Detroit: An American Autopsy

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Authors: Charlie Leduff
Tags: History, Sociology, Biography, Non-Fiction, Politics
anywhere he could get it.
At least the car still works. Praise Him!
    I drove around the corner to meet up with the family. They were in a neighborhood of blown-out, windowless houses mixed with others that had neatly manicured lawns. Harry grew up on this block.
    His wife, Marsha, waved wildly and ran to give me a hug. “Heya, Mister Charlie!”
    I blanched. “Mister Charlie” is an old slang term from antebellum times, a name given by slaves to their white oppressors.
    “Please, I told you, Marsha. Don’t call me Mister Charlie.”
    I shook Harry’s hand. He looked ill, and he was ill, suffering from obesity and hypertension and high blood pressure. He was my age but looked ten years older. He used to work in a fish house, but was too sick to stand anymore. I worried about him and how his family would get along without him and his steadying influence, if it should come to that.
    “Where’s the kid?” I asked him. He pointed.
    Keiara was in the front of the car, head down and sullen.
    “What’s the matter, Kei?” I asked, sliding into the backseat.
    She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said. “All the attention, I guess. It’s got me thinking. I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed to be poor. And I’m ashamed to live here. And I don’t know if I’m ever going to get out. I just want to move away.”
    “Where would you go if you could move out? The suburbs?”
    “No. I wouldn’t really fit in there,” she said. “Maybe the country, way far away, where there’s nobody to bother me. And it’s just a little farm and I have my family around me and nobody else.”
    “That’s a good dream,” I said. “That’s my dream too. It’d be nice to have you for a neighbor.”
    She smiled, and I smiled back, knowing the odds went against her. Half of Detroit kids don’t even make it through high school, and of those that do, half of them are functionally illiterate.
    Keiara was an honor student despite it all. The secret to her success, her mother said, was to lock her in the house at all times, except for the fifteen hours a week they spent at church. If any kid was going to get that farm, it was going to be Keiara.
    It was growing late. I had to meet Conyers, so I said good-bye to the family, promising Harry I would call the city in my capacity as a reporter to see if I couldn’t shame someone into removing the dead tree blocking the street.
    “Good-bye, Mister Charlie!” Marsha shouted as I pulled away.
    * * *
    I headed west and drove up Linwood Avenue. I remembered the street. I often delivered funeral flowers from my mother’s little flower shop to the black churches that lined the boulevard. Usually, the arrangements were gaudy casket sprays and urns stuffed with purple and orange pompons. Men would always greet me at the back door, dressed in dark funeral suits of varying exoticness: black, lavender, sometimes blood red or tangerine orange.
    I drove past the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the pan-African Christian church that set itself up in the 1960s as the militant alternative to the oppressive white version of Christianity. In the Shrine’s version of the passion, Christ is a black man.
    The church boasts thousands of members, if not worshippers. It delivered the vote that made Coleman Young Detroit’s first black mayor, in 1973, and has since been the wellspring of black political power in the city. Politicians like John and Monica Conyers still paid reverence. The county sheriff was the nephew of the Shrine’s founder, Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, formerly known as Albert Cleage. The executive ranks of the fire department and Kilpatrick’s chief of staff were worshippers, as were various local commissioners and Kilpatrick appointees, recipients and perpetrators of no-see, no-bid municipal contracts and favoritism.
    In fact, Kwame Kilpatrick himself was raised in the church, his parents having met there in the 1970s.
    The founder, Cleage, had threatened to burn the rest of the city down

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