Devil's Night (25 page)

That afternoon, when I entered his office, the mayor was engrossed in some official papers. After a time he looked up and shook his head. “They want me to pass out free condoms, because of this AIDs thing,” he said, dropping the documents on the desk with an exasperated gesture. “Hell, why do I have to get involved in this? I neither condemn, nor do I condone, ah … fuckin'.” He paused and peered out of narrowed eyes for my reaction.

“Mr. Mayor,” said Berg, “this interview is on the record.”

“Oh,” said Young, in mock alarm. “Well, in that case, you better say that I, ah, condone fuckin'. I don't want people to get the wrong idea about me.”

I laughed. I had no idea if this was the appropriate response, but the remark struck me as funny. What the hell, I thought, at least I got one good quote.

Switching subjects but not tactics, the mayor mentioned a construction project that had run into some opposition because it would require uprooting part of a cemetery. “They got this Greek priest who's leading the protests,” he said. “I found out that the motherfucker is from Warren. He doesn't even have a got-damned church.” Again he turned his eyes on high beam and peered across the desk. I don't know what he saw, but he was apparently satisfied; he conducted
the rest of the interview in more or less conventional language.

Later, Berg, a white former newsman, explained that Young has an infallible way of gauging white attitudes toward blacks. The cursing is a part of the test, and people who flunk have very short audiences with His Honor.

Young's conversational style is rambling and circuitous, but he always returns to the point, which is usually connected in some way with white racism and its crippling effect on blacks. Some of this is posturing; the mayor is far too sophisticated to believe that his city's problems—especially its crime problem—can be attributed wholly to discrimination, past or present. His enemies say, with justice, that he uses suburb-bashing as a tool for deflecting criticism, much as southern segregationists a generation ago hollered “nigger” to make poor whites forget their own misery. Young's attacks on the “hostile suburbs” are calculated to rally support, create an us-against-the-world atmosphere that he, as supreme commander of “us,” can use for political gain.

But there is no doubt that militance is more than a tactic; Young genuinely sees the world in racial terms. And when it comes to assessing guilt, he refuses to play the liberal game of dividing the blame and splitting the difference. “I view racism not as a two-way street,” he once told a conference on race relations. “I think racism is a system of oppression. I don't think black folks are oppressive to anybody, so I don't consider that blacks are capable of racism.”

Young also rejects the popular notion that the problems of black people—and of black Detroit—are a seamless web. “I'm not going to buy that vicious-cycle theory,” Young told the
Detroit Free Press
in 1987. “It starts with economic pressure, and the first economic pressure was slavery.… It reminds me of something Martin Luther King said. ‘How do you expect us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when we don't even have boots?' ” Improving on Dr. King, the mayor added a coda: “The motherfuckers
stole
our boots.”

The sense that Detroit has been fleeced and abandoned runs through Young's conversation. So does resentment of whites who have left but continue to meddle in the city's affairs. “I don't know of any other city in the nation where there's such a preoccupation in the suburbs for control,” he said. “The same people who left the city for racial reasons still want to control what they've left.”

Paradoxically, some blacks feel that Young himself has opened the door for white interference. Since taking office he has concentrated on rebuilding the downtown, and most of his grandiose projects have been financed and built by whites such as Henry Ford II and Max Fisher. The mayor is unapologetic about the strategy—which he views as necessary for creating jobs—or the tactic of marshaling suburban help. He is realistic in assessing the problem: “Ain't no black people wielding any of the major power—economic power—in this city,” he said.

The inability to translate political control into economic self-sufficiency is perhaps Young's greatest frustration. He goes through life keeping score: how many for us, how many for them. The dominant theme of his administration has been to get more black numbers on the scoreboard, but judged by that standard, he has been a disappointment. Only fourteen black-owned companies in Detroit earned more than $10 million in 1987, and six of them were auto dealerships. Even more revealing, of the twenty-five largest black-owned companies, just two were building firms whose combined income was $6.6 million. “The head of the Minority Contractors Association runs a soul food restaurant on Seven Mile Road,” a columnist for one of the daily papers said. “That tells you all you need to know, right there.”

Professional people have done better, although not as well as might be expected in a black-run city. A few weeks after our first meeting, the mayor attended the dedication of a downtown building. The architects involved stood on the podium. One was a towering black man, well over six-five. After the ceremony, he was
introduced, by a mutual friend, to the mayor. “I noticed you up there,” Young said.

“It's kind of hard to miss me,” said the architect. “I was the tallest one on the stage.”

“Yeah, and the only nigger, too,” snapped Young.

The mayor's critics say that his tough racial rhetoric has kept whites from moving back to the city, but he dismisses the notion. “White people find it extremely hard to live in an environment they don't control,” he observed archly.

This is very likely true, but the mayor has done little to allay the fears of his neighbors. A few years ago, Detroit constructed a monument to Joe Louis. The statue—a giant black fist—stands at the foot of Woodward Avenue, off the Lodge Expressway, where white commuters can't miss it; it is not the sort of symbol calculated to calm jittery suburban nerves.

Nor is Coleman Young anybody's idea of a law-and-order mayor. In his first inaugural address he made his famous remark about crooks hitting Eight Mile Road, but if they did, others have taken their place. And the fact that Young, who has an abiding distrust of cops, took that opportunity to include racist policemen in his list of personae non grata, did not endear him to the department.

Occasionally the mayor, reacting to public outcries, has assumed a sterner stance. After a spate of shootings in schools, he called for metal detectors at schoolhouse entrances. In the wake of persistent reports that Detroit cops were using drugs, he advocated random testing in the department. Both decisions violated his own principles of civil rights, and he adopted them with obvious reluctance.

