Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir Read online

  A great deal has been written about Detroit in the ensuing seventy years, and the thesis of much of it is that, if not worse than everywhere else, Detroit is, at a minimum, worse than most places. Though later commentators have lacked Céline’s gift for overstatement, it hasn’t been for want of trying, and such efforts may be warranted, as the facts of Detroit’s decline cannot be overstated. For more than five decades now, Detroit has found itself on the dwindling edge of an inverted frontier: people have fled it in the hundreds of thousands, the millions, to settle elsewhere. It has a sense of Manifest Destiny that runs in reverse. I once heard a white Detroiter remark, “We’re the last of the Mohicans.” It was an irony three hundred years in the making.

  The city was settled in 1701 by Frenchmen more optimistic than Céline, men who had come down from Montreal in the company of Algonquin Indians to set up a trading post. Today, in the plaza of the Detroit Historical Museum in the city’s midtown, three flags stand together: an “ancient” French flag—three yellow fleurs-de-lis, symbol of the French monarchy—that commemorates the city’s settling; a Union Jack, testifying to the British control that began in 1760; and a Stars and Stripes with “1796” etched into the base of its flagpole, the date of the British surrender of Detroit.

  The city was incorporated six years later, and the nineteenth century would see Detroit’s first mayors; their names—Zachariah Chandler, Levi Cook, Zina Pitcher—read like an index of characters for the collected works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The sequence of twentieth-century mayors tracks the usual progress of aspirant immigrant groups, with Catholic names like Miriani and Cavanagh eventually taking the city’s administration, in the 1950s and 1960s, back to its papist roots.

  Before Céline, the most prominent French writer to comment on the city was Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited Detroit twice in 1831 while doing research for Democracy in America. His journal entry for July 22 contains this passage: “We arrived at Detroit at 4 o’clock. A fine American village. Many French names on the houses; French bonnets. We went to see Mr. Richard, the priest in charge of the Catholic church in Detroit.” Father Gabriel Richard—a Catholic American pioneer, lionized in every Detroit-area parochial school—had arrived back in 1798 to assist at Ste. Anne’s Church. From Detroit’s earliest days, the place had been crawling with priests; a Jesuit, Father Vaillant, was in the company of Antoine Cadillac at Fort Pontchartrain de Detroit’s settlement. Ste. Anne’s Church was founded within days. Father Richard took it over a century later, in 1802, and in 1804, with the help of another priest, he began a prep school for boys. He was the first person in Michigan to own a printing press, and he published Detroit’s first paper. Entering the village to visit Father Richard, Tocqueville had noted “huts of a sort with a fire in the middle. On one side extreme civilization, on the other the extreme opposite.” The city was on the frontier then, with civilization ceasing just beyond its borders.

  By the time I was born, civilization surrounded the city and the Wild West lawlessness was contained within. This, at least, was the suburban view. Not everyone agreed. “I’ll be damned,” Coleman Young once said, explaining his opposition to antigun laws, “if I’m going to let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we’re surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state who have guns, and where you have vigilantes practicing Ku Klux Klan in the wilderness with automatic weapons.” This led to a famous “Uncle Coleman Needs You” recruitment poster, with the finger-pointing mayor in the posture of Uncle Sam, seeking help to “Defend Detroit Against Armed Suburban Attack.” It was still cowboys and Indians, and each side was afraid of having its wagon train surrounded.

  Tocqueville notes in his journal that “on leaving Mr. Richard” he felt “embarrassment about which way to set out.” My father would have told Tocqueville not to be embarrassed; all he had to remember, really, was that when he got to 8 Mile there—well, it was a bit confusing. Democracy in America was all well and good, but directions in America—now there was an idea for a book.

  “We took our freedom in 1973,” Coleman Young said during a 1989 campaign speech, and though he was referring to his first election, sixteen years before, he could just as easily have meant that 1973 was the year that the city’s minority population became its majority population. Blacks accounted for 16 percent of Detroit’s citizenry in 1950; 28 percent in 1960; 43 percent in 1970. Trace this arc, and 1973—the year of my birth—becomes the point at which the teeter-totter briefly struck a balance before tilting pronouncedly to one side, as it has ever since.

