Detroit City Is the Place to Be (18 page)

“Look at the neighborhood,” Andrews said. “There
is
no neighborhood. I campaigned for six months to get us in here. When they finally moved us, we had to share the space with bad boys and expelled kids. Because these were ‘bad girls.’ You know, bad boys hold up liquor stores and knock you over the head, and bad girls get pregnant. That’s still the mentality. When I first came here, people were inviting me to teen crime seminars. I said, ‘Hey! They didn’t
rob
anybody. They had sex!’”

Andrews’s telephone rang. We were sitting in her office. It was her sister calling. Andrews was having some work done on her house, and one of the contractors had apparently reached into a wall and got himself bit by an opossum. “No, I guess you shouldn’t let him do that,” Andrews said. She hung up. The opossum, a mother, had been holed up in the wall with a bunch of babies, and the contractor had wanted to seal the hole and let them die.

Andrews either didn’t find the coincidence of having received this call in the middle of our interview amusing or she did but chose not to remark on it. In any event, she continued, “We had more teen mothers in the fifties than anytime since, but they all got married. The term ‘drop out’ didn’t really exist until the midsixties, because it wasn’t assumed you necessarily finished high school. You didn’t have to. I heard the white girls went away or had special doctors. It was such a stigma to be pregnant and not get married. You didn’t want anyone to go through that. By the time I got to college, we’d collect cigarette money if someone needed an abortion. You’d give your last.”

I asked how she managed such an unheard-of college acceptance rate for a public high school. Andrews fixed me with a look and said, matter-of-factly, “I expect it.”

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. I said, “How is that not an overly simple answer? All of the special challenges—”

She cut me off and asked, “Did you go to college right out of high school?”

I said yes.

She said, “How come?”

This time I didn’t answer. Of course, she had a point.

“You do things because that’s what you
must
do,” she said. Then she shrugged. She was wearing a pearl necklace over a periwinkle sweater. Often, though not this particular afternoon, she liked to pin unusually large corsages to her chest. We’re talking flowers the size of a round sauceboat. This would have looked ridiculous on most women, but Andrews carried enough size, herself, to make it work.

“I mean, you don’t have to be
smart
to go to college—George Bush was president,” she went on, her dark eyes flashing. “These girls
know
they’re important to me. Women do things for a lot of reasons. Most of them not for themselves. So you can use that for your own purposes.”

*   *   *

Upstairs, in Mr. Drewery’s stuffy world history classroom, six girls, looking as generally unenthused as your typical high school world history class, sat around four wobbly-legged tables facing a chalkboard crowded with a list of words: “Maginot Line,” “Benito Mussolini,” “Anti-Semitism,” “Hittites.” Since one of the girls was pregnant, Mr. Drewery let her sit at the desk closest to the window so she would be more comfortable. Another, not pregnant, wore a very short shirt and kept a single earbud of her headphones in her ear during class. I wasn’t sure whether Mr. Drewery noticed, but did not snitch. A third girl, wearing a tight white tank top with FLIRT printed in pink letters across the front, her blond-streaked hair spilling out of a glitter Cedar Point cap, pulled a cell phone out of her bra and checked the time. There was a large, noticeable hole in the ceiling. Various pots and pans had been arranged on the bookcases to catch water from other leaks.

Mr. Drewery wore thick-framed black glasses riding low on his nose. He had sleepy eyes, a mustache and goatee, and a red lanyard with keys on the end dangling over his checked tie and white dress shirt.

“Miss Murray,” he said to one of the girls, who had partially put her head down on her desk, “you’re not your usual energetic self.”

The girl sighed and said that last night she and her family had heard what they thought had been a loud series of thunderclaps, but it turned out to be guys on their roof, trying to break into the house. Her father had chased them off, but the police didn’t arrive until two in the morning.

“I’m not sure why they didn’t go into the abandoned house next door,” Miss Murray said peevishly.

Outside on the farm, seventeen-year-old Tiffini Baldwin mixed soil and compost in a wheelbarrow. She had wild, frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail and wore white work gloves and a blue hoodie. Nearby, a pair of goats rammed each other atop a woodpile. Baldwin had a two-year-old daughter named Nicole. She’d gotten pregnant at fourteen and kept it a secret as long as she could.

“I was just bawling in the nurse’s office,” she recalled. “I wasn’t thinking about the baby. I was thinking about me, and I was worried about my family, particularly my mom. ‘I can’t be pregnant. Tiffini? The honor roll student?’ I was in denial. I just wanted it to go away. By the time I told my mom, it was too late to get an abortion. I was going to put her up for adoption. I actually met the adoptive parents. But I couldn’t go through with it.”

