by Paul Clemens
After Mass had concluded I went out the church’s western doors, accepting a parish flyer from an usher. “Excuse me,” I asked, and pointed up at the altar, “but who is that next to the pope? I haven’t been here in a while, and I’ve been wondering all Mass.”
“To which side of him?”
“In the same panel.”
“You know, I don’t know.”
“Do you know who might?”
“Ask Jim,” he said, pointing to an enormous usher who was talking to a woman a couple pews up.
I walked over and cut in on their conversation. It was one-fifteen in the morning, and I still had a My Little Pony castle to assemble and put under the tree before turning in. “Pardon me,” I said, “but can you tell me who that is in the panel with the pope? The usher by the door said you might know.” Jim looked down at me as if he reserved the right to kick my ass for asking. “I thought it might be Martin Luther,” I said, laughing a little. If so, I nearly added—if being inclusive meant including the constipated Luther—me and Catholicism were calling it a day.
Big Jim told me it was Father Gabriel Richard.
“Thank you,” I said, and walked back out the church doors, declining the offer of a second flyer. My faith in Catholicism restored, I started to drive north, in the direction of our old house.
Our second bungalow was well decorated for Christmas, with colored lights framing the living room and kitchen windows and candy canes stuck to the glass. The place looked pretty much the same, aside from a privacy fence in the backyard. Even my paint job, peeling badly in spots, was still on the garage. Afraid that I’d spook someone if I idled in front of the house much longer—my father would have been out after me already—I drove off.
And then, fearing I’d missed something, I looped back around the block. I wanted, above all, to get another look at the trees that had been given to us as housewarming presents by Mr. and Mrs. Shannon when we moved from our old bungalow at 6 Mile and Gratiot to this one, more than two decades back. One of the trees was mine, the other my sister’s, and a coin toss had determined which went where. I won, and so mine stood in the front of the house while my sister’s was along the side, where it was beginning to grow into the living room’s side window. When the trees were planted they had been smaller than my sister and I; they were now the height of the house, which seemed to me indestructible. There was a great deal of evidence, not too many blocks away, to contradict this, but the brick bungalow in which I’d been raised struck me then as being possessed of the permanence of the pyramids, as indestructible in reality as it is in my memory, where it can be rebuilt, brick by brick, at a moment’s notice.
Eventually, a white woman in dress clothes opened the front door, fiddled with something around the mailbox—a pretext to see what I was up to, presumably—and went back inside. I didn’t wait around to see if that front door was going to open again.
Shortly after I began work on this book—a testament to the novel I hadn’t the talent to write—I excused myself from a Sunday dinner at my parents’ house, saying that I wanted to go home and get some writing done. My mother said fine, that she’d be glad to babysit. My father followed me out to the car. “Still chasing that rainbow, are ya?” he asked, laughing a little at my literary pretensions. “Yeah, Pop,” I said. “Still chasing it.” Except instead of working on a novel about parentless adolescents in Detroit—instead of distorting the experience, to no clear end—I now wanted to write honestly, using as my primary literary influence my life’s main influence.
My father stood in the middle of the driveway, arms folded; up ahead in the garage was his latest hot rod, which he’d raced at Milan Dragway the weekend before. He wasn’t too happy with how things had gone; the miles per hour clockings were all right, but the elapsed time lagged, indicating problems with the start—a poor launch. His heart wasn’t really in drag racing anymore—the sport had been corporatized, with huge infusions of money that had loosed it from its white trash roots—and he was planning to sell the car, though not before he got it running right.
Behind the garage, in the house one block back, there had been a drug bust not long before. Several blocks over, a drifter doing odd jobs in the neighborhood killed an elderly woman. More and more bass booms from the cars that drive by, rattling the front windows. “I’ve never lived more than four miles from where I was born,” my father said, somewhat defeatedly, at the dinner following my Grandma Saulino’s funeral—a remark made to relatives living at 17 Mile, and 21 Mile, and 23 Mile roads. Still south of 8 Mile, a few houses onto the suburban side of the Ford Freeway—it’ll be time, very soon, for my folks to get out of here.
My father was wearing a yellow T-shirt from his garbage bag collection, bearing the words WOLVERINE 200, after the twenty-four-hour bicycle race held on Belle Isle each spring from eight on Saturday morning to eight on Sunday, making the intervening night the only one of the year that visitors are allowed to stay over on the island, the elegantly laid-out interior of which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park. A five-mile course is plotted around the island’s perimeter, and the object is to make forty circuits—two hundred miles. The race is sponsored by the Wolverine Bicycle Club, which gathers every Wednesday evening at the Cadieux Café.
