Suicide was now out of the picture, but Carrie also disapproved of Bev’s current boyfriend, a twenty-four-year-old musician. “I don’t do anything with him,” Bev protested, sounding like a teenager on a sitcom. “And I don’t like it when he calls me his woman. I’m too young to be someone’s woman. I just want a friend to talk to.” Her mother, who first got pregnant when she was just about Bev’s age, listened skeptically.
“You better think about what you’re doing, Bev,” she said. “This boy is a man. I tell this girl—wait for marriage to have sex. But if you can’t wait, I’ll take you to the doctor to have some pills. I’m telling you, every guy who tells you ‘I love you,’ what he means is ‘I love it.’ Just look at me and try to learn from my mistakes.”
“Mama, I know that,” Bev said. “I want to have a career, I want to be a policewoman. But, Mama, babies are so cute. You can dress them up and play with them.”
“If you don’t have any money, you can’t afford to dress anybody up.” Carrie sighed. Suddenly Bev sounded much younger than fifteen, and her mother seemed a lot older than thirty-three.
It was lunchtime, and we went to a neighborhood pizza parlor. Although Carrie and her kids have spent most of their lives on welfare, they seemed perfectly comfortable in the restaurant, expertly picking through the salad bar and the Italian menu. Clarence asked for a stack of quarters and amused himself at the Pac-man machine.
At the table, Bev took out a small mirror and a comb. “I have a white brother and a Jewish cousin, and they both have such good hair,” she said. “Not like me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your hair,” said Carrie. She explained that Bev’s white ‘brother’ is actually a trick baby, the child of her father’s wife—a prostitute—and one of her customers. The Jewish cousin is the daughter of Carrie’s sister and a man named Herb. Carrie explained these things without evident embarrassment. One of the things she learned at PACT is that it is permissible to talk openly with her children about sex.
“In my house, you didn’t talk about sex,” she recalled. “Once I asked my mother about the pill. When I got up off the floor, she said never to mention it again. I couldn’t communicate with my mother at all. She was too busy working and entertaining guests. My parents were very straightlaced. I’m glad my father wasn’t alive to see my children taken away—it would have destroyed him.”
The food arrived and Clarence left his Pac-man game to join us. He seemed happy and content, until his mother rose from the table. Suddenly a look of panic crossed his face. “Mama, where you goin’?” he demanded.
“Just next door for some cigarettes, baby. I’ll be right back,” she said. Reassured, he rubbed a small hand across his eyes and returned to his pizza.
Bev ate with foster-home etiquette, primly and efficiently. Once she reminded her mother not to sit with her elbows on the table. Carrie smiled, proud of her daughter’s manners. When Clarence spilled some of his Coke, Bev wiped it up with a napkin, saying nothing. He waited for a moment, surprised.
“Hey, ain’t nobody mad at me?” he piped.
“Why should we be?” asked Bev in a matronly tone. “It was an accident.”
“Seems like if you waste food, somebody gonna be mad,” said Clarence, sounding disappointed. Carrie leaned across the table and stroked his cheek.
Watching the interplay between Carrie and her kids, I had to remind myself that they were prime examples of the “urban underclass”—an unwed welfare mother, a rebellious teenage daughter who had lived in crack houses, and a small boy who had already spent almost half his life in foster homes. The conventional wisdom is that such people are irresponsible at best, and possibly evil. But the truth, it seemed to me, was more banal. Bev was a sweet, confused adolescent girl; her mother, a bright, harassed woman with no money and no resources to fall back on. I wondered if, in similar circumstances, I could have done better—and I wasn’t sure.
Clearly, despite the differences in our backgrounds, Carrie wants the same things for her kids that I want for mine—to finish school, go to college, stay away from drugs and violence, and wait for babies until marriage.
These are the values she preaches to her children, but her authority is limited; unlike Louise McCall, she is not strong enough, financially or personally, to provide security or impose discipline. She can only tell them what she thinks and hope they listen.
