Detroit: An American Autopsy (22 page)

A
IN’T
T
HERE
N
O
L
OVE
N
O
M
ORE?

A
FEW DAYS
later I got a call from Lyvonne Cargill, Je’Rean’s mother. She told me that Je’Rean’s best friend, a kid named Chaise Sherrors, had been murdered the night before—an innocent bystander who took a bullet in the head as he was on a porch clipping someone’s hair.

“It just goes on,” she said. “The silent suffering.”

Chaise’s mother wanted to talk to someone—anyone—who might think her child was worth something. The job fell to me since I knew there would be no other takers in a city anesthetized to violence.

Chaise lived on the other side of the Chrysler complex. He too was about to graduate from Southeastern High. A good kid who showed neighborhood children how to work electric clippers, his dream was to open a barbershop. The morning after he was shot, Chaise’s clippers were mysteriously deposited on his front porch, wiped clean and free of hair. There was no note.

If such a thing could be true, Chaise’s neighborhood was worse than Je’Rean’s. Walk a mile along Mack Avenue in each direction from Alter Road to Gratiot Avenue. You will count thirty-four churches, a dozen liquor stores, six beauty salons and barbershops, a funeral parlor, a sprawling Chrysler engine and assembly complex working at less than half capacity, and three dollar stores—but no grocery stores. In fact, there are no chain grocery stores in all of Detroit.

The house next door to Chaise’s was rubble smelling of burnt pine, pissed all over with spray paint by admirers of the East Warren Crips. The house on the other side was in much the same state. So was the house across the street. In this shit, a one-year-old played next door, barefoot.

Chaise’s mother, Britta McNeal, sat on the porch staring blankly into the distance, smoking no-brand cigarettes. She thanked me for coming and showed me her home, which was clean and well kept. Then she introduced me to her fourteen-year-old son, De’Erion, whose remains sat in an urn on the mantel. He was shot in the head and killed the year before, his case unsolved.

She had already cleared a space on the other end of the mantel for Chaise’s urn.

“That’s a hell of a pair of bookends,” I offered.

“You know? I was thinking that,” she said with tears.

The daughter of an autoworker and a home nurse, McNeal grew up in the promise of the black middle class that Detroit once offered. But McNeal messed up, she admits as much. She got pregnant at fifteen. She later went to nursing school but got sidetracked by her own health problems. School wasn’t a priority. Besides, there was always a job in America when you needed one.

Until there wasn’t. Like so many across the country, she’s being evicted with no job and no place to go.

“I want to get out of here, but I can’t,” she said. “I got no money. I’m stuck. Not all of us are blessed.”

She looked at her barefoot grandson playing in the wreckage of the dwelling next door and wondered if he would make it to manhood.

“I keep calling about these falling-down houses, but the city never comes,” she said.

McNeal wondered how she was going to pay the $3,000 for her son’s funeral. Desperation, she said, feels like someone’s reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.

* * *

It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can’t keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist’s match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children’s milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn’t manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation’s children with a burden of debt while they partied it up in Southampton?

Can she be blamed for that?

* * *

“I know society looks at a person like me and wants me to go away,” she said. “‘Go ahead, walk in the Detroit River and disappear.’ But I can’t. I’m alive. I need help. But when you call for help, it seems like no one’s there.

“It feels like there ain’t no love no more.”

* * *

I left McNeal’s porch and started my car. The radio was tuned to NPR and
A Prairie Home Companion
came warbling out of my speakers. I stared through the windshield at the little boy in the diaper playing amid the ruins, reached over and switched it off.

P
ANTS ON
F
IRE

T
HE MAN WHO
paid the bum twenty bucks to burn down the house that killed firefighter Walt Harris was brought into the courtroom by his elbow.

Mario Willis wore a suit with wide stripes and a jacket hem that hung low on his hips. He sported tasseled loafers and gold-framed glasses and steel handcuffs.

“Who is that, Papa?” my three-year-old daughter squealed.