  One can pick any number of points in Detroit’s last hundred years and say, Here—this is where the city’s history took a turn. Though it may not be the historical watershed of Young’s 1973 victory, or the 1967 riots, or the 1943 riots, 1972 stands out as the year that Berry Gordy Jr. packed up Motown Records and left Detroit for Hollywood. That event—Motown leaving Motown—helped set the stage for the semantic confusion that has bedeviled Detroit ever since. It was like the wind leaving Chicago, or Los Angeles losing its wings.

  If Detroit was no longer Motown, what was it? People were leaving so fast that there wasn’t time to ask the question, let alone formulate an answer. Although the city’s population had been shrinking, for reasons not exclusively racial, for some time before 1967, the reasons for moving out after the riots—at the time, the worst in American history—were overwhelmingly racial. And Coleman Young’s election six years later sealed the deal. “If white flight was a redefining fact of life in Detroit before Young assumed his office,” the coauthor of Young’s autobiography dryly puts it, “he was a doorman to those with their bags already packed.”

  The numbers bear this out. In 1950, the city’s population peaked at just below 2 million residents; in 1960, it dipped to 1.67 million; in 1970, that number slipped to 1.5 million; in 1980, after Young had served a term and a half in office, the number fell to 1.2 million; and in 1990 the total number of residents stood, on tiptoes, at just over a million. The population of Detroit is now well under that figure, and will never again come within whispering distance of it.

  In November 1973, when Coleman Young beat Police Chief John Nichols 52 to 48 percent—when, in his words, he “became the goddamn mayor of Detroit”—he’d received well in excess of two hundred thousand votes. (This came to more than 90 percent of the black vote and about 10 percent of the white.) Thereafter, Young’s victory margins widened to the near monarchical—60 percent of the vote in 1977, 66 percent in 1981—though his totals declined steeply. By the time of his fifth victory in 1989, he would receive nearly one hundred thousand fewer votes than he had in 1973, despite receiving a much higher percentage of the total. The distinguishing feature of Young’s tenure was that, as the years went on, he found himself in firmer control of less and less. His grip on Detroit tightened and the citizenry slipped between his fingers, with deposits settling north of 8 Mile or west of Telegraph.

  It is one of the many ironies of life in Detroit that it was almost always whites who suspected that blacks were undercounted in the city and much more of a majority than was officially reported. This runs counter to the usual urban legend, which holds that blacks are purposely undercounted in the national census. Detroit’s whites seemed to accept this story, at least as far as their city was concerned—blacks, in the white mind, were made more culpable for the city’s miserable state the more of them there were—and many people in our neighborhood relished the thought of being even more pronouncedly a minority than went down in the books. To this way of thinking, 76 percent, or whatever the official figures said, was severely underselling things. “This city’s a quarter white?” the guy at the pizza place would say. His arcade games, like the motorized horse rides outside the Kmart at 8 Mile and Gratiot, wouldn’t accept our Canadian coins. Store owners slipped them to unsuspecting customers as change but never took them back. “Detroit’s a quarter white—are you kidding? There’s me, and you, and who else?”

  The white population of D
etroit dropped by nearly a million and a half between 1950 and 1990, by which point there were a little more than two hundred thousand whites left in the city—characterized, by the president of the Malcolm X Academy Local School Community Organization, as those “white people who forgot to move out of the city when the rest of them did, or they are too poor to move out of there, or they are city workers or something.” That accurately summed it up, at least in our neck of the woods. Her organization supported the Detroit Board of Education’s desire to open a school for at-risk black males in a predominantly white neighborhood on Detroit’s west side. The response of the city’s black power structure to the residents’ objections to the Malcolm X Academy, which would open in the fall of 1992, could be fairly distilled as follows: What are you doing here?

