by Paul Clemens
As I sat reading Paradise Lost one day in the square, enjoying the sunshine and a sandwich, I attracted company. “You the original white man, ain’t ya?” a black man asked me, stopping as he walked by. He was not a degenerate, and, deep into middle age, he seemed still to have his wits about him; why he’d chosen me to pick on I had no idea. White I certainly was, but also unshaven, swarthy, sloppily Mediterranean in appearance—no one’s idea of Aryan purity, in other words. There were plenty of white men walking out of the GM building across the way who fit the bill better than I did. It was, I suspected, the book that did it: the white man reads.
I had, over the years, developed certain safeguards when it came to this sort of thing. For comments of the “white motherfucker” variety, which were not at all infrequent, I chose a proud silence, coupled with an internal recitation of some lines from late Auden: “Even Hate should be precise / Very few White Folks / Have fucked their mothers.” For something like this, I drew on the lessons I’d learned as a Denby Bulldog wideout; namely, that the genius of black teasing was not that it made sense, but that it didn’t. Searching such questions for signs of actual substance showed not how stupid the questions were but how dumb I was. The pointlessness of the give-and-take was its point, the way it rocked your opponent back on his heels. I’d learned, over the years, to respond in kind.
The original white man. “Now why would you say that,” I asked, “being that you’re Jewish yourself?”
I could see him racking his brain, trying to place what “Jewish” might mean. Weren’t they—weren’t those the people—hadn’t Farrakhan, in a speech . . . “What’s that mean, ‘Jewish’? I’m a black man.” “Come off it,” I said.
He walked away, and I turned back to Milton’s poem. In the opening of Book 2 of Paradise Lost, the fallen angels have gathered in Pandemonium, Satan’s palace in Hell, “with hope yet of regaining Heaven.” To this end, Satan presents those cast “into the great Deep” with their two options as he sees it: battle or trickery—“open war or covert guile.” After asking for counsel, he sits back on his throne and the floor is opened for debate:
[Satan] ceased, and next him Moloch, sceptred king,
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest spirit
That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair.
His trust was with the Eternal to be deemed
Equal in strength, and rather than be less
Cared not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He recked not, and these words thereafter spake:
“My sentence is for open war.”
If there was a better passage in English poetry I didn’t know it. I recalled that in Chapter 11 of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when Malcolm Little’s prison time turns scholarly, he provides the following synopsis of Milton’s poem: “The devil, kicked out of Paradise, was trying to regain possession. He was using the forces of Europe, personified by the popes, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionhearted, and other knights. I interpreted this to show that the Europeans were motivated and led by the devil, or the personification of the devil. So Milton and Mr. Elijah Muhammad were actually saying the same thing.”
Uh-huh.
The Honourable Circuit Court of Yoknapatawpha County
OUR APARTMENT was just across Alter Road, a divider between Detroit and Grosse Pointe, situated by the slimmest of margins on the right side of those tracks. Alter is perhaps the most appropriately named street in America—cross it, and boy does the scenery ever. Driving back into the city along Jefferson Avenue, one notes that the colonials, Tudors, and Cape Cods of Grosse Pointe give way, in the space of a few blocks, to a perfectly representative area of the City of Detroit, where many homes have bars on their windows, though few seem worth the bother of breaking into. It’s not unknown for newcomers to the area to crane their necks to get a last look at Grosse Pointe after crossing Alter, as if to verify that the transition had indeed been that abrupt.
The first several blocks in Grosse Pointe north of Jefferson, before you get to the big houses with big yards, serve as a buffer between the extremes they border. Former servants’ quarters from the days of the automotive mansions, the single-family homes in these blocks are mostly small bungalows, many of which have been subdivided into apartments; the rest of the area is composed of two-and four-family residences populated by college students and postgrads, a smattering of blacks, and a recent wave of Russian and Albanian immigrants.