Baldwin said her mother worked in human resources and her father did maintenance work for McDonald’s. As she spoke, she added scoops of perlite to the soil, which she said helped it absorb water. When the wheelbarrow was filled with exactly eleven shovelfuls, she pushed it toward the apple orchard. We passed a girl in a pink hoodie weighing a goat on a scale. A turkey behind a fence spread its tail feathers like a peacock. Inside the red barn, someone had written on a dry-erase board, in slightly childish handwriting, “Please milk Emily halfway. It is painful for her if she does not get milked. If you have trouble massage her udders or hold warm cloth on her udders for a minute. Thank you. Your welcome.”

“Excuse me, goat,” Baldwin said to a runty white goat named Snow White. Glancing at me, she said, “This must be really exciting, talking to a girl mixing compost.”

After school, Baldwin planned to become a nurse, “in order to live comfortably,” she said. Baldwin also hoped to indulge more creative passions. “If it was up to me, I’d pursue writing, but I have a daughter,” she told me. The father wasn’t around much. “If he would just come over once a week, I’d be happy,” she said. I asked if he was also in high school and she shook her head. “When we met, he
told
me he was seventeen. But he was older than that.”

As Baldwin struggled with the wheelbarrow, I offered to help, but she grinned and shook her head. “If Ms. Andrews catches you out here helping me—she’s superfeminist. So, hah, I’m good.”

In a couple of months, Baldwin would be joining Andrews and some of the other students on a field trip to South Africa. She’d never even been to Canada before. Baldwin asked if I had kids. When I said no, she said, “I don’t mean to sound like one of those parents who say, ‘As soon as you have a child,
everything
will change.’ But as soon as you have a child…” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence. “I just knew I had to go to college. I didn’t grow up dirt poor. But I want Nicole to have a better life than me. All this stuff?” She rubbed her dirty gloved hands together, meaning the farm. “I don’t really care about this stuff. But you do learn to take pride in your work. Students built this whole farm.
Pregnant girls
did this.”

Baldwin was pretty, with dimples and a slightly nasal voice. She wore thick brown-tinted sunglasses. “I don’t want to say all moms, but all teenage moms think about, ‘What would I be doing if I didn’t have a kid?’ You do miss life before. I get nostalgic. If you’re a pregnant teenager, no choice you make is a good choice. I’m happy with my decision now, but I wasn’t sure at first. Ms. Andrews’s thing is you’re not dependent on a man. Like,
that’s
what happens when you’re around ’em.” She sighed and then laughed. “Don’t get me wrong,” she went on. “I love America. Free this, free that. But it’s a two-faced country sometimes. It contradicts itself.”

A chicken squawked in the distance. Then I heard a police siren. We walked past a row of rabbit hutches and a fenced pond where a fat white goose stood watching us on one leg, the other held up like a palsied limb, and honked softly. Principal Andrews had wandered outside and cast a cold eye on Snow White. Earlier, when I’d asked her about the farm, she’d frowned and said, “I don’t like animals.”

Now, she said to Baldwin, with just the hint of a smile, “If that goat comes in this school, you fail.”

*   *   *

In 2012, when the threat of financial insolvency had made all of Detroit’s government a candidate for state takeover, the city held a series of contentious public meetings on the subject. The most inflammatory remarks came from Malik Shabazz, a local activist and founder of the New Marcus Garvey/ New Black Panther Nation
5
, who evoked 1967 when he stood up and said, “This is white supremacy, and we will fight you. Before you can take over our city, we will burn it down first.”

I’d met Shabazz in his capacity as cofounder of the Detroit 300, the crime-fighting group that patrolled dangerous neighborhoods. Physically enormous, Shabazz had a personality to match, obviously relishing his own oratorical skills in a way that is common among actors, preachers, and politicians. Shabazz had been all three.

One night, I stopped by the New Black Panthers headquarters to chat. The building stood on an unlit, deserted stretch of Fenkel Street on Detroit’s west side. Shabazz was wearing a grey hoodie and oval glasses, which he kept perched on his forehead, and he chain-smoked compulsively. The headquarters was a junky looking storefront, with an old-fashioned domed hair-dryer in the back of the room and folding chairs and VHS tapes (with hand-written labels like “400 Years of Lynching”) piled everywhere. Shabazz had two televisions running on mute, perched up so high they looked like closed-circuit monitors; he seemed to be copying a Malcolm X speech from one tape to another, though we didn’t discuss this. A sidewalk sandwich board, propped in a corner, offered:

Audio and Video Tapes

Books

Oils

CDs

Crack Houses Shut

Detroit has been the biggest majority-black city in the United States since the 1970s, and remains so today, even in its shrunken state. Shabazz gives voice, albeit in militant language, to quite common concerns regarding designs on Detroit by a hostile white power structure. “There’s a plot to take over Detroit,” Shabazz says. “White folks built up the suburbs in haste as the browning of the inner cities took place, and now they desire to take this city back. Detroit is Chocolate City, the Mecca, the Jerusalem, the Medina of problackness and black conscious thought, in many ways. Detroit gave birth to the African American middle class, the Nation of Islam, the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Brother Malcolm was here. So much has come out of Detroit.”

