Devil's Night (15 page)

When I told Bea Buck about some of the kids I had met—the fearsome Floyd; George, with a year missing from his life; Matthew, stabbed and bleeding on the lawn near the Seawinds—she looked up from the colored people's spaghetti she was preparing and said, “Somebody ought to cut them little fuckers' heads off with a sword.” She pronounced the
w
, giving the sentiment a biblical flavor, and then went back to stirring her pot in the narrow kitchen of her downtown apartment.

Ms. Buck is not a cook. She is police communications specialist by profession, an amateur playwright by avocation, and something of a social commentator. Close to sixty, she is a handsome, ample-breasted woman with a high-pitched laugh and sparkling almond eyes. Her round, caramel face contrasts nicely with a sharp tongue,
and she dispenses mordant observations on the human condition in the barbed aphoristic style of a Motown Ambrose Bierce.

I had offered to bring some wine for dinner, but Ms. Buck told me she doesn't drink wine. When I remarked that most Americans don't, she was quick to correct me.

“I am not an American,” she said, stiffly.

“Then what are you?” I asked.

“A colored person,” she replied, a note of challenge in her voice.

“Let me ask you something. Did you ever think what it would be like to be white?”

“No, I never thought about it and I never want to,” she said. “The idea horrifies me, if you want to know. White people will steal the taste right out of your mouth.”

Ms. Buck went into her bedroom and emerged with a photograph of her maternal grandfather, who was white. “I never liked that man,” she said. “He scared me when I was a little girl.”

“But you've got his picture. That must mean something.”

“That's right, I do. Well, the truth is that nobody else in the family would take it, so I did.”

She was so obviously enjoying the chance to shock a visitor that I persisted. “You can't tell me that you never wondered what it would be like to be white. You're a writer—aren't you at least curious about what white people's lives are like, what they think about, talk about …”

“I know what they talk about,” she said. “They talk about niggers.” She laughed and asked for my plate. “I fixed you some colored people's spaghetti,” she said.

“Okay, what's colored people's spaghetti?”

“That is spaghetti that ain't cooked right,” she said with a loud laugh, dishing a mound of it onto my plate.

Bea Buck was born and raised in Detroit. As a young girl she worked as a switchboard operator at the Gotham Hotel, the city's fanciest black establishment, where she became friendly with the entertainers, politicians and other celebrities who patronized the
clubs and cabarets of nearby Paradise Valley. Despite poverty and segregation, Ms. Buck regards the late forties and early fifties as a golden era, a time when black Detroit had safe streets, glamorous nightlife and obedient children.

“Don't get me wrong,” she said. “We had plenty of problems back then, too. But we certainly didn't have the opportunities that these children have today. The only thing they've been deprived of is a functioning brain. They've been raised without any values. There's only one answer: Somebody needs to cut the little fuckers' heads off with a sword.”

Fred Williams, spokesman for the Detroit Police Department, was both appalled and diverted by Bea Buck's sanguine solution to the city's crime problem. She and Williams are old friends, and he is well acquainted with her hyperbolic style. When I asked him if the department was laying in a stock of swords, he shook his head and said fondly, “Bea Buck is crazy.”

“She cooked me colored people's spaghetti,” I told him. “You know, spaghetti that ain't cooked right.”

The conceit did not amuse Inspector Williams. “You come by my place and I'll cook you a real dinner,” he said. “And bring Ms. Bea Buck with you. I'll show you what colored people's cooking is all about.”

“Freddie Williams is crazy,” said Bea Buck fondly, as we rose to the twenty-first floor of the Jeffersonian, a luxury high rise on the Detroit River, on the way to dinner. “But I'll admit one something—that man does know how to cook.”

In Williams's apartment, which might be more accurately described as a bachelor pad, hundreds of videotapes lined the walls and elaborate stereo equipment was stacked neatly next to an electric organ in the tasteful living room. Art books lay primly on the coffee table, in marked contrast to the sybaritic king-size bed in the bedroom. As Williams led me to the balcony to gaze at the lights of the city and his fishing boat bobbing below in the marina, the aroma of New Orleans gumbo wafted out of his small, immaculate kitchen.

The gumbo was as good as it smelled. Williams is a perfectionist, and as we ate he discoursed on the intricacies of Cajun cooking, one of his many hobbies. He produced literature—cookbooks and guides to New Orleans restaurants—and explained every aspect of preparing the complicated dish.

An ex-amateur boxer and high school football star, Fred Williams became a cop in the fifties. “In those days, the only time you saw a picture of a black man in a white newspaper, it had ‘wanted' printed over it,” he said. “Black policemen were locked into three precincts. We couldn't even patrol Woodward Avenue. That was in preliberation times. Hell, they used to have a black holdup squad with all white officers. People talk about the good old days? Well, what was so good about them?”

During those years, before the Young administration, Fred Williams was known as a militant. He led protests against discrimination in the department, and was considered a troublemaker by many of the white officers. He went into his bedroom and emerged with several photos of a younger officer Williams, with a formidable Afro, dressed in a dashiki.

Along with the photos, Williams brought out a police scanner. It crackled with reports from the street below. A man was cut in a knife fight on Chicago Boulevard. “We've got to rid ourselves of drugs and guns,” he said. “We've been waiting for a knight on a white horse ever since Martin Luther King died. These kids today, now that the civil rights bills are in, they think they have a free ticket. Young parents don't realize that the fight isn't over. Hell, we haven't even begun. We're going backwards. Blacks can't sit around and wait for whites to do for us. The trouble with us is us.”