“He is a man who did bad,” I told her. “He’s going to jail.”

I wasn’t a reporter anymore. I was just a stay-at-home dad again, bringing my daughter on a field trip to study the gears of the municipal machinery. I wanted her to see how it was supposed to work, how society looked when it functioned properly. I wanted her to see the good side of things. If the morning’s proceedings could be considered good.

And truth be told, I had a pony in this race. I had something to do with this man’s punishment. I wanted to feel like I had done at least something for the betterment of Detroit. I wanted to feel . . . happy, I guess.

“What did that bad man do?” my girl asked in her tiny alto.

Even Willis turned around to see where the little voice was coming from.

The bailiff walked over.

“There are no children allowed in the courtroom,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know. She is a citizen,” I said hopefully.

The bailiff hesitated, looked around at all the uniformed people who had packed the gallery, and sensing the sadness in the room, she relented. “That’s okay, hon. Just try to keep her quiet.”

I told my daughter to whisper.

The firehouse mates of Harris sat in the jury box, scowling and whiskered. They looked like one of those old silver daguerreotypes from the Wild West: dark-eyed, mustachioed and the hair miscombed. One of the men looked as though he were preparing to leap out of the box and puncture Willis’s throat with a knife.

Willis did not look up at them.

My daughter noticed the dour men in the jurors’ box as well.

“Who are they, Papa?”

“Those are firemen.”

“Why are they here?”

“They want to see what happens to the bad man.”

“What did the bad man do, Papa?” she asked again.

“He killed their friend,” I said. “He was my friend too.”

“Oh dear,” she whispered. “How did your friend die, Papa?”

“By fire.”

“Why was he making a fire?”

“He wasn’t. The bad man made a fire to burn a house so he could get some money.”

“Was it an accident, Pops?”

“No, sweets.”

“The bad man, he’s still nice. Right, Pops?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” I said, kissing her neck. “That’s why we’re here. All of us together will decide how nice he is.”

“Is your friend in heaven with God?”

“He has to be,” I said.

Judge Michael Callahan, a small stone-faced Irishman, entered the courtroom. The people stood.

“Who’s he, Papa?”

“He’s the judge, sweets. He will decide how long the man will go to jail for killing another man.”

“Killing is not right, is it, Pops?”

“No, it is not. God says it is the worst thing a human being can do.”

“Yes, Pops. It’s very bad.”

“And those are lawyers,” I pointed out to my daughter. “They will argue how long the man should go to jail.”

My daughter quickly grew bored with the lawyers and their arguments and protestations and sentencing guidelines. She ducked beneath the pews to play with her toys on the carpet. I did not stop her.

Willis’s mother and then his minister spoke on his behalf—calling his conviction both devastating and unjustified. They spoke about his faith and his work with young toughs. They spoke of the Spirit Award bestowed upon him by the mayor of the city, who was currently residing in the state penitentiary. Their son was a pillar of Detroit, they sobbed. Their son was an honest citizen.

Then came the sickening part. Willis himself. With a straight face, he maintained his innocence despite the fact that the handyman he hired to set the blaze placed him at the scene of the fire. The handyman testified he was paid to burn it down once before. Willis’s cell phone records placed him at the scene of the fire. Willis’s wife testified that he was sleeping with her that night even though phone records show that Willis called her on his cell phone. His wife testified he must have called her from the next pillow over.

His monologue was so weak, so insulting, so slippery, that some of the jurors who had convicted him at trial and had come for his sentencing hissed like snakes.

“Your Honor,” said Willis, standing with an oily but straight face. “I was taught to own up and be a responsible man to all actions. And it’s just . . . it’s not in me, Your Honor, to own up to anything that I didn’t have a part of. I maintain my innocence in this matter.”

Most insulting, he turned to the widow of Walt Harris, addressing her directly.

