Devil's Night (28 page)

Almost sixty years later that memory still rankles. A few days earlier, the Archdiocese of Detroit announced that it was closing 43 of the 114 churches in the city—the largest shutdown in the history
of the American church. Young, who snarls at shopkeepers who move their stores to the suburbs, took the news with an uncharacteristic public shrug. Privately he made it clear that he was not sorry to see the churches close. “What Cardinal Shaka did is only good sense,” he told me. “Catholics are mostly white, and they've left the city. And a lot of the churches that are still here have erected racial barriers. Why should the church subsidize prejudice?”

There was more than just the memory of a youthful insult behind this attitude. The ethnic whites who have remained in the city—mostly elderly, mostly Catholic—are a major faction in the ABC vote. The church itself has never been an active enemy of the mayor; but, funded and led independently, it is one of the few institutions he doesn't dominate.

The evangelical flavor of the get-out-the-vote meeting continued through the introductory remarks. The mayor of Highland Park began her speech with a ritual, “Giving praise unto God who is the head of my life,” in much the same way that Iranian mullahs praise Allah before every public utterance.

In the back of the room, I spotted a group I had come to think of as “The Mayor's Men.” They are the new political class of Detroit, ubiquitous young black men in power suits and gleaming glasses who congregate whenever Young is present. They stood in small clusters and exchanged the coin of municipal government—gossip about contracts, appointments, and what the mayor had said to them just the other day. From time to time they switched groups, like partners in a folk dance.

Not far away, all alone, stood Dick “Night Train” Lane, the legendary former defensive back of the Detroit Lions, and a crony of Young. Lane, who runs the Police Athletic Program, was dressed out of another era—purple suit draped over his now dining-car-sized frame, and tan shoes. He is an anachronism in an administration dominated by smooth, polished young men, but it was hard to imagine the mayor, smoother and more polished than any of them, sipping
late-night brandies in the Manoogian mansion with the woolworsted yuppies.

When the time came, Coleman Young offered the crowd a few platitudes about good citizenship and then introduced Coretta King. They embraced, making an odd couple. Mrs. King is the living symbol of the civil rights movement, the custodian of her husband's legend, with all the moral fervor and idealism it implies. Young, who came out of the labor movement and the smoke-filled rooms of big-city politics, is closer in temperament, if not in ideology, to Boss Curly than to any southern preacher.

Mrs. King made a fine speech about the need for black people to elect candidates who support their interests. As she talked, Young grew visibly restless. He glanced more often at his official papers and looked around the room. The men in the suits tried to catch his eye. Occasionally he acknowledged them with a nod or a gesture. When the speech ended, the mayor seemed relieved. He gave Mrs. King an avuncular kiss on the cheek, gathered up his papers and headed back to his office, where there was real work to do. The men climbed into their city cars and followed.

They were there again, a day or two later, at a political breakfast at the Lomax church. The mayor's men were virtually indistinguishable from the hundred or so ministers in attendance, who were also dressed like investment bankers. The bureaucrats and divines sat at long tables as white-clad members of the ladies' auxilliary passed among them with plates of bacon and eggs, grits and biscuits. Occasionally the churchwomen collided with political aspirants who walked through the crowd passing out pamphlets and campaign buttons like waiters in a dim sum restaurant.

Coleman Young entered, accompanied by Congressman Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., and took his place at the head table. The ministers stood at respectful attention and applauded, and a line immediately formed a few feet from the dais. One by one they approached the mayor for brief whispered conversations, each of which ended in
a whooping laugh. Men of God on Sunday, during the week they were Young's precinct captains, and he treated them each to a one-liner or anecdote they could dine out on in the days ahead.

Congressman Fauntroy rose to introduce the mayor. “People love Coleman Young,” he told them, “because he always says the appropriate word—the
appropriate
word.” A laugh went up; everybody knew what word Fauntroy was talking about. “And he says it the way you
like
to say it,” Fauntroy added, getting an even bigger laugh.

Young's remarks were, once again, brief and dry. He is a good speaker, but not an inspired one. Probably twenty men in the room were better orators. Unlike Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, or Fauntroy himself, all of whom are ordained ministers, Young lacks the intense, gospel-inspired cadences of the church. When he attacked the Reagan administration and called the members of its civil rights commission “Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs,” they hollered “Yessir!” and “That's right!” but these were courtesy calls. Fauntroy's compliment notwithstanding, the mayor is appreciated more for what he says than how he says it.

The congressman's speech was a different story. He is the pastor of one of the largest black churches in Washington, and he was in his element, quoting from the Bible, praising the preachers for their political power (“Black ministers are the umpires, and you can call this one for the Democrats”) and carrying them away with a rolling litany of past heroes. “Somebody has to vote this year for Martin Luther King,” he intoned. “Somebody has to vote for Medgar Evers. Somebody has to vote for Malcolm; somebody has to vote for Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.” As he called off the names, the ministers hollered “Vote, vote!” and the church basement filled with emotional energy. Fauntroy was doing more than whipping up the troops; he was providing his fellow clergymen with a model sermon for the following Sunday morning.

