Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  My daughter pressed the button and we all went down together.

  EPILOGUE

  KWAME KILPATRICK WASN’T the first Detroit politician to milk the city. It had been going on for a hundred years. And it wasn’t just the politicians. It was union bosses and contractors and industrialists and receptionists who were nieces of the connected. Everybody got their piece and that was all right when Detroit was rolling in money. There was always enough grease to hide the flaws.

  But now there wasn’t. At the time of this printing Kilpatrick was in the midst of his federal corruption trial while on parole from state prison. Kilpatrick was accused of racketeering, running a mob-style enterprise that stole from the poorest people in America and then trying to play the race card—even though his backers were the rich white industrialists. A neat piece of theater that got bad reviews.

  He also wrote a book called Surrendered in which he blamed everyone but himself for his troubles and apologized to no one.

  Monica Conyers was sent to Camp Cupcake, a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia, for a three-year bid. The time there is easy. Martha Stewart served five months for lying to the FBI and managed to lose some weight. There is no razor wire and inmates get a hair dryer. Still, it wasn’t good enough for Madam Conyers. She complained in letters to the press that they wouldn’t give her seconds at supper. She said she was bored. She asked the federal judge to let her serve the remainder of her sentence at home on Seven Mile Road with her son, who never bothered to mow the lawn. Her request was denied.

  Chief Evans and his career might have survived the accidental shooting of the little girl. He had brought murder way down during his year as the top cop. And he really had brought it down. Not by lying about the number of bodies and hiding them behind excuses, like his predecessors, but by turning the police loose and holding them accountable. Citizens were complaining that the police were too tough, but at least they were alive to complain.

  Chief Evans might have survived the shooting of the little girl had he too not been drawn to the lights of Hollywood. As it turns out, Evans was filming a pilot for his own reality show entitled “The Chief.”

  The six-minute sizzle-reel begins with Evans dressed in full battle gear in front of the shattered Michigan Central Rail Depot cradling a semiautomatic rifle and declaring that he would “do whatever it takes” to take back the streets of Detroit. Evans was fired.

  But in Evans’s defense, he seemed to understand one thing: after the collapse of the car industry and the implosion of the real estate bubble, there is little else Detroit has to export except its misery.

  Lt. Mike Nevin got his job back, winning yet another lawsuit against the city. He continues to jump into burning buildings. Fire Commissioner James Mack and his deputies were fired after I reported that they were engaged in a cover-up of the theft of a citizen’s property by a firefighter. A new man was brought in from Los Angeles. The stealing stopped, but nothing else improved.

  In the meantime, Detroit continues to struggle. A quarter million people fled the city in the first decade of the twenty-first century, bringing its population to less than 700,000—a hundred-year low.

  Evans’s successor, Chief Ralph Godbee, took a kinder, gentler approach to policing. Predictably, murder spiraled out of control, reaching levels not seen in a generation, taking the population decline into account. The fudging of the crime statistics began anew. And Godbee, who moonlighted as a preacher, would abruptly retire when it was revealed that he had bedded a bevy of female officers.

  General Motors and Chrysler continue to make cars thanks in large part to the American taxpayer, who bailed them out (and are stilled owed billions of dollars), and their creditors, who took it in the shorts and received almost nothing for their investment. Ford too is profitable again. And for the first time ever, more cars were sold in China than in the United States.

  American Axle moved much of the remainder of its Detroit jobs out of state and country. The stock moved up.

  Detroit, I am sure, will continue to be. Just as Rome does. What it will be and who will be here, I cannot say. The unnecessary human beings will have to find some other place to go and something else to do. The Great Remigration south, maybe.

  Sadly, Sgt. Mike Martel, the homicide detective, died after he lost control of his motorcycle and struck a telephone pole. His very big heart was donated to a stranger.

  My brother Frankie got a new place to live and a new used car to drive. He teaches college. My brother Bill was selling motivational speaking engagements for a prominent motivational speaker until nobody had the motivation to listen anymore. My brother Jim plugs along. My mother is a widow now that her husband, my stepdad, Warren, passed away. We’ll all be okay. They raise them strong on Joy Road.

  * * *

  There was still one place I had left to go: the Brightmoor section of the city. The site of my sister’s death. I needed to go back to the bar where my mother sat so elegantly in her raccoon coat among the filth, sipping Jack Daniel’s, trying to find some explanation for my sister’s ruined life and, receiving none, going home brokenhearted.

  Since my return to Detroit, I have seen my sister everywhere: every time I saw a rough-looking white woman with a limp, in every old woman locked in her house. I had avoided the neighborhood for a decade, but I had to confront that ghost. My sister counted, and the living people count too. We’re still here and we’re always going to be. I was in need of an answer when I didn’t even know the question.

  The Flame Bar was located around Five Mile and Telegraph, on the far west side of the city. It is a big intersection, but it was a hard place to find—the city had fallen into such disrepair that it looked like it had been dropped from the third-floor window by its hair. I drove past the shattered storefronts, then the roaming dogs, then the churches that didn’t seem to make any difference, then the leathery prostitutes and then a giant cinder-block bar painted pink, the doors wide open, the parking lot full. There was no sign.

  I pulled in. There was soul music spilling into the street. The Reverend Al Green. The place was pretty in its way, as much as it could be, like a daisy in a field full of rust.

  I approached a group of black men having a cigarette around a Ford Econoline. One lowered his bottle wrapped in a paper bag like I was a cop.