On the way home from the restaurant, Bev mentioned a fourteen-year-old cousin who just had her first child. “That girl has ruined her life,” said Carrie sternly. “She’ll never get an education now, or a decent job.”
“I know, Mama,” said Bev in her bubbly teenage voice. “But, Mama, that baby is so cute.…”
Carrie sighed and said nothing. She saw what might be coming, but was powerless to stop it. Only thirty-three herself, the woman who was still fighting to get back her daughter knew that she soon might have a grandchild to raise.
Northwestern High School shares Detroit’s Grand Boulevard with two citadels of the city’s faded dreams: General Motors World Headquarters, and Hitsville USA, the former Motown studio. Northwestern is also near the place where Clementine Barfield’s son Derrick was murdered. The day before he was killed, Derrick Barfield, knowing his life was in danger, had gone looking for Kim Weston for protection. He never found her, and by the time she heard about it, it was too late. “I don’t know what he thought I could do,” she said. “But I sure would have tried to do something.”
Thousands of young people have sought the protection and support of Kim Weston. The director of Festival, the city’s performing arts program, she is a quiet, dignified woman, nearing fifty, with dark skin and a face that belongs on an African coin. When she enters a room, the toughest street kids in Detroit stand up and take off their hats. When she holds up her hand, an auditorium full of noisy teenagers falls into immediate silence. And when she sings, usually gospel, the most talented young artists in the city listen with openmouthed awe.
People in the music community of Detroit say that Weston is one of the finest female singers the city has ever seen—a considerable compliment in a town that has produced Diana Ross, Anita Baker, Martha Reeves and Aretha Franklin. Weston herself makes no such claim. In the early sixties she had a string of hits as a Motown artist, but she was never a superstar.
In 1966, Weston left Motown and moved to Los Angeles, but she didn’t feel at home. Her husband, former Motown A&R director Mickey Stevenson, wanted to live in Hollywood near the show business community, but Weston hated its glitz and pressure. She missed being among black people, and used to drive miles across town, to Watts, to work with Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. She missed Detroit and the people she had grown up with on the city’s east side. And so, in 1972, Kim Weston came back home. Five years later, she founded Festival.
For her faculty, Weston chose Motown alumni—Beans Bowles, the musical director of the Motown Revue; Hank Cosby, who played horn on many of the old Motown hits; former personnel director Dorothy Carey; Teddy Harris, Jr., who worked with Diana Ross and the Supremes; costume designer Margaret Brown, who created the stage outfits for the Temptations and other Motown acts, and a number of others. She recruited them both for their professional skills and as role models for aspiring teenage performers. They serve as reminders that kids from the streets of the city can do something special.
“Did you ever see any of the old Motown artists?” Weston asked me as we walked down the hall of Northwestern High. It was a sweltering August afternoon, and I had come to see Festival in action.
“I saw you at the Fox Theater in the Motown Revue,” I said. “It was back in about 1962. You wore a tight red dress and you sang a show tune. How’s that?”
“Shut up!” Weston said, laughing and embarrassed. “You must have been a fan.”
“A fanatic,” I said. And I was. Our parents didn’t understand Motown, but we did. At one time I was even in a group—King Mellow and the High Earls of Jive—that dreamed of becom
ing Hitsville’s first integrated act. I was debating whether to demonstrate a few bars of our unforgettable rendition of “Two Lovers” when Weston was stopped by a pretty sixteen-year-old named Piper Carter. She was scheduled to perform in one of the minishows that Festival puts on at old folks’ homes and community centers around the city, and wanted to talk to Kim about her act.
“Is that what you want to do, be a professional rapper?” I asked.
“No, actually I want to be an attorney,” she said. “I’m planning to go to Harvard. What I really like to do is write poetry. But rapping might be a good way to make some money while I’m in college. It’s expensive, you know.”
Weston beamed and led me into the vocal music workshop. As soon as she entered, the room came to a respectful silence.
“We have a visitor with us today,” she said, pointing to me. “I want you to let him know, are you as good as the singers from Motown?”
