by Paul Clemens
In Chapter 17 Malcolm heads off to Mecca, and his warming toward whites begins. Stopping in Europe: “My brother Muslim and I both were struck by the cordial hospitality of the people in Frankfurt. . . . Europeans act more human, or humane, whichever the right word is.” As he flies from Europe to Mecca: “Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky-red hair—all together, brothers!” The we-are-the-world lyricism continues in Mecca: “In the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about ‘white’ men.” Reading this stuff is just death. In Chapter 18, Malcolm X (now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) returns to Kennedy Airport in New York, where, to a group of reporters, he delivers this speech: “In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again—as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.”
In the final chapter, Malcolm X thinks back to a discussion he’d had with a white American ambassador in Africa. “What you are telling me,” he says to the ambassador, “is that it isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic, and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man?” The ambassador agrees. Following this exchange, Malcolm X says that he had “a new insight—one which I like: that the white man is not inherently evil.” His italics. Next to which I had written, in devilishly bright red ink: “Not true.”
My novel was still garbage but I kept at it, incorporating more and more Malcolm X into its pages, hoping that the friction might spark something. My wife did better, graduating summa cum laude. Our first child was conceived, as close as we can tell, on the day of her college graduation.
Immaculate Heart of Mary
I CALLED FROM ACROSS THE STATE to my old high school and asked one of the priests who’d chaperoned the France trip if he’d be willing to perform the wedding ceremony. I explained the circumstances, and he asked that after we’d moved back to Detroit—Step One of our hastily put together master plan—we stop in and see him.
Under the circumstances, relocating to Detroit may seem odd—move back to a black city, knowing what I knew? Yet there was one overwhelming factor in Detroit’s favor: my family was still there. It wasn’t just that I loved my family—everyone loved his family, even those friends who did nothing but complain about their parents. I felt something rarer for mine: actual fondness. And behind these tender feelings was something else, something I’d come to think of as the background music to my days in Detroit, a tune I heard only in the company of my parents and sister. It was a comforting song, but I’d grown tired of it for a time; now I wanted to hear it again, and was frustrated when I couldn’t hum it. I hoped, going home, to hear it again.
We applied for our marriage license downtown at the City-County Building. Nine months later, this structure would be renamed the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center—“Coleman’s Place,” as it came to be called. There were no questions asked of us at Coleman’s Place; Coleman knew the score. Near the end of his tenure as mayor, despite previous denials, a paternity test had proven conclusively that Young, himself a former Catholic schoolboy, had fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman some forty years his junior.
Though our baby had been conceived before marriage, we weren’t about to let it be born out of wedlock like the Young love child. I was going to do the right thing, and in this the Catholic Church was going to help me. My wife-to-be, terribly nervous, was three months’ pregnant when we sat down across from Father in the priests’ house. She was not only non-Catholic but non-baptized, which Father said required special dispensation from the archdiocese. “It can take months to come through,” he told us.
I informed him that we didn’t have months. My wife wanted to be married in her mother’s wedding dress, so at best we had three weeks. The chapel had been rented, the organist hired, the dress altered, the restaurant was ready: all we needed was the permission of the Church.
A form had to be filled out, naturally, before the archdiocese would consider our request, and so my mother—a piece of work, by anyone’s standards—called upon the powers that be, in the space provided at the bottom of the form, to consider just how much she and my father had spent on twenty-six years of Catholic schooling for their two children, and just how little they, the archdiocese, had paid the groom-to-be’s great uncle, Father Hector Saulino, over the course of his more than fifty years of faithful service to the Detroit Archdiocese. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Father said four days later when he called, approval letter in hand.
That was the tune I’d missed.
When we discovered the pregnancy I sold my mountain bike—the replacement for the one stolen in Boston—along with a first edition of Samuel Beckett’s first book, his deeply depressing monograph on Marcel Proust simply entitled Proust (London, 1931). There was some minor chipping at the top of the dust jacket, but otherwise it was in excellent condition. My mother had bought it for a quarter at a Grosse Pointe estate sale. “I thought I’d heard you mention him before,” she said, handing me the book. She’d done this sort of thing previously, bringing back from Grosse Pointe estate and garage sales editions of books by famous authors about which there was little to be said other than that they were extremely old and worth more or less the quarter that she had paid for them. But the Beckett was a real find, even if the text itself was tough sledding. Sample sentence: “We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” Still, it was worth some money.