  “I’m looking for the Flame Bar,” I said. “I remember it was around here somewhere.”

  “This used to be the Flame Bar,” said one of the men, Tyrone. “What you need?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and explained my mind and my sister.

  The suspicious man softened. He handed me his bottle.

  “This bar changed six years ago,” Tyrone said. “They trying to put something nice up in this shit hole. Can’t say it’s working. But what you gonna do? You ain’t gonna be reincarnated, so you got to do the best you can with the moment you got. Do the best you can and try to be good. You dig?”

  I did. We are born to a time. What you do with it is on you. Do the best you can. Try to be good. And live.

  I went into the bar. It was a clean, dimly lit place with a pool table with a bulb over it and some photographs of old soul singers taped to the mirror. People were laughing. There were doors on the toilet thresholds, another improvement since the last time I’d been here. Tyrone bought me a drink.

  The sun was setting low through the open door. Despite the good feelings, I remembered what the prostitute near the mosque told me: I don’t work past sunset. They crazy motherfuckers out here.

  I bought a round and left. Then I drove northerly, up a side street, looking for the vacant lot where my sister died. After having the last drink of her life, my sister rode away with a strange man. It must have been a scene of insanity and adrenaline and purple haze. She jumped out the door. And into a tree.

  I found the lot. I parked the car and didn’t lock
it. I didn’t think I needed to. The block was utterly abandoned, the shells of homes where middle-class lives were once lived. The same homes were occupied the last time I was here with my mother. The collapse came on and it came on quickly. Like a tsunami. I don’t know if it was drugs that ruined the neighborhood or civic neglect. Was it the disappearance of the car jobs or the raping of the middle class by Wall Street? Had people just given up? I didn’t know. But it hurt to look at it. Vanity. In the end, it was all vanity.

  * * *

  The grass in the field was neck-high, so high in fact I couldn’t make out the tree. The mosquitoes were greedy.

  I stood in the field thinking of my sister and that picture of her on the junior high basketball team, dressed in knee-high socks and a green tank top with LOWELL LANCERS lettered across the chest, dribbling a ball, smiling. I thought of my own daughter, who looks like my sister in a way. I thought about my ancestors and all they had done to deliver me here to this spot. I thought of all that and cried a little bit through my cigarette.

  Then the grass rustled, startling me. Someone or something was coming on, but I couldn’t see through the tall stalks. I began to panic, realizing I was left high in the weeds, no knife, no gun, only a pen.

  They crazy motherfuckers out here.

  That’s when she stopped in front of me, not ten feet away, unafraid. A spotted fawn, a pretty little thing, barely thigh-high, with black bulbous eyes that didn’t seem to fit her skull.

  In that field of death covered with vines and grass, it was true what Tyrone said. You ain’t gonna be reincarnated, so do the best with the moment you got.

  I don’t believe in reincarnation either, but I do believe in symbolism.

  “Hey girl,” I whispered to the fawn. “Where’s your mama?”

  The beast sniffed once, turned away and off she ran into the wild city.

  EVIDENCE DETROIT

  DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER

  LIFE AND DEATH AND LIMBO.

  DANNY FRAZIER HAS SEALED THEM ALL

  IN THE BELL JAR OF HIS SECRET LITTLE CAMERA.

  THIS IS HIS PORTRAIT OF DETROIT IN ITS DECISIVE MOMENT:

  SMOKE AND SOOT AND BLOOD.

  DETROIT — AN ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE PLACE. AN AMERICAN

  PLACE FROM WHICH AMERICANS CAST AWAY THEIR EYES.

  BUT GIANTS THROW LONG SHADOWS AND

  HAVING NOTICED IT OUT THERE IN THE CORN, FRAZIER

  JUMPED IN HIS RATTLETRAP, TOOK A ROOM IN SOME

  DUMP ON JEFFERSON AVE. AND

  GOT DOWN TO THE WORK OF STARING CLEANLY INTO IT.

  WHAT HE HAS CAPTURED HERE IS THE CITY’S MARROW

  IN 6 X 6 CHEMICAL GRAIN.

  THE OLD SOOTY SMOKESTACKS OF A FACTORY LONG GONE.

  THE OLD FLINTY MAN NOT FAR BEHIND.

  A SEXPOT DRAGGING HER HEELS THROUGH RUBBLE.

  A RAKE IN SILK. DEATH IN SATIN AND MAHOGANY.

  THE COLD STEEL OF

  THE EXAMINER’S TABLE. A PEOPLE HOLDING TIGHT.

  ALL RIGHT HERE ON FILM, DANNY BOY. ALL RIGHT HERE.

  GOOD GOD AND WAR,

  IT’S ALL RIGHT HERE.

  CHARLIE LEDUFF

  SUMMER NIGHT, BELLE ISLE

  ABANDONED DOLLHOUSE, MIDTOWN

  FUNERAL OF AN INNOCENT BOY, EAST SIDE

  GOD + WAR, EAST SIDE

  MAN AND CHILD, BELLE ISLE

  PACKARD PLANT, EAST SIDE

  BED AND SHOE, WEST SIDE

  FOUR ALARMS, EAST SIDE

  UNCLAIMED DEAD, COUNTY MORGUE, MIDTOWN

  PRAYING, EAST SIDE

  CHILD, EAST SIDE

  FIREMEN, EAST SIDE

  FRONT STEPS, SOUTHWEST SIDE

  EMPTY FACTORY, EAST SIDE

  FIRE NEXT DOOR, EAST SIDE