by Drew Philp
We took shifts watching the house from across the street. Cameras, noise, anything we could do to make the drug buyers know they were being watched. Tearing the back off Jake’s was a show of solidarity and strength from the neighborhood. It needed to come off anyway, and Jake could have easily done it himself, but he wanted to let the dealers know he wasn’t going to be intimidated, that this would keep happening, in force and right in front of them.
As Cecilia and I chatted, the neighborhood was beginning to finish up. The crew began to gather for pictures, and someone mentioned going to Belle Isle to get clean. I wasn’t the only one without a shower, and we would often bathe in the river when it was warm enough. Cecilia asked what Belle Isle was.
“It’s an island, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to go. I have to work on my own house.”
I had the door I’d stolen on sawhorses, ready to begin stripping it. The general rule was if I didn’t get going on something for the house right after work and attempted to put it off till later, nothing would get done.
“Don’t you want to show me Belle Isle?” Cecilia said.
Well, maybe I could take some time off from the house and work.
We rode together in the cab of my truck with a few others piled in the bed. She said she was from Rome, and smelled like she owned a shower. She’d just built herself a home in the Italian mountains, and was finishing up grad school. She was in Detroit for some transatlantic art project.
“I like this city, this Detroit,” she said to me. “It is so”—she searched for the word—“so very real.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
We poured out of the truck at the gravel parking lot about half a mile from the swimming hole. At the time the cops called it Patchouli Creek. Now they call it Hipster Beach.
I was first in the stream. Gratiot was off the leash and splashed in with the overserious determination of a puppy, except he was terrified once he touched the water. He wouldn’t get in farther than his ankles, looking back to shore, mewling. Jake scrubbed himself with a bar of soap and was in up to his neck.
Matt, also from Forestdale, dived in headfirst. He had track marks up his arms, and was blind in one eye from metal scrapping. He had been using a torch on a tank he thought was empty but was filled with ammonia. When the gas exploded it knocked him off the scaffold. He was lucky the accident only took one eye. Now he swam to the far bank and hoisted himself from the water on a stone jutting above the stream like a diving board. At one time or another, he had made all the rock sculptures along the beach, large cairns, strange little mortarless monuments, and the diving board.
A couple of others got in quickly, including Eric and his girlfriend, Emily, who had also arrived from New York for an art residency. Together since high school, they had fallen in love with the city, stayed past the end of their residencies, and moved on to Forestdale. They were working on a project in one of the dozens of abandoned bakeries in Poletown, replacing the vanished pastries with cupcakes and pies made of concrete. They fit right in, and both would end up rehabbing homes in due time. Will stood wading to his knees, rolling cigarettes with Monk.
Cecilia was the only one not in the stream. She sat on the bank with her pants rolled to the shins, but wouldn’t touch the water. I wanted to say something, but Matt was cuddling Gratiot in his arms, and carried the squirming dog into the water over his head.
“He just needs to understand he can swim,” he said. I watched. Matt was part dog and I trusted him unquestioningly with anything canine.
Gently easing Gratiot into the water, he let go. After a second of sheer terror, Gratiot found he could float if he paddled, and made his way back to shore. Proud of himself and forgetting his former panic, his tongue lolled as he thrust his chest in defiance of his fear.
“Hey, Drew. Do you mind if I roll a cigarette?” Matt was drying his fingers off on a towel and holding my pack.
“Yeah, sure. Roll me one, too.”
Emily was sculling on her back, splashing water at Eric, submerged to the neck. Cecilia sat on the bank looking lonely and pensive like the shy new girl in school, unsure of which lunch table to sit at. Jake was really scrubbing himself with the soap at this point.
“Come on in!” I called to Cecilia.
“I think I will just watch.”
“Why? The water is perfect.” I splashed some in her direction. “Come on. At least get your feet wet.” I walked over to her, still in the water.
“Come on.”
“It’s the bobbles.”
“The what?”
“The bobbles. You are not supposed to swim in water with the bobbles.”
“The bubbles? What are you talking about?”
She didn’t want to get into the water because it had some bubbles in it. Apparently in southern Europe, water that has bubbles is dirty.
“I’ve never heard of that. I’ve swum in this water my whole life,” I said. “I grew up in this water and I’m fine. I’m healthy, I’m still here.” I splashed some more in her direction, then some more onto my shoulders. “It seems kind of rude of you when we bring you all the way out here and show you this, but then you think it’s dirty.”
“But with all the factories, doesn’t it get . . . ” She gestured with her hand like beating eggs upside down but couldn’t find the word.
“That’s all downriver. It’s all going the other way from us,” I lied.
She sighed and rolled up her pant legs. She stepped in.
“You’re not dead yet, are ya?”
She frowned and looked away.
“Look, we’re right here.” I pointed to Lake St. Clair on the tattoo of the Great Lakes I have on my left breast. Monte, the Chicano mural artist I’d met at the YES FARM standing under the painting of his unborn son, had done it for me at his kitchen table. His son, now two years old, watched while eating blueberries from a bowl one at a time. “Right here. Here’s Lake Huron, where I grew up. The water runs this way and all the factories are down here.”
