The Best American Essays 2011

by Edwidge Danticat

  Evans told me then that major crimes were routinely underreported by 20 percent. He also told me that perhaps 50 percent of Detroit’s drivers were operating without a license or insurance. “It’s going to stop,” he promised. “We’re going to pull people over for traffic violations and we’re going to take their cars if they’re not legal. That’s one less knucklehead driving around looking to do a drive-by.”

  His approach was successful, with murder dropping more than 20 percent in his first year. If that isn’t a record for any major metropolis, it is certainly a record for Detroit. (And that statistic is true; I checked.)

  So there should have been a parade with confetti and tanks of lemonade, but instead, the complaints about overaggressive cops began to roll in. Then Evans’s own driver shot a man last October. The official version was that two men were walking in the middle of a street on the East Side when Evans and his driver told them to walk on the sidewalk. One ran off. Evans’s driver—a cop—gave chase. The man stopped, turned, and pulled a gun. Evans’s driver dropped him with a single shot. An investigation was promised. The story rated three paragraphs in the daily papers, and the media never followed up. Then Huff got killed. Then Je’Rean was murdered. Then came the homicide-by-cop of little Aiyana.

  Chief Evans might have survived it all had he too not been drawn to the lights of Hollywood. As it turns out, he was filming a pilot for his own reality show, entitled The Chief.

  The program’s six-minute sizzle reel begins with Evans dressed in full battle gear in front of the shattered Michigan Central Rail Depot, cradling a semiautomatic rifle and declaring that he would “do whatever it takes” to take back the streets of Detroit. I saw the tape and wrote about its existence after the killing of Aiyana, but the story went nowhere until two months later, when someone in City Hall leaked a copy to the local ABC affiliate. Evans was fired.

  But in Evans’s defense, he seemed to understand one thing: after the collapse of the car industry and the implosion of the real estate bubble, there is little else Detroit has to export except its misery.

  And America is buying. There are no fewer than two TV dramas, two documentaries, and three reality programs being filmed here. Even Time bought a house on the East Side last year for $99,000. The gimmick was to have its reporters live there and chronicle the decline of the Motor City for one year.

  Somebody should have told company executives back in New York that they had wildly overpaid. In Detroit, a new car costs more than the average house.

  Aiyana’s family retained Geoffrey Fieger, the flamboyant, brass-knuckled lawyer who represented Dr. Jack Kevorkian—AKA Dr. Death. With Chief Evans vacationing overseas with a subordinate, Fieger ran wild, holding a press conference where he claimed he had seen videotape of Officer Weekley firing into the house from the porch. Fieger alleged a police coverup. Detroit grew restless.

  I went to see Fieger to ask him to show me the tape. Fieger’s suburban office is a shrine to Geoffrey Fieger. The walls are covered with photographs of Geoffrey Fieger. On his desk is a bronze bust of Geoffrey Fieger. And during our conversation, he referred to himself in the third person—Geoffrey Fieger.

  “What killed Aiyana is what killed the people in New Orleans and the rider on the transit in Oakland, and that’s police bullets and police arrogance and police coverup,” Geoffrey Fieger said. “People call it police brutality. But Geoffrey Fieger calls it police arrogance. Even in Detroit, a predominantly black city. They killed a child and then they lied about it.”

  I asked Fieger if Charles Jones should accept some culpability in his daughter’s death, considering his alleged role in Je’Rean’s murder, the stolen cars found in his backyard, and the fact that his daughter slept on the couch next to an unlocked door.

  “So what?” Fieger barked. “I’m not representing the father; I’m speaking for the daughter.” He also pointed out that while Jones remains a person of interest in Je’Rean’s murder, he has not been arrested. “It’s police disinformation.”

  As for the videotape of the killing, Geoffrey Fieger said he did not have it.

  I was allowed to meet with Charles Jones the following morning at Fieger’s office, but with the caveat that I could only ask him questions about the evening his daughter was killed.