“Yes!” the class erupted.
“Are you better than we were?”
“Yes!” they chorused.
“Okay,” she said, pleased. “Let me hear you prove it.”
A small, dark young man left his seat and stood at the head of the class. A pianist hit the opening chord and he began to sing “Amazing Grace” in a pure, clear baritone. When he hit the high notes with a flourish, the room erupted into cheers of “Sing, George, sing.” He closed his eyes and improvised, daring his own range, and the kids clapped wildly. Weston stood in the corner, listening intently, arms folded across her chest.
When the song ended, George walked across the room. Weston unfolded her arms and hugged him. There were tears running down her cheeks. Happy and embarrassed, George turned to the class. “Hey, give me two,” he said, and they responded with two sharp claps of applause. “Give me one,” he commanded, and they clapped once more. “Now, give me a half,” he yelled, and they moved their hands together, stopping just short of contact. The silence was a surprise, and Weston doubled over, laughing.
The kids sang on and on. A frail, pretty girl with reddish hair performed “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” The entire group sang “Now We Sing Joyfully unto God,” sounding like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Then choir instructor Rudy Hawkins sat down at the piano and played one of their favorites, a rousing gospel number called “Spirit of the Living God.” Weston sang along, quietly, careful not to upstage her young protégés.
The gospel spirit is part of Kim Weston, and of Festival. When you ask her how she is, she answers, “I’m blessed.” On especially good days she says, “I’m better than blessed”; on bad ones, “I’m blessed anyway.” And in private moments, when she is asked what she wants to accomplish with Festival, she says, “I want to be a blessing in the lives of these young people.” Coming from any other show business personality, such sentiments would sound corny, but for Weston they are natural expressions of a personality molded by a life of deep, fervent faith in God.
Kim Weston was raised, literally, in church. Her mother was an officer in the Apostolic Overcoming Holiness Church, a sanctified denomination with a stern moral code that forbade secular music, dancing, and even riding the bus for fun. She and Kim lived in a small apartment over the sanctuary. In the early morning, before she went to school, Kim would accompany her mother downstairs, where, together, they dusted the pews, swept the floor and lighted the stove in winter.
Kim’s mother spent her days cleaning white people’s houses, her nights looking after church business and her weekends singing in the choir and cooking barbecue to raise money for the congregation. At the age of three, Kim sang her first solo at a Sunday evening service, and by the time she was a teenager, she was a featured performer in the Wright Specials, a local gospel group.
One of the reasons for Weston’s amazing rapport with her “young people” is her authenticity. Although she rarely discusses her background, they can sense that she has been where they are now—black, poor, the child of a single mother with nothing more to fall back on than belief in God and her own talent. And there is something more; Weston was there, at Hitsville, a part of the Motown legend that motivates and haunts the city’s talented teenagers.
Kim Weston came to Motown in the early sixties, after songwriter Eddie Holland heard about her singing and invited her to record some songs. At first she refused because she felt uncomfortable singing secular music. But Holland was persistent, she needed the money, and eventually she made the trip across town to Hitsville, USA.
In those days, Hitsville was more than a company headquarters. It was a fraternity house, an exclusive club where black teenagers came together to make music and money under the tutelage of homeboy Berry Gordy. They sang together, partied together, toured together and often married one another. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live a decade later, the Motown stars were the envy of young America, permanent guests at the hottest party in the country.
Like a lot of parties, this one ended with a hangover. In the early seventies, Berry Gordy moved his operation to the West Coast, taking a few of his most popular acts with him and leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Gordy’s defection meant little to the white establishment. A scan of the Motown file at the Free Press reveals the extent of this apathy; the paper published only two articles—one a denial, one a confirmation—about Motown’s departure. There was virtually no editorial discussion or op-end comment. Thus did Berry Gordy move Motown, a multimillion-dollar industry with inestimable public relations value—out of the city.
