Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

Gas was $4.16 a gallon. Frankie’s wife’s hours got cut back. Bills started to go unpaid. Credit cards went ignored. They got behind on the mortgage. The bank wasn’t listening.

  Then the lease for the van came due. Give it back or buy it. He was in the red on the miles and owed $3,500 in overage. Frankie asked to buy it, but the company wouldn’t give him the credit, seeing the credit card problems he was having. Frankie didn’t cry.

  He told the car company to screw themselves on the $3,500. It wasn’t malice or dishonor. It was just the way it had to be in Detroit.

  It was the least Chrysler could do for him since the company was contributing to the collapse of his neighborhood. Frankie lived two doors east of the Dodge Ram plant, which was down to a single shift since nobody could afford a truck anymore, much less a Ram with an eight-cylinder Hemi. Even the rats seemed to know Chrysler was on its last legs. They fled the plant in hordes, infesting my brother’s neighborhood, nesting in his garage and under his house.

  Chrysler took the van and Frankie began to take the bus to his part-time job in Detroit working as a computer guy at the art college downtown.

  “What a fucking trip,” he would tell me of the bus odyssey from Warren through the guts of the Detroit ghetto. He would marvel at the neck-high grass that went ignored and the garbage heaps that went uncollected. He would snap surreptitious photographs of the scene.

  “I’m Rosa Parks on that bus. The only white man. You ought to hear it. It’s ‘nigger’ this, ‘nigger’ that,” he told me over beers at his VFW hall, a dreary joint with a keno machine and wobbly tables and people ready for the embalmer’s table. “‘I’ll kill you, motherfucker,’ that kind of shit. Unbelievable. The city bus is how school kids get to school, and they’re sitting next to a wino puking on his shoes. Or a kid’s got the flu and he vomits on the bus and all the kids are laughing at him, and he’s so embarrassed he gets off the bus into the cold. And his mother ain’t coming to get him. And you’re thinking these kids don’t have a fucking chance ’cause they don’t. And nobody cares.”

  The VFW hall was just a few blocks from Frankie’s house. Having been stationed in Korea, Frankie had technically served in a foreign war and so he was welcomed as a dues-paying member. They didn’t seem to mind that Frankie returned to the States without even a private’s stripe, this having something to do with a hooker in the barracks and him covering for a sergeant.

  When he got home, the grizzled Nam vets voted him in as an adjunct general, a nod to the younger generation. I don’t know what he did in his officer capacity and he didn’t get along with the rednecks so well, but the $1 beers worked for Frankie for a while and I’d go drinking with him there occasionally.

  Frankie lived in Warren, just a quarter mile north of Eight Mile Road, the geographic dividing line between the black city and the blue-collar white suburbs.

  But Warren isn’t a suburb really; it’s just a continuation of the urban sprawl. It was set up as an antidote to Detroit’s increasing blackness during the war years, with Eight Mile serving as a moat. It was the home of the famed Reagan Democrats, those blue-collar whites who voted Republican because of the perceived racial slights of affirmative action. The saying in many white households then as it is now goes something like this: “If I’m gonna lose my job, at least it ain’t going to a nigger.”

  Few whites then seemed to think much that the interests of the black working class were the same as theirs.

  This blue-collar suicide seemed to shock pundits and professors and they flocked to southeastern Michigan to study working-class whites like so many zoo animals. But they shouldn’t have been surprised. This was the same group of people who delivered the 1972 Michigan Republican primary to Gov. George Wallace, the snarling segregationist from Alabama.

  A cloistered rough-and-tumble place, south Warren had changed only incrementally over the preceding thirty years. It offered a nice—if unremarkable—middle-class life. If you had to live near and work in a factory on a boulevard strung with power lines, at least it came with a vacation cottage on a lake somewhere and a power boat. This is what you got if you committed your life to the machine.

  Then the economy started to turn south, and folks couldn’t make the mortgage notes on their discolored aluminum-sided Cape Cods. Instead of losing the house to the bank, they would either sell it to a slumlord or rent it themselves to Section 8 recipients from Detroit, who had their rent paid directly by the federal government.

  Now the neighborhood was a boiling stew of white culture going broke and blacks who had known nothing but poverty for two generations.

  South Warren—the part that directly touched Detroit—used to be about the Stars and Bars flag of the Confederacy flying from the flagpole in the front yard. The Dodge factory and the General Motors plant and the cinder-block mom-and-pop tool-and-die shops that supplied those factories also supplied the groceries and the fishing trips and the new car every other year. By the time I arrived in Detroit, perhaps 75 percent of those shops had died.

  The industries replacing them were increasingly drug sales and prostitution. What came with those businesses were not better schools but gunshots and rusting cars and broken porches with men drinking from paper bags. Tough-looking kids hung around the playground up the street, slinging dope. Frankie started keeping his daughters inside.

  Frankie had bought his house for $70,000 a decade earlier. It was an unpretentious two-bedroom with an unfinished attic on a double lot. It wasn’t worth $15,000 in 2008, if it was worth a nickel.

  Oftentimes, the bus home would be an hour late and my brother would sit in the cold at the transfer station near the State Fairgrounds, the wind blowing him upright.

