Devil's Night (32 page)

The mayor was introduced to enthusiastic applause. “Devil's Night is becoming more like any other night,” he said. “This year we should cooperate to see that there are less fires on Devil's Night than any other night of the year. Now, will you help me to prove that those who say Detroit is dead are wrong?” Children and parents cheered and Young began to hand out prizes to the winners. “This is pathetic,” said a radio reporter. “In what other American city do kids get awards for writing about not burning down their own town?”

Young's short speech struck me as an amazing gamble. I had expected him to lower public expectations, so that he could claim a post–Halloween success. Instead, he had belittled Devil's Night and called for fewer fires than usual—a demand that would inevitably become the standard by which this year would be judged. “You think he knows something we don't?” I asked the reporter, who shrugged. “He's God,” he said. “Maybe he's planning to make it rain.”

It didn't. Devil's Night was crisp and clear, and there was a feeling of expectation in the air as a group of fire buffs gathered for their traditional preholiday dinner at a McDonald's on the far east side. There were eight of them, including two firemen from nearby Farmington, members of an informal Devil's Night society that has been meeting for years. Over Big Macs and milk shakes they plotted their evening's activity. The plan was to fan out to various parts of the city and to inform each other of good blazes by car phone.

I was invited to ride with Harvey and Si, two ex-Detroiters in their early fifties who now live in the suburbs. Like the others, they were equipped with a shortwave radio, street maps and a cellular phone. The didn't intend to miss a thing. “If we catch one good house fire, the night will have been worthwhile,” Si said.

We hadn't been cruising for more than fifteen minutes when a fire was reported on the west side. Harvey expertly navigated the freeways and pulled up in front of a flaming wood house several minutes before the fire trucks arrived. The street was filled with neighborhood people who greeted the suburban voyeurs without apparent resentment.

Next to the burning building a thin, youthful black man stood on his lawn and sprayed the side of his white-shingled house with a garden hose. The wind was blowing the other way, but the fire was close enough to cast him in dramatic outline, and press photographers crowded around. He ignored them as he sprayed, a look of intense, fearful concentration on his face.

In the street, in front of the house, I spotted John Aboud, the owner of the Tailwind. He had a minicamera on his shoulder, and he was bent on one knee, filming the scene. He looked up and waved in recognition. It had been almost a year since our last meeting.

“How's it going, John?” I asked.

“My cousin was killed six weeks ago in a video store,” he said, giving me an update on his family body count. “That makes seven. And he had four kids, too.” He stared briefly at the flames leaping from the roof of the house to the telephone wires, sighed and then put the Minicam back on his shoulder.

A few minutes later the fire trucks began to arrive, and we watched for a while as they battled the blaze. The man with the garden hose ignored the engines and continued to spray his house. I felt a tap on my shoulder and saw Harvey. “Come on,” he said impatiently. “They've got this one under control. There's supposed to be four houses going up on the east side.”

“Four?” asked his partner, Si. “That's music to my ears.”

The report was only half true; when we reached our destination, a narrow residential street, there were two houses ablaze. One, reputedly a crack house, had already burned to the ground, leaving only a chimney. The other, which belonged to a family, was going fast.
Its residents had already been taken to a shelter by emergency workers.

A television crew stood in the street, recording the scene while a blond reporter in a trenchcoat went from neighbor to neighbor, trying to get someone to say that the crack house had been torched. No one knew anything. “Coleman says we don't have an arson problem here,” he said to a group of onlookers in a bitter tone. “Tell that to the lady whose house got burned down.”

“What you care, man?” asked a woman in a bathrobe and house shoes. “You don't live 'round here noway.”

“Coleman gonna win, and if you think I'm lying, my mother is a bitch,” said a teenager, and a laugh went up. A look of disgust passed over the reporter's face, and he walked away shaking his head.

“The only people who support Coleman are his constituents,” Si observed as we drove toward the next fire.

“The intelligence level of these people is so low that they don't know they need a change,” agreed Harvey. He dialed a number on the car phone. “Hey,” he said into the receiver, “we had a good one over here, you got anything good over there?”

For the next few hours we hopped from fire to fire. A commercial building (“Probably for the insurance,” said Harvey), a few abandoned houses, several dumpsters. Harvey and Si were still waiting for the big one, and they were getting restless.

Finally a call came over the radio—an apartment building was ablaze in Highland Park. “Bingo,” said Si happily. “I know just where that is. We used to live around there.”

The apartment building was deserted, but flames shot out of its windows, and fire fighters clambered along the roof. Across the street, an old lady sat on the steps of the Greater Emmanuel Church of God in Christ. “I heard my church was on fire so I came right down here,” she said in a determined voice. “I'm on the Mothers Board, and I'm not letting anything hurt my church. I intend to sit here until the last fire truck leaves.”

Several people had gathered around the lady. One of them was a cop from New Jersey who had come to Detroit especially to observe Devil's Night. “I have an M.A. in public safety,” he said, “but tonight I'm getting a Ph.D. in reality.”

Si and Harvey smiled at the compliment. “You picked a good year to come,” Harvey said. “This is much better than last year. But what the heck, good year, bad year, there'll always be a Devil's Night.”

The next day Bill Bonds, an outspoken anchorman on ABC-TV affiliate WXYT, delivered a furious commentary on the fires of Devil's Night. “It was like a vision from hell,” he told viewers. “Well, people say, those yo-yos burn down their city every year, don't they? But this year is different; this year, I've heard the words ‘who cares?' ”

That more or less summed up the suburban attitude. But in the city, with a week to go before the election, Devil's Night flared into a raging political controversy.

