Devil's Night (12 page)

In an effort to get her kids back, Carrie enrolled in the PACT program. It was one way to demonstrate to the court that she was a conscientious parent.

“At first I thought it was, you know, just some more changes they were putting me through—but it worked,” she said. “The counseling
sessions taught me to look at myself. I realized that I was always trying to please other people. I thought if other people were happy, if I did things for them, it would make them care about me. I had to learn to be my own person, not what everybody else wanted me to be.”

She also had to find a new home—her old place had been part of the reason that her kids were taken away. But she was broke. “Welfare took care of the rent, but I had no furniture, no money to heat the house and no transportation,” she said. “For six months I looked for a new place to live and a job that would bring in more than the welfare—that's what I did while my kids were gone.”

Where were her relatives while all this was going on, I wondered; didn't she have anyone to turn to for help? Carrie shook her head. “For a while I moved in with my mother, but I left because she wanted to use me as her tidy maid,” she said. Her sister, who lived nearby, wouldn't take her in at all. So she went back to her unheated house and wrapped herself in blankets, waiting out the cold weather.

Finally, she found a new place on the west side, furnishing it with secondhand furniture and appliances. Her mother gave her a hot plate. Finding the house was a major step in getting her kids back. Six months after they had been taken away, her two sons were returned to her. Bev was still required to live in the youth home, but was allowed to visit her mother on weekends.

“When my baby came home, he didn't laugh or play or talk very much,” Carrie said. “At night he would wake up screaming. My oldest boy hated Bev for what she did, although he's getting over it now. The two boys are very close. And I'm learning how to get along with Bev on a one-to-one basis. When she comes home, she'll have to learn that she can't just run wild. She'll have to work for what she gets.”

By this time we had been sitting in the PACT office for half an hour, and Carrie had to go. Before she left, she invited me to visit her the following Saturday afternoon.

The house that Carrie searched months to find is a small, wooden
bungalow on a quiet street in northwest Detroit. When I arrived, neighbors were watering their lawns and engaging in laughing porch-to-porch conversations, while their children rode bicycles on the sidewalk and ran from house to house. As I walked up to Carrie's door I noticed them noticing me; probably they thought I was another welfare inspector.

I found Carrie, wearing a red sweater and jeans, sitting in her living room, on a Salvation Army couch. Bev, home for the weekend, sat on the other end. Carrie's eldest son, Arnold, was at work, but Clarence raced around with a manic, six-year-old's energy. The place was clean but spare, the only wall decoration a hole punched through the plasterboard in the living room.

Bev was in a bubbly mood that afternoon, still excited about her high school homecoming game the night before. Although she lives in a girls' home, she attends a regular school on the west side. Like ninth grade girls everywhere she was worried about her appearance. “I'm only five-two and I weigh one hundred and twenty-four pounds,” she said ruefully, dipping into a bag of potato chips on the coffee table. “And I'm the darkest one in the whole family.”

Despite her ingenuous manner and baby face, Bev has had experiences that most American teenagers couldn't even imagine. In the two years she had been away she had run away from the girls' home half a dozen times. During one of her escapes, she and two girlfriends wound up in a crack house, where they spent two traumatic weeks. Bev saw people beaten bloody, stabbed, and one customer shot to death. After the shooting, the man who ran the house tried to keep her there by force; he was afraid she would tell the police. One day, while he was out, she fled. A few weeks later, her girlfriend, also fifteen, was murdered by the pusher, who accused her of stealing money and drugs.

She told this grisly story without prompting, in a high, girlish tone, while her mother sat on the other end of the couch and shook her head in dismay. “I know some people won't like this,” Carrie said, “but whenever you got a whole lot of black people, you're
gonna have problems. Blacks are ignorant and rude. Like that Suicide boyfriend of yours.”

“Oh, Mama, he was just a friend,” Bev said.

“She had a boyfriend named Suicide,” said Carrie in a grim voice. “
Suicide
. He called up here and I answered, and he said, ‘Yo, mama, Bev be home?' That's what I mean. Just an ignorant, crude nigger.”

Bev was only a year older than my own daughter, Michal. I tried to imagine how I would feel if she came home with a boyfriend named Suicide. But of course she wouldn't, I thought. Where would she meet someone like that? And even if she did, I'd put a stop to it. Or could I? I tried to imagine myself duking it out with a young hoodlum. Then I tried to imagine Carrie doing it. It wasn't an easy picture to conjure up in either case.

Suicide was now out of the picture, but Carrie also disapproved of Bev's current boyfriend, a twenty-four-year-old musician. “I don't
do
anything with him,” Bev protested, sounding like a teenager on a sitcom. “And I don't like it when he calls me his woman. I'm too young to be someone's woman. I just want a friend to talk to.” Her mother, who first got pregnant when she was just about Bev's age, listened skeptically.

“You better think about what you're doing, Bev,” she said. “This boy is a man. I tell this girl—wait for marriage to have sex. But if you can't wait, I'll take you to the doctor to have some pills. I'm telling you, every guy who tells you ‘I love you,' what he means is ‘I love
it
.' Just look at me and try to learn from my mistakes.”

“Mama, I know that,” Bev said. “I want to have a career, I want to be a policewoman. But, Mama, babies are so cute. You can dress them up and play with them.”

“If you don't have any money, you can't afford to dress anybody up.” Carrie sighed. Suddenly Bev sounded much younger than fifteen, and her mother seemed a lot older than thirty-three.

