one out of every five people on the planet was Chinese; since four out of five Detroiters were black, it seemed to me mathematically impossible for there to be any white people in Detroit. I recalled this fourth-grade lapse in logic during these drives. Every few blocks or so we’d pass a bungalow with a fenced-off yard and flower pots on the front porch, a place that I suspected of belonging to an old white woman—a widow, I imagined, whose husband had passed away thirty years before and whose children hadn’t yet found the money to move her to the suburbs. Aside from a few downwardly mobile Desdemonas imported from the near suburbs, that seemed to be about it: half a dozen holdovers from the time when the city had mayors with last names like Miriani and one’s offspring bought a house around the corner instead of out in Oakland County. Every time we passed one of these homes, I wondered who cut the grass.
This drive, part of our daily commute, was a pilgrimage that suburban Detroiters sometimes made—doors locked, windows up—to those special places that held pieces of their past. What people professed to be after from such trips tended toward the vague—they just wanted to have a look at the old place—and they were invariably disappointed afterward, as it was impossible not to be when the ostensible reason for the trip was so fundamentally dishonest. (It was to have one’s worst fears confirmed that such trips were undertaken.) Older couples drove down from the suburbs on Sunday mornings after Mass, the message of Christian charity still fresh in their ears and pleasant, anticipatory butterflies in their stomachs. As they crossed below 8 Mile, the contentment that comes of wearing one’s Sunday best began slowly to fade; smiles tightened and then disappeared altogether. By the t
ime the car had stopped in front of the house where their children were conceived, the sound of the priest’s voice had vanished, and the message of Christian love had begun to seem almost offensively simpleminded—insipid, even. How, they asked themselves, do you extend charity to this? You mean to tell me that these are the people who shall inherit the earth? They’ve already inherited Detroit, and look what they’ve done to it. Look.
There was an empty plot of land where our first bungalow near 6 Mile had been. I don’t remember who discovered its absence, but it had burnt down, or otherwise disappeared, within a decade of our having sold it.
The supply of abandoned homes in the city, with its preponderance of single-family structures and its rate of depopulation, was nearly endless, with stockpiles enough to last years. “To a unique degree,” Coleman Young said, seeking to explain the Devil’s Night fires, “Detroit had buildings to burn.” It also had buildings to demolish, and it’s possible that our house, rather than being a Devil’s Night fatality, had instead fallen into the hands of drug dealers and been knocked down during Young’s “Crack Down on Crack” campaign. Regardless: it took forty or fifty years for people of my grandparents’ generation to see pieces of their past begin to vanish. For people of my parents’ generation it was twenty or thirty. It took less than a decade before I began to lose the first tangible links to what became, once such links were severed, a bygone era in my life. A sense of life’s impermanence was imprinted on my psyche, along with the knowledge that nothing ever really returns. When things—neighborhoods, landmarks, businesses—go, they’re gone.
It was clear that our corner of Detroit was beginning to change beyond recognition already. Clearer still was the knowledge that it would be up to me to do the literary preservation work.
“X” hats were everywhere that summer, in anticipation of the release of the major motion picture. That same summer, in sync with the zeitgeist, the Detroit Board of Education decided to open an African-centered academy—its third, after Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson—in a predominantly white neighborhood on the city’s west side, to be named after Malcolm X. This decision went over like a lead balloon, and the angry reaction of whites in that section of the city made news all summer.
That the school board would seek to open a Malcolm X Academy didn’t surprise me—I’d assumed there was one already—neither did the media’s portrayal of white residents’ resistance as simply racist. Analogies to Little Rock were frequent. Hostile whites, black parents seeking the best for their kids, black students who just wanted to learn—it was the same story line, or presented as such. Little attention was paid to the fact that almost everything about this situation was different—that blacks, far from being powerless, controlled the city, including its school board; that the building the academy would occupy had already housed a school, closed by the Board of Education seven years before, and that the remaining neighborhood public school, predominantly white, was severely overcrowded as a result. And although in a concession to the overcrowding issue the school board had indeed opened a few slots at the academy to neighborhood kids, the unwillingness of white parents to send their kids to the academy was probably something more than the usual working-class racism, because it wasn’t just the three R’s being taught in the school but an Afrocentric curriculum, the driving impulse of which, aside from the usual mumbo jumbo about melanin and libations, may have been best illustrated at a Board of Education meeting when white residents who had questions about the curriculum were sneered at as “white devils.”
When the Archdiocese of Detroit proposed opening a similar academy for at-risk black males, to be run by the Jesuits, a member of the school board said: “My concern is whether we as a people should allow white men—whether they are priests or pimps—to be the educational guardians over our black boys.” During a radio interview, this same individual, angered by the resistance of white residents to the Malcolm X Academy, raised the possibility of leveling the neighborhood by armed force. This was a public statement, made by a city official. It was easy to feel that at least a little of Little Rock’s moral authority had been lost, while registering simultaneous relief that the academy had been designated for some other section of Detroit populated by white people who had forgotten to move out or were city workers or something.
