Devil's Night (14 page)

Weston was less concerned with the past than the future. “The band up there is all Festival graduates,” she told Rogers. “Believe me, some of the kids I have are better than we ever were.”

Rogers considered. Behind his thick glasses you could see his eyes grow hazy as he recalled the glory days with Smokey and the group. “Better than we were?” he finally said, in a gentle tone. “Yeah, I suppose they are better than us. But there's only one thing, Kim. They aren't us.”

“They're better,” Weston insisted softly. “All they need is a chance.”

After my first visit to Festival, I came back several times, partly because the sight of so many happy, talented kids cheered me up. One day I mentioned to Weston that it must be fun working with the city's teenage elite.

Weston shook her head. “We get a cross section,” she said. “The kids you see here come from every high school in the city. They're no different from everybody else. They have their problems.”

I was skeptical and said so. The kids at Festival seemed too well-behaved and gentle to be representative of the fierce generation of the homicide statistics. But Weston was adamant. “I'll let you talk to some of the young people and you can judge for yourself,” she offered.

Late that afternoon, I was introduced to three Festival participants. “This gentleman wants to interview you,” Weston told them, and left the room. The kids stared at me across a great gap of age and race, waiting to see what I wanted.

We began with a little what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up. Perrin, a light-skinned sixteen-year-old with a B average at Southwestern High School, said she intended to be a foreign ambassador. George, the baritone from the choral workshop, was out of school and trying to break into show business. Joycelyn, who had sung “Somewhere over the Rainbow” in a Judy Holliday voice, was older than the others,
and hoped to get a job at the Mazda factory while she looked for work as an entertainer.

“We're chosen to be part of a dream,” said George. Shifting into a mock-sermonic voice, he turned to the others. “Can I get a witness, children?” he demanded, and they said “Amen.” He was obviously the class clown, and the preacher parody is one of his stock bits.

“I came to Festival as a gospel singer,” said Joycelyn. “And you know what? I found out I can do opera. Imagine that.”

“The girl can do opera,” said George. “Great God Almighty, we got us an opera-singing young lady here with us today! Let us say ‘Amen.' ” Joycelyn and Perrin giggled.

“What it shows is that people can accomplish something, not just go out in the street and act the fool,” said Perrin, sounding adult and serious. “Smokey Robinson lived on my grandmother's street. We know him real well. He sends me little tips sometimes. And my family is good friends with the Four Tops, too.”

“People say Detroit is dead without Motown, but if they'd only give us half a chance, I do believe we could make the Motown of old come back to this fair city,” said George.

“That's right,” said Joycelyn. “We've got everything they had. We have a Berry Gordy in Kim Weston.”

“None of this would be here without Sister Weston,” said George.

“None of
us
would be here without Kim,” said Joycelyn. “If I have a hero, it's her.” The others nodded in agreement. “Praise God for Sister Kim,” George half-sang.

“My mother is my hero,” said Perrin. She hesitated. “See, my mother is black, and my father is white, although he's semiprejudiced against whites. At school the kids know about it and, being mixed, I get it from both ends. When I came here, I had to decide what I was, whether I was black or white. On the form I wrote ‘Amgriques.' That's what you call what I am,” she said, pronouncing the strange-sounding word. “I'm amgriques.”

“How do you get treated when you leave the city?” George asked.

“Like a black,” she said. “I went out to the suburbs to spend the
night with a friend one time, and the cops knocked on the door to find out who I was.”

The others nodded knowingly. “Those suburbs are taboo,” said George. “I don't even bother going out there anymore. Once I was just driving around, out in Bloomfield Hills, and a cop stopped me and hit me. I just called on Jesus.” He lapsed into his preacher's voice. “I said, ‘Lord, let me get out of this mess and I'll never come back out here again.' And I never have.”

“One time I got a job out in Bloomfield, taking care of some people's child,” Joycelyn added. “They left me in a big old house with a sauna and Jacuzzi and their little baby. He used to just fall out and have fits like something got a hold on him. And you know what they did? They left a fifty-dollar bill in a kitchen drawer. I said, ‘What's fifty dollars doin' in there with the spoons and the forks?' They were testing me, trying to find out if I was thief. So I quit and came back to the city. I'm no thief, just because I'm black.”

“Sometimes white people act crazy,” George said, and the others nodded assent. They have grown up in a black city, and they can't remember a time when Detroit wasn't divided by the invisible barrier at Eight Mile Road. On their side of the line they are at home, but they know all about the kind of trouble that faces blacks who try to break out into the larger world.

Talking about the suburbs had turned the conversation gloomy. To break the mood, I asked George whether his comic talents were inherited. I expected a wisecrack, but his eyes registered alarm.

“Inherited? I don't know if I should talk about what I inherited or not,” he said, and paused a long moment, weighing the matter. Finally he said, “Okay, you asked for it,” and took a deep breath. “A couple of years ago my father got up on the wrong side of the bed, you might say. He, ah, well, he killed my stepmother and baby brother. Then he burned down the house. Then he killed himself. Kind of a tough day, know what I mean? That's my inheritance.” He tried to smile. The others, who clearly hadn't heard the story, looked at him in shock.

“After that, I went through the drug thing,” he said in a steady voice. “At the time, it was severely critical. I took the insurance money and put it up my nose—fifty thousand dollars. And I lost two years of my life after Daddy took his scenic cruise.”

There was a long silence. Finally Perrin said, “There's drugs in every house around me, but I've never even seen them. Because of my mother.”