She put her finger on the tattoo. She found Buffalo and Niagara Falls, the Upper Peninsula. She never got in the water past her knees.
* * *
My job was to frame two rear windows in the Queen Anne. I had traded someone on Forestdale an indeterminate amount of work for a couple of used windows, and they were slightly too big for the openings already there. I made new sills on a table saw my grandfather had given me, a saw with a good motor and a vintage cast-iron deck that had likely cut wood to make my grandparents’ house from the houses that had been removed to make the freeway. Now it was back building the neighborhood it may have had helped to destroy. When masses of white people would move to Detroit a few years hence, many would openly wonder if this cyclical return was a genuine attempt to right the mistakes of the past, or if it was revenge for people whose parents or grandparents had left the city they once thought of as theirs and now wanted it back plus interest. I thought about Cecilia while I worked.
Reframing the window openings was far cheaper than purchasing new windows, but a hell of a lot more work. I would get the rest of the windows for my three rooms at an architectural salvage place in the city for anywhere between $15 and $50 apiece. I found a nice set of three casements, windows with a crank, with mullions, the grid often seen on colonial houses, for $100. One would go in the kitchen next to the door, the others side by side near where I planned to build the chimney in what would be the dining room. I found another long one, with three panels like a triptych, to go in the south wall of the kitchen, over the stove. Last, I scored a small one for the bathroom, less than a foot wide, for some natural light and to forgo having to install an exhaust fan.
For my job today, I had taken the plywood from the westward window openings in the living room and the afternoon sun was flowing into the dark house. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I framed the new openings a bit tight. Usually you frame them an inch or so larger than the window for warping and variance, and fill th
e empty space with insulation and cover the rest with trim. I had framed these to size and the windows didn’t fit.
I really didn’t want to redo it all. I would probably have to measure and cut and prime new sills, and the whole thing seemed like a mess. So I figured I could make this work. I was shirtless, perched inside the opening peeling large curls from the edges with a plane, widening the windows and thinking, merrily, about Cecilia. I decided I was going to ask her on a date, directly, something I had never done before. The pine curls fell on my naked shoulders and onto the front pockets of my jeans.
As I worked, I noticed there was an elderly woman on the back porch of the house behind mine watching me, and she interrupted my daydream. She had her hands folded over the top of a cane and sat on a bench as if she were feeding the birds in a park. It looked like she had been there for some time. When I noticed her she smiled and waved. I waved back.
I hopped off the sill and attempted to fit the window in again. It was close, but not perfect, and I thought I could force it without breaking the glass. This was a mistake. Nothing broke, but the framing cocked and warped the window just enough that the sills didn’t sit quite right. I determined at the time that it was fine. Now, years later, every time I sit in front of that window in the winter and feel just enough cold air sneaking in to be noticeable, I’m reminded of my laziness that summer day. What would have taken me twice the work then will now take me quadruple.
I screwed in the window. One down. I put on my shirt and walked over to introduce myself to the woman on the bench.
She said her name was Mrs. Terry, and I told her what I was doing with the house. A rotund woman who had some trouble walking, she unleashed the most inviting cackle, like Little Richard at his pyrotechnic best. She had hard features that betrayed a softness that said she’d been a mother to more than just her own children.
She said she had worked as an elementary teacher in the Detroit public schools for thirty years, and her husband put in thirty at the Ford River Rouge Plant as a maintenance man. They had inhabited their house as long, and by this time owned it outright. They lived their own version of the American Dream in a crumbling America, but had no plans to move anywhere else.
Two of their sons lived with them, a sports coach and a cable installer. An adult son who was a Detroit police officer lived on the other side of town. She said I would meet them in time as well, and then told me to wait while she shambled back into the house. She brought me back a bottle of purple Gatorade.
I considered for a moment refusing it. I couldn’t take from these people. Then I reconsidered. Who was I not to accept a gift?
“I know you be thirsty over there. I seen you working hard, boy. Yep.” She nodded.
I opened the bottle and took a giant swig, the overflow running down my chin and staining my shirt.
“Thank you. I was thirsty.”
The faint sound of blues music wafted in on the breeze from the west. I asked Mrs. Terry about it. She said it was a legendary blues jam and barbecue called John’s Carpet House. It had gone on in the neighborhood for dozens of years. Originally it had been held in a house with carpeted walls, hence the name, but it had burned and now they held it outdoors in the lot.
“If I can get up out of this chair I’ll take you sometime.”
We listened to the smooth music for a bit, but it was interrupted by the jingle of an ice-cream truck, the incessant soundtrack to summer. They all play the same song, once a blackface minstrel standard. Mrs. Terry scoffed at the truck and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture.
“That house used to be beautiful, just beautiful,” Mrs. Terry said, pointing back at my place. “That was the prettiest house in the neighborhood. It’s a shame what they did to it.”
“Well, I hope I can make it nice again.”
“Take your time. Don’t go too fast. Don’t go too fast.”