I’d assumed that there was already a Malcolm X Academy in the city because a year and a half before, during our senior year of high school, a friend of mine had written a front-page article for the school paper about the initial vote of the Detroit Board of Education in favor of opening such an academy for at-risk black males, to be named after Malcolm X. Infuriatingly fair-minded, the article noted that race- and/or sex-segregated public schools were open to legal challenge (the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women would eventually force the Malcolm X Academy to accept female students), as were Catholic schools, like ours, with a tax-exempt status.
Catholic schools had to be able to justify the sex segregation, which our principal, Father Louis, did as follows: “The purpose historically [of single-sex schools] is to alleviate some of the pressures.” We thought that was what girls were for, but his point was more persuasive. The principal of the girls’ school next door, Sister Shirley, was given the same opportunity to justify her single-sex institution: “There are no male counterparts in a girls’ school, so the girls must take all the leadership roles. Statistics show that women who head companies probably got their education in an all-female environment.” The article, which concludes by saying that “schools separated by sex, religion and race are difficult issues,” was accompanied by a picture of two of our classmates, one white and one black, with a caption stating that they “couldn’t be friends in a race-segregated school.”
Back on campus the next fall, the professor of my minority literature class had us attend a lecture by the originator of Kwanzaa, one of the very experts in Afrocentric education who had advised the Detroit School Board on the curriculum for its African-centered academies. I thought to make mention of this lecture during a visit home, to get a rise out of my father, but I didn’t think it would work. He wouldn’t have cared, for strictly economic reasons. I could anticipate his line of thinking: The kid has a scholarship, thank Christ, so at least over there I’m not paying for this crap.
It was against this backdrop that I worked during my summers home. Baldwin and Ellison—I kept the latter’s Going to the Territory on my lap when called down to the City-County Building for jury duty—seemed infinitely remote, even though their subject matter was much closer to me in Detroit than it was on the fourth floor of the college library. It was one of the paradoxes of bookishness: though drawn to certain writers because of the skill with which they handle their material, you eventually come to care more about the skill than the material, and the book itself comes to mean more than that to which it points beyond its covers. Rather than directing your gaze outward, the book’s very quality causes you to burrow in deeper, as external considerations recede.
I cut grass my first and second summers home for a college located in the Cass Corridor. The campus grounds crew was predominantly black, with a handful of white guys of the bearded, big-bellied Vietnam vet variety. My favorite crew member, a black guy of considerable charm, once walked into work well after seven o’clock, not at all concerned to be punching in late, swinging the door open wide enough to make an entrance—the undisputed champ, nonchalantly climbing into the ring.
“Well, well,” one of the white guys at my table said, “if it isn’t the black Jesus.”
“Is there any other kind?” my hero asked, a line that went straight into the next scene I began to sketch.
Each morning, the supervisors handed out the keys to the trucks to the full-timers, along with verbal instructions regarding the day’s assignment; then the summer help, like me, would be paired with a senior groundskeeper who, being a good union employee, would sit back and watch the college kid do much of the work. At the
end of my first day, when I’d been sent out alone with a push mower to take care of a patch of grass inaccessible by riding mower, I ran up to the steward, quickly explaining why I’d failed to finish the job. “You think that grass ain’t gonna be here tomorrow?” he asked, smiling.
After receiving our assignment, shortly after seven, my partner and I would head off to breakfast. Our favorite diner, located a few streets south of Tiger Stadium, was owned and operated by Macedonians, or Armenians, or Albanians: some variety of hirsute, shuffling people who accumulate their fortunes through coins left on countertops, and thereby build their empires across the sea. They never seemed more than one remove from their mercantile roots. I could always picture them standing in a town square somewhere in southeastern Europe, bartering for the pots and pans they’d need to set up shop in America. The waitresses in the place—all of whom looked to be sisters, or at least cousins—were coarsely beautiful, with full, rounded features and fabulous noses. When I went up to settle the bill and the girl behind the counter closed the register with her hip, I fell smack in love.
My partner tried to be considerate regarding the radio as we drove around the city, but by and large we listened to black stations while he was behind the wheel. When he got out of the truck for some reason, leaving it running with me inside, I’d switch the station, changing it back upon his approach. Though the truck was an automatic he drove with two feet, using his right foot for the accelerator and his left for the brake. Was this a black thing? According to my father, there were drivers who could handle a stick shift’s three pedals with a single foot, whereas my partner employed both feet for an automatic.
