The woman, who has a grandchild, couldn’t believe her ears. Floyd repeated the question. “You gotta be kidding,” she said, sounding more amused than frightened. “Listen, boy, you ain’t ready for me on Tuesday night, and I know you ain’t gonna be ready on Saturday.” Floyd shrugged; Saturday night was a long time off in any case.
Floyd rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, drank another orange juice and gin, and stretched. Gerald, sensing that there had been enough interfacing for one night, told him it was time to be going.
I nervously escorted them to the door, where I made a last-minute (and deeply insincere) offer to be of any help I could to Floyd. He didn’t even bother to say thank you.
“When I come up here, I didn’t think you was cool,” he said. “But you cool, you all right. Maybe I help you.”
“What kind of help do I need?” I asked uncomfortably.
“Man, there’s a lot of dudes out there. Somebody might be watching you right now, y’know. They could be wanting to do you something. I just say a word around, you know, let people know you mah friend.” He stepped out into the hall, leaving behind in the cozy apartment a chill intimation of the street below.
I returned to my guests, shaking my head. “Imagine that,” I said. “His mother would rather have him in jail than on the street.” I expected agreement, but I had assumed too much.
“Well, I can understand her,” said the grandmother who had rejected Floyd’s advances. “Sometimes I wish somebody would put my daughter in jail, too. That’s where she belongs.”
The statement shattered the “we’re us and they’re them” mood. “You want your daughter in jail?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know what to do about her anymore,” said the woman. “She’s strung out on crack cocaine, and I just can’t get through to her anymore.”
The woman, who is the mother of five, began to talk in a subdued voice about her seventeen-year-old child. “The girl steals everything. She took my microwave oven, brass plates, a floor-model TV. One time, when nobody was home, she got her boyfriend to bring over a U-Haul trailer and they cleaned out the house. I was lucky to find out where it was before they sold it. I had to send my son over there with a shotgun to get it back. I can’t leave her at home alone—one of my sons stays in the house at all times.”
Only a short time before, her daughter had gone out with some friends to buy drugs. She wound up in an argument, and another teenager hit her across the face with a two-by-four. The girl lost an eye.
“Why?” asked the woman. “Why? My other kids are fine—they don’t mess with drugs, they don’t even drink. I’ve done everything I can—psychiatrists, threats, beatings, praying—but nothing works. She says, “I’m gonna be all right now, mama, but she doesn’t stay all right. It’s got to where we have to protect her own baby from her.”
She was an educated woman, the grandmother in the living room. She had been through the civil rights movement, given her children African names, encouraged them to read James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison. Her daughter would sell her books if she could get her hands on them. She had already sold herself, and she might someday try to sell her only child. The lady shook her head. “You ever hear about the bad seed? I hate to say it but I’m afraid of my own daughter.”
Chapter Three
SOSAD
In the fall of 1988, two white Detroiters were tried for burning down a crack house on their street. Although they admitted the act, which was patently illegal, they were acquitted by a mostly black jury. The police department deplored the arson and denounced the two men as vigilantes, but most people applauded. There was a perceptible law-and-order mood in the city and Tom Delisle’s question—“Where’s the outrage?”—was beginning to resonate.
Many blacks were concerned, not only for their personal safety but also by the fact that violence, especially teenage violence, was frightening away whites. This view was forthrightly expressed in an article, published in the black-owned Michigan Chronicle, by columnist Jim Ingram. Entitled “Wanna Come Over to My House?” it addressed the city’s teenagers:
To errant Detroit youth: Imagine, if you will, my house. I, no one else, have broken out most of my windows, so the blame’s on me.
I throw trash in my backyard. I get bored, so I set fire to my attic or a bedroom.
When visitors come, I might attack them. I may get mad and stab one upstairs or I’ll shoot one or two in the kitchen.
It’s hard to fix the place up. Why? Well, when I get some money I go to houses ten miles away and spend it to repair their windows, clean up their litter or paint their porches. And you know what? They even take some of my money to hire people to keep me out when I try to act like I do at home.
So will you come over to my house? But you can’t come in my living room. I shot a guy in there and it’s all boarded up, you know.
And you have to watch yourself. Some of my friends carry guns and they sometimes come over and you might get shot or your woman might get raped or something like that. But come on over anyway, won’t you?
See, I really need you over because I was going to ask you … uh … for some money. See, I need some money to fix it up so more people will want to come over.…
Since arriving in the city I had met a number of kids, and on the surface they didn’t seem too different from Charles and his friends. Pontiac had been considered a rough town, and there were sometimes bloody incidents, but actual bloodshed was rare, and basically rational. I once saw a kid stab another kid at a dance, in a fight over a girl. A released convict shot and badly wounded a guy who had been seeing his wife while he was in prison. But these were exceptional events. Judging from the stories I heard in Detroit, many of the city’s teenagers seemed to be engaged in mindless mayhem.
This impression was confirmed by an FBI study published on the front page of the Free Press in September.
