The music community was shocked by the news, and saddened; many remembered Jacqueline as a little girl, backstage at her father’s shows. Berry Gordy sent money to bury her. The Four Tops dispatched a telegram. And Frieda Wilson, a prematurely old woman in a red ski cap, tattered overcoat and torn plastic shoes, went back to her rented room at the sleazy motel across the street from the party store and cried for days.
Once, when the money was good, Frieda Wilson lived like a celebrity. She had a big home and a fancy car. Her children were educated at exclusive Catholic academies, and she traveled in Detroit’s show business circles. In those days, she was an envied woman. But no one envies her anymore. Three of her children are dead, and she shares a room with a dying old man in a wheelchair, whom she nurses. There is only one window in the room, boarded up because of the gunfire of drug dealers in the parking lot. Frieda cooks on a Bunsen burner and cleans her dishes in the bathroom sink.
“The income tax people took my house,” she said, sitting on an unmade bed. “And Jack’s estate is still all tied up, because of all these women and children he had.” Frieda Wilson picked up a picture of her dead daughter and stared at it. “When Jackie Jr. was killed, Jack couldn’t even come to the funeral. He just locked himself up in his room and wouldn’t come out. He wanted to see pictures of his son in the casket. He was very, very close with his kids; he was a family person. And now look what’s happened.…”
Frieda Wilson has been battered by circumstances and she knows it. At times she seems confused and helpless. But occasionally she summons the strength to pull herself together, and you catch a glimpse of her as an articulate, ambitious young woman who dreamed the Detroit show business dream, a dream so powerful that it could, for a moment, dispel the gloom of the present.
“You know, Jack’s songs are starting to sell again in England,” she said. A few months before, “Reet Petite,” written by a man who has been as lucky as Jackie Wilson was unlucky, hit the charts in Great Britain, and a generation of young kids there were thrilled by the great singer’s voice. “Maybe they’ll be some money from that,” she said wistfully. If there is, it’s safe to say that Berry Gordy will get his share. Frieda will get hers—maybe.
“And you know, the people from Entertainment Tonight were here,” she said. “They visited Jack’s grave. After he died, we reburied him next to his mother. I told you, he was a family person. And we’re negotiating with ABC about a miniseries.…”
Loud laughter from the pimps and dealers in the parking lot wafted through the open door. Frieda looked once more at her daughter’s picture. “Maybe something good will come of all this,” she said, and then she began to cry again.
Jacqueline Wilson was murdered because she got caught in the cross fire of an unsuccessful drug transaction. Much of the violent crime in Detroit is drug related, and there is little the cops can do about it. Crack is sold openly; police say that there is simply no way to arrest everyone. The main thrust of enforcement is to keep the supply to a minimum. No one believes that it can be dried up altogether.
From time to time, the cops stage raids on known crack houses, which are nothing more than apartments or homes from which drugs are sold. Locating them is as easy as finding stockbrokers on Wall Street, but busting them can be dangerous—most pushers are armed and ready to fight.
Not long after the search for Jacqueline Wilson’s killer, Jim Francisco gathered his troops for a raid on a crack pad. Robinson was off that night, but half a dozen others were there, including Caldwell, the massive, bearded black undercover cop. The raiding party also had one woman, a thin redhead with a southern twang. Francisco took the wheel of the van, and the raiders climbed in the back. They were in good spirits that night, buoyed by the prospect of action, and as the van turned onto Woodward Avenue, they began to sing—“Roll ’em, roll ’em, roll ’em,” to the tune of the theme song from Rawhide. They sounded like a high school football team on the way to a big game.
The singing stopped when we pulled up in front of a seedy apartment building on a side street. Without a word the cops jumped out of the van and raced into the building. Caldwell carried a battering ram, and the policewoman held a shotgun in both hands. A couple of people stepped aside to let them pass as they ran up the two flights, stopped in front of a door, hollered “Police, open up!” and, without waiting for a response, bashed in the door and flooded into the apartment.
