Free Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie Leduff Page A

school to the chapel with a powerful congressman to the position of president pro tempore of the Detroit City Council. She insisted the children call her by that title: City Council President
Pro Tem
. A fancy way of saying runner-up.
    Finally, Riddle stepped in and asked the children about the Shrek incident.
    “Anybody have an opinion on that?” he asked the kids. A thirteen-year-old girl, Keiara Bell, asked Conyers if she felt she’d been disrespectful toward the council president and the city itself.
    “What do you mean by that?” Conyers asked with a sneer.
    “You’re an adult,” Bell lectured. “We have to look up to you.”
    “Absolutely,” Conyers replied. “You’ve never gotten angry with someone?”
    “Yes, but we’re kids. We’re looking on TV, and, like, this is an adult calling another adult Shrek? That’s something a second-grader would do.”
    Conyers could barely contain her anger. Her eyelids flared, her jaw clenched.
    “Now you’re telling me, young lady, what I should have and should not have done?”
    “Well, you’re an adult,” Bell countered. “Sometimes people need to think before they act.”
    * * *
    Not surprisingly, the video made its way around the world via the Internet, and Conyers became yet another symbol of what was wrong in Detroit: murder capital, arson capital, poverty capital, unemployment capital, illiteracy capital, foreclosure capital, segregation capital, mayoral scandal capital—and now Monica Conyers capital.
    Her negative publicity boiled for a month: the
CBS Early Show
, the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
, even the local television stations. None of it credited to the dying
Detroit
News
.
    Suddenly, Conyers was everywhere for the wrong reasons.
    Naturally, Monica wasn’t happy and wanted to tell me. In person. We arranged to meet.
    As I drove to my rendezvous with Conyers at a cocktail lounge off Eight Mile Road, I decided to stop off at Keiara Bell’s home and say hello to her family.
    I hadn’t seen Keiara since the “Shrek” taping, which had made her a YouTube darling and an example of what is good in Detroit. I drove through the crumbling neighborhoods on the city’s west side, where she lived.
    When I had left home—back in the early nineties—Detroit was still the nation’s seventh-largest city, with a population of over 1.2 million. Back then, Detroit was dark and broken and violent. Murders topped six hundred a year and Devil’s Night—the day before Halloween when the city burst into a flaming orgy of smoke and shattered glass—was at its height.
    Studying the city through the windshield now, it wasn’t frightening anymore. It was empty and forlorn and pathetic.
    On some blocks not a single home was occupied, the structures having fallen victim to desertion and the arsonist’s match. I drove blocks without seeing a living soul.
    I stopped by the Bells’ home off Livernois, once known as the Avenue of Fashion. They lived in a Tudor alongside other grand Tudors that surrounded a park with long, unkempt grass and a broken drinking fountain. I knocked on the iron gate that sealed the front door. The Bells weren’t home. They’d taken their rattletrap Cadillac and gone around the way to sell candy from the trunk, since the only other candy to be bought within a five-mile radius was at the liquor store.
    A dead sycamore that had snapped in the wind was lying in the street.
    Harry Bell, the family patriarch, praised God when I called him on his cell phone to find out where they were. I asked about the tree. He said the sycamore had fallen on his car a week ago during a heavy rainstorm and smashed it. He’d been asking the city for months to cut the dead tree. He called the city to come clean up the timber. But it was still lying there like a corpse.
    “The car still works,” Harry told me over the phone. “Great is He. God works miracles.”
    Harry was a typical Detroiter: unemployed part time, full of God and finding hope