Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  Randall has lived his life with books. For years he was a librarian and poet-in-residence at Wayne State University. During that time he founded the Broadside Press, a forum for black poets. But now, retired, he doesn’t write anymore, nor does he bother much with literature. “I no longer find truth in the great poets or the great books,” he said. There was a pause. “I still read Tolstoy,” he added, and fell silent again.

  “What’s it like being the Poet Laureate of Detroit?” I asked. Randall considered for a moment. “Poetry isn’t such a big thing in Detroit,” he said finally, in a flat tone.

  “What do you think of the city?” I asked, trying hard to make conversation. Friends had told me that Dudley Randall was one of the smartest, most perceptive people in Detroit, but he seemed too discouraged to talk. He looked out the window at the car. “I want to move away,” he said. “I’d like to go someplace where it’s warm.”

  A few weeks earlier, on a visit to the mayor’s office, I had noticed a poem of Randall’s, entitled “Detroit Renaissance,” which is dedicated to Coleman Young, hanging on a wall in the reception room. Now I asked Randall about it, and he rose slowly, returning with a slim volume of his work, which includes the poem. He sat in silence as I read it to myself.

  Cities have died, have burned,

  Yet phoenix-like returned

  To soar up livelier, lovelier than before. Detroit has felt the fire

  Yet each time left the pyre

  As if the flames had power to restore.

  First, burn away the myths

  Of what it was, and is—

  A lovely, tree-laned town of peace and trade.

  Hatred has festered here,

  And bigotry and fear

  Filled streets with strife and raised the barricade.

  Wealth of a city lies,

  Not in its factories,

  Its marts and towers crowding to the sky,

  But in its people who

  Possess grace to imbue

  Their lives with beauty, wisdom, charity.

  You have those too long hid,

  Who built the pyramids,

  Who searched the skies and mapped the planets’ range,

  Who sang the songs of grief

  That made the whole world weep,

  Whose Douglass, Malcolm, Martin rung in change.

  The Indian, with his soul

  Attuned to nature’s role;

  The sons and daughters of Cervantes’ smile;

  Pan Tadeysz’s children too

  Entrust their fate to you;

  Souls forged by Homer’s, Dante’s

  Shakespeare’s, Goethe’s, Yeats’s style.

  Together we will build

  A city that will yield

  To all their hopes and dreams so long deferred.

  New faces will appear

  Too long neglected here;

  New minds, new means will build a brave new world.

  “Do you still believe it?” I asked. “Will you ever be able to rebuild this city together?”

  Randall looked at me and shrugged, a slow movement of tired shoulders. “I guess not,” said the Poet Laureate of Detroit. “All the white people have moved away.”

  And that is the simple truth. The week I met with Randall, the Detroit papers published a University of Chicago study that found, to no one’s surprise, that the suburbs of the Motor City are the most segregated in the United States.

  Many blacks look beyond the Eight Mile Road border and see America—an undifferentiated, uncaring world of suburban affluence where they are neither liked nor wanted. Actually, the almost four million people of the Metropolitan Detroit area—Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties—are subdivided by ethnicity. Macomb, to the northeast, is blue-collar territory; a large percentage of its people are second- and third-generation Polish and Italian refugees from Detroit. Oakland, to the northwest, is the second wealthiest American county among those with a population of over one million, and it is dominated by WASPs and, to a lesser extent, Jews. Detroit itself is located in Wayne County, whose population, outside the city, includes a good number of working-class southern whites, Hispanics, Arabs and ethnics.

  In most ways the towns of the tri-county area have little in common; what they share is an estrangement from Detroit. Unlike the suburbs of other major cities, they are not bedroom communities. The average suburbanite almost never visits the city for any reason. As Arthur Johnson, head of the local NAACP, observed, Detroiters know they aren’t loved by their neighbors. During the early years of the great white exodus this antipathy was impersonal. It got a face in 1973, with the election of Mayor Coleman Young.