Inside they found a very frightened black woman of twenty, dressed in a flimsy nightie and holding an infant. They were alone. One of the cops looked in a nightstand drawer and found several packages of cocaine.
“That’s my boyfriend’s,” the woman said, crying. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he stay. We don’t even get along that good—he’s just the baby’s father, that’s all.” The policewoman sat on the bed and talked gently to her while the others continued their search. Under the bed they found a police scanner, a pager and a loaded carbine. “I don’t know nothin’ about all that stuff,” the young mother protested. “It belongs to my boyfriend. I ain’t mixed up in nothin’.…”
The small apartment was neat and clean. A high school equivalency diploma hung on a wall, next to a shelf of stuffed animals. Record albums were stacked near an expensive stereo. The cops, respectful of neatness, searched gently, replacing things as they went along.
The baby, dressed in pink-and-white pajamas, began to cry. “He had a shot today, that’s why he don’t feel good,” his mother explained.
“Yeah,” said the policewoman empathetically. “Those shots make me feverish, too.” She gently undid the baby’s diaper, looking for hidden drugs.
The police stacked the carbine and the cocaine on a counter, next to a box of Oh So Nice Baby Wipes, and began to make a list of the seized material. By this time the young woman had calmed down and was watching the search without apparent emotion. Her composure irked the policewoman. “If we bust you again, we’ll take your baby and get it a good home,” she threatened. “Not no crack house.” The mother nodded, but said nothing. Now that she knew she was not going to be arrested, she was simply waiting for the police to complete their business and leave.
As they carried out the search, I could hear people scurrying through the halls. The building is a maze of crack houses, and many of the tenants were quietly leaving with their inventory. Francisco, who had no warrant for any other apartment, seemed unconcerned. This wasn’t his first visit to the building, and it wouldn’t be his last.
The task force gathered up the drugs and weapons, put them in bags, and trooped down the stairs. Francisco, pistol in hand, potbelly drooping over his jeans, Crimson Tide baseball cap set back on his head, swaggered down the hallway, just to make sure the neighbors knew who had been there. In the stairwell he met a tall, thin black man with a heavily bandaged hand and the look of someone caught in the act.
“Excuse me sir,” said Francisco, his mouth working on a large wad of gum. “I can’t help but notice that you have been wounded.” The man nodded in guarded affirmation. Francisco waited. “I got shot,” the man finally said.
“May I ask you a personal question?” said Francisco in an intimate tone. “Was the shooting by any chance, ah, drug related?”
“Naw, man, it was a family situation,” said the thin man.
“I’m glad to hear that, sir. It’s a pleasure to meet a family man in a place like this,” said Francisco of Morality, and walked down the stairs, pistol in hand, whistling the theme song to Rawhide.
It was around this time that I decided to move into the city. I had been living in West Bloomfield, commuting every day across the Eight Mile border, then retreating behind it every night. But this was an inconvenient arrangement and, more to the point, I found myself increasingly comfortable in Detroit.
The time I spent on the city streets, my evenings with the cops or hanging around the Tailwind and various other neighborhood spots, had convinced me that Detroit’s reputation as a violent city was well deserved. It wa
s possible, I knew, to get caught in cross fire, like Jacqueline Wilson, or stabbed or mugged. But strangely, I didn’t feel any real sense of personal danger, certainly nothing that justified the dire warnings of my suburban friends. Years in the Middle East had given me good antennae for hostility, and the truth is, I didn’t feel any. When I went into a bar or a club where there were no other whites, which was pretty often, I got some wondering looks. If I was taking notes, people sometimes clammed up. But that was all.
My decision to move into the city was made easier by the fact that, during the course of interviewing people, I had become friendly with a number of black Detroiters. They rarely admonished me for living in the suburbs—to them it seemed natural—but the time I spent with them made Detroit seem a less alien place.