And I was frantic for the stuff. More than once did we sit down with my mother, who’d pull out a pen and a legal pad, and discuss our “finances.” “You’re going to be fine,” she said at the end of each session. It was her usual message, one I depended on: Relax. Don’t worry. Things have a way of working out. “We were worse off than you guys when we started out, believe me,” she often said, telling us how, after I was brought home from the hospital in that ice storm, the boiler blew up in the basement; how my father had been a delivery-truck driver for the Detroit News, had stirred vats of syrup at the A&W root beer plant—oh, he’d had all sorts of odd jobs before he began work at Diamond Racing, where he got his foot in the door of Detroit’s auto industry. “The first dinner I made for your father after we got married—hot dogs,” she said, smiling.
At such moments I was overcome by a distinct sense of things unraveling. Only the constant application of common sense could keep disorder at bay, and because somewhere along the line my constancy had failed, chaos was now closing in. That I’d found a job was beside the point. Indeed, it was absolutely irrelevant, at least as it related to my mother’s scheme for righting our finances after the baby had been born. “You know, based on your last year’s earnings, you guys probably qualify for some kind of public assistance.” “Ma, we were working at the bookstore. Those were just student jobs.” “I’m just saying,” she said.
As had been the case when I was applying to college, our financial need was being calculated on an unrepresentative year; but whereas the change back then was negative—my father had gone from earning good money to earning none—in this case it was positive: I had already begun working at a job that precluded our receiving such help in the future. The help we were to receive from the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which provides redeemable coupons for food staples—baby formula, peanut butter, milk—would be for one year and one year only. My wife, standing on principle, said she wouldn’t use the coupons that were meant for her, redeemable for milk and peanut butter—just formula, just things for the baby. All I could think of was the taunt Kurt and I had
hurled at our grade school classmate: “Is that welfare cheese?”
Though I felt as if I might keel over, my mother asserted, again and again, that it was the right thing to do. This little bit of assistance, which we would repay countless times over in income tax during the rest of our lives, would be of great help to us now, freeing up money for car insurance, rent, student loan payments—all sorts of things.
“Yeah, don’t worry about the baby formula,” my father said in a reassuring tone, not bothering to look away from the television set. “You can always get the government to buy you more.”
The job I’d landed was with a Catholic college, and since its offices were located downtown in a city building, I made the same drive along the Ford Freeway that I had over summers home from school. Everyone else in the building worked for the City of Detroit, but because our work had been subcontracted out to the college there was no residency requirement to abide by—a good thing, too, since we’d rented an apartment that, though still south of 8 Mile, was a few blocks outside the city limits. In an office of ten, I was one of two white people, and the only male.
As I got on the freeway one morning that fall I saw signs in the embankment urging passersby to VOTE THE BLACK SLATE in upcoming elections. Twenty-five years earlier, in the fall of 1973, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the west side church that organized these campaigns, had put out a similar call:
Safe Streets For All
End STRESS
On Nov. 6
Elect
Coleman
Young
and the
Black Slate
Vote a Straight
Black Slate
“Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” (STRESS) was the Detroit Police undercover unit that sent cops, dressed as easy marks, out onto the streets to lure criminals. When he beat Police Chief John Nichols in 1973, Young made STRESS a major campaign issue, holding the squad responsible for numerous deaths caused by white officers who, he said, used STRESS as a pretext for brutalizing Detroit’s black population. After Young’s victory, the unit was disbanded.
By 1998 everything in the city had long since come under black control, so white foes had to be found outstate. In this respect Michigan’s governor, John Engler, was a godsend. Like most Republican politicians since Lincoln, he was widely disliked in the black community, particularly in Detroit, where he had begun to orchestrate the state’s takeover of the failing Detroit Public School system.
And yet many of us in the City of Detroit building owed our employment to him, and to the Republican Party’s welfare-to-work reforms of the mid-1990s. MICHIGAN WORKS! said the sign on the outside of the building, and it was our job to test the aptitude of our clientele, many of whom were on public assistance, and to link them with training programs where they would gain the skills necessary to find employment as heating and cooling specialists or licensed practical nurses. It was mindless work, and there was a lot of downtime in which to write.
Many of our clients were already talking about their future careers and what they would do with the money they earned when they walked in the door. Others, as I made my way up and down the aisles, handing out the multiple-choice tests and giving verbal instructions, would look up and say: “You know what job I want? Yours.” Such statements were poison darts. I had no doubt that they could do my job, and worried that someday soon I might be jobless and, like them, in need of assistance to get off assistance. I’d already taken a step, however small, in that general direction.