  The problem started with Young’s inaugural address, in which he warned hoodlums (“whether they’re wearing blue uniforms or Superfly suits”) to “hit Eight Mile and keep on going.” The idea of Detroit policemen crossing the boundary didn’t seem to bother suburbanites, but they were mightily exercised by the prospect of a legion of Superfly badasses invading their turf.

  A more politic mayor would have tried to mend fences, but Young is not a fence-mender. He dubbed his neighbors “the hostile suburbs” and mounted a campaign of verbal and political harassment that still goes on today. They responded with a hatred usually reserved for enemy heads of state—which, in a way, he is. The mention of the mayor’s name is enough to set off tirades from the ritzy salons of Grosse Pointe to the redneck suburbs—places such as Melvindale, “The Little Town with the Big Heart.”

  Melvindale is a hamlet of modest, neatly tended tract houses, located not far from the Ford factories that employ many of its twelve thousand citizens. Like other working-class suburbs heavily dependent on the auto industry, it has experienced hard times since the seventies, although not so hard as the city of Detroit, where most of its people were born and raised.

  The nerve center of Melvindale is Tom Coogan’s barbershop, a two-chair emporium with a homey, Mayberry feeling—bear rugs and stuffed moose heads on the wall, brown-and-white-checked linoleum on the floor, and a sign in the window: BURGLARS BEWARE. And, in back of a barber chair, over a Pinaud Clubman Talc advertisment, there is another sign: TOM COOGAN, MAYOR.

  When I arrived at his shop, Mayor Coogan had a constituent in the chair and three more waiting for haircuts. Coogan is a genial, cautious man in a pale blue barber’s smock whose thick glasses give him a scholarly appearance. He was in the middle of trimming a sideburn when a woman with a Tennessee accent came in to complain about overgrown weeds in a lot near her house. A believer in direct action, Coogan put down his scissors and called the police chief on the walkie-talkie he keeps next to his barber tools. He spoke briefly, then picked up his shears once again. “The violation is in the mail,” he told the lady.

  “Can you imagine Coleman Young doing something like that?” I asked, hoping to get a rise. I got one. A waiting customer snorted. “You have to change your color, you want any help from him,” he said.

  “No, Coleman is responsive,” said Coogan with collegial solidarity.

  “Shit, that son of a bitch don’t even take care of black people, let alone white,” said another man. “Back in the fifties, Detroit was a beautiful city. You could get drunk in Detroit.”

  Coogan snipped reflectively. “The city started deteriorating when they took off STRESS [a tough police unit, established after the 1967 riot, which deployed white cops as decoys in mostly black areas]. It kept people honest, being subject to search. Now everybody packs a piece downtown.”

  The old man in the chair, who was getting a marine crew cut, cleared his throat. “Back in the old days when I was in Detroit there were colored but they knew their place. They knew right from wrong. They wanted to work then, not like today.” The others said “Damn right” and “Goddamn Young,” but Coogan snipped away in silence.

  Except when Tom Coogan is conducting municipal business, his barbershop is a male preserve, a sort of club where fellas drop in every so often to get their ears raised whether they need i
t or not. They are talkers, and they weren’t at all averse to chewing the fat with a visiting writer, especially when the subject was the city they once lived in and now view as an alien colony.

  “Detroit is real squalor,” drawled one of the regulars. “All Young cares about is the great big monuments he’s building himself.”

  “Shit, they enjoy the environment they’re in. That’s the way they are,” said another man.

  The blue phone that Coogan uses for official business rang. He picked it up and said, “Mayor Coogan.” As he spoke, the old fellow in the barber chair said, “This here is the only place in Michigan where you can insult the mayor. Ol’ Tom’s the best mayor we ever had. Even the best ain’t too damn good, but he’s the best anyway.” It got a laugh, and Coogan, hand over the receiver, nodded in agreement.

  The mayor completed his conversation, finished the flattop and another man climbed into the chair for a six-dollar haircut. “Every community has crime and drug problems,” Coogan said, “and we’ve got our share. But we try to keep Detroit from spilling over into Melvindale. We run police cars up and down Schaffer Road at night—that’s our border with Detroit—and we feel it’s a deterrent. We’ve been able to keep the crime under control out here.”