Many of my new acquaintances had little experience with books and authors; most of the younger ones had known very few whites. But they surprised me with their willingness to speak openly about their lives and their city. Clearly they enjoyed the chance to educate an interested foreigner. “I know you’ve never eaten any of this,” a woman would say, handing me a plate of collard greens. “I know you’ve never heard anything like this,” a man would tell me, putting on a Little Milton tape. Any evidence that I understood black culture was greeted with good-natured surprise. Once, at a party, I astonished a room full of people by dancing without breaking an ankle.
As time went by, and people became more relaxed around me, I heard a great deal of candid black talk. Detroiters constantly discussed race, often, I suspected, with the intention of shocking me.
“If you want to write about us,” a playwright told me one night at a party, “you’ve got to realize that we come in four types—Afro-Americans, blacks, colored folks and niggers.”
“What’s the distinction?” I asked.
“Well, take vacations,” she said. “An Afro-American goes to the Bahamas. A black goes to Harlem. Colored folks load their kids in the car and go down south to visit their kinfolks.” She paused, forcing my hand. “And what about niggers?” I finally asked. “Niggers don’t go on vacation—they wait for you to go on vacation,” she whooped, and the others laughed loudly.
On another occasion, a group of people were discussing a media controversy that had erupted around the question of why blacks excel in sports. Several experts had been roundly criticized as racists for suggesting that black anatomy is better suited for some kinds of athletic activities. My hosts, however, happily asserted that the experts were right.
“Do you really think that blacks are built differently than whites?” I asked.
“Sure,” said a woman. “We’ve got bigger butts and thinner legs.”
“That’s considered racist,” I pointed out, but she didn’t agree. “All you got to do is look at us,” she said.
From time to time, the tables were turned and I became the subject of other people’s scrutiny. Despite the fact that race is a constant topic among Detroiters, there is a surprising confusion about who is what.
One night in the 606 Club, a sort of black Cheers located downtown, a man who had obviously had a couple of drinks approached me at the bar. “Excuse me, brother, but are you a white man or a light-skinned colored man?” he asked.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
The man looked at me closely, and then ran his fingers over my scalp. “You got nappy hair,” he said. “I guess you one of us.” Satisfied, he returned to his seat and announced in a loud voice that I was, indeed, a light-skinned black. Apparently several other patrons had been wondering, because they looked at me, nodded in satisfaction and smiled.
The incident at the 606 brought back memories of a childhood friend, Jesse Stephen. Jesse was a preacher’s son, and one day he told me that Jews aren’t white, but red. “Noah had three sons,” he intoned, borrowing his father’s sermonic cadence. “Ham, who was black, Japheth, who was white, and Shem, who was red. The Jews are Shemites.”
For years I considered this a personal eccentricity of Jesse’s, but in Detroit I learned that it is a widespread article of faith. People were constantly telling me that I was “almost white” and they would buttress this belief by pointing out that I had “bad hair” and swarthy skin. “I know plenty of black people lighter than you,” a woman told me, “and they don’t go around pretending to be white.” (There was another side to this coin, too. Many people I met believed that Jews are the chosen people. “Do I look chosen to you?” I once asked a churchwoman who scrutinized me and said, “I never said God made the right choice.”)
Not only Jews fail to qualify in Detroit as whites. During my visit I got into an argument with a very sophisticated city official who tried to convince me that all Arabs are black because they come from Asia and North Africa. She believed this despite the evidence of her own eyes—most of Detroit’s Arabs are unquestionably not black-skinned. But it soon emerged that we were talking about different things. “To me,” she said, “a white man is somebody like George Bush.”
The longer I stayed in Detroit, the more accustomed I became to the local habit of immediately classifying everyone by color; and I also began to see the world through the race-conditioned eyes of the people I met. Once, watching Nightline, I asked a friend what she thought about the discussion, which had to do with the economy. “You notice that there are never any black people on these interview programs,” she said. “They don’t think our opinions matter, or that we even have any opinions.” Of course she was right; and from then on I watched American television with a new sensibility.