Suddenly, without warning, the congressman began to sing “The
Greatest Love of All.” He sang in a high, professional voice, tore off his jacket to cheers, and swung the microphone by its cord like a nightclub crooner. The ministers stood and sang along with him, and only the tone-deaf mayor remained seated, his shoulders shaking with appreciative laughter.

I was sitting next to Jim Holley, who had greeted me with a collegial “Good morning, Reverend,” when I came in. He cheered and clapped with the others, but I knew he wasn't applauding for the mayor. The two men have clashed often, particularly over Holley's support of Jesse Jackson. Young calls Holley “an Oreo” and the feeling is mutual.

As I watched the mayor leave, surrounded by his entourage, I recalled what Holley had told me about him a few weeks before. We had been sitting in his study when Young's name came up, and suddenly the black rabbi sounded like Brooks Patterson.

“We asked for control of this city,” he said. “Well, now we're in control and everything is out of control. We don't build anything, not even a grocery store. The mayor has been in office fifteen years and only two blacks own anything downtown. Why? Because we don't hold Coleman accountable. What we have is a group of blacks running a black plantation.”

I mentioned to Holley that the mayor seemed pretty popular for a plantation master.

“Maybe he's still popular, but there were slaves who loved their owners, too,” he said. “If Coleman was white, he would have been gone a long time ago, and that's a fact. But black politicians think they can do any damn thing to black people and get away with it. White people aren't our problem. They don't control our schools. We got to stop blaming white people for everything.

“I'll tell you something else,” he continued. “If Coleman gets in trouble, he'll get a white lawyer. A slave is a slave, whether he's in the house or the field. We call them rent-a-Toms today. Their job is to keep the black folks calm and quiet. Coleman feeds us emotions
and gives the bread to the white folks. And you can't ride to freedom in Pharaoh's chariot. Maybe once he was good for this city, but it's time for him to move on—it's Joshua time.”

Holley's was a minority opinion among black Detroiters that fall. Despite the city's manifest difficulties, he was still Big Daddy, leader of the revolution, first president of the republic, field marshal of the forces of retribution. If he had not solved all their problems, he had at least provided the people of Detroit some of the nation's best political theater. And, more important, he had given them a sense of control over some portion of their own lives. For this they forgave him his trespasses, as he condemned their trespassers.

Surrounded by reverent loyal appointees, sustained by a campaign fund that made a run at his job impractical at best, checked-and-balanced by a city council grown accustomed to his authoritarian rule, supported by a white industrial establishment indebted to him for keeping the lid on, covered by a press frequently charmed and bludgeoned into averting its gaze, in the fall of 1988, Coleman Young was perhaps the most powerful and independent black politician in the United States.

And yet, a year before the next election, even some of Young's strongest supporters were beginning to wonder how long he could go on. He was seventy years old and, some said, not in the best of health. Worse, it was whispered that the old lion was going soft. He had taken his casino gambling defeat almost philosophically, had gone out of his way to patch things up with Jesse Jackson; and it had been months since his last tirade against the hostile suburbs.

More and more he was given to reflection. One day, during a drive through the city in the mayoral limo, he unexpectedly mentioned the fact that Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson exchange kisses in public.

“You know something?” he said. “I never even kissed my father when I was a kid. It was that macho thing we had. I don't think I hugged him more than a couple of times. It's only in the last few
years that I feel comfortable embracing another man, and I'm past seventy.” Young looked into the distance, and suddenly he seemed strangely vulnerable. He wondered aloud how long he could continue. Sometimes, he said, he dreams of a quiet old age, far removed from his battles with the suburbs and the challenges of his job. He talked of the joys of peace and solitude, a well-earned rest. It was a moving, convincing meditation, and his spokesman, Bob Berg, listened to it with growing concern.

“So, am I ready to bow out gracefully?” Coleman Young asked in what seemed to be a rhetorical tone. “Am I ready?” Suddenly the mayor of Detroit crinkled his eyes and his shoulders began to work up and down. “Hell no, I ain't ready,” he said. “They'll have to carry me out on my fucking shield.”

Chapter Seven
 
THE FAT LADY SINGS

Early in 1989, election year, Coleman Young got some unexpected news—he was a father.

The stork arrived in the form of a paternity suit filed by a thirty-five-year-old former city employee, Annivory Calvert. Calvert, now living in California, charged that Young was the father of her six-year-old son, Joel. Through her lawyers she demanded that the mayor acknowledge the boy and pay child support.

At first, the heretofore childless seventy-one-year-old Young seemed nonplussed. “If it weren't so serious, it would be flattering or funny,” he told the press, and then refused further comment. But it was too good a story to go away. The papers had a field day with the news that Big Daddy had become a dad. Political opponent Tom
Barrow tut-tutted that the mayor was a poor role model for the city's youth. Women's groups demanded that Young meet his obligations. Here and there, church leaders raised their voices in moral indignation.

Worse than the indignation were the jokes; Young became the butt of disrespectful humor. In an act of lesse majeste, a local disc jockey changed the words of David Bowie's “Space Oddity” from “Earth control to Major Tom” to “Birth control to Mayor Young,” and played it on the radio. For the first time in years, people were laughing at him, and Young didn't like it at all.