“I apologize to you, Ms. Harris. I hate the loss. You know, I don’t like what’s happening. I mean because you and your family had the biggest loss ever. I hate that you have been put in this situation, but I did not set this man to do this and I did not have any type of financial gain or any financial wherewithal with this situation. And that’s from me to you.”

He turned to the ash-faced Callahan. “I just once again, just thank you. I ask you to have mercy upon me and I’m very humbled by the situation.”

The widow sobbed at the audacity of the pimp-suited businessman who had cheated her of a beautiful life. Willis the arsonist who burned down a corner of the city for his own profit. Willis the man of God who asked for mercy but could not admit to a widow’s face that his greed had cost her husband’s life.

He was everything wrong. He took no responsibility for the lives he ruined. He blamed others. He hid behind slogans and excuses. He was Kwame Kilpatrick. He was General Motors. He was Wall Street. He was modern America. He was a cheater.

My daughter, hearing the widow whimper, crawled up on my lap.

The judge’s porcelain complexion had gone scarlet as he imposed his sentence:

“In the City of Detroit we have been plagued by arson as a means of entertainment that was known in the city as Devil’s Night, a situation in which the firefighters were called on in many instances to battle hundreds of fires,” he growled.

“They have also been forced to battle fires in schemes for profit, fires set in order to generate insurance proceeds from those who do not deserve them. The defendant went to great lengths to avoid detection and responsibility in his arson-for-profit scheme, including orchestrating perjury by his wife for use in his alibi defense.”

My daughter, who was standing on the pew, whispered in my ear.

“Why is the judge yelling, Papa?”

“The judge is angry because the man is lying,” I said.

“He’s a liar, Pops?”

“Yes, he’s a liar.”

“Pants on fire?”

“Yes, Boo Boo. Pants on fire.”

Judge Callahan sentenced Willis to forty-two years in prison.

* * *

People often ask, where is the hope in Detroit? It was right here. I had just watched it. Society had functioned properly in this case because we all wanted it to. The firefighters, the cops, the judge, the jury, the reporter. We the people who wish to raise our children in peace and health. We the people who would like to bequeath something decent to the people who will follow us. To borrow from George Orwell: People like the cops and the firefighters are willing to commit violence and risk their lives on the behalf of others so others may sleep peacefully at night. People who believed in order and fairness. People clever enough to get away with the lie but who defeat the urge for the greater benefit.

A dirty man had killed our friend. And we got him behind bars. We got justice without harming the law. It felt righteous. In the end, if we are going to fix it, we are going to have to stand up and say “enough” and then get on with the difficult work of cleaning it up.

On my way to the elevator, a group of firefighters including Nevin stopped me.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said. “Thank you.”

It was only the second time in my journalism career that I remembered someone with an official capacity saying that to me. Thank you. The other time was at Ground Zero when the final piece of debris had been removed from the hole. It was a group of iron workers who until that point acted as though they hated my interloping guts.

“LeDuff. I appreciate you writing our names down,” shouted one of them, walking across the bar and handing me a glass of bourbon. “Thank you.” I was happy he knew my name. That was enough.

It was the same now.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

The elevator doors opened.

“Can I push the button, Pops?” my daughter asked.

A woman wearing a blouse tighter than a prophylactic and saucer-sized sunglasses stood in our way.

“Excuse us, please,” I said.

She looked like Monica Conyers, the city councilwoman-for-sale who would be sentenced to prison in a few weeks. She said nothing and turned from the doors.

I said nothing and stepped into the elevator.

My daughter pressed the button and we all went down together.

E
PILOGUE

K
WAME
K
ILPATRICK WASN’T
the first Detroit politician to milk the city. It had been going on for a hundred years. And it wasn’t just the politicians. It was union bosses and contractors and industrialists and receptionists who were nieces of the connected. Everybody got their piece and that was all right when Detroit was rolling in money. There was always enough grease to hide the flaws.