  I felt bad for my brother and I wanted to help him. But my brother is a prideful man. He didn’t want a loan. He didn’t want a ride. He stuck with the bus. It gave him perspective.

  “It could be worse,” he said. “I was standing out there one day, it was piss-cold, and the bus drivers went on a wildcat strike, but they didn’t tell the kids. So you got the kids standing out there in thin coats freezing their asses off and nobody bothered to tell them.”

  Frankie is six-one and 130 with a pound of pennies in his pockets. He has scoliosis, an eighteen-degree curve in his spine from when he was struck by a car as a kid. It gives him the perpetual look of being bowed by a wind gust. Frankie looks raw—he wears a Fu Manchu mustache, is heavily tattooed and carries a large chip in his heart. He has an iron head and a big right hook.

  A black man at the bus stop wanted his camera. Frankie looked up at him, and then at the man’s friend, and then back at the would-be thief and said: “You’re gonna be embarrassed for the rest of your life that you got your ass kicked by a white guy weighing a hundred and thirty pounds.”

  The black man walked away while his friend laughed at him. Still, Frankie stopped carrying the camera.

  * * *

  One night at the VFW hall, a retired cop—a stringy older white man—told a story about a black man killed on the beat. It was during the early 1970s, and the white man had just gotten back from Vietnam and was a rookie on patrol with a partner.

  “We were chasing him down through an alley,” the man explained. “We couldn’t catch him. So I pulled out my service revolver and shot him in the back. He died.

  “So they tape off the scene, and the investigating sergeant in charge of the scene walks up to me and my partner and pulls a starter pistol from an ankle holster and says, ‘Okay, here’s the story. The nigger pulled this cap gun, see . . . ?’”

  The sergeant always wore a cap gun in his ankle holster, the old white man explained. Just in case a black man decided to run and a gun accidentally went off and struck him dead in the back. That’s how order was kept along Eight Mile in the old days.

  The old white man seemed blistered by the memory, like it was burning him up. Frankie bought him
a drink to cool him off.

  Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city’s flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.

  Detroit first burned in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, when a ten-year-old white girl accused a swarthy-skinned tavern owner named William Faulkner of rape. The Detroit Free Press wrote at the time that Faulkner had but “a trifle negro blood in his veins.” But Faulkner denied being a “negro,” claiming he was of Spanish and Indian descent.

  A trifle was enough for the white mob that went berserk after his conviction, putting an axe in one black man’s skull and burning down thirty-five buildings. Federal troops were called in.

  Detroit burned again in the race riots of 1943, during World War II, after a group of white teenagers got in a brawl with a group of black teens. The melee quickly spread through the city as rumors of a white girl being raped by a gang of blacks fueled the mobs. People were pulled from cars and beaten; the black quarter of town was set on fire. After three days of rioting, thirty-four people were dead before federal troops quelled the violence.

  Detroit burned yet again in 1967, when police stormed a speakeasy frequented by black men. A party was in full swing for soldiers returning from Vietnam. The cops attempted to arrest all eighty-two people at the west side establishment at the corner of Twelfth Street and Clairmount, turning billy clubs on the patrons and onlookers alike. Five days later—only after the National Guard and the army’s Eighty-second Airborne were brought in to restore quiet—the violence ended. Forty-three were dead, more than seven thousand had been arrested and two thousand buildings had burned.

  And so Detroit has the ignominious distinction of being the only American city to have been occupied by the United States army three times.

  Michigan may geographically be one of America’s most northern states, but spiritually, it is one of its most southern. During Detroit’s great expansion between 1920 and 1960, nearly half a million blacks came north from the cotton fields of the South as part of what is known as the Great Migration. Detroit was seen as the Promised Land, where a man could buy himself a house with a patch of grass, just as long as he had a job to pay for it. And Detroit had plenty of jobs.

  Southern hillbillies also came to places like Detroit and Flint looking for unskilled factory work. The Klan in Michigan exploded in membership during the Roaring Twenties. By the end of the decade, there were estimates that eighty thousand Klan members were living in Michigan, half of them in Detroit, with other klaverns throughout the state in places like Grand Rapids and Flint.

  What the black man found when he came to Detroit was de facto segregation enforced with bodily threats and restrictive real estate covenants that barred him from living almost anywhere but in the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods that ran up east of Woodward Avenue—the spine of the city that divides east from west. The area was vibrant with jazz clubs and black-owned stores, but it was densely packed, plagued by rats and rotting garbage and substandard housing. Consider the more than two hundred rat bites that were reported in the Valley in 1952.

  Then came the urban renewal and interstate highway projects that rammed a freeway down the middle of Paradise Valley, displacing thousands of blacks and packing the Negro tenements further still.

  Predictably, the city exploded. And following the 1967 riots, whites would begin their rapid exodus to the suburbs, leaving behind their homes and taking their factories and their jobs and their tax dollars with them—to places like Warren.