My father and I entered the race twice, when I was in seventh and eighth grades. We both rode two hundred miles the first year, reaching the milestone by eight o’clock on Sunday morning, but the second year I finished alone, twenty-one hours after starting out. My father, a few hours into that year’s race, had fallen off his bike, dislocating his right shoulder. My mother took him to Detroit Receiving Hospital as I continued to pedal around the island. He came back to Belle Isle after several hours in the emergency room with his right arm in a sling and a noticeable bump on his right shoulder. It looked, under his T-shirt, as if he’d suffered a compound fracture and had a bone sticking out of the skin.
We’d taken two cars to Belle Isle, and I drove back home with my father in the Renault. Driving a Renault in Detroit wasn’t quite the sacrilege it might seem, the American Motor Company, whose suburban headquarters had so angered Coleman Young, having been bought out by the French manufacturer. Because my paternal grandfather had worked for AMC, and briefly for the bigger fish by which it had been swallowed, he got a discount on the already cheap Renaults. By the time he sold the compacts to my father, their odometers were pushing six figures and the cars were pretty close to free. “You’re going to have to shift for me,” my father said as we got in, nodding toward his sling. He could still steer with his left arm.
I put his keys in the ignition for him, turning them when he told me to start it. The car was already in first gear, which got us going. Around ten or fifteen miles per hour he put in the clutch: “All right, try second. Pull it straight back.” Success. Around twenty-five miles per hour, the two of us out on the Belle Isle Bridge now, he again let up on the accelerator and put in the clutch: “Now up and over, for third.” Again, success. “Just tell me when for fourth,” I said. “I think third is all we’ll need for surface streets,” he said. “I’ll just wind out the gear a bit. You’ll have to downshift for me, though, when we slow down.” “Just tell me when,” I repeated, to show my readiness. And then, joking: “I think I know how to drive a stick now.”
Well, he didn’t know about that. Shifting was important, and I seemed to have that down, but there was still the footwork—gas, clutch—and I’d need to learn to coordinate the shifting with what went on with the pedals. But I still had two years before I turned sixteen; I’d get the hang of it. “Now, when you get real good,” he said, holding out for me an impossible standard of achievement, like a perfect score on the SAT, “you can shift without even using the clutch.”
I felt my confidence grow as we got off the bridge and turned right onto Jefferson Avenue. Behind us was the site of the old Uniroyal Tire plant, where my mother had worked while pregnant with me. After the plant’s closing
in 1980, the land was sold to the City of Detroit, and the site was cleared a few years later. Though riverfront property that the City had hoped to develop, the land is now fenced off, with a sign pronouncing the site contaminated.
I might, that Sunday morning in 1987, have taken this emptiness as a harbinger of things to come. All of my father’s old shops in the city would soon close, if they hadn’t already. The Catholic grade schools from which my friends and I were then graduating—St. Peter, St. Brendan—would fold before long, reopening under incense-free names like Heart Academy and the Detroit School for the Industrial Arts. The former parish house of the School of the Guardian Angels would become the St. Jude’s Home for Boys, and the building that had formerly housed the St. Francis Home for Boys would serve as the first-year home for a Jesuit academy for at-risk black males. Fifty-five years after its founding, St. Bernadette—once the spiritual home for thousands of wops with wet feet—would become the headquarters for an Arab community service organization, the road it sits on now called Saulino Court. Around the same time, Sal’s barbershop would close up, replaced by a nail salon.
Nothing was sacred. The residency requirement for City of Detroit employees would be rescinded, with nearly half of all Detroit cops estimated to be living outside the city limits—legally. Most telling of all, perhaps, would be the closing of the last rest stop on the outskirts of metropolitan Detroit, one I used to pass on my drives to and from college, its bathrooms, candy machines, and You Are Here map of Michigan’s highway system no longer necessary now that the suburbs—some of them thirty, forty, and fifty miles outside the city center—had surrounded it. The only thing I might have predicted back in 1987 was that, sooner or later, the State of Michigan would elect a governor who was Canadian by birth. Such a turn of events was inevitable in a state whose largest city is Detroit. Because I still don’t have cable, on Friday nights during cold-weather months I continue to twist my television’s antennae this way and that, trying to tune in Hockey Night in Canada.
“I grew up in a part of Detroit that doesn’t exist anymore,” Coleman Young writes on the first page of his autobiography in reference to Black Bottom, leveled to make way for the Chrysler Freeway and urban renewal. Still on page one: “Detroit will never again be the city it once was.” It’s the feeling of every Detroiter, black and white alike, and not only a feeling—it’s a fact, more often than not. A. J. Liebling, writing in the 1950s of Chicago, called it less a big city than merely a large place. This was even truer of late-twentieth-century Detroit; some of its residents couldn’t have found the city’s downtown if they had to. They had their neighborhoods, and that was that. Coleman Young was less the mayor of a major city than the overseer of a large place—much of it empty space—collected under the name Detroit, the border of which stretched along 8 Mile to what felt like the ends of a flat Earth. At auction a few years back the nameplate that Coleman Young kept atop his mayor’s desk sold for six hundred dollars. It said “MFIC.”