The latter half of Shabazz’s claim is uncontroversial fact. Detroit has been known as a strong black city for years. By the nineteen-sixties, despite the rampant discrimination, all of the relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs in Detroit had resulted in a high proportion of black home owners. Shabazz himself is part of a long radical black tradition that came out of the city. Malcolm X grew up in Lansing, and after his release from prison, he worked as a minister at the Nation of Islam temple in Detroit.
6
The Nation was started in Detroit by a door-to-door peddler and life-long hustler calling himself Wallace Fard;
7
when Fard fled the state in 1932—after one of his followers, Robert Harris, stabbed another man to death at a home altar as part of a weird sacrificial ceremony, leading Detroit authorities to crack down on what became known as a dangerous Negro cult—he handed over the reins to an autoworker named Elijah Poole, who reformed his own hard-drinking ways and changed his name to Elijah Muhammad. Over thirty years later, on Easter Sunday 1967, the increasingly radical Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. changed the name of his Central Congregation Church to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, eventually adopting the Moniker Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman and preaching a revolutionary black liberation theology, famously promising to “dehonkify” Jesus. Shabazz, after falling into a life of drug use and gangbanging as a teenager and young adult, turned his life around when someone gave him some Malcolm X tapes and convinced him to begin attending services at the Shrine.
8
“I heard that little yellow brother speaking fire,” Shabazz says, referring to Cleage. “I was afraid for his life.”

To this day, though, the black radical most emblematic of Detroit remains Coleman A. Young, the city’s first African American mayor. No Detroit political figure in the modern era casts a greater shadow than Young, who was elected in 1974—Cavanagh’s successor, Roman Gribbs, a law-and-order Democrat, having lasted only a single term—and remained in office for the next two decades, the longest mayoral reign in the city’s history. Even if he’d never gotten into politics, Young would have left future biographers with a story to tell. He grew up in Black Bottom, on Antietam Avenue, which runs a block south of Service Street. The opening line of Young’s 1994 autobiography,
Hard Stuff
, describes his earliest memory as being woken in the middle of the night by the bells of St. Joseph’s Church.
9
His father, a hard drinker and dedicated gambler who had attended Alabama A&M on the GI Bill, eventually opening his own tailor shop, had been light-skinned enough to pass, which he did in order to take certain whites-only jobs. For this reason, Young writes, his father considered his skin color both blessing and curse—the latter because it often privied him to the unexpurgated feelings of white people. “It caused him,” notes Young with characteristic bluntness, “to hate them uncommonly.”

Young himself experienced cruel and mundane prejudices as a boy: having his application to a Catholic high school ripped up in his face after the headmaster realized he was not Japanese but black; being turned away from the Boblo amusement park during an eighth-grade trip, when one of the guides, spotting kinky-looking hair beneath his hat, jerked it off and informed him that the park was for whites only. (“I honestly was not prepared for that,” Young writes of the latter incident. “And I was never the same person again.”) He worked as a shoeshine boy; read Du Bois; began working as a labor and civil rights activist after being fired from Ford (it was during this period that Young missed taking part in a major strike while he was off cavorting with a secretary, prompting an older union man to tell him, “Son, the human race is perpetually involved in two struggles—the class struggle and the ass struggle”
10
); flew during World War II with the Tuskegee Airmen, the elite, all-black B-25 squadron; returned to Detroit and began working at the post office, which was really just a way to begin organizing for the United Public Workers union (and become a thorn in the left side of the UAW’s Walter Reuther, to Young a conservative throwback
11
); found himself subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where his heroic, combative testimony became legend, in particular his verbal tussles with John Wood, “the motherfucker from Georgia who headed the committee” (Young’s words, in
Hard Stuff)
, in whose district only 2 percent of blacks had ever been allowed to vote, and with the committee’s counsel, Frank Tavenner, a Virginian.
12
Young wound up scoring a regional hit record when a local label released a spoken-word recording of his testimony.