My boss, Dorothea, had given me advice on how to deal with such comments. “Just don’t let them make you lose your cool. These people are unemployed, they’re angry. They lash out. They’ll complain, ‘That white guy made me whatever,’ you know? Just do your job and you’ll be fine.” Trim and classically chic, she seemed at times to have stepped out of a black-and-white photo from decades before, when things like posture and elocution mattered—an era when people paid attention to how they comported themselves. She was in her early forties and childless. Many of the women in the office, particularly the more educated, were either unmarried or childless or both. Some of them lived twenty miles out in the sububs, but Dorothea stayed in the city. One morning, after driving by a very small brother and sister out walking the streets alone, she came into the office furious. “People don’t have any sense. These kids are what—four, five?—and they’re out walking to school, or somewhere, all by themselves. It makes you just want to take people’s children away from them.” Like many in Detroit, she was adept at a sort of racial self-deprecation; in the presence of whites, she’d point out black actions by which she’d been annoyed, and I’d reciprocate by mocking some white politician or celebrity.
The women I worked with, like all the women I’d known, suffered a severe addiction to fashion magazines and clothes catalogs. They could recall any article in any issue of any wide-circulation magazine within the last year; they could remember which outfit was in which catalog—Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter, Winter Closeout, Spring Clearance—and they could read any magazine article, no matter how superficial, at least twice. They would examine the catalog photographs of outfits they’d already bought, to gauge how the reality corresponded to their expectation. They had a memory for the minutiae of the lives of models and celebrities that, if applied in other areas, would have resulted in the memorization of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. A good portion of each workday was spent passing magazines and catalogs back and forth over cubicle walls.
They could be cutthroat in their observations, particularly with white models and celebrities. “Sure, she’s got the boobs, but where’s her butt? I don’t see any butt.” When a failed white candidate for governor began to hint that he might want to run for mayor of Detroit, there was a good deal of discussion of his wife, who had been visible on the campaign trail. One of the younger women suggested that the candidate’s better half—his blonder half—may not have been the brighest bulb. “Don’t say that. No, don’t say that,” one of the older women said. “You’re just saying that because she’s blond, and that’s not right.” Though the photo I’d taped up in my cubicle, taken in the Boston subway, was done in black-and-white, it was clear that my wife was blond.
Our office staff made periodic trips to the campus of our employer, the Catholic college on the city’s west side, where we took part in training sessions and orientations. It was pleasant to get away from the City of Detroit building for a day and to walk on the grounds of the school’s wooded campus—which, if you walked in deep enough, could give you the impression of not being in Detroit at all. The buildings were made of stone and weathered to perfection; everything looked like a chapel. Occasionally, walking around, you’d even see a nun.
But a church, as we’d been taught in Catholic school, was not a building; it was its people (here’s the church, here’s its steeple), and the people I saw on campus didn’t strike me as being particularly Catholic. Though this wasn’t entirely unexpected, I was surprised to learn that the school’s new president, who’d come from a historically black college down South, was a Baptist.
The training sessions themselves were the usual blur of bagels and name tags. By the end of the afternoon, when we’d broken out into focus groups, the name tag would begin to curl in on itself, and it was possible to expend a good deal of mental energy in wondering how much sweater lint the adhesive backing might remove. In one such session, concerning the future of the college, it was agreed that the school would actively seek to retain its Catholic character. “Whatever that means,” a young black woman in the seat next to me said, laughing.
Back in our City of Detroit building the next day, the boss asked me to read over a narrative history of the college. From this, I was to write multiple-choice questions for the clients who came into our office, in order to test their reading comprehension. The narrative started with the founding, in Europe, of the order of nuns who ran the school, and went on to discuss the order’s move to the Americas; it
s subsequent move to Detroit; and its pride in the past, its commitment to the present, and its faith in the future.
The section on the 1960s spoke of the college’s commitment to integrating its surrounding area. The college president, an Immaculate Heart of Mary sister, asserted in a press conference that the school would not want a “lily-white neighborhood.” And I thought: You wouldn’t get it, Sister. No, instead of lily white you got the opposite—and, by the time I began working here, a Baptist president for your Catholic school.
Weather permitting, I would spend my lunch hour outside, reading in a small square across the street from the General Motors building on the corner of Cass Avenue and West Grand Boulevard. A couple miles down the boulevard was the General Motors Poletown plant, built back in the early 1980s from the remains of an old Hamtramck Dodge plant. To accommodate the new plant, which Mayor Young desperately wanted, some four thousand Detroit residents—many of them Polish, like the residents of adjacent Hamtramck—were forced from their homes. At the beginning of a decade in Detroit that, by its end, would see some three dozen Catholic parishes disappear, Cardinal Dearden immediately okayed the closing of two churches in the condemned area—one of them dedicated to the proposition that the mother of our lord had been conceived immaculately, and led by a priest, Father Karasiewicz, who openly fought his superior’s decision. Eventually Ralph Nader came to town, siding with those residents of the area against the plan put forward by Coleman Young and General Motors. Nader, on Young: a “petty dictator.” Young, on Nader: a “carpetbagger from Washington.” Again: “This man has a phobia. Whenever you mention General Motors Corporation, he foams at the mouth.”