  Jones, twenty-five, a slight man with frizzy braids, wore a dingy T-shirt. An eleventh-grade dropout and convicted robber, he said he supported his seven children with “a little this, a little that—I got a few tricks and trades.”

  He has three boys with Aiyana’s mother, Dominika Stanley, and three boys with another woman, whom he had left long ago.

  Jones’s new family had been on the drift for the past few years as he tried to pull it together. His mother’s house on Lillibridge, he said, was just supposed to be a way station to better things.

  They had even kept Aiyana in her old school, Trix Elementary, because it was something consistent in her life, a clean and safe school in a city with too few. They drove her there every morning, five miles.

  “I can accept the shooting was a mistake,” Jones said about his daughter’s death as a bleary-eyed Stanley sat motionless next to him. “But I can’t accept it because they lied about it. I can’t heal properly because of it. It was all for the cameras. I don’t want no apology from no police. It’s too late.”

  I asked him if the way he was raising his daughter, the people he exposed her to, or the neighborhood where they lived—with its decaying houses and liquor stores—may have played a role.

  Stanley suddenly emerged from her stupor. “What’s that got to do with it?” she hissed.

  “My daughter got love, honor, and respect. The environment didn’t affect us none,” Jones said. “The environment got nothing to do with kids.”

  Aiyana was laid to rest six days after her killing. The service was held at Second Ebenezer Church in Detroit, a drab cake-shaped megachurch near the Chrysler Freeway. A thousand people attended, as did the predictable plump of media.

  The Reverend Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy, though his heart did not seem to be in it. It was a white cop who killed the girl, but Detroit is America’s largest black city with a black mayor and a black chief of police. The sad and confusing circumstances of the murders of Je’Rean Blake Nobles and Officer Huff, both black, robbed Sharpton of some of his customary indignation.

  “We’re here today not to find blame, but to find out how we never have to come here again,” said Sharpton, standing in the grand pulpit. “It’s easy in our anger, our rage, to just vent and scream. But I would be doing Aiyana a disservice if we just vented instead of dealing with the real problems.”

  He went on: “This child is the breaking point.”

  Aiyana’s pink-robed body was carried away by a horse-drawn carriage to the Trinity Cemetery, the same carriage that five years earlier had taken the body of Rosa Parks to Woodlawn Cemetery on the city’s West Side. Once at Aiyana’s graveside, Charles Jones re-leased a dove.

  Sharpton left and the Reverend Horace Sheffield, a local version of Sharpton, got stiffed for $4,000 in funeral costs, claiming Aiyana’s father made off with the donations people gave to cover it. “I’m trying to find him,” Sheffield complained. “But he doesn’t return my calls. It’s always like that. People taking advantage of my benevolence. They went hog-wild. I mean, hiring the Rosa Parks carriage?”

  “I don’t owe Sheffield shit,” says Jones. “He got paid exactly what he was supposed to be paid.”

  While a thousand people mourned the tragic death of Aiyana, the body of Je’Rean Blake Nobles sat in a refrigerator at a local funeral parlor; his mother was too poor to bury him herself and too respectful to bury him until after the little girl’s funeral anyhow. The mortician charged $700 for the most basic viewing casket, even though the body was to be cremated.

  Sharpton’s people called Je’Rean’s mother, Lyvonne Cargill, promising to come over to her house after Aiyana’s funeral. She waited, but Sharpton never came.

 
“Sharpton’s full of shit,” said Cargill, a brassy thirty-nine-year-old who works as a stock clerk at Target. “He came here for publicity. He’s from New York. What the hell you doing up here for? The kids are dropping like flies—especially young black males—and he’s got nothing but useless words.”

  The Reverend Sheffield came to see Cargill. He gave her $800 for funeral costs.

  As summer dragged on, the story of Aiyana faded from even the regional press. As for the tape that Geoffrey Fieger claimed would show the cops firing on Aiyana’s house from outside, A&E turned it over to the police. The mayor’s office is said to have a copy, as well as the Michigan State Police, who are now handling the investigation. Even on Lillibridge Street, the outrage has died down. But the people of Lillibridge Street still look like they’ve been picked up by their hair and dropped from the rooftop. The crumbling houses still crumble. The streetlights still go on and off. The landlord of the duplex, Edward Taylor, let me into the Jones apartment. A woman was in his car, the motor running.