Despite these sporadic get-tough efforts, however, Coleman Young clings resolutely to his old image as a bad-ass rebel. The mayor has an extensive collection of firearms, and he talks about guns with fond expertise. Within minutes of assuring me that Detroit's violent image is a media exaggeration, he bragged about how dangerous the city is. “I always carried a gun when I knew it
was necessary,” he said of the years before he became mayor. “In the old days, in the barbershop, there was a guy named Sol—Solomon—who used to make regular gun runs to Ohio. We'd order any damn gun we wanted.” Today, with two bodyguards, he no longer packs his own piece, but he leaves no doubt that he would know what to do with one.

Young's machismo makes him a dubious role model for the city's teenagers. Toward the end of the year, the mayor appeared before a group of two hundred high school students at a rally of Congressman George Crockett's Youth Caucus. The kids, all but one of whom were black, listened avidly but with a certain bemusement as the mayor lectured them about their civic duties.

“I know I have the responsibility to close down the crack houses and scoop up the guns,” he said. But, he told them, they had to cooperate—by saying no to drugs, helping their friends to stay clean, and by calling the police to report crack dealers at school or in the neighborhood. The mayor used a mixture of mild profanity and occasional slang to make the point, and unlike most septuagenarians, he carried it off; Coleman Young's street talk is still impeccable.

“Now,” he hollered to the kids, “are you tired of crime?”

“Yeah!” they chorused.

“Are you going to do something about it?”

“Yeah!” they answered.

“Are you prepared to point a finger and drop a dime on the sons of a bitch who're dealing?” he thundered.

“No!” yelled most of the audience, with a spontaneity that startled the mayor. He narrowed his eyes, but his shoulders began to work, suppressing laughter. He made them answer again, getting a halfhearted “Yeah” the second time, but it was clear that everybody knew where everybody else stood.

Later, when I asked him about the rally, his eyes crinkled up and he began to laugh. “Did you really expect that the kids would agree to turn in pushers?” I wondered.

“Shit no; I know about the code of silence,” he said.

“Would you have turned in a drug dealer when you were their age?” I asked, and he looked at me as if I were softheaded.

“Me?” he said, in a tone of disbelief. “Hell no. But don't forget, it was a different city then. Cops used to shoot black kids for fun. They'd tell you to run, and call themselves shooting over your head, and shoot you in the back. I learned when I was ten or eleven not to turn my back on a cop.” Although he could fire the chief of police with a phone call, there is still a lot of little Coleman in him, and the people of his city, the good guys and the bad guys, sense it.

One of the ways in which Coleman Young conveys his allegiance to his roots is through the use of profanity; when the mood is on him, he elevates cussing to a minor art form. Suburbanites and some prissy Detroiters complain about the mayor's foul language, and church leaders often grumble that, as a role model, the mayor shouldn't be saying “all kinds of bitches and motherfuckers.” Young, for his part, genuinely savors the shock value of his rough talk.

The newspapers in Detroit often go into reportorial contortions to convey the mayor's language. Many interviews with him look as if they were written in Morse code, dots and dashes filling in for unprintable words. Local journalists take a certain pride in their inventiveness. During the mayor's 1983 visit to Japan, for example, the
Detroit Free Press
began an article this way:

During that same visit, Young was the dinner guest of the mayor of Toyota, Detroit's sister city in Japan. After the meal, the Japanese host honored his colleague by donning a kimono and performing a warrior dance with a spear and fan. Then, in accordance with good manners, he asked Young to perform a dance of his own.

“I hate to disillusion you,” said Young, “but I can't dance and I can't sing. And I don't like watermelon, either.”

Young is, indeed, tone-deaf, but he had changed his mind on the watermelon issue by the time, in December, he visited Detroit's open-air Eastern Market. He was on one of his periodic forays around the city, and he stopped in to say hello to an Italian vegetable man, a crony from the old days.

After some vigorous hand-shaking, the vendor informed the mayor that a Chinese restaurant was about to open not far from his shop. Young, a connoisseur of Chinese cooking, nodded approvingly.

“What's the owner's name,” he asked.

“Don Pollack, something like that,” said the grocer.

“Pollack? What the hell kinda Chinaman is he?” demanded Mayor Young with mock outrage.

Trying to recoup, the Italian offered the mayor some poinsettias for his office.

“I don't need no got-damned poin-settas,” said the mayor of Detroit. Pause. “How 'bout a watermelon?” The small crowd that had assembled laughed loudly. Coleman loves watermelon; we love watermelon; ergo …

On a state visit to Zimbabwe, Coleman Young approvingly called his host, President Robert Mugabe, “a mean sucker,” and compared his own problems with the bureaucracy of Detroit to local practice. “He doesn't have a civil service, and he can shoot people if he wants to, I guess. I can't do that,” Young said wistfully.

The mayor's international style is not the product of ill-mannered buffoonery, any more than calling the governor of Michigan a “motherfucker” in a meeting or his periodic references to Ronald
Reagan as “Old Pruneface” were slips on the tongue. Young's language is calculated to get heads nodding on the corner, to serve as proof that Coleman hasn't forgotten who he is and where he came from. A black businessman summed it up nicely. “I like Coleman because he's him, and he ain't gonna
change
him,” he said.

Young, the Cadillac mayor, is prickly about his prerogatives as leader of the black polis. During his first administration, he went to Washington to meet with the secretary of HUD. Instead, he was greeted by a black undersecretary. “I didn't come here to see the house nigger,” he told the official. “Get me the Man.”

But the mayor is also capable of great charm and diplomacy when the occasion calls for it. This was in evidence one afternoon when, together with a representative of the governor's office and the leaders of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, he unveiled a new joint marketing scheme for the tri-county area. The room at the Detroit Art Institute was crowded with businessmen in dark suits and a three-martini afterglow. On the dais, Young was the only black, a reminder of the true balance of power in the area.