Tom Barrow struck first. Accompanied by reporters and press photographers, he toured the burned ruins, had his picture taken with victims and blasted the mayor. For months he had been talking about the declining quality of life and attacking Young for concentrating on grandiose buildings in the business district at the expense of the neighborhoods. Now he hammered home his point. “Just look at downtown,” he said in an I-told-you-so tone. “Everything's fine down there. Nothing burned down there.”

For three days, city officials declined to publish Devil's Night statistics; they wanted to wait until after Halloween and the end of what they called “the seventy-two-hour Devil's Night period.” Young's only comment was that the number of fires had been “about normal.” Off the record, the mayor's people admitted that it might have risen slightly from the previous year's 104.

That estimate was loudly disputed by the Firefighters Union, which also happened to be Barrow's biggest financial supporter.
Union officials claimed their men had fought 285 Devil's Night fires—far more than in any of the previous four years, and almost as many as 1984's all-time record of 297.

On the day after Halloween, Young finally called a news conference at the City-County Building. Dressed in a blue blazer and pink shirt, the mayor gave his version of what had happened. There had been 115 fires on Devil's Night itself, he said—up slightly from the year before. But, for the overall three-day period, the number had declined. He pointed to a red-white-and-blue chart, which showed constant decreases for the “Devil's Night period” since 1984. The mayor praised the community spirit of the thirty thousand patrol volunteers, saluted the city's “outstanding effort” and then offered to answer questions.

The reporters sitting around the conference table seemed momentarily speechless. None of them knew exactly how many fires there had been, but they had been on the street on Devil's Night, and they knew that it had been bad, certainly worse than the year before. They had come to the press conference expecting to hear a chastened mayor explain his failure; instead, he had declared victory.

The months of media bashing and personal attacks on journalists suddenly hung heavy over the crowded room. Young glowered at them, daring them to dispute his version of reality. Finally a reporter broke the silence. “Mr. Mayor, I don't want to be critical, but …”

“Yeah, sure you don't,” interrupted the mayor with heavy sarcasm. “None of you wants to be critical.”

For the next half hour, the mayor snapped and raged at the reporters. He answered their gentle queries with harsh denunciations, demanding to know if they dared to dispute his official figures, and then waiting for their docile “no sirs” before moving on. Despite the fact that at least twenty journalists were present, the silences between questions grew longer and longer.

Finally a TV correspondent in the back of the room spoke up.

“Mr. Mayor, what we really want to know is, well, did the number of fires actually go down this year or what?”

Young fixed him with an imperious stare. “What do you think?” he demanded. “You can see the chart.”

“Yes sir,” said the reporter. “But you're the mayor, I want to know what you think.”

Young refused to be appeased. “You got a big opinion,” he said. “I hear it on television every night. Let's hear what
you
think.” The reporter reddened like a schoolboy and said nothing. “Next question,” snapped the mayor.

At the end of the press conference, the journalists filed quietly out of the room. They had been intimidated and they knew it. I was standing in the hall with Bill McGraw of the
Free Press
when a young black radio reporter came over and introduced himself. “That was a good question you asked in there,” McGraw told him in an encouraging tone.

“I had another question,” said the radio man. “I wanted more sound. But when I talk to the Man, I walk on coals. Maybe when I get bigger, y'know?”

Young's performance had won him a partial victory. The next day the press would report two sets of figures—his and the Firefighters Union's—without being able to say which was correct. Now he had to find a way to make voters give him the benefit of the doubt.

That evening, Young attended a fund-raiser sponsored by the Black Firefighters organization. The affair was held in an elegant nightclub just inside the Eight Mile border. Soul Muzak played softly in the background and civil servants in their Sunday clothes lined up for a free buffet supper. These were the mayor's people, beneficiaries of his affirmative action policies, and they were in a receptive mood.

Young began his remarks with a general overview of his accomplishments, among which he included the construction of town houses on the Detroit River. “You can drive into your garage, walk
through the house and out the back door, get into your boat and float over to the marina,” he said. He was reminding them of their prosperity—and its source. Before Coleman Young, blacks in Detroit didn't have boats—or jobs as fire fighters.

Then the mayor turned to the main business of the night, an attack on the lily-white leadership” of the Firefighters Union. “They oppose affirmative action,” he said, “and so does my opponent. My opponent supports that damn union. Now, that's some kind of an uncle.… And he's got the right first name for it, too.” The room burst into laughter and applause. Young joined them, shoulders shaking. “Back home they call that signifyin',” he said.

And so, Devil's Night was Colemanized. It had taken one day for him to turn the “vision from hell” into a racial confrontation, with the bigoted white fire fighters and Uncle Tom Barrow on one side and the signifying leader of the black polis on the other. Barrow didn't even mention the conflagration during the last week of the campaign.

On the Sunday before the election, Coleman Young staged his final rally, at the New St. Paul's Tabernacle. The street outside the large church was festooned with triangular red-and-white Young '89 signs. Dozens of city employees loitered in front of the building, talking politics and sniffing the aroma of fried chicken that wafted over from the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner. From time to time a Barrow car cruised by, and the Colemanites hooted good-naturedly.

When I arrived, notebook in hand, some of them mistook me for a local newsman. “Quit tellin' people what to think,” they shouted. “We're gonna have the last laugh!” They weren't able to put any real hostility in it though; they could parrot their boss's phrases, but not his rage.

Inside, a large crowd filled the pews of the blue-carpeted sanctuary. As usual, virtually everyone was black; throughout the campaign,
the mayor almost never appeared before a predominantly white audience. Special roped-off areas were reserved for “Clergy” and “Elected Officials.” There was no press section. I took a seat in the rear of the church, next to a
Free Press
reporter.

There was none of the rowdy energy normally associated with a political rally. Men and women sat in dignified silence, waiting for the mayor and Jesse Jackson, who was also scheduled to speak. Church ushers escorted latecomers to seats. An organ played quietly in the background.