Finding a job in an auto factory today is harder than getting into Harvard. In 1987, Mazda opened a new plant in Flat Rock, south of Detroit. The company had two thousand jobs—and one hundred thousand candidates. People who had been hired off the street twenty years before couldn’t even get an application form.
Of the Big Three, only Ford has been doing any real hiring in recent years in the Detroit area. It can afford to be picky, and it is, recruiting new workers with the care of a country club screening committee. Candidates who hear about jobs apply through the State Employment Agency, which weeds out the obviously unqualified; high school dropouts or recent graduates aren’t even considered. To make the first cut you need a record of successful previous employment.
Applicants who reach the personnel department are required to take a thorough physical examination, which includes a drug test and a battery of psychological tests aimed at judging attitude, motivation, reliability and teamwork. Only an elite few make it through the screening process.
Those who do are then called in for personal interviews. If they pass, they are sent to a special forty-hour orientation course. Some drop out at this stage; some are put on a waiting list; a few are given jobs for a ninety-day probationary period, which can turn into permanent employment.
Under this system, my old boss, Lucky, would never have got a job. Neither would I. The impoverished and poorly educated kids in Detroit don’t have a prayer, and they know it. The complexities of international business, oil politics and modern technology have conspired to disinherit them.
Most of the auto jobs that do become available will go to well-educated whites from the suburbs. The simple truth is that a great many of the kids in Detroit do not have the skills—reading, writing and simple arithmetic—to work in a modern factory.
Like other urban problems, bad schools are not unique to Detroit. But the situation there is more stark, the numbers more depressing than in other places. Experts say that as many as 70 percent of the city’s teenagers do not finish high school, and the overwhelming majority of those are barely educated. A senior state official told me that, of the twenty thousand or so kids who start the first grade each year, only five hundred will graduate with the skills needed to do college work. And, of the five hundred, four hundred will be girls. In other words, only a tiny fraction of the black males educated in Detroit can expect to attain the earning power associated with higher education.
One obvious reason for the breakdown of Detroit’s schools is its diminished tax base: the white exodus left the system impoverished. Detroit spends about half as much as many of its suburban neighbors on education—and it shows.
In 1971, a federal judge named Stephen Roth ruled that de jure segregation existed in Detroit’s schools and that there was no way to remedy it within the city itself. The judge decided that the only solution would be to bus students—suburban whites into the city, urban blacks out to the suburbs.
Roth’s prescription was based on a revolutionary notion—that Detroit and its satellites were all part of one metropolitan community. This idea aroused fierce opposition from white people who had left town precisely because they didn’t want anything to do with blacks. Bumper stickers saying “Roth is a child molester” became common, even after the United States Supreme Court overruled the decision. Three years later, when it was announced that Roth was dying, the hospital was flooded with hate calls wishing him a happy bus trip to hell.
Since then, the situation has become, if anything, worse. “Detroit schools are more segregated today than they ever were,” according to Father William Cunningham, a Catholic priest who works with inner-city kids on job programs. “If the enrollment of the Detroit schools was all white, industry and the state government would come down here and put the Board of Education in jail for fraud and failure. Corporations would be screaming. But in America there is a marvelous neglect of what is black. The white administration of this state doesn’t give a goddam for black kids.”
Faced with the dangers and difficulties of raising kids in Detroit, parents with enough money move out of the city, or send their sons and daughters to private schools in the suburbs. But most people have no such option. Some put their faith in God and hope for the best. Others simply give up. A few, like Louise McCall, dedicate their lives to protecting their offspring.
In the case of her only daughter, Lisa, Louise McCall has a dual mission—to safeguard both the girl and her talent. Lisa is, at nineteen, perhaps the best young dancer in Detroit. A lithe, dark-skinned girl with a giggly voice and long ponytail, she is beautiful enough to have been a contestant in the Miss Black World pageant. Entering the competition was her mother’s idea. So was applying for a scholarship, which she won, to the Alvin Ailey dance troupe in New York. With a little luck, Lisa and her mother hope she can dance her way out of danger.
I first met Lisa at a folklore festival, where she was performing with a group of young dancers. We were introduced by the program’s director, who hoped to get her a little publicity. I asked a few questions about her career, but Lisa didn’t really want to talk about herself. “My mother is the special one in our family,” she said, and invited me to visit them the following Sunday afternoon.
Louise McCall was widowed when Lisa was small. She took her husband’s insurance money and bought a house in the northwest corner of the city. Today the neighborhood, a well-tended area of middle-class homes and leafy trees, is mostly black, but when the McCalls moved in, Lisa was one of only two black children in her school.
“On the first day of class, I brought Lisa in,” said Mrs. McCall, a large, handsome woman with dark skin and a serious demeanor. “Her teacher was surprised to see me, I guess. She said, ‘I didn’t know you people cared about your children.’ I realized right then that there might be a problem, so I started going to school with Lisa. I went every day for the next five years.”
As Lisa grew older, Louise McCall went to work as a secretary. She also enrolled at Wayne State University, where she now lacks only a few credits for a B.A. in journalism and psychology. But even working full-time and studying at Wayne, Louise McCall has kept her daughter on a very short leash.
