Detroit: An American Autopsy (18 page)

K
ISS THE
B
ABIES

I
WAS IN
my underwear, shaving cream on my face, a razor in my hand. I was getting dressed for my aunt’s funeral.

That’s when a man called me. He spoke fast and he spoke as though he had matriculated at the University of Jailhouse Law School.

“So-and-So told me to give you a call,” he said without introducing himself, without so much as a good morning.

“Who’s So-and-So?” I asked the voice, confused. “Who is this?”

“Our mutual friend on that barbershop job,” the voice said. “He told me you might want to talk.”

I quickly put it together. It was the hit man caught on an interrogation tape saying he would be willing to wear a wire to send the Black Mafia to prison.

Understanding now, I set down the razor and picked up a pen. The hit man whined that he had been aggrieved, that the assistant prosecutor broke all notions of protocol when he turned the interrogation tape over to the defense attorneys working for the very people he was snitching on.

“Me and my family’s dead, know what I’m saying? I mean, the first witness got killed,” he shouted. “The prosecutor’s desperate for a case, but they can’t even use that tape. I could have been lying. It’s hearsay. If they subpoena me, I ain’t saying shit. I’m taking the Fifth. Who’s gonna protect me? I’m fucking dead. I ain’t going out without a gun battle. I promise. There’s gonna be a war.”

“I didn’t know there were rules in the murder business,” I said to him.

“Gangsters dying, that’s part of the game. But innocent people? No.”

He was worried that the “Family” now knew his identity and was going to kill his children, him and his dog.

A dollop of shaving cream dripped to the floor. I wiped it out with a toe.

The hit man said he was going to hurt the prosecutor if his own children got hurt.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“What do you think I should do?” he asked me.

“Get out of Dodge,” I said lamely. Like I said, I’ve never been in a gangster picture. I was grasping for dialogue here.

“That ain’t gonna work, they’ll find me,” he said. “There’s gonna be a war.”

“Then I’m talking to a dead man,” I said.

“You probably right.”

“Call So-and-So,” I said. “But just calm down and don’t do anything stupid. I gotta go to a funeral. I’ll call you later. Just don’t go killing anybody.”

“Aw, man, I’m fucked.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“If anything happens to my family,” the hit man warned me again, “that fucking prosecutor, he can kiss the babies.”

I hung up the phone and went back to the bathroom to finish shaving. I’d have to call the prosecutor, I figured. If I wasn’t legally obligated to do so, I suppose I was morally. Even if the guy was a fucking tool.

G
RANDMA

M
Y WIFE AND
I loaded up the baby in the SUV and drove to my aunt’s funeral in a rural corner of Oakland County, where the land rolls like a ship on the swells. A boat, a house, a lake, a foreclosure sign.

“Jesus, it’s Whitey McWhiteville out here,” my wife said distractedly, noticing a white-faced lawn jockey. My woman is a white girl who grew up in Detroit—not the suburbs—which makes her a special kind of white person.

“Have some respect,” I barked at her. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the idea of the funeral. My people don’t handle them very well. There is usually a drunk screaming from an upstairs window, like a stewed sailor on night watch. Sometimes it is a fistfight. One time, a cousin threw a beer bottle at his brother’s casket as it was lowered down the hole, screaming that his brother could keep the dime deposit.

I turned up the radio. Manfred Mann was singing, the blackest-sounding white band there probably is. Blue, black and white, can’t we get anything right? An appropriated sound, of course, but righteous enough in its own way.

The funeral for my aunt was weird in the fact that it wasn’t weird. It was normal. It was white. It started on time. Everyone wore a tie and jacket. Aunt Marilyn, my father’s sister, had raised the ultimate American family. A husband of forty-nine years, seven children, twenty-two grandchildren or something like that. No divorce. No death by misadventure. Catholic to the point of evangelical. Her progeny lining up single file to each place a rose in a vase. It was simply odd in its normalcy, its clean-scrubbed sweetness. Who were these people? Where was their bitterness? Their bite? Their whiskers? They couldn’t possibly belong to me.

And then a brassy woman stepped out of a dark corner.

“Hi, Charlie?”

“Yes?” I had never seen her before.

“I’m your long-lost Aunt Debbie.”