Constant daily contact with black people was enlightening; and it was also reassuring. I began to think about moving into town, and one day, in the midst of a discussion about the violence on the streets of Detroit, I surprised myself by asking a black auto executive if he thought it would be safe. “Nobody’s totally safe here,” he said. “But you won’t be in any special danger because you’re white. And one thing’s for sure, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than in Bloomfield Hills.”
And so I left the suburbs and moved into Detroit. At first, I rented a room from a black woman who lived on the east side, not far from downtown. Later, feeling more independent, I moved into one of Detroit’s few high-rise apartment buildings, a short walk from City Hall and the river. The manager proudly pointed out the building’s security features, which included a special service: residents returning at night could call ahead, and an armed guard would escort them from the parking lot into the lobby.
I never used the service, because I didn’t feel threatened. But from time to time I got intimations of danger. One of them arrived at my apartment in the person of Floyd.
Floyd was a young man with a passive ferocity and yellow, malign eyes that peered out of a hard dark skull. When he walked into my living room, in the midst of a small cocktail party, he suddenly made some comfortable people very nervous.
Floyd was brought by Gerald, a heavyset black man who lives in the Brewster projects. We met in the course of my research; Gerald was trying, unsuccessfully, to promote music concerts at one of the downtown theaters, and I went to talk to him about the difficulties faced by a small entrepreneur. We soon discovered that we shared a love of fifties rhythm and blues, and struck up a friendship.
An inveterate do-gooder, Gerald met Floyd in the projects shortly after Floyd had been released from Jackson Penitentiary, at the end of a six-year term for armed robbery, and decided to rehabilitate him. “You got to learn how to interface with white people,” he told Floyd, and brought him to the party.
Actually we were an integrated group that evening, but to Floyd, one of ten children born to an unwed mother, the blacks must have seemed as white as the whites. All the guests were middle-class and well educated. They sipped white wine and looked out at the city through wide glass windows and tried to act like they weren’t scared stiff of Floyd. He drank a gin and orange juice and looked at his red tennis shoes. After a few moments he took them off and stretched out, uninvi
ted, on the couch. Everyone pretended not to notice.
“Feel good layin’ back,” said Floyd sociably. “Up to Jackson, they ain’t got no soft mattress.” A halfhearted chuckle went up, and I thought, How in the hell do I get him out of here?
Gerald believed that it would be therapeutic for Floyd to talk about his past. “I come from Memphis,” Floyd said. “Got some bad motherfuckers down there. Got some up here, too. Met some bad motherfuckers up to Jackson.” The guests waited, but Floyd had summarized his biography to his own satisfaction.
A lady asked about his brothers and sisters. “I got seven brothers. Six of ’em been to Jackson, same as me,” said Floyd, the way someone might mention the name of a family prep school.
“What does your mother feel, with all of you in prison like that?” the woman asked.
“She like it,” he said. “She say, ‘You safer in Jackson than in the city.’ ”
“The city isn’t so bad,” said Gerald defensively.
Floyd stirred, his professional opinion challenged. “Shit, man, it is, too, bad. That motherfucker be a war. Onliest thing, I ain’t never been shot or stabbed.” He sounded a bit amazed at his own good fortune.
“You ever stab or, ah, shoot anyone yourself?” asked one of the guests, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Floyd shook his head. “Naw, man,” he said. “I leave that shit up to my friends. I got a whole lot of friends down there.” He nodded at the street, where the guests knew they would be, on the way to their cars, in an hour or two.
Without further preliminaries, Floyd closed his eyes and fell off to sleep. He snored softly and put his hand on his crotch. An angelic look came over his face. Everyone made small talk and tried to act as if an ex-convict dozing in the living room was a common social occurrence. No one said anything about it because Gerald was there and because Floyd might be listening, even in his sleep, monitoring the conversation with some sort of prison sixth sense.
After half an hour or so, Floyd stirred. He must have been dreaming about sex, because he turned to an attractive black woman in her forties and, in a soft voice, said, “Mama, what you doin’ Saturday night?”
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