  Five years after the riot, blacks seized political control of Detroit with the election of Coleman Young, the city’s first black mayor. Vengeful, intelligent and always good for a turn of phrase, Young famously said in his 1974 inaugural address, “I issue a forward warning now to all those pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers: It’s time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile Road. And I don’t give a damn if they are black or white, or if they wear Super Fly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.”

  The remaining whites took Young’s words to mean that they should hit Eight Mile Road. And they did.

  Detroit reached a peak population of nearly 1.9 million people in the 1950s and was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 700,000 people, is 83 percent black and is the only American city that has surpassed a million people only to contract below that threshold.

  “The blacks wanted out of the ghetto and now the whole city’s a ghetto,” said the blue-haired bartender at the VFW hall, weaseling in on our conversation, assuming she had a sympathetic audience. “Young ruined that city.”

  Merle Haggard was playing on the jukebox. I looked at my brother, who appreciates a good bar brawl. I hadn’t been to a cracker barrel like this in a while, not since the last time I’d come home for the holidays and sat at this very bar. That time, we were asked to leave because I had used profanities when I called out a local for being a phony veteran of war. Apparently cussing is not allowed in the VFW, although pretending you saw action overseas is only a minor offense.

  Frankie was smiling at the bartender. “I guess that depends on who you’re asking,” he said with a dismissive wave of his cigarette. “And which side of Eight Mile you’re standing on. Blacks might think you ruined it when you left without cleaning up your mess.”

  The place went silent. Except for good ol’ Merle.

  “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street . . .” he sang.

  FIRE

  NOT ONLY WAS the city crumbling because of sex scandal and political corruption, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Streetlights were broken or shut off for no apparent reason. Garbage went uncollected. Sewers backed up into houses, drowning an entire block in crud. Ambulances were busted down and sometimes didn’t show up for hours to emergency calls. Police cars were a decade old. Meanwhile Kilpatrick and his wife drove around in an expensive Cadillac Escalade paid for by the taxpayers of the country’s poorest city.

  So in an attempt to save money, the mayor was trying to force cutbacks on a besieged and beleaguered fire department. One morning, as I sat in the somnolent newsroom, listening to the silence occasionally interrupted by the occasional tick tick of an editor’s key strokes, I read an article in the morning Free Press where the mayor insinuated that the city firefighters had a bum’s job that consisted mainly of sleeping and eating steak, with the occasional fire thrown in to pass the time.

  From my days covering Ground Zero for the Times, I learned who firemen were: the closest thing to cowboys that existed anymore. Imagine a man willing to run into a burning building. They had an insular culture and a way of speech and a thousand stories that few ever bother to document until calamity strikes.

  Kilpatrick had made a thousand enemies in boots with his comments in the paper, I knew right then. I put on my coat and went to see the man.

  Dan McNamara was the typical big-city union boss who appeared to have graduated from the kiss-my-ass school of negotiation.

  “If the mayor thinks it’s so easy working the back of a truck, have him call me,” said McNamara, president of the firefighters’ association. Silver-haired and mustachioed, he sat behind a large desk with his fingertips pressed together, pantomiming the diamond shape of a vagina. “I’ll arrange it so that pussy can do some real work.”

  “I’ll do it,” I told him.

  “Do what?”

  “I’ll tell him he’s a pussy and then I’ll ride on the back of the truck.”

  McNamara smiled through his mustache.

  * * *

  He drove me to the east side where the men assigned to the Squad 3/Engine Co. 23 firehouse work. We pulled up on a block checkerboarded with an inhabited house next to a burnt-out shell, next to an inhabited hou
se, next to a shell and so on, something like a meth addict’s mouth.

  In the middle of the street were three rigs and a dozen or so firefighters mopping up a fire in an abandoned house that was next to a tidy little Cape Cod inhabited by an old woman.

  The officer in charge that day was Mike Nevin, a balls-out, high-energy guy with a potato nose and an outrageous mullet hairdo—short in the front, party in the back. I imagined that if an ember fell on the long mop hanging over his collar, his head would ignite like a blond Brillo pad.

  I could tell right away, Nevin was one of those no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners sort of leaders that men instinctively follow into combat, but by the looks of his troops’ equipment—melted helmets, boots with holes, and coats covered with thick layers of carbon that made them the equivalent of walking matchsticks—these men, it seemed to me, were nothing less than soldiers garrisoned on some godforsaken front. They were fighting an unwinnable war, and it was taking its toll. Detroit was perpetually on fire. The burning couldn’t be stopped.

  “You did a good job, boys,” Nevin told the troops. “We saved an old lady’s house. Probably saved her from the homeless shelter. She invited us over for dinner.”

  As I was making notes, one of the firemen, a big guy with a shaven soot-stained skull, tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Is your name Charlie?”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised someone would recognize me in this obscure corner of the urban desert.

  “My name’s Dave. I went to school with your wife’s brother. You remember me?”

  I said I did. We got drunk someplace a long time ago. We shook hands.

  “Well, welcome home. Such as it is.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  He gave me an “if I had a nickel” shrug. “I just put ’em out, man. And there’s no lack of work. That’s all I know.”

  Nevin walked up. “So you want to be a fireman?”

  “No, I just want to watch. See what you see. What happened here?”