“I’ve never really done anything but study and dance.” Lisa said. “I always had a fascination with dance, ever since I was a little girl. I’d see things when I watched other people.” Louise McCall noticed that her daughter could duplicate the moves she saw on stage, and enrolled her in classes. By the time Lisa was twelve, she was dancing in productions around the city. Lisa’s talent and protective upbringing made her an outsider at school and in the increasingly black neighborhood. “We aren’t like other people,” she said, looking fondly at her mother. “We go to plays, ballet—we never really fit in. I know that behind our backs we’ve been called E-lites, but were not. We’re just different.”
The McCalls are different in another way, too: They are Catholics in a Protestant fundamentalist city. Lisa occasionally attends church with friends, out of curiousity, but the gospel tradition, so formative for most black entertainers, is basically foreign to her. “I like Motown,” she said, “but we listen to a lot of jazz and classical music. We just don’t fit the stereotype. We’re them, but we’re not like them. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not really black or white. I don’t care if the place I live is all black or all white. I just want to live in a safe environment.”
The McCalls’ neighborhood seems safe enough; its streets are wide and well lit, its homes substantial and respectably middle-class. But there are bars on the doors, and Louise McCall, still a young woman herself, seldom goes out after dark. “I’m afraid,” she said, speaking for her daughter as well as herself. “People get shot at clubs and parties in Detroit.”
As we sat chatting in the living room, we were joined by Lisa’s current boyfriend, James. Boy trouble is one of the most common kinds in Detroit, and Mrs. McCall keeps a sharp eye on Lisa’s friends. Clearly, she approved of James, a neighborhood kid who was studying archit
ecture at Lawrence Institute of Technology. Like Lisa, he saw himself as an outsider on his own block.
“People think we’re too white to be black,” James said. “I can’t even speak black English. My mother kept us in the house and made us learn how to study.” Louise nodded approvingly.
James took a jaundiced view of his hometown. “I mean, when’s the last time you heard a game show give away a fabulous trip to Detroit?” he said. Once again, Louise McCall nodded in agreement. Detroit is her home, too, the place where she was born and raised. She is committed to staying in the city; but she has also spent the better part of the past twenty years trying to keep it at arm’s length.
People like the McCalls, members of the black middle class, have created an assimilated, American way of life for themselves. They are, in Lisa’s words, different. But, despite Lisa’s assertion that she feels neither white nor black, it is impossible to escape the reality of race.
On the night of Jesse Jackson’s address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, I returned to the McCall’s to watch the speech on television with Louise. Together we heard Jackson tell his audience that he understood—the wounds of discrimination, the pain of poverty, the dreadful struggle of young mothers to raise their children on their own. As he spoke, I imagined that Louise McCall, safe in her comfortable home, proud of her talented daughter, was congratulating herself for having overcome these obstacles. But when I looked at her, tears were running down her dark cheeks. “Tell it, Jesse,” she murmured. “Tell it just the way it is.”
Carrie Baker* did not watch Jesse Jackson’s speech because she doesn’t have a television. Besides, she didn’t need a presidential candidate to remind her of where she had been—she was still there, on welfare, an unwed mother of three.
I met Carrie at PACT, a program run by Wayne State University that helps parents get back children who have been taken by the court. She is a thin, intense woman with an intelligent, heart-shaped face and a soft-spoken manner. Despite the fact that her three children were taken away from her, and she went to jail briefly for child abuse, she didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed. Instead, she described her life, and her recent ordeal, with the dispassion of a professional social worker.
Carrie Baker was born in 1955, and raised in Highland Park. Her father, who worked on the line at Ford, was a “party person”; her mother, quiet and strict. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade and had her first child, a boy, at seventeen. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter. When we met, her son was sixteen, her daughter fifteen. She also had a five-year-old boy. The children have three different fathers, but she was never married to any of them.
For years, Carrie and her kids struggled along on welfare. Trouble started, according to her, early in 1987, when the father of her daughter, Beverly, got out of jail and demanded to move in.
“He was an alcoholic and a drug addict,” she said, “and I didn’t want him. So he started to harass me.” Even sitting in the safety of the PACT office, I could see the fear in her eyes as she recalled what had happened.
“Bev’s father tried to break in a couple of times, and I didn’t know what to do. The harassment went on for months. My mother suggested that I get a shotgun and shoot him, and I considered it but I couldn’t,” she said. “I’m not a violent person, and I was too afraid.”
Instead, Carrie turned inward. “I got depressed and I couldn’t clean the house. There was a dope pad across the street, and people used to fight on our lawn. The situation began to affect Bev. She went on a rampage. She wouldn’t go to school, and when she did, she looked like she was nobody’s child. I just couldn’t control her.
“Right about Easter, Bev stayed out all night. When she came back I told her that I was going shopping, but when I got back I was going to take her to the gynecologist. When I came back home, Bev had taken the baby to the Second Precinct and said I was abusing them. I guess she was mad because I yelled at her, and she wanted revenge. The next day I got a summons. I didn’t see my children for two months.
