Devil's Night (9 page)

As time went by, and people became more relaxed around me, I heard a great deal of candid black talk. Detroiters constantly discussed race, often, I suspected, with the intention of shocking me.

“If you want to write about us,” a playwright told me one night at a party, “you've got to realize that we come in four types—Afro-Americans, blacks, colored folks and niggers.”

“What's the distinction?” I asked.

“Well, take vacations,” she said. “An Afro-American goes to the Bahamas. A black goes to Harlem. Colored folks load their kids in the car and go down south to visit their kinfolks.” She paused, forcing my hand. “And what about niggers?” I finally asked. “Niggers
don't go on vacation—they wait for you to go on vacation,” she whooped, and the others laughed loudly.

On another occasion, a group of people were discussing a media controversy that had erupted around the question of why blacks excel in sports. Several experts had been roundly criticized as racists for suggesting that black anatomy is better suited for some kinds of athletic activities. My hosts, however, happily asserted that the experts were right.

“Do you really think that blacks are built differently than whites?” I asked.

“Sure,” said a woman. “We've got bigger butts and thinner legs.”

“That's considered racist,” I pointed out, but she didn't agree. “All you got to do is look at us,” she said.

From time to time, the tables were turned and I became the subject of other people's scrutiny. Despite the fact that race is a constant topic among Detroiters, there is a surprising confusion about who is what.

One night in the 606 Club, a sort of black Cheers located downtown, a man who had obviously had a couple of drinks approached me at the bar. “Excuse me, brother, but are you a white man or a light-skinned colored man?” he asked.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

The man looked at me closely, and then ran his fingers over my scalp. “You got nappy hair,” he said. “I guess you one of us.” Satisfied, he returned to his seat and announced in a loud voice that I was, indeed, a light-skinned black. Apparently several other patrons had been wondering, because they looked at me, nodded in satisfaction and smiled.

The incident at the 606 brought back memories of a childhood friend, Jesse Stephen. Jesse was a preacher's son, and one day he told me that Jews aren't white, but red. “Noah had three sons,” he intoned, borrowing his father's sermonic cadence. “Ham, who was black, Japheth, who was white, and Shem, who was red. The Jews are Shemites.”

For years I considered this a personal eccentricity of Jesse's, but in Detroit I learned that it is a widespread article of faith. People were constantly telling me that I was “almost white” and they would buttress this belief by pointing out that I had “bad hair” and swarthy skin. “I know plenty of black people lighter than you,” a woman told me, “and they don't go around pretending to be white.” (There was another side to this coin, too. Many people I met believed that Jews are the chosen people. “Do I look chosen to you?” I once asked a churchwoman who scrutinized me and said, “I never said God made the right choice.”)

Not only Jews fail to qualify in Detroit as whites. During my visit I got into an argument with a very sophisticated city official who tried to convince me that all Arabs are black because they come from Asia and North Africa. She believed this despite the evidence of her own eyes—most of Detroit's Arabs are unquestionably not black-skinned. But it soon emerged that we were talking about different things. “To me,” she said, “a white man is somebody like George Bush.”

The longer I stayed in Detroit, the more accustomed I became to the local habit of immediately classifying everyone by color; and I also began to see the world through the race-conditioned eyes of the people I met. Once, watching
Nightline
, I asked a friend what she thought about the discussion, which had to do with the economy. “You notice that there are never any black people on these interview programs,” she said. “They don't think our opinions matter, or that we even have any opinions.” Of course she was right; and from then on I watched American television with a new sensibility.

Constant daily contact with black people was enlightening; and it was also reassuring. I began to think about moving into town, and one day, in the midst of a discussion about the violence on the streets of Detroit, I surprised myself by asking a black auto executive if he thought it would be safe. “Nobody's totally safe here,” he said. “But you won't be in any special danger because you're white. And one
thing's for sure, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than in Bloomfield Hills.”

And so I left the suburbs and moved into Detroit. At first, I rented a room from a black woman who lived on the east side, not far from downtown. Later, feeling more independent, I moved into one of Detroit's few high-rise apartment buildings, a short walk from City Hall and the river. The manager proudly pointed out the building's security features, which included a special service: residents returning at night could call ahead, and an armed guard would escort them from the parking lot into the lobby.

I never used the service, because I didn't feel threatened. But from time to time I got intimations of danger. One of them arrived at my apartment in the person of Floyd.

Floyd was a young man with a passive ferocity and yellow, malign eyes that peered out of a hard dark skull. When he walked into my living room, in the midst of a small cocktail party, he suddenly made some comfortable people very nervous.

Floyd was brought by Gerald, a heavyset black man who lives in the Brewster projects. We met in the course of my research; Gerald was trying, unsuccessfully, to promote music concerts at one of the downtown theaters, and I went to talk to him about the difficulties faced by a small entrepreneur. We soon discovered that we shared a love of fifties rhythm and blues, and struck up a friendship.

An inveterate do-gooder, Gerald met Floyd in the projects shortly after Floyd had been released from Jackson Penitentiary, at the end of a six-year term for armed robbery, and decided to rehabilitate him. “You got to learn how to interface with white people,” he told Floyd, and brought him to the party.