But now there wasn’t. At the time of this printing Kilpatrick was in the midst of his federal corruption trial while on parole from state prison. Kilpatrick was accused of racketeering, running a mob-style enterprise that stole from the poorest people in America and then trying to play the race card—even though his backers were the rich white industrialists. A neat piece of theater that got bad reviews.

He also wrote a book called
Surrendered
in which he blamed everyone but himself for his troubles and apologized to no one.

Monica Conyers was sent to Camp Cupcake, a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia, for a three-year bid. The time there is easy. Martha Stewart served five months for lying to the FBI and managed to lose some weight. There is no razor wire and inmates get a hair dryer. Still, it wasn’t good enough for Madam Conyers. She complained in letters to the press that they wouldn’t give her seconds at supper. She said she was bored. She asked the federal judge to let her serve the remainder of her sentence at home on Seven Mile Road with her son, who never bothered to mow the lawn. Her request was denied.

Chief Evans and his career might have survived the accidental shooting of the little girl. He had brought murder way down during his year as the top cop. And he really had brought it down. Not by lying about the number of bodies and hiding them behind excuses, like his predecessors, but by turning the police loose and holding them accountable. Citizens were complaining that the police were too tough, but at least they were alive to complain.

Chief Evans might have survived the shooting of the little girl had he too not been drawn to the lights of Hollywood. As it turns out, Evans was filming a pilot for his own reality show entitled “The Chief.”

The six-minute sizzle-reel begins with Evans dressed in full battle gear in front of the shattered Michigan Central Rail Depot cradling a semiautomatic rifle and declaring that he would “do whatever it takes” to take back the streets of Detroit. Evans was fired.

But in Evans’s defense, he seemed to understand one thing: after the collapse of the car industry and the implosion of the real estate bubble, there is little else Detroit has to export except its misery.

Lt. Mike Nevin got his job back, winning yet another lawsuit against the city. He continues to jump into burning buildings. Fire Commissioner James Mack and his deputies were fired after I reported that they were engaged in a cover-up of the theft of a citizen’s property by a firefighter. A new man was brought in from Los Angeles. The stealing stopped, but nothing else improved.

In the meantime, Detroit continues to struggle. A quarter million people fled the city in the first decade of the twenty-first century, bringing its population to less than 700,000—a hundred-year low.

Evans’s successor, Chief Ralph Godbee, took a kinder, gentler approach to policing. Predictably, murder spiraled out of control, reaching levels not seen in a generation, taking the population decline into account. The fudging of the crime statistics began anew. And Godbee, who moonlighted as a preacher, would abruptly retire when it was revealed that he had bedded a bevy of female officers.

General Motors and Chrysler continue to make cars thanks in large part to the American taxpayer, who bailed them out (and are stilled owed billions of dollars), and their creditors, who took it in the shorts and received almost nothing for their investment. Ford too is profitable again. And for the first time ever, more cars were sold in China than in the United States.

American Axle moved much of the remainder of its Detroit jobs out of state and country. The stock moved up.

Detroit, I am sure, will continue to be. Just as Rome does. What it will be and who will be here, I cannot say. The unnecessary human beings will have to find some other place to go and something else to do. The Great Remigration south, maybe.

Sadly, Sgt. Mike Martel, the homicide detective, died after he lost control of his motorcycle and struck a telephone pole. His very big heart was donated to a stranger.

My brother Frankie got a new place to live and a new used car to drive. He teaches college. My brother Bill was selling motivational speaking engagements for a prominent motivational speaker until nobody had the motivation to listen anymore. My brother Jim plugs along. My mother is a widow now that her husband, my stepdad, Warren, passed away. We’ll all be okay. They raise them strong on Joy Road.

* * *

There was still one place I had left to go: the Brightmoor section of the city. The site of my sister’s death. I needed to go back to the bar where my mother sat so elegantly in her raccoon coat among the filth, sipping Jack Daniel’s, trying to find some explanation for my sister’s ruined life and, receiving none, going home brokenhearted.