  “Control, hell,” said one of the men. “My insurance guy called the other day and said, ‘Bill, we’ve got to raise your premiums because of Detroit.’ ”

  “Hell, the insurance companies will use any excuse,” said the fellow in the chair.

  “Yeah, well ninety-five percent of prisoners are black,” said Bill. “Now, what does that tell ya?”

  “Where is the mom and dad, that’s what I wonder,” said a young man who had come into the shop and assumed one of the Naugahyde seats along the wall.

  “Hell, they can’t even count their kids. I used to walk three miles ever’ day to Southwestern High School, for cripes sakes,” said Bill.

  The mayor snipped away and said nothing.

  “Last time I was in Detroit, some big black come up and asked me for some money,” said the young man. “I told him, ‘If you ain’t out of here in two seconds I’ll kill ya.’ But I’ll tell ya something, I wouldn’t drive my car down Woodward Avenue today. Them big black dudes standing down there—shit.”

  A heavyset middle-aged man named Carl, wearing a soiled T-shirt and work pants, came in to the shop and was enthusiastically greeted. He is considered the town wit, and he immediately went into his routine—a series of jokes about Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis, dagos and A-rabs, and Greeks who, according to him, have a universal passion for anal sex. Then, surprisingly, he offered a minority opinion on Coleman Young.

  “I think Coleman’s good,” he said. “He’s fast, forward and he tells it like it is.”

  “Shit,” said the young man, whose name was Angelo. “You’re the first white guy I ever heard say something good about him.”

  “Yeah, well where was my car stolen, Detroit or Melvindale?” Carl demanded. “People are afraid to go into Detroit just because of the fear instilled by the news media. Blacks are human, you know. Just don’t go looking for problems and you’ll be all right.”

  “This guy is crazy,” said Angelo. “He’ll go anywhere. I ride with him and I start to shake. Shit, Detroit, man. My old house is gone. Wiped out.”

  “Yeah, well you fuckin’ I-talians abused the houses. Blacks didn’t want them no more. You left them a ghetto,” said Carl.

  Angelo was furious. “Tell them about that incident on Belle Isle—you never tell that to anybody,” he almost shouted.

  “Shit, all that happened is some blacks hassled my car over on Belle Isle. They didn’t hurt nobody,” said Carl.

  Mayor Coogan continued snipping, and said nothing.

  “1967?” said Bill. “I was over at the Stroh’s Brewery when the riot broke out. Blacks and whites were shooting each other all over the place. They say that only forty-three were killed but that’s a damned lie—I counted more’n a hundred in the hallway at Receiving Hospital.”

  “Fuckin’ blacks, man,” someone said, and the others shook their heads. “Fuckin’ Coleman Young.”

  Carl, the liberal, sensed he was losing his audience. “You’re from Israel, right?” he said to me. “Did you hear the one about the Jewish Santa Claus? He asks the kids for presents.” The men laughed, happy to be back on familiar ground.

  “I’ll tell you one thing about Detroit,” said Mayor Coogan, snipping away at his customer’s neck. “I don’t know about this other stuff, but it’s the best damn sports town in the world. I think we can all agree on that.”

  Not every politician in suburban Detroit is as circumspect as the barber-mayor of Melvindale. Few, on the other hand, are as outspoken as Brooks Patterson, who served as prosecutor of Oakland County for sixteen years before stepping down in 1988, and made a career out of Detroit-bashing.

  Patterson’s headquarters was the Oakland County courthouse, a modernistic building set down in the vacant land in the northern tip of Pontiac. On the day I visited him, the halls were quiet. A dorky-looking young couple wearing his-and-hers matching dental braces walked hand in hand, holding a marriage certificate. Outside a courtroom, a white lawyer and a black defendant were in conference, the lawyer saying, “I can’t promise, I can’t promise, I can’t promise …” while his client peered off into the distance. But there was no tension in the air, none of the hurly-burly normally associated with places where people’s fates are determined. Clearly, in Brooks Patterson’s domain, things were under control.