After finishing the windows, I decided to stop by the lumberyard to pick up some shipping pallets on my way back to Forestdale. The yard dealt primarily in roofing material, and as a result they’d put their extra pallets on the side of the road for free, some of them made from rough hardwood. I was making my fence from them, using the thin cross pieces as pickets, the sturdy longer sections for rails.
I’d bust them apart with a ripping chisel, a kind of sturdy, flat crowbar, breaking the nails, which were spiral, shot in with a nail gun, a bitch to remove without breaking the thin pickets. Sometimes I’d pay one of the kids on Forestdale a penny a nail to remove what was left, or just do it myself. I cut the tops into points with a chop saw my family had given me the previous Christmas. It was mindless work and I could daydream about whatever I liked, which was Cecilia.
The pickets were all different colors and sizes, some fat, some skinny, some tall or short, light and dark, and when I nailed them to the rails the effect was of looking at a musical staff. For what they had cost—the price of nails—they looked pretty good.
Grosse Pointe, our fabulously wealthy old-money neighbor to the east, was getting ready to add to its own fence, one like that concrete wall of shame on 8 Mile. Already many of the smaller streets between Detroit and the Pointes were blocked off with obstructions that ran right across the road like little Berlin Walls, but this was on a far larger scale. They began by piling snow across Kercheval Avenue, a main artery and one of the largest roads connecting the two cities. That next spring, they added two sheds, to be used as a farmers market, completely blocking the road.
The thing was, both sheds only opened toward the Grosse Pointe side. Looking at the stalls from the Pointes, they’re inviting and friendly. Looking from Detroit, we stare at the backs of two blank buildings and a physical barrier across a main road. Under pressure from Detroit the street was reopened, although the avenue was narrowed into something resembling a checkpoint.
This is the same Grosse Pointe famous for its “Point System.” Before it was outlawed in the ’60s, you needed to score a certain number of points to be able to purchase a house there, actually a collection of five municipalities. The realty association sent private investigators to judge applicants on things like “swarthiness,” “accent,” and “way of living,” and whether your friends were “predominantly American.” WASPs needed to score 50 points, Poles 55, Greeks and Italians 75, and Jews 85. Blacks, Latinos, and Asians were automatically disqualified, game over.
These agreements were called restrictive covenants, and they happened all over the place, not just in GP. Groups of real estate brokers, homeowners’ associations, and builders would band together to ensure blacks could not buy homes in their neighborhoods and cities. This had the effect that, while whites were fleeing to the suburbs, even the most prosperous blacks could not. These sheds are just a part of what they’ve walled off, a sixth of the streets between the two cities now blocked, some with walls made of brick, iron spikes adorning the top.
They’ve outlawed restrictive covenants now, and it’s tempting to say these metaphorical walls are all in the past. But they reverberate today. The average household income in Grosse Pointe Park is $111,974. Just across those walls in Detroit, it’s $24,444. In 2015, nationally, the average white family holds twelve times the wealth of the average black family.
That inequality exists mostly because of racist housing practices like these restrictive covenants and redlining, which created the other wall. When blacks weren’t allowed to purchase houses or were denied loans, they were also denied the prosperity, appreciation, and inheritance those houses provided to their white counterparts.
People aren’t even shy about it. Our very own modern-day George Wallace of the north, L. Brooks Patterson, has called for more. In 2014, in an on-the-record interview with the New Yorker, he stated, “I made a prediction long ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it and throw in the blankets and corn.’ ”
The same arti
cle also noted when accused of racism by a black city council member, “Patterson publicly declared that he’d ‘rather own a 1947 Buick than own’ her.”
As of 2016, he’s the commissioner of Oakland County, our wealthy suburban neighbor to the north. He was first elected to the position in 1992. For more than twenty years a plurality of the people of Oakland County have believed he represents their views.
I was hoping my fence didn’t have the same effect. I hated these walls and everything they represented. It seemed as though they were a literal rather than metaphorical line in the sand and whichever side one chose to live on was a declaration of allegiance. Right or wrong, I had even begun to hate the people who lived behind them, or at least not respect them. To live on the other side of something like that and turn your back seemed a cowardly choice.
The reality was, I didn’t know anyone who lived on that side or why they chose to, only an impersonal history. My anger was directed toward phantoms, to ghosts of the past, still haunting the present.
Maybe good fences make good neighbors only if both sides care about keeping stone upon stone. I hoped I wasn’t about to make one of those kinds of choices with Cecilia. I decided the next time I went back to my new house I would bring a socket set and take the red gate I’d seen from the roof. It would complete the fence.
* * *
“In Rome we have ruins right in our city. Are you jealous?” Cecilia said with a mischievous look that drew sweat from my palms. We sat at the point of Belle Isle where the prow of the island splits the river. I had asked her on that date. We had ridden our bikes to a jazz club downtown and after some drinks she had already begun to talk of overstaying her visa. We ended up kissing in the street in front of her house in the rain, my hat falling off into the rivulets of water moistening the road, water that had evaporated from the lake we now sat in front of. This was our second date. I asked her if she wanted to go on a picnic. She didn’t know what that was but said yes.