“The police came and arrested me for prostituting my daughter, grand larceny and other trumped-up charges,” she continued. “I had no idea what they were talking about. I stayed in jail for three days. I didn’t have a lawyer and I was in a panic. But they never pressed any charges, and they just let me go.”
Despite the fact that Carrie was innocent, when she got home she found that all three of her children were gone. The baby was put in a foster home, her daughter and son sent to youth centers.
“A lady came out from Social Services and looked around my house. ‘Your windows are broken, your house is filthy,’ she said. ‘You must be on drugs’—although I wasn’t. She went down the basement, and it was flooded. I couldn’t get the landlord to fix it. ‘You won’t be getting your kids back,’ the lady said, ‘because your house is filthy and there’s derbies in the water in the basement.’ Derbies, you know, shit.”
In an effort to get her kids back, Carrie enrolled in the PACT program. It was one way to demonstrate to the court that she was a conscientious parent.
“At first I thought it was, you know, just some more changes they were putting me through—but it worked,” she said. “The counseling sessions taught me to look at myself. I realized that I was always trying to please other people. I thought if other people were happy, if I did things for them, it would make them care about me. I had to learn to be my own person, not what everybody else wanted me to be.”
She also had to find a new home—her old place had been part of the reason that her kids were taken away. But she was broke. “Welfare took care of the rent, but I had no furniture, no money to heat the house and no transportation,” she said. “For six months I looked for a new place to live and a job that would bring in more than the welfare—that’s what I did while my kids were gone.”
Where were her relatives while all this was going on, I wondered; didn’t she have anyone to turn to for help? Carrie shook her head. “For a while I moved in with my mother, but I left because she wanted to use me as her tidy maid,” she said. Her sister, who lived nearby, wouldn’t take her in at all. So she went back to her unheated house and wrapped herself in blankets, waiting out the cold weather.
Finally, she found a new place on the west side, furnishing it with secondhand furniture and appliances. Her mother gave her a hot plate. Finding the house was a major step in getting her kids back. Six months after they had been taken away, her two sons were returned to her. Bev was still required to live in the youth home, but was allowed to visit her mother on weekends.
“When my baby came home, he didn’t laugh or play or talk very much,” Carrie said. “At night he would wake up screaming. My oldest boy hated Bev for what she did, although he’s getting over it now. The two boys are very close. And I’m learning how to get along with Bev on a one-to-one basis. When she comes home, she’ll have to learn that she can’t just run wild. She’ll have to work for what she gets.”
By this time we had been sitting in the PACT office for half an hour, and Carrie had to go. Before she left, she invited me to visit her the following Saturday afternoon.
The house that Carrie searched months to find is a small, wooden bungalow on a quiet street in northwest Detroit. When I arrived, neighbors were watering their lawns and engaging in laughing porch-to-porch conversations, while their children rode bicycles on the sidewalk and ran from house to house. As I walked up to Carrie’s door I noticed them noticing me; probably they thought I was another welfare inspector.
I found Carrie, wearing a red sweater and jeans, sitting in her living room, on a Salvation Army couch. Bev, home for the weekend, sat on the other end. Carrie’s eldest son, Arnold, was at work, but Clarence raced around with a manic, six-year-old’s energy. The place was clean but spare, the only wall decoration a hole punched through the plasterboard in the living room.
Bev was in a bubbly mood that afternoon, still excited about her high school homecoming game the night before.
Although she lives in a girls’ home, she attends a regular school on the west side. Like ninth grade girls everywhere she was worried about her appearance. “I’m only five-two and I weigh one hundred and twenty-four pounds,” she said ruefully, dipping into a bag of potato chips on the coffee table. “And I’m the darkest one in the whole family.”
Despite her ingenuous manner and baby face, Bev has had experiences that most American teenagers couldn’t even imagine. In the two years she had been away she had run away from the girls’ home half a dozen times. During one of her escapes, she and two girlfriends wound up in a crack house, where they spent two traumatic weeks. Bev saw people beaten bloody, stabbed, and one customer shot to death. After the shooting, the man who ran the house tried to keep her there by force; he was afraid she would tell the police. One day, while he was out, she fled. A few weeks later, her girlfriend, also fifteen, was murdered by the pusher, who accused her of stealing money and drugs.
She told this grisly story without prompting, in a high, girlish tone, while her mother sat on the other end of the couch and shook her head in dismay. “I know some people won’t like this,” Carrie said, “but whenever you got a whole lot of black people, you’re gonna have problems. Blacks are ignorant and rude. Like that Suicide boyfriend of yours.”
“Oh, Mama, he was just a friend,” Bev said.
“She had a boyfriend named Suicide,” said Carrie in a grim voice. “Suicide. He called up here and I answered, and he said, ‘Yo, mama, Bev be home?’ That’s what I mean. Just an ignorant, crude nigger.”
Bev was only a year older than my own daughter, Michal. I tried to imagine how I would feel if she came home with a boyfriend named Suicide. But of course she wouldn’t, I thought. Where would she meet someone like that? And even if she did, I’d put a stop to it. Or could I? I tried to imagine myself duking it out with a young hoodlum. Then I tried to imagine Carrie doing it. It wasn’t an easy picture to conjure up in either case.
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