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Made in Detroit Author: Paul Clemens
A Dead City?I was attracted to this book because I too have lived in the city of Detroit and have written about it. Detroit is a city that fell from grace, losing most of its population. The closed and demolished Catholic churches that are all over the city are markers for where white ethnic residents once lived. Even before the prosperous years of the American auto industry, Detroit was an elegant city with beautiful buildings, many lovely parks, excellent schools, single-family homes with nice yards and an aura of its own importance. Founded by French explorers in 1701, Detroit was the first important city west of the original colonies. Three hundred years of history are behind this city that some say is dead. Being White in a Black CityPaul Clemens struggles with his own attitude toward being a white boy in a black city, but he never resolves the conflict. He buries himself in this book in literary metaphors and references that he hopes will make some sense of it all, even as he describes the differences between black Detroiters, with their odd speech patterns, and the residents of his white Catholic corner of the city. He takes us through his boyhood growing up in this white enclave on the East Side, through Catholic schools, playing sports with black teammates and through his college years away from the city. It seemed to me that he took his story a bit too far from his premise, that it was a book about Detroit. Woven through the narrative are his thoughts on a novel he wanted to write about the city but could never quite formulate. It seems he had the same problem with this book, which has no story line and no conclusion about his angst over growing up in Coleman Young's Detroit. The most interesting parts of the book are in the beginning, when he talks about his family and how Catholicism, with its separate schools and ties to immigrant ethnic groups, was the glue that held their lives together. He is frank about how hostile the remaining white people felt toward the majority black population, aptly symbolized by Sal the Barber with his sign saying you must have an appointment. He kept the sign in case a black person entered the shop, so he could point to it and refuse them service. After the Riot, After the FallMr. Clemens is not old enough to remember the 1967 riot, as I do, since I was living very close to where it started. My husband and I newly-weds, white people living in a black neighborhood. We ended up being engulfed by the riot and unable to leave our apartment building for days with the bang-bang of gun fire a constant and National Guard tanks rolling down our street. But no black people attacked us, though our apartment manager could not speak of black people without using derogatory and insulting terms. I grew up too with family that did not want to live around black people. Somewhere around 1950 when I was in kindergarten, a black family moved onto our street in Flint, an industrial city north of Detroit where my Dad worked at the Buick plant just a few block from our house. Every white family on the street put their house up for sale. Whites and blacks might have worked together in the auto factories, but they did not want to live together. I came to Detroit to attend Wayne State University and decided to stay. I've lived in various parts of the city and today live in a old suburb bordering the city (like the author, just across Eight Mile Rd). I love my house and where I live now, and there are risks in Detroit's abandoned neighborhoods, but I cannot resist repeated photographic forays into the heart of the city to see and photograph what's left of the places I've known over the years. My husband and I have had our car trashed and been mugged on these city trips, but we will not stop going into the city; it is a place I still love. The Way Back for a Great American CityThe city has hit bottom with thousands of abandoned buildings and a bankruptcy, with a state-appointed Emergency Manager (EM) who is supposed to get the city's finances back on track. In an act that defies the logic in Paul Clemens' book, the black people of the city elected a white man as mayor in 2013. Mayor Mike Duggan is working to end the need for the EM and to bring people (even white people) back into the city. This is a tall order and Duggan will have to deliver. The people who elected him are looking for results (get the street lights working, pick up the trash, get police to come faster than the one hour it now takes -- if they come at all) I believe Detroit can come back from its troubles, but that will require its residents, both black and white, to finally denounce the segregation by race that characterizes the city's long history. Bring back neighborhoods with houses and people living in them, not as black or white neighborhoods but as simply Detroiters living together to build up a city that has fallen so far. Perhaps it will take a new young and brave generation to be capable of making that happen. Buy Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir Find more
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reviewed by Theresa Welsh
at amazon.com.
at amazon.com.