In The American Earthquake, Edmund Wilson, sounding a little like Mayor Young fifty years later, writes disapprovingly of Henry Ford’s “removal of his factories to Dearborn outside the city limits, in order to escape city taxes.” Elsewhere, sounding like the soul of common sense, Wilson observes: “You can see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of an industrial society; almost everybody who lives in Detroit is dependent on the motor industry and in more or less obvious relation to everybody else who lives here. When the industry is crippled, everybody is hit.”
Whatever. Back then, as we were leaving behind Belle Isle and the blank space where the Uniroyal Tire plant had been, heading toward the Chrysler Jefferson plant that, a decade hence, would become the Daimler Chrysler Jefferson plant, it was just me and my father in a car. We came to a red light on Jefferson—“Slip it in neutral”—and coasted to a stop. I put the car back into first as we idled, and we took off again, using the gear progression to which I’d grown accustomed. But my father started to get fancy. “You can skip gears, you know. Go ahead—put it in fourth if you’re so good.” He accelerated hard in second, so that the car wouldn’t chug in the higher gear, and put in the clutch. I made the shift, but went up and over to third before pulling back and finding fourth. “That’s cheating. Now back to second,” he said, hitting the brakes. I found the lower gear, bypassing third entirely this time. “Not bad. The hardest downshift is from fifth to second.” “Let’s try that,” I said. “We can’t get going fast enough for fifth on Jefferson,” he said. “We can go to third, though, without the clutch, if you want to.” He was quiet, listening to the engine, trying to find the sweet spot. “Okay,” he said after a time, letting the car coast, “go on. Slow.” Concentrating hard, I pushed the shifter up and over while staring at my father’s feet, both of which were firmly on the floor mat. The gears didn’t grind—his doing, not mine—and we drove on in third. It was the closest we ever came to discussing the facts of life. “You did it right,” he said, smiling.
Do the thing right. Goddamnit, do it right—how many times had I heard this growing up? No, no, not like that—there, like that. See the difference? Want me to show you again? Yes, I think these days: show me again. Let me see it again. Because it’s going, all of it, and the only way to preserve it is to put it down on paper and to hope that I managed, at long last, to get some things right.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my agent at Russell & Volkening, Timothy Seldes, and to my editor at Doubleday, Adam Bellow. Thanks as well to those who commented upon various versions of the manuscript, particularly Rob Franciosi and Stanley Shapiro, talented readers both. To my immediate family, I owe a debt it will take lifetimes to repay.
Thanks to Roman Godzak, archivist for the Archdiocese of Detroit, who shared with me Father Hec’s records. Mr. Godzak’s books Catholic Churches of Detroit (Arcadia, 2004) and Make Straight the Path: A 300-Year Pilgrimage: Archdiocese of Detroit (Editions du Signe: Strasbourg, France, 2000) were just as considerable a help. For similar assistance with facts related to Sister Marcia, I must thank Sister Marilyn Sullivan at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Nazareth convent outside Kalamazoo.
The books that I kept beside me throughout were: The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young (Droog Press, 1992), compiled by reporters for the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press; Detroit and Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001, edited by David Lee Poremba (Wayne State UP, 2001); The Detroit Almanac: Three Hundred Years of Life in the Motor City, edited by Peter Gavrilovich and Bill McGraw (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 2001); Ze’ev Chafets’s Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit (Random House, 1990); and Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young (Viking, 1994), by Young and Lonnie Wheeler. Both these latter books belong back in print. The sections dealing with the residency requirement and STRESS, in particular, draw from Hard Stuff.
The best academic treatment of contemporary Detroit that I have read is Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton UP, 1999), by John Hartigan Jr. The section dealing with the opening of the Malcolm X Academy is indebted to his fine book, from which details and quotes have been drawn.
The quotes from Tocqueville in the opening chapter come from his Journey to America (Yale UP, 1960), translated by George Lawrence and edited by J. P. Mayer. The “Vote the Black Slate” sign from the fall of 1973 appeared in the Detroit Public Library’s 2004 exhibit on the Reverend Albert Cleage and the Shrine of the Black Madonna.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trade
marks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clemens, Paul, 1973–
Made in Detroit : a south of 8-Mile memoir / by Paul Clemens.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN-13: 978-0-307-27853-1
eISBN-10: 0-307-27853-0
1. Clemens, Paul, 1973—Childhood and youth. 2. Whites—Michigan—Detroit—Biography. 3. Detroit (Mich.)—Biography. 4. Detroit (Mich.)—Race relations. I. Title.
F574.D453C58 2005
305.809'0977434'092—dc22
[B] 2005041327
Copyright © 2005 by Paul Clemens
All Rights Reserved
www.anchorbooks.com
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