Wednesday, February 1, 2017 // The Statement
6B
PHOTO BY CAROLYN GEARIG
DETROIT
From Page 5B
portly gentleman with white pants, smooth
black leather shoes, some kind of political
T-shirt, black square-framed sunglasses, and a
charcoal grey fedora with a yellow-red feather.
“How’s it going, brother?” The words sound
like those of a honeyed baritone jazz singer. Each
vowel is a deep bellow that vibrates my ear lobes.
“Well, man. Just in town checking stuff out.”
I have no idea what to talk about but I want to
hear more.
“Nice. Nice. You ever hear about our stuff
before?”
I admit I hadn’t. It’s all handmade leather
goods, that much is apparent, but virtually
everything in the store is also for sale, including
the teepee.
“We were actually way underselling these
chairs,” he said, pointing to what I thought were
just for customers to rest on. “They’re actually
worth about $10,000.”
It turns out that nothing in the store is actu-
ally from Detroit, but instead shipped from the
parent company in Oregon. Not even the uphol-
stery, teepee or random mining equipment are
native to Detroit. Every last object in the store
is scavenged in Oregon, stored in a warehouse
and then distributed to outlet stores. It’s a very
determined system. Does selling out-of-town
wares — as opposed to local crafts — make Will’s
any less legitimate as a business in Detroit or
its conscience less an authentic part of the city?
Why should this place force-fit an image of soli-
darity with the community if it’s just trying to
be a business? Maybe it’s more honest just to
sell what they want and not a façade to comfort
people like me.
“I knew Detroit as a kid when it had the best
retail store in the state: Hudson’s,” my dad said.
“When it had the best hobby shop for model
trains. When the Tigers won the American
League pennant in 1968, and I rode the bus down
Michigan Avenue with my grandfather to Tiger
Stadium.”
He continued: “But I didn’t know Black peo-
ple. My mother taught Black students in Dear-
born Heights, and my father worked with Black
workers in the Ford Rouge Assembly plant.
There was tension at my dinner table about race
because my father would make racist comments
about his Black co-workers. My mother would
stop him. It was hard for me to make sense of it.
I grew up in a white town whose trash cans said,
‘Keep Dearborn Clean,’ and people often inter-
preted that as ‘keep Black people out.’
It’s uncomfortable, the feeling you get in your
gut when you hear about family bigotry. How can
I judge the character of my grandfather, whom
I’ve never met? My grandmother described him
as “the kindest man that ever lived,” but how do I
reconcile these two polarizing narratives?
Needless to say that task was not as hard as
that of my dad’s, who had to reconcile bigotry
in a parent. It came as no surprise to me when I
heard that he hosted a classical music program
on the Wayne State University radio station
WDET in 1974 during his undergraduate career
at the University of Michigan. On Saturdays he
would drive from campus to Detroit for the 8
p.m. broadcast.
“After the one-hour show ended at 9 p.m., I
drove down Woodward Avenue to Eight Mile,
then west to Livernois where Baker’s Keyboard
Lounge is located,” he said. “I sat at the bar so
that I didn’t have to pay the cover charge, and
forced myself to learn to drink beer so I could sit
there and listen to Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Sonny
Stitt and more. There were regulars at the bar,
particularly two middle-aged Black guys named
Skeets and Walter. Those two knew all the
musicians. … Black and white people got along,
listening to the beauty of jazz played by master
musicians. It’s an ancillary aspect of the music
that always impressed me deeply.”
His volunteering and forced appreciation
for beer was of course willful, pedagogical and
enjoyable, but was also threaded with a sense of
duty. If each generation should attempt to cor-
rect the transgressions of its predecessors in the
name of progress, this was a noble example. I am
half the product of someone who was the prod-
uct of Dearborn, which is a product of Detroit,
who moved to Ann Arbor — itself the product
of Detroit — and created the foundations for my
life. I am the latest iteration of this series of rela-
tionships. My bigoted, loving grandfather’s job in
the auto industry, the college education he pro-
vided his son and trashcans that signaled racial
exclusion are, for better or worse, what I stand
upon. Should my actions therefore not contain a
similar thread of duty to continue the mindful-
ness my father set as a precedent? Is it not my job
to continue to understand my own narrative as
it relates to this city, particularly if I’m trying to
say that I love it?
I made a mistake in trying to capture the
essence of this city in two days. The narratives
of Detroit are as numerous as the streets that
extend from Campus Martius Park. Woodward
Avenue tells a story of the power of gentrification
and its complicated benefits; Grand River Ave-
nue portends the future of a Black community as
it sits poised on the brink of destruction; Michi-
gan Avenue reminisces for the glory days of old
school baseball, trains and Irish heritage; and if
I had traveled down Gratiot Avenue, Lafayette
Street and Fort Street, their stories would have
made themselves equally known.
But my trip down these thoroughfares has
also further opened my own story. My father’s
upbringing in such a tumultuous city has nec-
essarily informed his politics, principles and
outlook on racial tension, all of which have been
resources from which I draw my own disposi-
tions. We have never had a catalyst for these con-
versations, and maybe never would, were it not
for Detroit. I owe it a great deal of thanks, a senti-
ment that one often doesn’t hear about the city.
No narrative is truer than the other, not my
own nor any of the others. Each trades off the
myths and facts that surround the city, and
serve the self-interests of those who adopt them.
But as my father frequently states: “I’ll say it till
I die — if someone wants to know what’s hap-
pening in the United States, call me, let’s meet
at my house at 9:00, go to Detroit by 9:40, drive
around and have a discussion about what we
saw at lunchtime.” True affection for Detroit is
to have a complex relationship, to listen to mul-
tiple narratives for honesty about what’s hap-
pening to the city. It means you need to take that
drive with my dad. While it may not work for
everyone, I, whose youth was passed in the tran-
quilities of a college town, one day hope to feel
sincerity in saying the words: “I love Detroit.”