I stood there blankly. She was a well-put-together blonde in a black dress, with red lipstick. A smoker, I thought, by the sound of her voice.

“Your father’s half sister?” she offered helpfully. “Your grandmother, she was my mother. Betty? I’m your father’s half sister.”

“Her name was Betty?”

“Yes, your father’s mother. We had the same mother. Betty.”

“Betty what?”

“Well, first Betty Lancour. And then Betty LeDuff when she married your father’s dad. And then Betty Zink when she married my dad. She died when she was thirty-five years old. Alone.”

“Those are a lot of names.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“How did she die?”

“A heart attack, I think.”

“Oh.”

“How is your father?”

“I haven’t talked to him in a decade,” I told my new Aunt Debbie. “Not since my sister’s funeral. She was thirty-five too.”

“Oh, wow,” Aunt Debbie said with an eyebrow.

Like a gossip with a secret, Aunt Debbie wasted little time telling me her son’s girlfriend just had her feet amputated because of a virus and that the muffler just fell off her car, making it difficult to fulfill her job, which was to shuttle around the Amish back in Pennsylvania.

This was more like my family. I liked her.

Grandma Betty died alone. Who was she? And who was Grandpa, for that matter? It occurred to me, especially now that I was back in Detroit, that for a man who had spent his entire professional life crisscrossing the planet asking others the most pointed and personal questions, I didn’t really know much about my family. Or myself. A boat without an anchor, bobbing across the shores of Whitey McWhiteville.

I eventually found Grandma Betty in the municipal archives.

* * *

The radio dispatcher sent scout car no. 10-1 to see about a dead woman, according to the police report. It was 3:35 in the afternoon on March 8, 1956. It was cold outside. Patrolman Mitchell Adamek found a youngish woman lying dead in the back bedroom of Apartment 207 at 2665 Gladstone, on the west side of Detroit, near the Sacred Heart Seminary. She was dressed in a slip, nothing more. There were no visible signs of violence to her body. Adamek contacted the homicide squad anyway.

On the dressing table was a bottle of Anacin tablets, a bottle of Bufferin tablets, a bottle of nose drops and a bottle of codeine cold remedy in liquid form. In the corner stood John W. Migan, a narrow-shouldered dentist who, at the age of thirty-four, was still living with his mother. He told Adamek that he had been dating the woman for the better part of three years and that he had last seen her about two
A.M
., when he dropped her off after an evening of spirited partying.

When they were done having a good time, Migan went home to his mother. He returned later that afternoon to find his girlfriend dead.

* * *

The woman, Betty Zink, was my grandmother, but as I began digging into her story, I realized she could have been my sister.

It seemed to me looking over her police report that the dead don’t take their sorrows and confusion with them, they pass them on like watches and amulets.

Born Betty J. Freed in 1920 to a traveling salesman and a Chippewa Indian woman from Mackinac Island, my grandmother had married and divorced twice in her short life. Her first husband was an elegant, swarthy-skinned man named Royal LeDuff, my grandfather. She bore him two children—my father, Roy Jr., and Marilyn—before the marriage ended in divorce. She then married Robert Zink and bore him two children, Debbie and Bob. That marriage also rapidly dissolved, Betty divorcing herself of Zink and his fists.

By all accounts, she was a fantastically handsome woman, with dark brown hair, gray eyes and a full, curvaceous figure. A door-to-door saleslady, according to the death certificate.

But she was wild and ill equipped for the domestic life. Both sets of children would end up living with their fathers while Betty lived with her demons. She danced with the liquor bottle and dined with barbiturates. The coroner determined her cause of death to be heart failure, but he did not perform toxicology tests. He did note, however, that her liver was in an advanced state of failure.

More than fifty years had passed since her death, and no one had ever mentioned her name to me. No photographs had been passed down, no story. A ghost in the attic. A beautiful woman who was haunted by something unknown to all but herself. A woman who medicated herself into a slow oblivion, to the point of failing organs. A woman who met a dark and sad death, just as her granddaughter Nicole would.

Why had no one spoken about any of this until a long-lost aunt emerged from a dark corner of a cold Catholic church to tell me?

