Devil's Night (10 page)

In the fall of 1988, two white Detroiters were tried for burning down a crack house on their street. Although they admitted the act, which was patently illegal, they were acquitted by a mostly black jury. The police department deplored the arson and denounced the two men as vigilantes, but most people applauded. There was a perceptible law-and-order mood in the city and Tom Delisle's question—“Where's the outrage?”—was beginning to resonate.

Many blacks were concerned, not only for their personal safety but also by the fact that violence, especially teenage violence, was frightening away whites. This view was forthrightly expressed in an article, published in the black-owned
Michigan Chronicle
, by columnist
Jim Ingram. Entitled “Wanna Come Over to My House?” it addressed the city's teenagers:

Since arriving in the city I had met a number of kids, and on the surface they didn't seem too different from Charles and his friends. Pontiac had been considered a rough town, and there were sometimes bloody incidents, but actual bloodshed was rare, and basically rational. I once saw a kid stab another kid at a dance, in a fight over a girl. A released convict shot and badly wounded a guy who had been seeing his wife while he was in prison. But these were exceptional events. Judging from the stories I heard in Detroit, many of the city's teenagers seemed to be engaged in mindless mayhem.

This impression was confirmed by an FBI study published on the front page of the
Free Press
in September.

Shortly after this article appeared, I met with a black journalist about my age who writes with sensitivity and insight into the problems of the city and its people. In the course of our conversation I asked her why Detroit's kids seemed so violent.

The reporter regarded me with disdain “Drugs, unemployment, babies making babies,” she said, reciting the causes in a bored tone, like a train conductor calling off stops. I had asked a naive question and she was letting me know it. I also detected a note of resentment in her voice. Who was I to come poking around, snooping judgmentally into the business of black folks and their children?

“But there must be more to it than that,” I said. “There were drugs and unwed mothers when we were growing up. And a lot of these kids come from good homes. Why them? Why now?”

She shrugged and stared at me, professional courtesy wearing thin. Throughout my stay in Detroit, the only real hostility I encountered was from members of the black intelligentsia. Some were better at concealing it than others, but very often there was an unspoken question in the air—What the hell do you care? White apathy regarding the fate of blacks in general, and black children in particular, is so pervasive that interest is automatically a cause for suspicion.

This is reflected in the antipathy that many blacks, including black journalists, feel toward Detroit's newspapers and television stations. The major media are all white owned and operated, and most of their editors and reporters live outside the city. Several years ago, black reporters at the
News
, a Gannett newspaper, staged a weeklong
byline strike to protest discrimination in assignments, and most, at the
News
and elsewhere, continue to believe that press coverage of black affairs swings between the sensational and the apathetic.

Certainly this is true in the case of teenage violence. Particularly gruesome killings, especially when the victims are white, get front-page treatment; but average murders get reported on the inside pages under laconic headings like
IN THIS WEEKEND
'
S SHOOTINGS
. Partly this is a simple variation on the old journalistic rule that a dog biting a man is not news; every year, upwards of three hundred kids are shot in the city. But it is also true that black teenagers killing one another is of scant interest to the upscale suburbanites who are the media's target market.

In the city, however, where hardly a family has been untouched by adolescent violence or drug addiction, the question of the kids—how to raise them, protect them, defend yourself against them—was a constant topic. In a strange way it reminded me of Israel, where parents are universally concerned about their children's compulsory military service. Yet the chances of a teenager's being shot on the streets of Detroit are far greater than those of an Israeli soldier's being wounded in combat.

Clementine Barfield learned that in 1986, when her sixteen-year-old son, Derick, and his fifteen-year-old brother, Roger, became two of the 365 children shot in Detroit that year. Roger, critically wounded, survived. Derick died. And their mother, a large, gentle-faced woman with a lilting Mississippi accent, decided to try to put a stop to the violence.

“After Derick was murdered, about a month later, I began looking for a support group,” Mrs. Barfield told me as we sat talking in her office on the second floor of an old schoolhouse on Martin Luther King Boulevard. “But there was none. So I went out and started one.” The name of the group is Save Our Sons and Daughters—SOSAD.

Half a dozen women, mothers of slain children, were in the SOSAD office that day, performing the menial tasks that go with
running an organization. They worked quietly while Mrs. Barfield, a frequently interviewed woman, patiently retold the story of the day in July 1986 that changed her life.

“The day before it happened, there had been an argument in school, and a boy pulled a gun on Roger,” she recalled. The next day Derick and Roger went looking for the boy. He saw the Barfield brothers first, sitting in their car in a gas station. Afraid that they had a gun, the boy fired four shots into the car, and fled. The murderer was eighteen years old and he is in jail now. “The family of the killer lost their son, too,” said Mrs. Barfield. “It's a thin line between victim and murderer in the black community.

“The kids in this city want to get away as fast as they can,” she continued. “Derick planned to go to Georgetown University. He should have graduated this June. Next fall he would have been in college. This should have been his new beginning.” Her voice faltered. “All I have now are memories.”