DETROIT TOPS BIG CITIES IN RATE OF YOUTHS SLAIN
Detroit, whose children have died for gym shoes, drugs or a dirty look, has the highest juvenile homicide rate of the country’s ten largest cities, according to a computer study of FBI crime reports from 1979 through 1986.
By 1986, Detroit’s children were being killed at more than triple the combined rate for the nation’s 10 largest cities.…
Shortly after this article appeared, I met with a black journalist about my age who writes with sensitivity and insight into the problems of the city and its people. In the course of our conversation I asked her why Detroit’s kids seemed so violent.
The reporter regarded me with disdain “Drugs, unemployment, babies making babies,” she said, reciting the causes in a bored tone, like a train conductor calling off stops. I had asked a naive question and she was letting me know it. I also detected a note of resentment in her voice. Who was I to come poking around, snooping judgmentally into the business of black folks and their children?
“But there must be more to it than that,” I said. “There were drugs and unwed mothers when we were growing up. And a lot of these kids come from good homes. Why them? Why now?”
She shrugged and stared at me, professional courtesy wearing thin. Throughout my stay in Detroit, the only real hostility I encountered was from members of the black intelligentsia. Some were better at concealing it than others, but very often there was an unspoken question in the air—What the hell do you care? White apathy regarding the fate of blacks in general, and black children in particular, is so pervasive that interest is automatically a cause for suspicion.
This is reflected in the antipathy that many blacks, including black journalists, feel toward Detroit’s newspapers and television stations. The major media are all white owned and operated, and most of their editors and reporters live outside the city. Several years ago, black reporters at the News, a Gannett newspaper, staged a weeklong byline strike to protest discrimination in assignments, and most, at the News and elsewhere, continue to believe that press coverage of black affairs swings between the sens
ational and the apathetic.
Certainly this is true in the case of teenage violence. Particularly gruesome killings, especially when the victims are white, get front-page treatment; but average murders get reported on the inside pages under laconic headings like IN THIS WEEKEND’S SHOOTINGS. Partly this is a simple variation on the old journalistic rule that a dog biting a man is not news; every year, upwards of three hundred kids are shot in the city. But it is also true that black teenagers killing one another is of scant interest to the upscale suburbanites who are the media’s target market.
In the city, however, where hardly a family has been untouched by adolescent violence or drug addiction, the question of the kids—how to raise them, protect them, defend yourself against them—was a constant topic. In a strange way it reminded me of Israel, where parents are universally concerned about their children’s compulsory military service. Yet the chances of a teenager’s being shot on the streets of Detroit are far greater than those of an Israeli soldier’s being wounded in combat.
Clementine Barfield learned that in 1986, when her sixteen-year-old son, Derick, and his fifteen-year-old brother, Roger, became two of the 365 children shot in Detroit that year. Roger, critically wounded, survived. Derick died. And their mother, a large, gentle-faced woman with a lilting Mississippi accent, decided to try to put a stop to the violence.
“After Derick was murdered, about a month later, I began looking for a support group,” Mrs. Barfield told me as we sat talking in her office on the second floor of an old schoolhouse on Martin Luther King Boulevard. “But there was none. So I went out and started one.” The name of the group is Save Our Sons and Daughters—SOSAD.
Half a dozen women, mothers of slain children, were in the SOSAD office that day, performing the menial tasks that go with running an organization. They worked quietly while Mrs. Barfield, a frequently interviewed woman, patiently retold the story of the day in July 1986 that changed her life.
“The day before it happened, there had been an argument in school, and a boy pulled a gun on Roger,” she recalled. The next day Derick and Roger went looking for the boy. He saw the Barfield brothers first, sitting in their car in a gas station. Afraid that they had a gun, the boy fired four shots into the car, and fled. The murderer was eighteen years old and he is in jail now. “The family of the killer lost their son, too,” said Mrs. Barfield. “It’s a thin line between victim and murderer in the black community.
“The kids in this city want to get away as fast as they can,” she continued. “Derick planned to go to Georgetown University. He should have graduated this June. Next fall he would have been in college. This should have been his new beginning.” Her voice faltered. “All I have now are memories.”
Mrs. Barfield handed me a copy of the program for SOSAD’s first annual Mother’s Day benefit. It was a glossy booklet, a testament to the organization’s professionalism—and the pain in which it was founded. It featured page after page of ads from bereaved parents, with pictures of their murdered children.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF A GIFT OF LIFE. ANDRE STREETER:
If I were to take stock of all my worldly treasures, the memories I have of the few years spent with you would be my most cherished possessions. Your mother.
RONALD ‘LIL MAN’ WEBSTER:
The love you spread, the good you’ve done, will never be forgotten by anyone. Your loving family.
And, next to a picture of a little boy with a smiling, open face:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF JEFFERY HILSON:
To the son we lost.
“There is a war in Detroit,” Mrs. Barfield said, when I finished looking at the booklet, “and young black men are the targets. Our sons are at risk—to suicide, murder, jail and hopelessness. Really it’s genocide; the enemy is the society that has forced the situation on them. Right now, the largest employer of young men in Detroit is drugs.”