I asked this of my father when he called after hearing through the family telegraph that I was nosing around in the past. I hadn’t spoken to him in about ten years. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him probably more than a dozen times in my life, and then it was usually at funerals and family functions. We didn’t know much about each other beyond the fact that we shared a name and blood. I told him it didn’t seem natural that his mother and his daughter never knew each other’s names.

“You’ve got to understand the thing about this family,” he told me. “We were all just pieces of everything, there is no whole there. Nobody really knows the truth.”

I was beginning to understand, now that I was home in Detroit, that things are rarely what they seem—they’re an amalgam, a fictionalized version of the truth served up to suit people’s needs and help them get on with the difficult business of living.

It is like that in most places, I suppose, with most families.

After listening to my father’s recollections of his mother, our conversation turned to his father, my grandpa Roy LeDuff. I had always been told that LeDuff was a Cajun name, with its roots in the swamps of Louisiana. This is what my father had been told too. I would come to find out this was a lie.

G
RANDPA

M
Y GRANDPA FIRST
touched the woman who would become his second wife some evening in 1951. They drank and danced and the buds of a midlife romance bloomed.

The exact date of their rendezvous is lost in time, but it is quite certain they did not meet on a Monday night. Monday night was “colored” night at the Vanity Ballroom, located on the east side near my mother’s old flower shop. Monday was the only night blacks were allowed in the joint.

And Roy LeDuff, my grandfather, was not black.

Not anymore.

LeDuff is a Creole name—belonging to a culture of people with mixed blood, black and white. In the racial arithmetic of America, that means black.

Imagine my surprise when, peeling through old government documents looking for some clue to the LeDuff arrival in Detroit, I put my thumb on the 1920 U.S. Census, in which my grandfather, Royal, is listed as an eight-year-old “M”—mulatto.

I could hardly believe it. Here I was, a middle-aged man wandering about in a city where just about every major narrative since the Civil War had been played out in black and white, only to find out what I’d been told about my grandfather’s past was false.

I was told there may have been some mixing of the races in a distant wing of my family, and every LeDuff I had ever met was the color of caramel. But the fact that Grandpa himself was born black and died a white man blew me away. Not only did my blood track to the woodlands of the Great Lakes and the Celtic shores of France, but to the Gold Coast of Africa too. The African Diaspora and the Great Migration could be traced through my own family, and it was written on paper.

I sat in my basement smoking cigarettes and looking at an old sepia photograph of my great-grandmother I’d recently been given by a distant relative, wondering how the story of Detroit had come to this point, with me being the palest black man in Michigan.

* * *

The name LeDuff, as far as it goes in the United States, can be traced to an eighteenth-century “free man of color” from New Orleans named Jacques LeDuff, whose forebears had come from Brittany, on the coast of France, and on the slave galleons from Africa.

He was a well-to-do man for a time. Although he was colored he lived in an upscale white neighborhood, unheard of in colonial America. Fashioning himself as a gentleman farmer, he also broke ground on a 340-acre plantation in the wilderness southwest of New Orleans that was managed by his slaves.

But alas, as quickly as he earned the silver, he spent it. The War of 1812 came and Jacques found himself a man perpetually in trouble with the bill collectors. He lost his land and his house servant Claude, who was taken away and sold to satisfy a $100 debt.

His son Honoré—the product of Jacques’ marriage to Josephine Dupar, a free black woman, or
negresse libre
—was also a veteran of the War of 1812. But lacking an inheritance from his father, Jacques, Honoré moved his family from New Orleans to Pointe Coupée Parish, about twenty-five miles northeast of Baton Rouge, a fertile farming plain between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers.

There, the LeDuff clan lived along the Mississippi River as farmers, coopers and carpenters and spoke what over a couple generations evolved into a Creole French dialect.

Honoré had many children, including Honoré Jr., who sired Donatien, an illiterate sharecropper who himself fathered six boys and a girl. Among them was Henry, my great-grandfather. According to the 1900 census, he was a ten-year-old farm laborer, unable to read or write. Fair-skinned, Henry was listed as “M”—mulatto.

By 1910, Henry had married Inez Porche, a privileged Creole girl who could read and write both English and French. According to his 1917 draft registration, Henry was employed as a carpenter by Inez’s family. It appears that Henry, something of a hustler, may have shown up to his draft registration appointment in a cast, making him unfit for war service. In any event, he did not sign his own draft card. The man who signed the name for Henry listed him as “Negro.”