Since my return to Detroit, I have seen my sister everywhere: every time I saw a rough-looking white woman with a limp, in every old woman locked in her house. I had avoided the neighborhood for a decade, but I had to confront that ghost. My sister counted, and the living people count too. We’re still here and we’re always going to be. I was in need of an answer when I didn’t even know the question.

The Flame Bar was located around Five Mile and Telegraph, on the far west side of the city. It is a big intersection, but it was a hard place to find—the city had fallen into such disrepair that it looked like it had been dropped from the third-floor window by its hair. I drove past the shattered storefronts, then the roaming dogs, then the churches that didn’t seem to make any difference, then the leathery prostitutes and then a giant cinder-block bar painted pink, the doors wide open, the parking lot full. There was no sign.

I pulled in. There was soul music spilling into the street. The Reverend Al Green. The place was pretty in its way, as much as it could be, like a daisy in a field full of rust.

I approached a group of black men having a cigarette around a Ford Econoline. One lowered his bottle wrapped in a paper bag like I was a cop.

“I’m looking for the Flame Bar,” I said. “I remember it was around here somewhere.”

“This used to be the Flame Bar,” said one of the men, Tyrone. “What you need?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and explained my mind and my sister.

The suspicious man softened. He handed me his bottle.

“This bar changed six years ago,” Tyrone said. “They trying to put something nice up in this shit hole. Can’t say it’s working. But what you gonna do? You ain’t gonna be reincarnated, so you got to do the best you can with the moment you got. Do the best you can and try to be good. You dig?”

I did. We are born to a time. What you do with it is on you. Do the best you can. Try to be good. And live.

I went into the bar. It was a clean, dimly lit place with a pool table with a bulb over it and some photographs of old soul singers taped to the mirror. People were laughing. There were doors on the toilet thresholds, another improvement since the last time I’d been here. Tyrone bought me a drink.

The sun was setting low through the open door. Despite the good feelings, I remembered what the prostitute near the mosque told me: I don’t work past sunset. They crazy motherfuckers out here.

I bought a round and left. Then I drove northerly, up a side street, looking for the vacant lot where my sister died. After having the last drink of her life, my sister rode away with a strange man. It must have been a scene of insanity and adrenaline and purple haze. She jumped out the door. And into a tree.

I found the lot. I parked the car and didn’t lock it. I didn’t think I needed to. The block was utterly abandoned, the shells of homes where middle-class lives were once lived. The same homes were occupied the last time I was here with my mother. The collapse came on and it came on quickly. Like a tsunami. I don’t know if it was drugs that ruined the neighborhood or civic neglect. Was it the disappearance of the car jobs or the raping of the middle class by Wall Street? Had people just given up? I didn’t know. But it hurt to look at it. Vanity. In the end, it was all vanity.

* * *

The grass in the field was neck-high, so high in fact I couldn’t make out the tree. The mosquitoes were greedy.

I stood in the field thinking of my sister and that picture of her on the junior high basketball team, dressed in knee-high socks and a green tank top with
LOWELL LANCERS
lettered across the chest, dribbling a ball, smiling. I thought of my own daughter, who looks like my sister in a way. I thought about my ancestors and all they had done to deliver me here to this spot. I thought of all that and cried a little bit through my cigarette.

Then the grass rustled, startling me. Someone or something was coming on, but I couldn’t see through the tall stalks. I began to panic, realizing I was left high in the weeds, no knife, no gun, only a pen.

They crazy motherfuckers out here.

That’s when she stopped in front of me, not ten feet away, unafraid. A spotted fawn, a pretty little thing, barely thigh-high, with black bulbous eyes that didn’t seem to fit her skull.

In that field of death covered with vines and grass, it was true what Tyrone said. You ain’t gonna be reincarnated, so do the best with the moment you got.

I don’t believe in reincarnation either, but I do believe in symbolism.

“Hey girl,” I whispered to the fawn. “Where’s your mama?”

The beast sniffed once, turned away and off she ran into the wild city.