To those from the east side, Alter is just another border crossing, like 8 Mile, and its juxtapositions no longer startle. It’s a quirk, actually, that both sides of Alter Road are in fact Detroit proper. The city-suburb divider is not the roadway itself, as is typical, but the fence line separating the backyards of the Detroit homes on the east side of Alter Road from those of the Grosse Pointe homes in the block directly behind them. It was on the side of Alter Road abutting Grosse Pointe that my father’s cousins, Uncle Johnny’s six boys, had grown up during the fifties and sixties, when they attended St. Ambrose, at the foot of Alter and Jefferson. My father would frequently bike to his cousins’ from his house by St. Jude, a six- or seven-mile ride.
Though later just a grade school, St. Ambrose also had a high school back then—“a couple hundred kids,” according to my father—and a football program that was strong out of all proportion to the school’s size. In the 1961 Goodfellows Game—the yearly contest between the champions of the Detroit Catholic League and the Public School League, played at Tiger Stadium—St. Ambrose beat Detroit Pershing, a school of many thousand students, by a score of 20–0 before a crowd of thirty-seven thousand. The next year St. Ambrose beat Detroit Cooley 19–0. The following year the Catholic League champ, my future alma mater, would lose to Detroit Denby 7–0. St. Ambrose would restore Catholic pride in 1964, shutting out Detroit Southeastern 20–0. In 1965 Denby and my alma mater would play to a 14–14 tie. St. Ambrose would beat Denby yet again the next year, and the year after that—1967—would mark the end of the three-decades-long tradition of St. Somebody playing Detroit Somebody in the Goodfellows Game. By the time I started high school, contests between the two leagues—meaning, in many cases, games between an all-white and an all-black squad—were called Operation Friendship.
More than three decades after the Goodfellows Games had come to an end I drove up and down Alter Road, passing St. Ambrose from both directions, thinking long and hard about a certain passage from Faulkner. Back at the apartment, I’d been rereading Chapter 6 of Light in August, thirty of the greatest pages in American literature, and the chapter’s first line had become my mantra: “Memory believes before knowing remembers.” Five words, if properly understood, that could help me unlock the door to something—of that, if not the meaning of the words themselves, I was certain. Memory believes before knowing remembers. Before knowing remembers, memory believes. Memory’s beliefs precede knowing’s remembrances.
I was trying to solve another problem while mumbling to myself behind the wheel, and for help in finding a solution I drove to the home of a retired Detroit cop of my acquaintance, a widower who had been stationed for many years at the Fifth Precinct, at the corner of Jefferson and St. Jean. During the ’67 riots, the Fifth Precinct had been home base for the Eighty-second Airborne, called in to help patrol the east side. We had talked many times—though never about what was most on my mind these days—and like all Detroit cops he was an extraordinary storyteller, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century realists. His best story, however, defied belief entirely, sounding like pure fantasy. In it, he told of a somewhat idealistic young cop who had voted for Coleman Young back in 1973 (“I thought it was time the city had a black mayor”), an act he would remember, like Scott’s return from the South Pole, for its costly miscalculations.
A realist, not a racist: there was a distinction there, though one likely to be lost on the list of usual suspects upon whom such things were typically lost, the professional point-mi
ssers. In the world as such cops saw it, everyone fit a profile: the European ethnicities had been captured perfectly by the centuries-old stereotypes that they’d carried with them across the Atlantic, and black Americans enjoyed the benefits of full citizenship in the republic, as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, by being just as fallen as their fellow citizens, just as corrupted by the power they now held in the City of Detroit as every previous group that had had the misfortune to hold the reins in what was, without question, the worst city in American history.
There were those who found such a realistic worldview refreshing, and preferable to liberal cant. “I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends so much time cultivating!” Malcolm X declares. Coleman Young, who considered himself a radical, not a liberal, spends much of his autobiography expressing a similar dislike. He was frequently apoplectic over the “tireless effort of knee-jerk liberals on City Council. Together with assorted bleeding-heart newspaper types, they have managed, or at least attempted, to sabotage just about every proposal for economic growth that has come out of my office. They’ve made it clear what they oppose—the motherfuckers are against everything—but I’ve yet to figure out what they propose.” Many Detroit cops felt similarly about liberals, particularly suburban ones: The motherfuckers are against everything, but what do they propose? You try patrolling these streets.