At this point, Henry disappeared on the train headed north. He left in the colored car. He left his wife and two sons in a boardinghouse at 110 Plum Street in East Baton Rouge with no visible means of support. Inez and her boys—Earle and Royal, my grandfather—were documented in the 1920 census as mulatto.

Meanwhile, Henry resurfaced in Detroit, one of the millions of blacks who would make their way north to the industrial yards to earn a new life and escape the Jim Crow South. Henry accomplished this in a decidedly curious way.

He took a room at the boardinghouse of Alfred Ingersol, a white machinist at a motor factory. Henry’s occupation was listed as “carpentry—auto factory.”

Now living a new life, he began constructing a new history. He told the census clerk that his mother was born in Paris and spoke only French. But she was actually a homely mulatto about four feet tall and three feet wide who spoke Creole.

He also told the clerk that he was a white man, and the clerk dutifully wrote it down: “W.”

* * *

The Motor City was booming then, thanks to men like Henry Ford and the Dodge brothers. In 1925, Detroit’s factories employed more than 300,000 people. And thanks to Prohibition and the city’s proximity to the liquor distilleries of Canada, another 50,000 were employed in the illicit sale of alcohol. There was money everywhere, and people arrived by the trainload to get theirs. Of those, 120,000 were black Southerners, an epic shift in American demographics known as the Great Migration.

Men and women with histories they were free to erase and reconstruct. How many truths were buried in those years? In Detroit, who really knows? Growing up in the suburbs, they taught us nothing except that one hot day in 1967, the blacks went crazy and burned down the most beautiful city in America and the whites had to leave.

The adults never told us why.

In the Detroit factories, blacks got the worst jobs: at the foundries and grinding tables and paint shops. Because he was now white, Henry was able to work as a carpenter.

In 1924, the LeDuff family reunited in Detroit. Inez and her sons left Baton Rouge by train, traveling in the segregated “colored” cars.

Henry gave his wife a new house on Birwood Street on the city’s west side. He also gave her a new child, a case of syphilis and a frying pan in the face when she complained about it.

He gave her one more thing: a new identity. The 1930 Census shows the family living at 14103 Birwood Street, in a Dutch colonial that Henry built with his own hands. The census also shows that the copper-skinned LeDuff clan, a family who had for nearly two centuries been recorded in American government records as either mulatto, Negro or black, had magically been scrubbed “W”—white—hiding the secret among the hordes of swarthy Italians and Greeks and southern Europeans who had also descended upon Detroit.

Henry went by the name Frenchy. It may seem outrageous from today’s perspective that a man should dislike his lot so much that he would lie about his blood. But it doesn’t seem outrageous to me. Consider Frenchy’s time. Detroit was little better than the South for a man with African ancestry. If Henry had admitted he was black, then restrictive—and legal—real estate covenants would have banned him from owning property on Birwood or renting outside the squalid ghettos like Black Bottom or Paradise Valley.

The year Great-Grandma got off the train—1924—a Ku Klux Klan–endorsed candidate was elected mayor of Detroit. Charles Bowles could not take office, however, because it was a write-in campaign and so many of his supporters had misspelled his name that 17,000 ballots were disallowed. During that campaign there were mass marches of Klan supporters—40,000 strong in the city. They even burned crosses on the steps of City Hall.

A few months later, a black man, Dr. Ossian Sweet, had the temerity to move into a white neighborhood on the city’s east side. A mob set upon his house and the doctor fired into the crowd, killing a white man. Sweet was defended by noted attorney Clarence Darrow and acquitted of murder by an all-white jury. Still, Dr. Sweet knew better than to press his luck. He left the house. The Sweet incident was the stuff of national headlines and my great-grandmother—much darker than her husband and able to read a newspaper—must have known about the white mobs and the burning crosses.

Great-Grandma LeDuff was said to have had few friends. She threw no parties and rarely came out of her house. She knew she did not belong there.