  The residency requirement for city workers had been around since the early twentieth century but went basically unenforced until Coleman Young, who campaigned in 1973 against the overwhelmingly white Detroit police department as an “occupying army,” came to power. Once in office, Young worked quickly to integrate the force, in keeping with his campaign pledge. But when a budget crisis early in his first term necessitated layoffs, Young seized on the residency requirement as a way to unload not the most recently hired, almost all of whom were black, but those officers, almost all of whom were white, who were not in compliance with the 1914 law that mandated that city employees live within the city limits.

  Most city workers abided by the requirement, living as close as possible to Detroit’s borders without living beyond them. 8 Mile Road was the wall, and they lived with their backs against it. To mix historical metaphors, many folks who felt that they were among the last of Detroit’s Mohicans also felt that, by living in our corner of the city, they were engaged in something equivalent to Custer’s Last Stand.

  It wasn’t until I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X that I began to get a sense of just how signal a role Detroit played in this country’s racial history. Among much else to recommend it, the book is an invaluable guide to the early days of Detroit’s—which is to say, America’s—Black Power movement. I remember being surprised, as a college student who’d left Detroit for a dorm in west Michigan’s cornfields, to learn that Malcolm himself was raised just outside Lansing, that he moved to Detroit after being released from prison (that he was, in fact, nicknamed “Detroit Red”), and that in 1931, after Elijah Muhammad met a mulatto door-to-door salesman on the streets of this city, a man with a strange story to tell, the Nation of Islam was founded here. Malcolm X had worked in the auto factories, and in his spare time stood on street corners, recruiting for the Nation of Islam. All of this seemed to give my Detroit experience a history that predated Coleman Young and served to validate my sense that I had indeed been born right smack in the middle of America’s racial shitstorm.

  Around this time, too, I would discover Ze’ev Chafets’s book Devil’s Night, a survey of the political and racial landscape of late-eighties Detroit. Chafets, who was raised in suburban Detroit before moving to Israel, took his title from the local custom, on the night before Halloween, of attempting to burn the city down. The news the next day would report fire tallies as if they were the winning Daily Three combination: 810 (1984), 479 (1985), 386 (1986). Catholic school friends of mine whose fathers were firemen wore T-shirts under their uniforms that broadcast these totals in front of a background of flames—DEVIL’S NIGHT 1985—already, at the age of twelve, exhibiting the ironic pride in the city’s awfulness that was many an adult Detroiter’s means of coping. Neighborhood men stood guard in doorways on Devil’s Night, in fulfillment of their biological duty. Once a year they loaded guns, gripped baseball bats, and weighed lead pipes in their hands, objects that, the other 364 days of the year, sat in the backs of sock drawers, leaned against basement walls, and awaited the next plumbing project. City officials recommended leaving your lights on. My father leapt off our front porch more than a few times, if only in pursuit of teenagers carrying cartons of eggs. Can’t be too careful.

  Near the end of the book, in a passage I underlined, Chafets writes: “Under Young, Detroit has become not merely an American city that happens to have a black majority, but a black metropolis, the first major Third World city in the United States. The trappings are all there—showcase projects, black-fisted symbols, an external enemy and the cult of personality.” That’s what Detroit was, after it had ceased to be Motown. A Detroit News editorial cartoon that ran shortly after the publication of the book shows an angry mayor with his press secretary standing beside him, saying: “Look at the bright side—nobody’s gonna have the gall to call us a Fourth World city.”

  The cult of personality, of course, centered around Young himself, Detroit’s uncontested king; the external enemy was white suburbia and, to a lesser extent, those white city residents like ourselves—“motherfuckers,” as Young would have put it—who did not support him; the showcase projects were disastrous civic undertakings like the People Mover, the elevated train system downtown that made a three-mile loop and drew no riders; and the black-fisted symbol was the big black fist at the intersection of Jefferson and Woodward avenues.