It wasn’t beyond either Coleman Young or Malcolm X to express admiration, or at least grudging respect, for people whose realism clearly crossed the line into racism. Upon the death of Orville Hubbard, who for more than three decades was the mayor of Dearborn, that citadel of racism, and remained fiercely opposed to any policies that would facilitate integration, Coleman Young said: “Orville Hubbard was quite a man. Believe it or not, he was a person I admired. He and I disagreed on some things, but he was a hell of a mayor. I regarded him as one of the best mayors in the United States. He took care of business. He knew how to meet the needs of his people.” Contrast this with Young’s statement about a progressive former New York City mayor: “I think Ed Koch is full of shit.”
A racist, perhaps, but probably not full of shit: such was my image of myself as I drove to the foot of Alter Road, crossing over into the city via a small bridge that took me onto one of the tiny islands that dot the banks of the Detroit River. On one such island my father’s great-aunt had lived, and may have yet: she was the sort of distant relative we all have, and forget about, and who lives to be a hundred and six. I’d visited her house a few times as a kid—I recalled clutter and floating dust motes—but couldn’t for the life of me have found it now. Somewhere in here, too, according to family legend, was where my Grandpa Clemens had been a bootlegger during Prohibition, when these little islands in the river served as drop sites for cases of whiskey smuggled from Canada.
On the Grosse Pointe side of this bridge, in the middle of a boulevard bounded by Windmill Pointe mansions, was a historical marker that I often stopped and read. It told the story of the Fox Indian Massacre: “Encouraged by a potential alliance with the English, the Fox Indians besieged Fort Pontchartrain, Detroit, in 1712. Repulsed by the French and their Huron and Ottawa Indian allies, the Fox retreated and entrenched themselves in this area known as Presque Isle. The French pursued and defeated the Fox in the only battle fought in the Grosse Pointes. More than a thousand Fox Indians were killed in a fierce five-day struggle. Soon afterward French settlers began to develop the Grosse Pointes.” Reading this always cheered me, as did the thought, plagiarized from a novel set in the area, that the French settlers proceeded to name this waterlocked spit of land the “Fat Tip” in a three-hundred-year-old dirty joke no one ever got.
Such was the stalling I engaged in as I thought things through. My problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to begin. I had no idea where to find—whom? Whoever he was, he knew who my wife was. Why shouldn’t I know who he was? How was this fair? Knowledge is power, and I wanted to know. What I would do with such knowledge was something I’d decide once I had it.
Like a high school boy with a crush, I sometimes drove past the retired cop’s house, even when his lights were on and his car in the drive, my nervousness preventing me from knocking. Other times I stopped, only to talk about nothing in particular. And then one day, feeling neither more nor less prepared than any other, I told him what was weighing on me. What I wanted to hear was his considered solution to my troubles. I should leave it to him: he’d take care of everything. After all, I had a family to raise.
Instead he smiled, said he understood, and gave me the number of another retired cop, a guy he knew from his days on the force who had turned to private detective work to supplement his pension. A week later, when I had the apartment to myself, I let this man in the door.
“What can you tell me?” he asked, sitting down in one of our garage sale chairs. I sat on our Salvation Army couch. He was older than I expected, in his midsixties, but still solid and handsome. An Italian, he looked like one of Sal’s customers, and his salt-and-pepper hair was feathered and layered in a way reminiscent of Sal. He was all business, but not in the least abrupt. He could have been a contractor giving me a quote on a new driveway.
One question, and already I was out of my depth. I had almost nothing to tell him, and I sensed he knew it the moment he walked in the door. He’d sized me up, and only politeness had kept him from walking back out. I knew a few broad details—the attacker’s race, the approximate date, the location—and nothing more. What I could tell him wouldn’t take ten seconds.