Mrs. Barfield handed me a copy of the program for SOSAD's first annual Mother's Day benefit. It was a glossy booklet, a testament to the organization's professionalism—and the pain in which it was founded. It featured page after page of ads from bereaved parents, with pictures of their murdered children.

“There is a war in Detroit,” Mrs. Barfield said, when I finished looking at the booklet, “and young black men are the targets. Our sons are at risk—to suicide, murder, jail and hopelessness. Really it's genocide; the enemy is the society that has forced the situation on them. Right now, the largest employer of young men in Detroit is drugs.”

Genocide
seemed a strong word; after all, the vast majority of black victims, including Mrs. Barfield's own son, are killed by other black teenagers. “Statistically that's true,” she conceded, “but it's misleading. The real enemy is hopelessness. This is the first generation that hasn't done as well as its parents.”

One of the women who had been stuffing envelopes when I arrived was listening to our conversation. Suddenly she began to sing, in a soft, mournful contralto. “Reach out and touch somebody's hand, make this a better world, if you can …” she sang, and the other ladies in the office put down their papers and joined in. A phone rang but no one answered it. Instead they sang on and on, “Reach out your hand, reach out your hand,” mothers of the dead who were lamenting a generation of hopeless, furious, defenseless children.

When I was growing up, Detroit made one promise to its young people—a good job. A place on the line at GM, Ford or Chrysler was part of our birthright, a legacy to the city's children. And then, in the early seventies, that legacy was withdrawn.

After I graduated from Pontiac Central High School in 1965, I followed a route that was being traveled by eighteen-year-olds throughout the Detroit area. The prom, a few days of r&r and then, on Monday morning, the hiring line at Pontiac Motors.

Getting a job was as easy as showing up. We filled out a couple of forms, took a perfunctory physical exam, went to Montgomery Wards to buy work clothes and a lunch bucket and the next day found ourselves turning screws and fastening bolts for $3.65 an hour and all the overtime we could handle.

My first paycheck was close to $180, a fortune in those days. To
earn it, I loaded sheets of metal into a giant press, hit a button, and watched the metal turn into panels. I never knew what the panels were for—nobody told me and I wasn't curious enough to ask. My orientation took approximately two minutes, and it was conducted by a scraggle-toothed hillbilly named Lucky who had thin tattooed arms, a greasy ducktail and a mean nasal twang. The foreman brought me over to him, said that we would be working together on the giant machine, and told him to explain my duties.

“See this press, kid?” Lucky snarled. “I'm the boss of this press. The last guy I worked with didn't think so, but he happened to fall in. They just covered this thing up with a black sheet and cleaned him out with a toothbrush.”

I didn't say anything, but the look on my face must have convinced him that he had made his point. “Just do what I tell you, and you're gonna get on real fine,” said my new mentor.

I have no idea whether Lucky's story was true or not, but I loved it—it was just the sort of initiation into the world of industrial manhood that I had been looking for. Working in the plant was more than just a way to make good money; it was a rite of passage, induction into the brotherhood of workingmen.

I didn't stay in the factory too long because I didn't have to. I blew most of the money I made on a trip to the Bahamas at the end of the summer, and used the rest for college. There were other kids working for tuition or travel money, but many signed on for the duration. Even then, you could easily support a family on an auto worker's salary.

Today you can do a lot better than that; a job with one of the Big Three is a blue-collar dream. Figuring in benefits, workers can easily earn sixty thousand dollars a year, and some make more. The problem is, there aren't any jobs.

The story of the rise and fall of the auto industry in Detroit has been told often. In the early part of the century, Henry Ford lured tens of thousands of semiliterate southern farm boys and European immigrants to Detroit with the offer of a magical five-dollar-a-day
wage. Ford was a paternal tyrant who turned his operation into a giant plantation. A service department supervised the personal lives and private morality of his workers, and a private goon squad, led by the infamous Harry Bennett and manned by a collection of gangsters and ex-prizefighters, kept the unions out of the plants.

Throughout the thirties and early forties, the UAW and the auto companies, led by Ford, fought fierce battles. But following World War II, a new policy of cooperation was put in place by Henry Ford's grandson and successor, Henry II. The young Ford realized that fighting the unions was both wasteful and unpopular. In 1946, shortly after assuming control of Ford Motors, in a speech to the Society of Automotive Engineers, he introduced his new approach. “There is no reason that a union contract could not be written and agreed upon with the same efficiency and good temper that marks the negotiation of a commercial contract between two companies,” he said.

Over the next quarter century the UAW, led by Walter Reuther, won ever more generous contracts from the Big Three. These concessions were, in turn, passed along to the consumers in the form of price increases. While it lasted, the system kept Detroit prosperous, but, in the mid-seventies, it fell apart. Japanese cars were cheaper, better and more economical. The OPEC—inspired rise in oil prices depressed the market for American gas-guzzlers. Automation made thousands of workers redundant. And the riot of 1967 encouraged management to locate new factories far from the urban battlefield.