Devil's Night (19 page)

There is a lovely park across the street from Dudley Randall's house, on the west side of Detroit, but at three in the afternoon it was deserted. At the curb, almost directly opposite the house, two very tough-looking young men sat in a late-model Pontiac. They passed a bottle between them and gazed out the windows, as if they were waiting for someone.

I rang the bell and Dudley Randall had to open several locks to let me in. At seventy-four he was a stooped, tired-looking man with bifocals, dressed in a flannel shirt and khaki trousers. His living room was lined with books, the walls were covered with African art and there were
National Geographic
magazines and anthologies of poetry stacked on the coffee table. Above a bookcase I saw a plaque, signed by the mayor, proclaiming Randall the Poet Laureate of Detroit.

Randall looked out his front window and gestured at the car in front. “I moved across from the park because I thought it would be nice,” he said. “But those two sit there every day and drink whiskey. And then they urinate in the bushes.” He made a sad face, offered me a seat and took one himself.

Randall has lived his life with books. For years he was a librarian and poet-in-residence at Wayne State University. During that time he founded the Broadside Press, a forum for black poets. But now, retired, he doesn't write anymore, nor does he bother much with literature. “I no longer find truth in the great poets or the great books,” he said. There was a pause. “I still read Tolstoy,” he added, and fell silent again.

“What's it like being the Poet Laureate of Detroit?” I asked. Randall considered for a moment. “Poetry isn't such a big thing in Detroit,” he said finally, in a flat tone.

“What do you think of the city?” I asked, trying hard to make conversation. Friends had told me that Dudley Randall was one of the smartest, most perceptive people in Detroit, but he seemed too discouraged to talk. He looked out the window at the car. “I want to move away,” he said. “I'd like to go someplace where it's warm.”

A few weeks earlier, on a visit to the mayor's office, I had noticed a poem of Randall's, entitled “Detroit Renaissance,” which is dedicated to Coleman Young, hanging on a wall in the reception room. Now I asked Randall about it, and he rose slowly, returning with a slim volume of his work, which includes the poem. He sat in silence as I read it to myself.

“Do you still believe it?” I asked. “Will you ever be able to rebuild this city together?”

Randall looked at me and shrugged, a slow movement of tired shoulders. “I guess not,” said the Poet Laureate of Detroit. “All the white people have moved away.”

And that is the simple truth. The week I met with Randall, the Detroit papers published a University of Chicago study that found, to no one's surprise, that the suburbs of the Motor City are the most segregated in the United States.

Many blacks look beyond the Eight Mile Road border and see America—an undifferentiated, uncaring world of suburban affluence where they are neither liked nor wanted. Actually, the almost four million people of the Metropolitan Detroit area—Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties—are subdivided by ethnicity. Macomb, to the northeast, is blue-collar territory; a large percentage of its people are second- and third-generation Polish and Italian refugees from Detroit. Oakland, to the northwest, is the second wealthiest American county among those with a population of over one million, and it is dominated by WASPs and, to a lesser extent, Jews. Detroit itself is located in Wayne County, whose population, outside the city, includes a good number of working-class southern whites, Hispanics, Arabs and ethnics.

In most ways the towns of the tri-county area have little in common; what they share is an estrangement from Detroit. Unlike the suburbs of other major cities, they are not bedroom communities. The average suburbanite almost never visits the city for any reason. As Arthur Johnson, head of the local NAACP, observed, Detroiters know they aren't loved by their neighbors. During the early years of the great white exodus this antipathy was impersonal. It got a face in 1973, with the election of Mayor Coleman Young.

The problem started with Young's inaugural address, in which he warned hoodlums (“whether they're wearing blue uniforms or Superfly suits”) to “hit Eight Mile and keep on going.” The idea of Detroit policemen crossing the boundary didn't seem to bother suburbanites, but they were mightily exercised by the prospect of a legion of Superfly badasses invading their turf.

A more politic mayor would have tried to mend fences, but Young is not a fence-mender. He dubbed his neighbors “the hostile suburbs” and mounted a campaign of verbal and political harassment that still
goes on today. They responded with a hatred usually reserved for enemy heads of state—which, in a way, he is. The mention of the mayor's name is enough to set off tirades from the ritzy salons of Grosse Pointe to the redneck suburbs—places such as Melvindale, “The Little Town with the Big Heart.”

Melvindale is a hamlet of modest, neatly tended tract houses, located not far from the Ford factories that employ many of its twelve thousand citizens. Like other working-class suburbs heavily dependent on the auto industry, it has experienced hard times since the seventies, although not so hard as the city of Detroit, where most of its people were born and raised.

The nerve center of Melvindale is Tom Coogan's barbershop, a two-chair emporium with a homey, Mayberry feeling—bear rugs and stuffed moose heads on the wall, brown-and-white-checked linoleum on the floor, and a sign in the window: B
URGLARS
B
EWARE
. And, in back of a barber chair, over a Pinaud Clubman Talc advertisment, there is another sign: T
OM
C
OOGAN
, M
AYOR
.