“My mother is said to have ESP,” said Joycelyn. Then she stopped, looked at George, and her lip began to quiver. “I had a tragic incident too,” she said, averting her eyes. “I got involved with cocaine and—well, there is time I can't account for. I don't remember where I was or what I did. I can't account for a year and a half of my life.” She began to cry silently, and it was George's turn to look on helplessly.

At the beginning of the conversation, I had suspected a setup; three model students to represent the program. But Kim Weston had a different point to make. The media have turned “teenage drug addicts,” “high school dropouts” and “unwed mothers” into clichés of the black metropolis, stock phrases meant to convey an image of menace or immorality. But just as there is a thin line between victim and murderer in the black community, there is a blurred distinction between “good” kids and “bad” ones.

After a few moments, Joycelyn wiped away her tears. “Three years ago I went to Solomon's Church,” she said. “I spoke in tongues and caught the Holy Ghost, and I was saved.”

“Amen to that,” said George, serious this time. “Amen,” the others whispered. “If it hadn't of been for God, and Festival, I'd be lost,” Joycelyn said. “Instead, I'm saved.”

Several months after my first visit to Festival, Kim Weston invited me to a dinner-dance sponsored by the National Law Enforcement Practitioners, who were holding their annual convention in Detroit. By day, the practitioners discussed the ways and means of fighting
crime; by night they partied. And in Detroit, partying still means Motown.

The dinner was an elaborate spread. The Detroit Police Department laid on a full buffet, open bar and entertainment by Weston, Ivy Hunter (who wrote “Just Ask the Lonely” for the Four Tops) and the Earl Van Dyke Band, once the house band at Hitsville.

Like the Martha Reeves show, this was something of a reunion. George Gordy was there, representing the Gordy family. A tiny man with a shining bald head, gold-framed granny glasses and a giant gold medallion dangling from his neck, he looked like a diplomat from some Afro-American foreign planet.

Maxine Powell sat at our table. She wore a fedora and green suit, and looked as proper and forbidding as she had in the days when she ran a charm school—chaperone operation for the company's young stars. She munched fried chicken wings, holding them daintily with her pinky finger sticking out, chewing with her mouth tightly shut. When she wanted to pick her teeth, she put her head almost under the table and covered it with a white linen napkin. The legend is that she turned Diana Ross and the others into little ladies, and the aging musicians at our table behaved like children forced to dine with a strict schoolmarm.

The band sat together, old men who still make young men's music. That night Earl Van Dyke played mostly left-handed because his right was arthritic. The others, pushing sixty, wore thick glasses and sported potbellies that hung over their cummerbunds.

Pistol Allen, the old Motown drummer, came escorted by his twenty-eight-year-old daughter. He produced pictures of all nine of his children and passed them around. “Every one of them is a professional,” he said, beaming, and the others, mindful of the pitfalls of child rearing in Detroit, nodded appreciatively.

The emcee that night was a middle-aged police officer who told the crowd that he had originally come to Detroit from Ohio to join Motown. Before starting the show, he introduced Katherine Shaffner of the Marvelettes.

Once the Marvelettes communicated in three-minute bursts of rhythm, little poems with cautionary messages: “Watch out, here comes that playboy”; “Don't mess with Bill”; “Danger, heartbreak dead ahead.” Tonight Shaffner had a different warning, and it was delivered in dry, measured prose.

“Some of you may know,” she said, “that last year my nineteen-year-old son, Tony, was shot to death here in Detroit.” She said it with such dignity and reserve that it took a moment for the words to sink in. The musicians exchanged looks—most of them hadn't known. There was an uncomfortable rustling in the audience. The officers, mostly white, had come to party, not to listen to another hard-luck story. But if Shaffner sensed their mood, she ignored it. She took her time, telling them about the son she had lost.

These stories are all depressingly similar. There wasn't a Detroiter there who hadn't heard them, and many had experienced them personally. Jacqueline Wilson; Jackie Wilson, Jr.; Tony Shaffner—the sons and daughters of the famous rate an item on the evening news, a visit from
Entertainment Tonight
, a brief mention at the flatfoots' ball. The others get six lines in the newspaper and a gospel song.

“I'm telling you this,” she concluded with composure, “because you are on the front lines of the battle, and you need to know what a mother feels. You need to see this from the family's point of view. We are all the victims of what's going on. There's a war going on out in the streets.”

There was an awkward moment when she took her seat. Then the musicians filed up to the bandstand to start the show. They struck up a Motown medley, and the assembled officers and their wives lumbered out of their seats. The white cops danced with thickankled determination, and their black colleagues showed solidarity by moving sedately to the beat. Gradually, as Van Dyke played and Ivy Hunter sang, the gloomy mood lifted, and a sense of tentative festivity took its place.

Closing the show, Kim Weston took the microphone and belted out one of her old hits, “Take Me in Your Arms.” People danced,
clapped at the tables or bellied up to the open bar for a nightcap. The evening was coming to a successful conclusion.

During Shaffner's speech, Weston had been in the ladies' room, preparing to go on. She had missed the story, and knew nothing of Tony Shaffner's death. Now, as the band swung into “Dancing in the Streets,” she called on the former Marvelette (“My Motown sister Katherine”) to join her onstage. Schaffner hesitated for just a moment, and then rose from her seat. The two women stood side by side and sang: “Summer's here and the time is right, for dancing in the streets; don't forget the Motor City, dancing, dancing in the streets.…”

The officers and their wives danced and sang along, transported by the tune and the memories it evoked. Memories of a time when Detroit was Motown, not the Murder Capital; a time when children walked to school in safety and there was dancing, not warfare, in the streets of America's sixth largest city.

Chapter Four
 
A CHRISTIAN WOMAN
NAMED VIOLENCE