  “They still owe me rent,” he said with a face about the Joneses. “Don’t bother locking it. It’s now just another abandoned house in Detroit.”

  And with that, he was off.

  Inside, toys, Hannah Montana shoes, and a pyramid of KFC cartons were left to rot. The smell was beastly. Outside, three men were loading the boiler, tubs, and sinks into a trailer to take to the scrap yard.

  “Would you take a job at that Chrysler plant if there were any jobs there?” I asked one of the men, who was sweating under the weight of the cast iron.

  “What the fuck do you think?” he said. “Of course I would. Except there ain’t no job. We’re taking what’s left.”

  I went to visit Cargill, who lived just around the way. She told me that Je’Rean’s best friend, Chaise Sherrors, seventeen, had been murdered the night before—an innocent bystander who took a bullet in the head as he was on a porch clipping someone’s hair.

  “It just goes on,” she said. “The silent suffering.”

  Chaise lived on the other side of the Chrysler complex. He too was about to graduate from Southeastern High. A good kid who showed neighborhood children how to work electric clippers, his dream was to open a barbershop. The morning after he was shot, Chaise’s clippers were mysteriously deposited on his front porch, wiped clean and free of hair. There was no note.

  If such a thing could be true, Chaise’s neighborhood is worse than Je’Rean’s. The house next door to his is rubble smelling of burned pine, pissed on by the spray cans of the East Warren Crips. The house on the other side is in much the same state. So is the house across the street. In this shit, a one-year-old played next door, barefoot.

  Chaise’s mother, Britta McNeal, thirty-nine, sat on the porch staring blankly into the distance, smoking no-brand cigarettes. She thanked me for coming and showed me her home, which was clean and well kept. Then she introduced me to her fourteen-year-old son, De’Erion, whose remains sat in an urn on the mantel. He was shot in the head and killed last year.

  She had already cleared a space on the other end of the mantel for Chaise’s urn.

  “That’s a hell of a pair of bookends,” I offered.

  “You know? I was thinking that,” she said with tears.

  The daughter of an autoworker and a home nurse, McNeal grew up in the promise of the black middle class that Detroit once offered. But McNeal messed up-she admits as much. She got pregnant at fifteen. She later went to nursing school but got sidetracked by her own health problems. School wasn’t a priority. Besides, there was always a job in America when you needed one. Until there wasn’t. Like so many across the country, she’s being evicted with no job and no place to go.

  “I want to get out of here, but I can’t,” she said. “I got no money. I’m stuck. Not all of us are blessed.”

  She looked at her barefoot grandson playing in the wreckage of the dwelling next door and wondered if he would make it to manhood.

  “I keep calling about these falling-down houses, but the city never comes,” she said.

  McNeal wondered how she was going to pay the $3,000 for her son’s funeral. Desperation, she said, feels like someone’s reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.

  It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can’t keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist’s match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children’s milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn’t manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation’s children with a burden of debt? Can she be blamed for that?

  “I know society looks at a person like me and wants me to go away,” she said. “‘Go ahead, walk in the Detroit River and disappear.’ But I can’t. I’m alive. I need help. But when you call for help, it seems like no one’s there.

  “It feels like there ain’t no love no more.”

  I left McNeal’s porch and started my car. The radio was tuned to NPR and A Prairie Home Companion came warbling out of my speakers. I stared through the windshield at the little boy in the diaper playing amid the ruins, reached over, and switched it off.