White adults never saw Motown as more than a bunch of black kids in capes and ball gowns. But for blacks, losing the company was a demoralizing blow. The auto companies promised young Detroiters a job, but Motown offered more—a chance for greatness. Every kid who sang in church dreamed of following Smokey and Diana, Martha and Little Stevie—and Kim Weston—into Berry Gordy’s star-making machine on West Grand Boulevard.
Today, now that it is too late, people understand what they lost. The state of Michigan uses Motown songs in its promotions and the governor was on hand to dedicate the Motown Museum, located in the old Hitsville studio, which is all that is left of the Detroit show business dream.
The museum attracts more than a thousand visitors a month, most of them from out of town. People come to pay homage to the Motown sound and to gaze at the tiny Studio Number One, a primitive facility where most of the early hits were recorded. A Lebanese Christian told a tour guide that he used to listen to “My Girl” while his village was being bombed by Druze artillery. A Japanese tourist fainted from excitement in the control room. A lady from England stood on the spot where the Supremes had recorded “Stop in the Name of Love” and cried.
“This is the first place I came when I arrived in Detroit,” said Gerald Clark, the man who had brought Floyd to my cocktail party. Clark, who often speaks in fragments of old rock and roll lyrics, arrived in Detroit from Springfield, Massachusetts. “I wanted to be a songwriter, and this was Mecca. I drove from Springfield, and I listened to Motown songs the entire way.” He looked lovingly around the studio he never managed to penetrate, and remembered an old Smokey Robinson tune. “You really had a hold on me,” he said to the empty room.
Clark’s friend Bob Kerse came a little closer. In the late sixties he worked at Motown briefly as an assistant technician, and he had dreams of becoming a producer. “I didn’t take it seriously back then, though,” he said. “I was a young guy and I goofed off. I thought there would be plenty of time. Nobody ever dreamed that Motown would leave Detroit. Motown was Detroit.”
In the summer of 1988, Clark and Kerse were trying to revive the dream. They were promoting amateur shows, attempting to locate and sign new singers, just as their idol, Berry Gordy, had done a generation before. But, they admitted, things were going slowly. The talent was still there, an unending stream of church-schooled crooners and shouters, but the magic was missing, and so were the audiences. “Some nights we don’t get more than fifty, sixty people,” said Kerse. “I don’t know wha
t the problem is, but it’s pretty discouraging.”
The shows were staged at the Palms, a downtown movie house just a few blocks from the Fox Theater, where the Motown Revue once performed, and this proximity gave a haunting, melancholy flavor to the effort. Many of the contestants were kids from the Festival program. Kim Weston encouraged them and helped them prepare. She takes a proprietary interest in their careers, and her greatest frustration is that she has been unable to help most of them find outlets for their talent.
When they do perform, Weston is often in the audience to cheer them on. That is what brought her one evening to the Latin Quarter, a downtown showroom where Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were staging a bon voyage show on the eve of a British tour. Weston, who dislikes nightclubs, was there because Martha is an old friend from Miller High and Motown, but mostly because some Festival graduates were performing that night in the New Breed Be-bop Society Orchestra.
When she arrived at the club, there was a sense of excitement and reunion in the air. The tables on the mezzanine had little white place cards reserving them for “Miracles,” “Contours,” “Spinners,” “Tops” and other members of the Motown royalty. The entirely black audience sat at long tables on the sprawling main floor and looked up at the empty places with anticipation. The parking attendants under the club’s marquee inspected the new arrivals closely, searching for stars.
Backstage, Martha Reeves sat in a red-sequined gown and fussed with her long, straight wig. When she saw Kim Weston, she jumped up and gave her a warm kiss. The two women, about the same age, made an interesting contrast. Reeves looked like an aging teenager; Weston, who had just come from a reception honoring civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, wore glasses and had her hair pulled back primly in a knot.
One of the Vandellas spotted Weston and came over to give her a hug. “You got back together a year ago, right?” Kim asked, and the Vandella nodded. “Well, y’all started a year before me last time, so maybe I’ll start up again pretty soon myself,” Weston said. The two women giggled, remembering their first years at Motown, more than a quarter century before.
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