Looking back, I can’t blame Great-Grandpa Henry or Great-Grandma Inez for passing themselves off as some sort of ethnic whites. Henry couldn’t have made his life otherwise. A drop of African blood was enough to condemn a man to eternal poverty. Like his grandfather Jacques, he simply found the white neighborhoods preferable.

* * *

Henry’s son, my grandfather Royal, excelled at mathematics, was considered an excellent dancer and was something of a dandy, with his straightened hair, pencil mustache and taste for expensive clothing. Roy hated his father, Henry, who was surly and an angry drinker, and when he told his own narrative, my grandfather always began it in 1933, the year, I imagine, that he was emancipated from his father’s shadow and began working at the post office.

Henry died in 1951, the same year that Grandma Betty Zink died alone, the same year my Grandpa Roy met Betsy Steele at the Vanity Ballroom. Roy and Betsy were married a year later. Roy brought his two children from his previous marriage to Betty Zink, including my father. Betsy gathered up her six children from a previous marriage, children—including my mother—who had been fobbed off to orphanages and distant relations after that marriage dissolved.

Roy gave Betsy’s children a sturdy home and a serenity they had never known up to then. They attended Catholic schools and ate with silverware and lap linens. My grandfather—black and white—and my grandmother—Chippewa Indian and white—reinvented themselves, creating new myths to cover their pasts and their olive skin.

They both knew their true heritage. My grandfather left Jim Crow Baton Rouge as a teenager, after all. My grandmother’s mother was as red as the sunset. Nevertheless, they became paragons of clean white middle-class living. This was the 1950s.
Leave It to Beaver
was the top-rated show on television, and they did their best to live up to its example: a dining room decorated with priscilla curtains and crystal wineglasses.

Grandpa was known as “The Duke of Woodward Avenue” and left the post office to become the morning odds maker at the Detroit Race Course—a Teamsters track. He was good pals with Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. My grandmother once showed me a photo of the two men holding picket signs in front of the track gates in the late sixties.

Their children tried to live up to the fancy white linen, but it was a little too late. They were too old to forget the pain of their scattered childhoods. Some got caught up in pregnancy, some with the law, some with alcohol.

Two years after his birth mother, Betty Zink, died alone in an upstairs apartment on the west side of Detroit, my father, Roy Jr., went off to the navy. And when Betsy Steele’s daughter Evangeline came of age, she jumped on a train at the old Michigan Central Depot and met him in San Diego, where she became his wife.

She gave him a daughter, Nicole. Two months later, Roy Jr. shipped out as part of the first official U.S. combat troops in Vietnam.

When he returned, I was conceived.

So am I black? White? Mulatto? How much of anything am I? When I tried telling black people in Detroit my discovery, most would simply wave me off with a go-away-white-boy smirk. White folks laughed and called me Tyrone and asked if I was now ahead of them on the fire department hiring list.

In Detroit, I was reminded, old habits die hard.

Our family returned to Detroit in May 1967, just in time for the riots and the landing of the 82nd Airborne in the heart of the city to quell the violence.

It was a terribly muggy and uncomfortable evening when the fires started. My parents were living with my grandparents on the west side in the home built by the hands of my great-grandfather Henry, the sharecropper’s son.

The riots officially started in the early hours of Sunday, July 23, when white cops began knocking black heads at an after-hours party. People started smashing things, but the real rampaging and looting did not begin until Sunday proper. The news media went out of its way to avoid reporting about the “disturbance,” but the west side, where we lived, was already starting to burn. Even Willie Horton, the Tigers left fielder and a black man who had grown up near the ballpark, couldn’t soothe the mob when he drove into the middle of it and stood on top of his car, still dressed in his uniform from that afternoon’s game. The city would burn for five days.

My father was working that Sunday night at the old Wonder Bread factory, which has since been replaced by the Motor City Casino. My grandfather Roy, my grandmother Betsy and my mother, Evangeline, holding me in her arms, stood on the front lawn around dusk. The blacks were slowly moving out of their ghettos and setting up lives in the traditionally white areas of the city. If that weren’t bad enough, at least in my grandmother’s mind, now the blacks were burning the place down.

“Pa,” she said to my grandfather, “we’ve got to get out of this neighborhood.”

To which my grandfather, a black man who never revealed the fact to any of his relations, replied: “How many can there be?”

The following day, Grandpa got a gun.