Actually we were an integrated group that evening, but to Floyd, one of ten children born to an unwed mother, the blacks must have seemed as white as the whites. All the guests were middle-class and well educated. They sipped white wine and looked out at the city through wide glass windows and tried to act like they weren't scared stiff of Floyd. He drank a gin and orange juice and looked at his red
tennis shoes. After a few moments he took them off and stretched out, uninvited, on the couch. Everyone pretended not to notice.

“Feel good layin' back,” said Floyd sociably. “Up to Jackson, they ain't got no soft mattress.” A halfhearted chuckle went up, and I thought, How in the hell do I get him out of here?

Gerald believed that it would be therapeutic for Floyd to talk about his past. “I come from Memphis,” Floyd said. “Got some bad motherfuckers down there. Got some up here, too. Met some bad motherfuckers up to Jackson.” The guests waited, but Floyd had summarized his biography to his own satisfaction.

A lady asked about his brothers and sisters. “I got seven brothers. Six of 'em been to Jackson, same as me,” said Floyd, the way someone might mention the name of a family prep school.

“What does your mother feel, with all of you in prison like that?” the woman asked.

“She like it,” he said. “She say, ‘You safer in Jackson than in the city.' ”

“The city isn't so bad,” said Gerald defensively.

Floyd stirred, his professional opinion challenged. “Shit, man, it is, too, bad. That motherfucker be a war. Onliest thing, I ain't never been shot or stabbed.” He sounded a bit amazed at his own good fortune.

“You ever stab or, ah, shoot anyone yourself?” asked one of the guests, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Floyd shook his head. “Naw, man,” he said. “I leave that shit up to my friends. I got a whole lot of friends down there.” He nodded at the street, where the guests knew they would be, on the way to their cars, in an hour or two.

Without further preliminaries, Floyd closed his eyes and fell off to sleep. He snored softly and put his hand on his crotch. An angelic look came over his face. Everyone made small talk and tried to act as if an ex-convict dozing in the living room was a common social occurrence. No one said anything about it because Gerald was there and because Floyd might be listening, even in his sleep, monitoring the conversation with some sort of prison sixth sense.

After half an hour or so, Floyd stirred. He must have been dreaming about sex, because he turned to an attractive black woman in her forties and, in a soft voice, said, “Mama, what you doin' Saturday night?”

The woman, who has a grandchild, couldn't believe her ears. Floyd repeated the question. “You gotta be kidding,” she said, sounding more amused than frightened. “Listen, boy, you ain't ready for me on Tuesday night, and I know you ain't gonna be ready on Saturday.” Floyd shrugged; Saturday night was a long time off in any case.

Floyd rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, drank another orange juice and gin, and stretched. Gerald, sensing that there had been enough interfacing for one night, told him it was time to be going.

I nervously escorted them to the door, where I made a last-minute (and deeply insincere) offer to be of any help I could to Floyd. He didn't even bother to say thank you.

“When I come up here, I didn't think you was cool,” he said. “But you cool, you all right. Maybe I help
you
.”

“What kind of help do I need?” I asked uncomfortably.

“Man, there's a lot of dudes out there. Somebody might be watching you right now, y'know. They could be wanting to do you something. I just say a word around, you know, let people know you mah friend.” He stepped out into the hall, leaving behind in the cozy apartment a chill intimation of the street below.

I returned to my guests, shaking my head. “Imagine that,” I said. “His mother would rather have him in jail than on the street.” I expected agreement, but I had assumed too much.

“Well, I can understand her,” said the grandmother who had rejected Floyd's advances. “Sometimes I wish somebody would put my daughter in jail, too. That's where she belongs.”

The statement shattered the “we're us and they're them” mood. “You want your daughter in
jail
?” I asked.

“Well, I don't know what to do about her anymore,” said the
woman. “She's strung out on crack cocaine, and I just can't get through to her anymore.”

The woman, who is the mother of five, began to talk in a subdued voice about her seventeen-year-old child. “The girl steals everything. She took my microwave oven, brass plates, a floor-model TV. One time, when nobody was home, she got her boyfriend to bring over a U-Haul trailer and they cleaned out the house. I was lucky to find out where it was before they sold it. I had to send my son over there with a shotgun to get it back. I can't leave her at home alone—one of my sons stays in the house at all times.”

Only a short time before, her daughter had gone out with some friends to buy drugs. She wound up in an argument, and another teenager hit her across the face with a two-by-four. The girl lost an eye.

“Why?” asked the woman. “Why? My other kids are fine—they don't mess with drugs, they don't even drink. I've done everything I can—psychiatrists, threats, beatings, praying—but nothing works. She says, “I'm gonna be all right now, mama, but she doesn't
stay
all right. It's got to where we have to protect her own baby from her.”

She was an educated woman, the grandmother in the living room. She had been through the civil rights movement, given her children African names, encouraged them to read James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison. Her daughter would sell her books if she could get her hands on them. She had already sold herself, and she might someday try to sell her only child. The lady shook her head. “You ever hear about the bad seed? I hate to say it but I'm afraid of my own daughter.”

Chapter Three
 
SOSAD