I felt the same deflation I experienced when I sat down to write a story that I’d been contemplating forever, only to find, when I finally started to put it down on paper, that I had three sentences that didn’t add up to a thing. In my imagination, these stories had been immense; but when I began telling them I had a half-furnished scene and the beginnings of a character sketch.
“I don’t know what your economic circumstances are,” he said, looking around the small apartment, “but I’d need a five-thousand-dollar retainer to take on a case like this.” This was said perfunctorily, as part of the spiel.
“I can get it,” I said, having no idea how. My paternal grandmother, perhaps: she had the money, along with certain opinions about black criminals.
“If you don’t want the man brought to trial”—I’d made this clear—“what do you want him found for?”
“You’d simply be paid for finding him,” I said, as if this payment were a hurdle already cleared—the first step in a plan each stage of which would be as easily executed.
He thought about this. “And then what—doorknobs in a pillowcase? Is that what you’re saying? Sorry, I can’t. I understand, believe me, and in your shoes I’d probably be doing the same. But I can’t. I was a Detroit cop for thirty years. Trust me, this guy will get his. You don’t even need to get involved.”
We hadn’t talked for five minutes before saying goodbye. Though I appreciated his belief in my capacity for vengeance—my sentence is for open war—he was giving me more credit than I deserved. I really didn’t know what I would do with such information, if and when I should get it. Doorknobs in a pillowcase was one option; so was doing nothing. And even if I were capable of decisive action, simple prudence might prevent me from going forward. Or maybe I’d split the difference, and do nothing—for now. After we’d had more kids, put them through college, married them off, and held a few grandchildren aloft, maybe then—I’d have carried the slip of paper with his name and specs in my coat pocket all this time—maybe then I’d say to myself, Now, and speed the sonuvabitch’s progress to hell.
It was a comforting plan, susceptible to infinite postponement. I began, in my darker moments, to despair of my good citizenship. I had no tickets or accidents on my driving record. I had a perfect credit rating. I showed up for jury duty, reported my earnings honestly, and aside from one time when I was three and a half had never been picked up by the cops. I couldn’t even steal a goddamn hood ornament, try as I might
.
I abandoned thoughts of revenge, and went back to books.
The novel was going badly, though some of it could be salvaged. There would still be a lot of driving around—my device for connecting the disparate scenes—but the drive downtown would now bypass The Fist entirely. My narrator remained, but his friends had morphed: the dumb bully had become a sensitive boy, the love interest of the narrator’s sister; and the smart-ass was still a smart-ass, and still a racist, though his racism now had a stronger rationale: his mother had been raped. The plot, such as it was, concerned their search for the perpetrator. The narrator had supplied a cabbie who hung around the neighborhood barbershop with the police composite sketch, and told him to keep an eye out. Some time later, the cabbie spots the guy down in the Cass Corridor, just a few blocks behind the machine shop where the narrator works. As a way to make sense of things before exacting his revenge, the smart-ass—an intellectual killer like Raskolnikov—becomes obsessed with the writings of Malcolm X and William Faulkner.
At the urging of a college girlfriend, I’d begun my reading of Faulkner with As I Lay Dying, the story of poor, struggling, and ever-so-slightly stupid whites—which seemed applicable. In an American literature class I’d read The Sound and the Fury, and later I read Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! on my own, along with other novels, stories, and letters. But it was these four books, written over a span of seven years, that I fixated on. It was a line from another Faulkner novel of that period, however, that gave me a tingle down my spine. It came from the trial scene at the end of Sanctuary, when the bailiff intones: “The honourable Circuit Court of Yoknapatawpha County is now open according to law.” No other line in Faulkner had this effect on me; it was the line’s simple message concerning the meting out of justice that did it. Someone, you couldn’t help but sense as you read that line, is about to die here.