Genocide seemed a strong word; after all, the vast majority of black victims, including Mrs. Barfield’s own son, are killed by other black teenagers. “Statistically that’s true,” she conceded, “but it’s misleading. The real enemy is hopelessness. This is the first generation that hasn’t done as well as its parents.”
One of the women who had been stuffing envelopes when I arrived was listening to our conversation. Suddenly she began to sing, in a soft, mournful contralto. “Reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this a better world, if you can …” she sang, and the other ladies in the office put down their papers and joined in. A phone rang but no one answered it. Instead they sang on and on, “Reach out your hand, reach out your hand,” mothers of the dead who were lamenting a generation of hopeless, furious, defenseless children.
When I was growing up, Detroit made one promise to its young people—a good job. A place on the line at GM, Ford or Chrysler was part of our birthright, a legacy to the city’s children. And then, in the early seventies, that legacy was withdrawn.
After I graduated from Pontiac Central High School in 1965, I followed a route that was being traveled by eighteen-year-olds throughout the Detroit area. The prom, a few days of r&r and then, on Monday morning, the hiring line at Pontiac Motors.
Getting a job was as easy as showing up. We filled out a couple of forms, took a perfunctory physical exam, went to Montgomery Wards to buy work clothes and a lunch bucket and the next day found ourselves turning screws and fastening bolts for $3.65 an hour and all the overtime we could handle.
My first paycheck was close to $180, a fortune in those days. To earn it, I loaded sheets of metal into a giant press, hit a button, and watched the metal turn into panels. I never knew what the panels were for—nobody told me and I wasn’t curious enough to ask. My orientation took approximately two minutes, and it was conducted by a scraggle-toothed hillbilly named Lucky who had thin tattooed arms, a greasy ducktail and a mean nasal twang. The foreman brought me over to him, said that we would be working together on the giant machine, and told him to explain my duties.
“See this press, kid?” Lucky snarled. “I’m the boss of this press. The last guy I worked with didn’t think so, but he happened to fall in. They just covered this thing up with a black sheet and cleaned him out with a toothbrush.”
I didn’t say anything, but the look on my face must have convinced him that he had made his point. “Just do what I tell you, and you’re gonna get on real fine,” said my new mentor.
I have no idea whether Lucky’s story was true or not, but I loved it—it was just the sort of initiation into the world of industrial manhood that I had been looking for. Working in the plant was more than just a way to make good money; it was a rite of passage, induction into the brotherhood of workingmen.
I didn’t stay in the factory too long because I didn’t have to. I blew most of the money I made on a trip to the Bahamas at the end of the summer, and used the rest for college. There were other kids working for tuition or travel money, but many signed on for the duration. Even then, you could easily support a family on an auto worker’s salary.
Today you can do a lot better than that; a job with one of the Big Three is a blue-collar dream. Figuring in benefits, workers can easily earn sixty thousand dollars a year, and some make more. The problem is, there aren’t any jobs.
The story of the rise and fall of the auto industry in Detroit has been told often. In the early part of the century, Henry Ford lured tens of thousands of semiliterate southern farm boys and European immigrants to Detroit with the offer of a magical five-dollar-a-day wage. Ford was a paternal tyrant who turned his operation into a giant plantation. A service department supervised the personal lives and private morality of his workers, and a private goon squad, led by the infamous Harry Bennett and manned by a collection of gangsters and ex-prizefighters, kept the unions out of the plants.
Throughout the thirties and early forties, the UAW and the auto companies, led by Ford, fought fierce battles. But following World War II, a new policy of cooperation was put in place by Henry Ford’s grandson
and successor, Henry II. The young Ford realized that fighting the unions was both wasteful and unpopular. In 1946, shortly after assuming control of Ford Motors, in a speech to the Society of Automotive Engineers, he introduced his new approach. “There is no reason that a union contract could not be written and agreed upon with the same efficiency and good temper that marks the negotiation of a commercial contract between two companies,” he said.
Over the next quarter century the UAW, led by Walter Reuther, won ever more generous contracts from the Big Three. These concessions were, in turn, passed along to the consumers in the form of price increases. While it lasted, the system kept Detroit prosperous, but, in the mid-seventies, it fell apart. Japanese cars were cheaper, better and more economical. The OPEC—inspired rise in oil prices depressed the market for American gas-guzzlers. Automation made thousands of workers redundant. And the riot of 1967 encouraged management to locate new factories far from the urban battlefield.
The decline of the American auto industry was a national phenomenon, but it has been most painfully felt in the Motor City. In 1978, the UAW had about 1.5 million members; ten years later, it was struggling to stay around 1 million. During that period, the number of auto workers in the Detroit area dropped by fifty thousand.
Union economists know that this is not a temporary phenomenon; the best they can hope for is a slow, managed retreat. Once the UAW was a powerful progressive voice in Detroit, but today its role is largely reactionary. Its primary task is protecting the jobs of its members, which means keeping young people out of the plants. “The chance of a high school graduate in Detroit getting a job in an auto factory today are zilch,” a union official told me without evident distress. “His best bet is fast foods.” Fast-food jobs pay the minimum wage, $3.35 an hour in 1989. And you can’t live on that.
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