  After Young himself, The Fist may have been the most disliked entity in Detroit. (Disliked by whites, I mean.) Twenty-four feet long, eight thousand pounds, and set square in the center of Detroit’s downtown, The Fist stood, ostensibly, as a tribute to Joe Louis, a native Detroiter. A big man, Louis, though you would never know it from the statue with which Detroit memorialized him: 95 percent of his body was missing. All that remained, the symbolism lost on no one, was his extended right forearm and clenched right fist. Nothing since the political ascent of Coleman Young had so antagonized the ever-diminishing mass of Detroit’s whites.

  For many white Detroiters, such feelings led to difficulty during the 1989 campaign, when they were forced to choose between Young and Tom Barrow, who happened to be Joe Louis’s grandson. My father, who voted for Barrow, voiced a popular sentiment: “I never go downtown anymore anyway,” he said. Other Barrow voters—old Italian men in barbershops, particularly—tried to soften the symbolic impact of The Fist by remembering that, at the end of his career, Louis had been beaten badly by Marciano. Others made the decision, bordering on the immoral in their minds, to sit out the election. “It almost seems like a sin,” you could hear them saying, “not voting against Coleman Young.” “Oh, what difference does it make, really?” someone else would chime in. “You could raise Abraham Lincoln from the dead. Nobody’s going to beat Coleman Young.”

  And yet we stayed in Young’s Detroit, in part because we had a means of escape besides the suburbs. The other side of 8 Mile was Macomb County; the other side of the Detroit River was another country.

  Though debatably Third World, Detroit has always been the most Canadian of American cities. A few miles from our house was the city of Windsor, Ontario—a place so scrupulously clean, so highly habitable, that it never seemed to qualify as a city. As with many kids in Detroit, I’d grown up watching Canadian television, turning the rabbit ears on top of our set just slightly to the south and east in the morning before school so that I could see the cartoons on Channel 9, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (More confusion: Canada is south of Detroit. Check any atlas.) This was how I eventually learned, multiplying by nine-fifths and adding thirty-two, to convert the day’s predicted high from Celsius to Fahrenheit; it’s also how I stumbled into certain misspellings, adding an unnecessary u to color, for instance, or putting the r before the e in theater.

  In the evening I’d tighten the tinfoil around those rabbit ears, tilting them this way and that with my arms outspread so that I could watch my favorite program, Hockey Night in Canada. The rest of America, I learned later, had to settle for stateside news, weather, and sports. That there were kids in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky unable to follow the exploits of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Montreal Canadiens, and the Vancouver Canucks—that kids in these states didn’t even know who Guy LeFl
eur was—seemed to me awfully sad. I could sing “O Canada” long before I knew the lyrics to my own country’s anthem.

  The announcers on Hockey Night in Canada provided me with a fourth possible pronunciation of the name of my hometown. Whites in the city said “Di-troit,” accent on the second syllable; blacks said “Dee-troit,” accent heavily on the first; and Grosse Pointe girls whose noses sought a certain altitude ironically parroted the French pronunciation—“Day-twa”—to highlight how poorly European refinement squared with Rust Belt reality. But the Canadians, whose national sport is curling, were not content to leave Detroit a two-syllable city, and their three-syllable pronunciation was my favorite, particularly when it came from the Hockey Night announcers: “De-troy-it are fighting off the Canadiens’ power play.” “De-troy-it bring the puck out of the zone.” “De-troy-it are a hard-checking hockey club.” Noun-verb agreement also posed problems.

  My mother and I made trips about once a month to a Canadian hockey store for equipment repairs for both my father and myself. To get to the store we took the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the underwater mile, completed in 1930, that connects the two countries beneath the Detroit River. That there was always water in the tunnel—that the white tiles along its walls, just inches outside my passenger window, were always leaking—never ceased to cause me alarm, but my mother managed to distract me each time by leaning forward in her seat as we neared the midpoint of the tunnel, trying to be the first of us into Canada, which began at the sweating maple leaf flag on the wall.