Free You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits Page A

half asleep in her arms. He’d conked out on the drive back from Clarkston, and she carried him into his room and fussed around noisily in the dark to get him down for his nap. The three of us listened to her singing for a while—her voice had been trained by ten years of Catholic school. I guess she knew we could hear her. Eventually Mel said, “All right, all right,” and pushed himself up with his hands on his knees and walked out,taking with him the rest of the six-pack. Afterwards Tony gave me a ride back into the city.
    “Mel’s okay,” Tony said, “and I’ll tell you something you don’t want to hear. The reason our neighborhood works is that everyone’s white. Except for Raymond Chu, who happens to be our family doctor, and Amit Patel. Amit went to Michigan and works at the Chrysler design lab. Both are middle-class professional types. These are the people who are taking over our block. Mel’s old-school Eastpointe, but the reason he doesn’t mind is because of guys like me, working-class white guys who moved up in the world, and because guys like Amit and Raymond have to fit in with everyone else and not the other way around. You can’t be a cop in this city for as long as Mel was and not pick up some racial information. And don’t expect me to say that some of my best friends are black. My best friends aren’t black, and there’s a reason for that. I know some brothers, and like a few, too, but there’s a point beyond which I don’t really understand or trust them, and to be honest, the black guys I respect are the ones who feel the same way about me.”
    “I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” I said.
    “How many black kids grew up on your street in Baton Rouge?”
    “You know the answer to that.”
    “I want you to realize what you’re getting into. Detroit is a black city. They don’t want you living there.”
    I GOT MY FIRST REAL taste of this fact a week later, just a couple of days before moving into Johanna Street. I wanted to spend a night in the house before Walter came down, just to prove that I could. This was around the turning corner of May/June. The weather was cool and sunny, with tall clear skies, good roofing weather, andI spent that last week in work boots and overalls, supervising the Mexicans I brought in at the last minute to help me finish the job.
    The Mexicans probably need some explanation. By this point Robert had signed off on the first group of bidders, a network of Latinos, spanning classes and generations and even nationalities. There were families waiting over in Windsor for their visas to come through and lots of back-and-forth traffic across the water. (Canada was softer on immigration.) Part of the deal Robert struck with these people had to do with the fact that they promised to bring skilled labor to the project—painters, carpenters, contractors, electricians, plumbers, roofers and gardeners, who offered to help out on other sites when they could. Their own neighborhood was about twenty blocks north of Johanna Street, towards Hamtramck, and you could hear the sounds of hammer, mower and drill as far as Gratiot. Anyway, a bunch of these guys showed up to lend me a hand.
    I met Hector Cantu, who put their bid together, a short, baby-faced dude with thick black hair cut in a Ken-doll perfect haircut. He was maybe forty years old and had left a pretty good job at J. P. Morgan to set all this up. His people worked hard and gave us time to talk together. There was a Spartan grocery store about five blocks away, run by some Iraqi guy, and we often walked over together to bring back coffee and hot dogs for the men. Hector was a good organizer, planner and fund-raiser, but the kind of work he was good at wasn’t the kind that dirtied your hands. So I kept him company some, and we watched his buddies sweat.
    They laid roof tiles and bathroom tiles and plumbed the kitchen to fit a dishwasher. They laid down grass. They painted the outside walls, where