When I arrived at his shop, Mayor Coogan had a constituent in the chair and three more waiting for haircuts. Coogan is a genial, cautious man in a pale blue barber's smock whose thick glasses give him a scholarly appearance. He was in the middle of trimming a sideburn when a woman with a Tennessee accent came in to complain about overgrown weeds in a lot near her house. A believer in direct action, Coogan put down his scissors and called the police chief on the walkie-talkie he keeps next to his barber tools. He spoke briefly, then picked up his shears once again. “The violation is in the mail,” he told the lady.

“Can you imagine Coleman Young doing something like that?” I asked, hoping to get a rise. I got one. A waiting customer snorted. “You have to change your color, you want any help from him,” he said.

“No, Coleman is responsive,” said Coogan with collegial solidarity.

“Shit, that son of a bitch don't even take care of black people, let
alone white,” said another man. “Back in the fifties, Detroit was a beautiful city. You could get drunk in Detroit.”

Coogan snipped reflectively. “The city started deteriorating when they took off STRESS [a tough police unit, established after the 1967 riot, which deployed white cops as decoys in mostly black areas]. It kept people honest, being subject to search. Now everybody packs a piece downtown.”

The old man in the chair, who was getting a marine crew cut, cleared his throat. “Back in the old days when I was in Detroit there were colored but they knew their place. They knew right from wrong. They wanted to work then, not like today.” The others said “Damn right” and “Goddamn Young,” but Coogan snipped away in silence.

Except when Tom Coogan is conducting municipal business, his barbershop is a male preserve, a sort of club where fellas drop in every so often to get their ears raised whether they need it or not. They are talkers, and they weren't at all averse to chewing the fat with a visiting writer, especially when the subject was the city they once lived in and now view as an alien colony.

“Detroit is real squalor,” drawled one of the regulars. “All Young cares about is the great big monuments he's building himself.”

“Shit, they enjoy the environment they're in. That's the way they are,” said another man.

The blue phone that Coogan uses for official business rang. He picked it up and said, “Mayor Coogan.” As he spoke, the old fellow in the barber chair said, “This here is the only place in Michigan where you can insult the mayor. Ol' Tom's the best mayor we ever had. Even the best ain't too damn good, but he's the best anyway.” It got a laugh, and Coogan, hand over the receiver, nodded in agreement.

The mayor completed his conversation, finished the flattop and another man climbed into the chair for a six-dollar haircut. “Every community has crime and drug problems,” Coogan said, “and we've got our share. But we try to keep Detroit from spilling over into
Melvindale. We run police cars up and down Schaffer Road at night—that's our border with Detroit—and we feel it's a deterrent. We've been able to keep the crime under control out here.”

“Control, hell,” said one of the men. “My insurance guy called the other day and said, ‘Bill, we've got to raise your premiums because of Detroit.' ”

“Hell, the insurance companies will use any excuse,” said the fellow in the chair.

“Yeah, well ninety-five percent of prisoners are black,” said Bill. “Now, what does that tell ya?”

“Where is the mom and dad, that's what I wonder,” said a young man who had come into the shop and assumed one of the Naugahyde seats along the wall.

“Hell, they can't even count their kids. I used to walk three miles ever' day to Southwestern High School, for cripes sakes,” said Bill.

The mayor snipped away and said nothing.

“Last time I was in Detroit, some big black come up and asked me for some money,” said the young man. “I told him, ‘If you ain't out of here in two seconds I'll kill ya.' But I'll tell ya something, I wouldn't drive my car down Woodward Avenue today. Them big black dudes standing down there—shit.”

A heavyset middle-aged man named Carl, wearing a soiled T-shirt and work pants, came in to the shop and was enthusiastically greeted. He is considered the town wit, and he immediately went into his routine—a series of jokes about Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis, dagos and A-rabs, and Greeks who, according to him, have a universal passion for anal sex. Then, surprisingly, he offered a minority opinion on Coleman Young.

“I think Coleman's good,” he said. “He's fast, forward and he tells it like it is.”

“Shit,” said the young man, whose name was Angelo. “You're the first white guy I ever heard say something good about him.”

“Yeah, well where was my car stolen, Detroit or Melvindale?” Carl demanded. “People are afraid to go into Detroit just because of
the fear instilled by the news media. Blacks are human, you know. Just don't go looking for problems and you'll be all right.”

“This guy is crazy,” said Angelo. “He'll go anywhere. I ride with him and I start to shake. Shit, Detroit, man. My old house is gone. Wiped out.”

“Yeah, well you fuckin' I-talians abused the houses. Blacks didn't want them no more. You left them a ghetto,” said Carl.

Angelo was furious. “Tell them about that incident on Belle Isle—you never tell that to anybody,” he almost shouted.

“Shit, all that happened is some blacks hassled my car over on Belle Isle. They didn't hurt nobody,” said Carl.

Mayor Coogan continued snipping, and said nothing.