Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

by Paul Clemens

  “Her apartment is on the way to the highway,” I told Tom as we climbed into his Corolla. “We’re running a little late,” he said, but I reminded him that we gained an hour driving to Chicago, which was a time zone behind us. “Besides, it’ll only take a second. I just want to see what she wants.” Her roommate let us in and called her to the living room. Tom smiled when he saw her: so this was why we stopped.

  She asked, shyly, what I was up to, and I said that we were driving to Chicago for the night. “When are you leaving?” “Now.” “Oh,” she said, “I open tomorrow morning at nine. Rats.” She was a girl who said “rats.” “Hold on a second,” she said, and ran to the back of the apartment. She returned smiling, holding a toothbrush aloft. “Promise to get me back on time?”

  The second we got to Chicago I tried to ditch Tom, who’d deftly driven us through a blizzard on I-94, but he accompanied us to an Irish pub in Lincoln Park called The River Shannon (“[snow] . . . was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves”). He’d failed to find the people we’d come to meet, vague figures whose names I could no longer recall. He stayed at our table for a couple drinks before making a graceful exit, eventually finding his way to the apartment of a friend of mine where, after several increasingly frantic phone calls, I’d secured our use of the floor.

  The walls of the pub were lined with the photos of cadets from the Chicago Police Academy from the turn of the last century, almost every one of whom had an Irish last name. We talked about her time in Ireland, which she’d spent in a small village north of Galway. The houses they’d lived in were poorly heated, and I was charmed by her description of how, before turning in for the night, they’d heat pans on the stove and then run them over the bedding to warm the sheets and blankets. Every sixty minutes, with another round of Jameson’s to warm us, we noted that it was actually an hour later, our time; by eleven it was already the New Year according to our body clocks, but I was secretly happy to have another hour to plot my midnight strategy. When 1998 finally came to Chicago, I gave her a polite peck on the cheek. A pub wasn’t the place. “Let’s go,” I said. We walked to my friend’s apartment in the snow and wind, huddling around the corners of buildings when the breeze off Lake Michigan became too much. She smoked a cigarette, and I did, too, for the hell of it, and we made some progress from that initial peck.

  “Get up,” I said to Tom a couple hours later, giving him a kick. Everyone else in the apartment—nine of us were on the floor—was fast asleep. My new girlfriend and I had been forced to sleep head to toe in order to fit. “It’s five o’clock.” “We’ve got time, then,” Tom said. “It’s a three-hour drive back.” “But it’s already six in Michigan. We lose an hour going that way.” “I thought we gained an hour.” “That was eight hours ago. Get up. We promised to get her back on time.” We made it back by five to nine, and she brushed her teeth in the bookstore’s bathroom.

  On nights when she didn’t have class and neither of us had work she began to cook dinners. I hadn’t enjoyed many home-cooked meals in graduate school, though the occasional female Ph.D. candidate had taken pity on me. Neither had I had many nutritious meals since. Books I couldn’t live without, but if I’d had to be personally responsible for all that went into the making of a pleasant dinner—the shopping, preparation, serving, and disposal—I’d have quite happily starved. My days, like those of many another postgraduate male, were distinguished by their almost complete inattention to life’s organizing principles.

  Back in the seventh and eighth grades, I’d been attracted to the cute Italian girls whose upper lips had begun to darken around the time mine had. Now I had found a girl who was fair, non-Catholic, and completely, eerily calm most all the time. I’d never before realized that it was possible to live a life at such a low decibel level. There was no need, as in Detroit, to constantly assert oneself; silence could be pleasant, even productive. For our first formal date we attended a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, and we talked only slightly less during the sixty-minute funeral mass than we did at other times. I appreciated her passivity, which seemed less like weakness than a source of power, after the manner of those martial arts in which you employ your opponent’s aggressiveness against him. Her blood pressure, I thought, must be astonishingly low, a stark contrast with that of the people where I had come from, where the entire region had a vein pulsating on its collective forehead. She made me want to be other—better—than I was.

  On the first night such information would have any relevance to me she took my hand—hers were shaking—and said, “There’s something I have to tell you.” I smoothed her hair back, smiled, and said I didn’t care. Four months later she was pregnant.

  “I just remind myself that worse injustices happen all over the world, all the time,” she said. This was sincere: there was an Amnesty International sticker on her stereo speakers, directly above a picture of Kurt Cobain.

  The very calm that had first attracted me now infuriated me; I felt that I had to seek retribution, on her behalf, for the rape she’d suffered two years before. Though the question was by no means constant, occurring with varying degrees of intensity and sometimes staying away for days, it was never terribly far from my thoughts, either: Which tree to hang this fucker from?

  She hadn’t, in fact, specified her attacker’s race—she was too socially sensitive for that. But a mutual friend filled me in on this detail a few weeks later. She, too, was a delicate young woman, of a sort common among our group: vegetarian, single, her recipes taken from The Moosewood Cookbook and her toothpaste trucked in from an organic farm in Maine—the sort of girl, as Salinger puts it somewhere, with a head full of very touching crap. It was a surprise, then, that she would freely inform me that the attacker was black. I’d thought, in these circles, that it was holy writ that black men didn’t commit such crimes, and that Gregory Peck could prove it.