  Patterson himself appeared relaxed and jocular. He was only a few months away from voluntary retirement and there was an end-of-the-semester informality about him. Nearing fifty, he was wearing a sport shirt, a boating jacket and moccasins without socks. A boyish-looking man with a round face and a dry “heh, heh, heh” kind of laugh, he had the air of shrewd efficiency normally associated with the security chief of a medium-sized corporation.

  Patterson, like his nemesis, Coleman Young, is known to local journalists as “good copy.” One reporter who came to interview him found a miniature electric chair, complete with a battery-charged shock, on display. To another, who asked him if he would be defending felons in private practice, he replied that he wouldn’t “unless they’re members of the family.” But, despite his sense of humor, Brooks Patterson is a highly unpopular man in the city of Detroit, where he is regarded as the symbol of suburban racism.

  Patterson considers the charge unfair. “I’m color-blind,” he said. “But out here we don’t plea-bargain on breaking and entering cases, assault and other violent crimes, and black defendants don’t like it. Oakland County is less than ten percent black but eighty five percent of the jail population is black.”

  I wrote down the statistic, but the prosecutor suddenly seemed unsure. He picked up a phone and asked an assistant for the racial breakdown of the county’s prisoners. “Actually, that number is about fifty percent,” he corrected himself in a same-difference tone of voice.

  It is rare for a suburban politician to talk so specifically about blacks. In the established code, they are “Detroiters,” and whites are “suburbanites.” A few years ago, when Patterson became embroiled in one of his epic battles with Coleman Young, these terms came into wide public use.

  That was back in 1984, when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. Following the final game, gangs of drunken revelers celebrated by attacking passersby and burning a car. The incident, which drew national attention, was a major embarrassment to the city, and Young blamed it on his neighbors.

  “When Coleman Young talked about marauding gangs coming in from the suburbs, I checked the figures,” said Patterson. “It turned out that on that same day, thirty of the last thirty arrests in Southfield [an Oakland County city that abuts Detroit] were of Detroiters. Now, is that racial? Bullshit. The fact is, Detroiters present a serious law enforcement problem to Oakland County.”

  Although he denies being a racist, Patterson beg
an his public career as the attorney for NAG (the National Action Group), a Pontiac-based organization dedicated to fighting school busing. His high profile in that struggle won him election as prosecutor in 1972. Twice he led unsuccessful state-wide petition drives to institute capital punishment, and he established a policy of refusing to plea-bargain in cases involving serious crimes.

  He also developed an appetite for political advancement. A hard-line Republican in a basically Democratic state, three times he ran for higher office—governor, senator and attorney general—and three times he lost. In each race, his base of support was conservative suburbanites, many of them former liberals, who applauded his law-and-order attacks on Detroit.

  “In this county, robbery is a crime,” said Patterson. “In Detroit, it’s an occupation. It’s warfare in the city, it absolutely is. A baby born in Detroit has a bigger statistical chance of being killed than a soldier in World War Two. If I was the mayor, I’d call in the National Guard.”

  I mentioned that, in their defense, Detroiters often say that there is crime in the suburbs, too, but Patterson wasn’t having any. “We’ve got a crime problem? Bullshit! We have crime, sure; there’s more than a million people here. But by percentage, we’re light-years ahead of Detroit when it comes to protecting the public.”

  Hundreds of speeches to Kiwanis Clubs and Rotaries have given Patterson a ready command of the statistics. “In Wayne County in 1987, out of a population of two-point-two million, there were close to one thousand homicides,” he said. “Here, in Oakland County, with one-point-one million, there were between forty-five and fifty.”

  The great suburban nightmare is that the violence of Detroit will spill out beyond Eight Mile Road. In the mid-eighties, Grosse Pointe, which abuts the city, tried to build a “flood-control wall” along the border, and the town of Dearborn passed an ordinance forbidding the use of its parks to nonresidents.

  “The walls will be up for a long time,” he said. “Is there hatred between us and them? Okay, I don’t deny it. We see ourselves as a target. In this situation you see the evidence of one man’s hatred for the honkies. He’s the racist. Things will quiet down when Coleman leaves.”