“Freddie, did you ever think about what it would be like to be white?” Bea asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Williams snorted. “I wouldn't be white for nothin',” he said. “I would have missed a lot of living. The heritage we have is so rich and so proud, we've done so much with so many handicaps.”

“What I can't stand is these
siditty
folks who move out of town,
them little bourgeois-ass niggers,” said Bea Buck. “They go out there and just tear up. They don't know anything about lawns, anyway. The only thing a black person wants to do with something green is put it in a pot and boil it with some ham hocks.” She laughed happily.

“I go out to the suburbs for a drive, and police cars follow me,” said Williams. “Now, what in hell is suspicious about me? When I get into an elevator with a white woman, she looks at me like I'm going to mug her. Because that's what she's been conditioned to think about black men.

“Basically this is a problem of image. We got a problem with the media. And it's not just the way they make us look to other people; the media make you feel bad about Detroit, bad about yourself. They call it a hellhole. Is Detroit worse than other cities? Hell no. Are the Dallas Cowboys ‘America's Team'? Same thing, it just PR.”

The radio crackled again—a fatal shooting on the east side.

Williams cast his gaze toward the glistening lights of the city below. “Things are building up out there,” he said in a low voice. “Could we have another riot like 1967? Shit, yeah. The police were the catalyst last time, but it would have happened anyway. The lack of jobs, the despair, the bullshit by the politicians—read the Kerner Report, you could adjust it to today. It's building up, and if something isn't done, it could happen again.”

“I'll tell you something,” he continued. “Detroit was the first city to get a lot of these problems, and it's going to be the first city to find solutions to them. We're going to solve these urban problems and blacks are going to do it. The real answer is moral—the family and especially the church. We need moral rearmament; this is basically a very moral city.”

Ms. Buck, serious for once, nodded in agreement. “The church is a sleeping giant,” she said. “And it's about time it woke its tired self up.”

Williams rose from the table, dimmed the lights and sat down at his small electric organ. He is a self-taught musician who, with typical
thoroughness, learned to read music as well as play by ear. He ran his fingers over the keyboard with a professional flourish and began to play “Tenderly.” Bea Buck closed her eyes and sang along quietly. Twenty-one floors below the lights twinkled merrily while the police radio crackled, bringing news from another planet.

Wherever I went that fall, people talked about the need for what Fred Williams called “moral rearmament,” a return to a perhaps mythical time of traditional values and accepted authority. And, not surprisingly, they tended to look for leadership to the city's most powerful institution—the church.

“In this city, people
stay
on their knees,” a woman told me, and it was true. In Detroit, Christianity—specifically black Protestant fundamentalism—approaches the status of state doctrine. It touches every aspect of public life—politics, government, art, culture, education—in a way unknown in other American cities. Public school choirs sing gospel songs and classrooms are decorated with pictures of prominent religious personalities. Political meetings begin with prayers and hymns. Clergymen write columns in the newspapers and serve as precinct captains for the Coleman Young machine. In 1988, four of the nine members of the Common Council were ordained ministers.

One day I came across a copy of a form letter sent by a city department to thousands of citizens. It was signed “Yours in Christ.”

“How can you send something like this?” I asked the official. “Haven't you heard that there is separation of church and state in America?”

“Maybe in America,” the official said with a grin. “But not here.”

Nobody knows for sure just how many churches there are in Detroit (the usual estimate is upwards of 2,500, one for every 400 people); with the commercial exodus from the city, banks, grocery stores and theaters have been transformed into houses of worship, and there are some blocks with a church on every corner. In most of them, the majority of worshipers are women, often accompanied
by small children or grandchildren, and elderly men. A generation ago, several ministers told me, there was a more even balance between the sexes. “Used to be, the women came to pray with their menfolk,” a deacon told me. “Today, they come to pray for them.”

I attended a different church almost every Sunday for months, and I was usually the only white in attendance. My reception was always warm and welcoming. Ushers smiled and nodded when I arrived; members of the congregation supplied me with prayer books and stenciled church bulletins, and made it a point to shake my hand at the end of worship. Often I was acknowledged from the pulpit and asked to stand and introduce myself. Invariably, when I did so, I received a round of encouraging applause.

Predictably, these congregations came in all sizes, shapes and shades of black. They ranged from the flinty respectability of the elite black churches, such as Hartford Memorial, to frenzied storefronts and cultist shrines. Taken together, they are an institution that might someday spearhead the moral rearmament that Fred Williams talked about.

Despite their denominational diversity, the ministers in the city can be divided into two primary groups—those who emphasize works, and those who preach faith. Jim Holley, a short, powerfully built, light-skinned preacher from North Carolina, is a works man.

Holley is the pastor of Little Rock Baptist Church, one of the largest and most prominent in Detroit. Its chapel seats around one thousand, and it is usually full on Sunday mornings, when Reverend Holley preaches. Thousands more listen to his sermons on the radio, see his billboards advertising Little Rock Baptist's philosophy (“Don't Worry, Be Happy”) as they drive along the freeways, or read about his various political campaigns and social programs in the newspapers. Since he came to town fifteen years ago, Jim Holley's activism and outspoken eloquence have made him one of Detroit's most visible clergymen.

His credentials are impressive—a B.A. from Tennessee State University, M.A.s from Tennessee State and the University of Chicago,
and a Ph.D. in education from Wayne State. Despite his degrees, however, Holley affects a down-home style and calls himself “a country preacher,” a title he appropriated from his friend and political mentor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Most of Little Rock's 3,500 members are working class people, and a good many come from the South. Holley wants them to feel at home.