  But a black man didn’t rape her, I told myself; a man who happened to be black did. In the interests of open-mindedness and a sense of fair play, I kept repeating this to myself: a man who happened to be black. Who happened to be. Happened to—how’s that for a funny locution? What were the odds, I wondered, of that “happened to” happening?

  When I learned of the landlord who owned the building in which the rape had occurred, and who could have been held legally liable for failing to equip the apartment building with a locking front door, my mood improved considerably. It warmed my heart to have a white guy to want to hang as well—wouldn’t want to leave myself open to charges of racism. I could picture him: some sensitive dork in sandals—sandals—whose delicately exposed metatarsals constituted incontrovertible proof that he posed no possible threat to anyone—had never, in fact, harbored an ungenerous thought in all his life. What need was there for a locking front door? Sure, the building was in a black neighborhood, and the renters were mostly white college kids—what could go wrong?

  Every jerkoff in town worth his ACLU card and condescending smirk wore those fucking sandals. The only grown man in Detroit I’d ever seen wearing sandals was John the Baptist, as we neighborhood kids called him: an eccentric dressed in flowing black garb who walked up and down our side street and strongly resembled Frank Zappa. He walked miles each day through the Detroit desert, surviving on a diet of insects. John the Baptist could be spotted, on any given Tuesday afternoon, at 7 Mile and Schoenherr, at 6 Mile and Hayes, at 8 Mile and Hoover, and just in front of your family’s front porch. Memories of John the Baptist walking down the middle of the road, muttering to himself, seemed to me to present an image of powerful, penetrating sanity compared to the stupidity with which I was now contending.

  I flashed back to that Christmas Eve night. At one point in the evening, there’d been a discussion of crime in the area (we’d heard what we hoped was a car backfiring outside), and someone brought up a spate of recent crimes against women, mentioning that a woman’s body had just been found along a highwa
y. “It’s because of all these repressed conservative Christians around here,” my soon-to-be girlfriend said jokingly, referring to the abundance of Dutch Reformists who lived in the area. There were still some dry counties on this side of the state. I sat silent, but in a way that sought to express solidarity with her sarcasm: yes, these repressed Dutch Reformists.

  As if that’s who’d attacked her. People in Detroit may have been racists, but this was nuts.

  The black population on the west side of the state was relatively small, or seemed so to someone accustomed to Detroit. One of the distinguishing features of the place—impossible to miss—was that you could go all day and not see a black man with a black woman. You saw black women with black children; but you didn’t see black men with black children, or with black women. You saw black men with white women—women pretty, as a friend put it, in an Ernest Borgnine sort of way.

  Back in Detroit, during a summer home from college, a fat blond single mother and her dishwater blond children had moved in across the street and a few houses down from us, right across from the Lutheran family. “You know what follows white trash, don’t you?” you could hear people asking each other across front porches. We did. The single blond mother can be found in any similarly depressed area, where the white trash women come equipped with stretch pants, pendulous breasts, and black boyfriends pleased as punch to have landed themselves a white (what’s the word I’m looking for here?) bitch.

  It’s a term her boyfriend clearly took a shine to. You could hear it coming from him at four in the morning on warm summer nights when the windows were open. “Bitch, you shut that baby up!” “Bitch, I thought you got that tire fixed!” The gunshot blasts I’d long been able to sleep through, but this was something new, as was the music he blared when his car pulled up a little after three each morning.

  Now what, exactly, would respectable whites have done here? Sightlessness? Hearing loss? Which of their senses would have had to go? This is black behavior that our social betters simply cannot countenance and therefore pretend not to notice. Just to show that they’re not completely oblivious, and by way of warning, they might remind me that we live in a country that, ostensibly anyway, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Which is fine. Which is fantastic. But what comfort is that when it’s three in the morning and outside your window the bass is booming, the bitches flowing? Does the “I Have a Dream” speech really matter at such moments?

  I recalled the conversation my mother and I had several years before, about my sister’s boyfriend: Your dad just thinks, sooner or later, it’ll be a problem.

  For whom?

  For me.

  How should one live? This is the question, a critic once said, that underlies every major nineteenth-century Russian novel; there was an answer, I was certain, on my bookshelf somewhere. It was a matter of close reading, of paying attention. “Think!” I thought, tapping the side of my own head now that my father wasn’t around to do it. There was nothing study and hard work couldn’t solve. Apply yourself.

  I tried, but I wasn’t in the mood to read—I wanted a fight—so I fought with my favorite black authors, in much the same way that watching the nightly news had been a fistfight for the fathers in my old neighborhood, with them in one corner of the living room and Coleman Young, on TV, in the other. Instead of blood on the canvas, my books had red ink spilled all over the margins.

  In his essay “A Fly in Buttermilk,” about the integration fight in southern schools, Baldwin quotes the mother of a fifteen-year-old black boy—the first student to integrate a previously all-white high school—on the inevitable issue of what such integration might lead to: “I really don’t know how I’d feel if I was to carry a white baby around who was calling me Grandma.” Later, when Baldwin interviews the school’s white principal, a man who says that he never dreamed of a mingling of the races, Baldwin manfully bites his tongue, refraining to mention “the lack of enthusiasm evinced by [the black student’s] mother when musing on the prospect of a fair grandchild.”

