Free Devil's Night by Ze'ev Chafets Page A

collard greens. “I know you’ve never heard anything like this,” a man would tell me, putting on a Little Milton tape. Any evidence that I understood black culture was greeted with good-natured surprise. Once, at a party, I astonished a room full of people by dancing without breaking an ankle.
    As time went by, and people became more relaxed around me, I heard a great deal of candid black talk. Detroiters constantly discussed race, often, I suspected, with the intention of shocking me.
    â€œIf you want to write about us,” a playwright told me one night at a party, “you’ve got to realize that we come in four types—Afro-Americans, blacks, colored folks and niggers.”
    â€œWhat’s the distinction?” I asked.
    â€œWell, take vacations,” she said. “An Afro-American goes to the Bahamas. A black goes to Harlem. Colored folks load their kids in the car and go down south to visit their kinfolks.” She paused, forcing my hand. “And what about niggers?” I finally asked. “Niggersdon’t go on vacation—they wait for you to go on vacation,” she whooped, and the others laughed loudly.
    On another occasion, a group of people were discussing a media controversy that had erupted around the question of why blacks excel in sports. Several experts had been roundly criticized as racists for suggesting that black anatomy is better suited for some kinds of athletic activities. My hosts, however, happily asserted that the experts were right.
    â€œDo you really think that blacks are built differently than whites?” I asked.
    â€œSure,” said a woman. “We’ve got bigger butts and thinner legs.”
    â€œThat’s considered racist,” I pointed out, but she didn’t agree. “All you got to do is look at us,” she said.
    From time to time, the tables were turned and I became the subject of other people’s scrutiny. Despite the fact that race is a constant topic among Detroiters, there is a surprising confusion about who is what.
    One night in the 606 Club, a sort of black Cheers located downtown, a man who had obviously had a couple of drinks approached me at the bar. “Excuse me, brother, but are you a white man or a light-skinned colored man?” he asked.
    â€œWhat do you think?” I asked him.
    The man looked at me closely, and then ran his fingers over my scalp. “You got nappy hair,” he said. “I guess you one of us.” Satisfied, he returned to his seat and announced in a loud voice that I was, indeed, a light-skinned black. Apparently several other patrons had been wondering, because they looked at me, nodded in satisfaction and smiled.
    The incident at the 606 brought back memories of a childhood friend, Jesse Stephen. Jesse was a preacher’s son, and one day he told me that Jews aren’t white, but red. “Noah had three sons,” he intoned, borrowing his father’s sermonic cadence. “Ham, who was black, Japheth, who was white, and Shem, who was red. The Jews are Shemites.”
    For years I considered this a personal eccentricity of Jesse’s, but in Detroit I learned that it is a widespread article of faith. People were constantly telling me that I was “almost white” and they would buttress this belief by pointing out that I had “bad hair” and swarthy skin. “I know plenty of black people lighter than you,” a woman told me, “and they don’t go around pretending to be white.” (There was another side to this coin, too. Many people I met believed that Jews are the chosen people. “Do I look chosen to you?” I once asked a churchwoman who scrutinized me and said, “I never said God made the right choice.”)
    Not only Jews fail to qualify in Detroit as whites. During my visit I got into an argument with a very sophisticated city official who tried to convince me that all Arabs are black because they come