  Magical Dinners

  Chang-Rae Lee

  FROM The New Yorker

  SO PICTURE THIS: Thanksgiving 1972. The Harbor House apartments on Davenport Avenue, New Rochelle, New York, red brick, low-rise, shot through with blacks and Puerto Ricans and then a smattering of us immigrants, the rest mostly white people of modest means, everyone deciding New York City is going to hell. Or, at least, that’s the excuse. The apartments are cramped, hard-used, but the rent is low. Around the rickety dining room table, the end of which nearly blocks the front door, sit my father, my baby sister, myself, and my uncle, who with my aunt has come earlier this fall to attend graduate school. They’re sleeping on the pullout in the living room. In the abutting closet-size kitchen, my aunt is helping my mother, who is fretting over the turkey. Look how doughy-faced the grownups still are, so young and slim, like they shouldn’t yet be out in the world. My father and uncle wear the same brow-line-style eyeglasses that have not yet gone out of fashion back in Seoul, the black plastic cap over the metal frames making them look perennially consternated, square. My mother and my aunt, despite aprons stained with grease and kimchi juice, look pretty in their colorful polyester blouses with the sleeves rolled up, and volleying back and forth between the women and the men is much excited chatter about relatives back home (we’re the sole permanent emigrants of either clan), of the economy and politics in the old country and in our new one, none of which I’m paying any mind. My sister and I, ages five and seven, the only ones speaking English, are talking about the bird in the oven—our very first—and already bickering over what parts are best, what parts the other should favor, our conception of it gleaned exclusively from television commercials and illustrations in magazines. We rarely eat poultry, because my mother is nauseated by the odor of raw chicken, but early in the preparations she brightly announces that this larger bird is different—it smells clean, even buttery—and I can already imagine how my father will slice into the grainy white flesh beneath the honeyed skin of the breast, this luscious sphere of meat that is being readied all around the apartment complex.

  We like it here, mainly for the grounds outside. There’s a grassy field for tag and ballgames, and a full play set of swings and slides and monkey bars and three concrete barrels laid on their sides, which are big enough to sit in and walk upside down around on your hands (and they offer some privacy too, if you desperately need to pee). There’s a basketball court and two badly cracked asphalt tennis co
urts that my parents sometimes use, but have to weed a bit first. So what if teenagers smoke and drink beer on the benches at night, or if there’s broken glass sprinkled about the playground. We’re careful not to lose our footing, and make sure to come in well before dark.

  And you can see the water from here. I like to sit by the windows when I can’t go outside. With the right breeze, at low tide the mucky, clammy smell of Echo Bay flutters through the metal blinds. Sometimes, for no reason I can give, I lick the sharp edges of the blinds, the combination of tin and soot and sludgy pier a funky pepper on the tongue. I already know that I have a bad habit. I’ll sample the window screens too, the paint-cracked radiators, try the parquet wood flooring after my mother dusts, its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts. I like the way my tongue buzzes from the copper electroplating on the bottom of her Revere Ware skillet, how it tickles my teeth the way a penny can’t. My mother scolds me whenever she catches me, tells me I’m going to get sick, or worse. Why do you have to taste everything? What’s the matter with you? I don’t yet know to say, It’s your fault.

  One of my favorite things is to chew on the corner of our red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth backed with cotton flocking and watch the slowly fading impression of my bites. It has the flavor of plastic, yes, but with a nutty oiliness, and then bears a sharper tang of the ammonia cleaner my mother obsessively sprays around our two-bedroom apartment. She’ll pull out the jug of bleach too if she’s seen a cockroach. There are grand armies of cockroaches here, and they’re huge. She keeps the place dish clean, but it’s still plagued by the pests stealing over, she is certain, from the neighboring units. Twice a year, the super bombs the building and they’ll be scarce for a few weeks, until they show up again in the cupboard, the leaner, faster ones that have survived. You’ll hear a sharp yelp from my mother, and a slammed cabinet door, and then nothing but harrowing silence before the metallic stink of bug spray wafts through the apartment like an old-time song. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I’ll breathe it in deeply, nearly making myself choke. For I’m a young splendid bug. I live on toxins and fumes. My mother, on the other hand, is getting more and more frustrated, hotly complaining to my father when he gets home: we’ve lived here for more than a year, and no matter what she does she can’t bar them or kill them, and she’s begun to think the only solution is to move, or else completely clear the kitchen of foodstuffs, not prepare meals here at all.