  Bull’s-eye, Baldwin. That’s exactly right. It’s always been the white belief that it’s black grandmothers with a rooting interest in miscegenation. Even Ellison, perhaps the most gracious presence in all of twentieth-century American literature, was beginning to bug me. When, in one of his stories, a little boy observes to his friend that “white folks ain’t got no sense,” it was all I could do to finish it. Mm-hmm, I wanted to say. And to hell with you, too.

  But white people didn’t have any sense. I couldn’t get over white people. White people! Not just stupid—a special kind of stupid. A credulousness that was simply remarkable. “Look, I’m not going to hand you some line,” a panhandler had said one warm Miami evening as I walked the streets of Coconut Grove with a graduate school friend, who swallowed the line along with the hook and sinker, “but I’m trying to get some money together to take a group of sick kids to Disney World. Where y’all from?” My companion mentioned his hometown, outside of Chicago, and reached in his pocket for a fiver. “The east side of Detroit,” I said, making no such move. “Really? No fooling? Finney High School!” the man hollered, naming the public school at the corner of Cadieux and East Warren. We were two Detroit boys from the east side, standing in an Atlantic breeze, Cuba off in the distance. Could you believe it?

  An hour or so later, as we circled back, we saw the panhandler again, and for a second time he asked us for money. The story this time was that he was trying to take some retarded kids to Busch Gardens—something like that. “Hey, Shit-for-Brains,” I said to my friend as he walked silently past, “aren’t you going to give the nice man some money?” “I’m disappointed.” “Disappointed? What does disappointed have to do with anything?”

  What does disappointed have to do with anything? The white world, Baldwin says, is too powerful and too complacent to love easily. But above all, he says, it is “too ignorant and too innocent for that.” I wasn’t innocent enough to be disappointed, and I was beginning to doubt my earlier assumption about my ignorance—that my problem was a lack of knowing, something that my incessant reading sought to correct. What if there was nothing to know? What if, as an Oscar Wilde character remarked of women, blacks were sphinxes without secrets?

  Negroes, Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, know far more about white Americans than to believe the myths white America holds about itself. “It can almost be said, in fact, that [Negroes] know about white America what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children.” A recent black writer said simply: “We know white America better than white America knows us.”

  Whose fault is this? If I’ve spent this much time reading you, and you say that I still don’t know you, then is it my comprehension that’s lacking, or your level of expression?

  Ellison had entitled his great novel Invisible Man, but blacks weren’t invisible to me, never had been, not even in the limited sense that Ellison had meant. Baldwin entitled his second essay collection Nobody Knows My Name. I always remembered black people’s names, though they didn’t always remember mine. (My former grass-cutting partner, whom I sometimes saw back in Detroit, had taken to calling me Mark.) What if the men in Sal’s barbershop had been right, and I’d known as much about black people as I ever would by the age of thirteen, simply from listening to their rants every three weeks when I got a haircut? A little lacking upstairs. Prone to violence. Repulsed by their own women. That pretty much covered it at Sal’s.

  In “A Letter from Harlem,” the writer whose name I knew says: “Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.” It seemed to me I could do one better. I could read the canon, plus Baldwin on my reading of the canon, and still not understand this straightforward, seven-word statement.

  Those seven words were perfectly penetrable, of course. What I didn’t understand,
would never understand, was what I was supposed to do about them. Was I supposed to RESPECT THE BLACK MAN, as the T-shirt of a former coworker of mine—not yet twenty, and the father of three—instructed me to do? What form, aside from a nodding acknowledgment of his presence each morning, would such respect take? And how could I tolerate, let alone respect—if I wanted to see myself as a man—the actions of the sonuvabitch whose continued ability to draw breath poisoned my every minute?

  It became awfully hard to walk by my bookshelf and see The Fire Next Time standing there, spine out. “The fire next time? Why next time? Let’s get it over with.” My problem was that, every time I picked the book up, fully intending to throw it away, I ended up reading through it, feeding off the anger I felt on every page. (Eventually I did throw it out, only to replace it.) Near the end of the book, on the topic of interracial marriage, Baldwin writes: “Why, for example—especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me.”

  Where to start? First of all it wouldn’t, in Baldwin’s case, be my sister I’d be worried about him wanting to marry. Second, no man, of any race, can understand why another man would want to marry his sister, knowing what every brother knows about his sister’s pigtailed past. Third—and my family must have been an exception here, or the fellow must not have known us too well—one certainly seemed to want to marry my sister.

  Or, worse, didn’t. Though it’s fashionable in some circles to mock the nuclear family, many of these same people persist in the mystifying practice of talking about interracial marriages. Look around: what does marriage have to do with anything? Doesn’t this, too, feel a little shopworn, its portrait of black-white pairings as dated as the separate beds on a black-and-white sitcom? His parents, for instance—black father, Irish mother—weren’t married. And though he and my sister had dated for quite a while, and had even begun to live together, there was still no engagement ring in sight.