It was lunchtime, and we went to a neighborhood pizza parlor. Although Carrie and her kids have spent most of their lives on welfare, they seemed perfectly comfortable in the restaurant, expertly
picking through the salad bar and the Italian menu. Clarence asked for a stack of quarters and amused himself at the Pac-man machine.

At the table, Bev took out a small mirror and a comb. “I have a white brother and a Jewish cousin, and they both have such good hair,” she said. “Not like me.”

“There's nothing wrong with your hair,” said Carrie. She explained that Bev's white ‘brother' is actually a trick baby, the child of her father's wife—a prostitute—and one of her customers. The Jewish cousin is the daughter of Carrie's sister and a man named Herb. Carrie explained these things without evident embarrassment. One of the things she learned at PACT is that it is permissible to talk openly with her children about sex.

“In my house, you didn't talk about sex,” she recalled. “Once I asked my mother about the pill. When I got up off the floor, she said never to mention it again. I couldn't communicate with my mother at all. She was too busy working and entertaining guests. My parents were very straightlaced. I'm glad my father wasn't alive to see my children taken away—it would have destroyed him.”

The food arrived and Clarence left his Pac-man game to join us. He seemed happy and content, until his mother rose from the table. Suddenly a look of panic crossed his face. “Mama, where you goin'?” he demanded.

“Just next door for some cigarettes, baby. I'll be right back,” she said. Reassured, he rubbed a small hand across his eyes and returned to his pizza.

Bev ate with foster-home etiquette, primly and efficiently. Once she reminded her mother not to sit with her elbows on the table. Carrie smiled, proud of her daughter's manners. When Clarence spilled some of his Coke, Bev wiped it up with a napkin, saying nothing. He waited for a moment, surprised.

“Hey, ain't nobody mad at me?” he piped.

“Why should we be?” asked Bev in a matronly tone. “It was an accident.”

“Seems like if you waste food, somebody gonna be mad,” said
Clarence, sounding disappointed. Carrie leaned across the table and stroked his cheek.

Watching the interplay between Carrie and her kids, I had to remind myself that they were prime examples of the “urban underclass”—an unwed welfare mother, a rebellious teenage daughter who had lived in crack houses, and a small boy who had already spent almost half his life in foster homes. The conventional wisdom is that such people are irresponsible at best, and possibly evil. But the truth, it seemed to me, was more banal. Bev was a sweet, confused adolescent girl; her mother, a bright, harassed woman with no money and no resources to fall back on. I wondered if, in similar circumstances, I could have done better—and I wasn't sure.

Clearly, despite the differences in our backgrounds, Carrie wants the same things for her kids that I want for mine—to finish school, go to college, stay away from drugs and violence, and wait for babies until marriage.

These are the values she preaches to her children, but her authority is limited; unlike Louise McCall, she is not strong enough, financially or personally, to provide security or impose discipline. She can only tell them what she thinks and hope they listen.

On the way home from the restaurant, Bev mentioned a fourteen-year-old cousin who just had her first child. “That girl has ruined her life,” said Carrie sternly. “She'll never get an education now, or a decent job.”

“I know, Mama,” said Bev in her bubbly teenage voice. “But, Mama, that baby is so cute.…”

Carrie sighed and said nothing. She saw what might be coming, but was powerless to stop it. Only thirty-three herself, the woman who was still fighting to get back her daughter knew that she soon might have a grandchild to raise.

Northwestern High School shares Detroit's Grand Boulevard with two citadels of the city's faded dreams: General Motors World Headquarters, and Hitsville USA, the former Motown studio.
Northwestern is also near the place where Clementine Barfield's son Derrick was murdered. The day before he was killed, Derrick Barfield, knowing his life was in danger, had gone looking for Kim Weston for protection. He never found her, and by the time she heard about it, it was too late. “I don't know what he thought I could do,” she said. “But I sure would have tried to do
something
.”

Thousands of young people have sought the protection and support of Kim Weston. The director of Festival, the city's performing arts program, she is a quiet, dignified woman, nearing fifty, with dark skin and a face that belongs on an African coin. When she enters a room, the toughest street kids in Detroit stand up and take off their hats. When she holds up her hand, an auditorium full of noisy teenagers falls into immediate silence. And when she sings, usually gospel, the most talented young artists in the city listen with openmouthed awe.

People in the music community of Detroit say that Weston is one of the finest female singers the city has ever seen—a considerable compliment in a town that has produced Diana Ross, Anita Baker, Martha Reeves and Aretha Franklin. Weston herself makes no such claim. In the early sixties she had a string of hits as a Motown artist, but she was never a superstar.

In 1966, Weston left Motown and moved to Los Angeles, but she didn't feel at home. Her husband, former Motown A&R director Mickey Stevenson, wanted to live in Hollywood near the show business community, but Weston hated its glitz and pressure. She missed being among black people, and used to drive miles across town, to Watts, to work with Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket. She missed Detroit and the people she had grown up with on the city's east side. And so, in 1972, Kim Weston came back home. Five years later, she founded Festival.

For her faculty, Weston chose Motown alumni—Beans Bowles, the musical director of the Motown Revue; Hank Cosby, who played horn on many of the old Motown hits; former personnel director Dorothy Carey; Teddy Harris, Jr., who worked with Diana
Ross and the Supremes; costume designer Margaret Brown, who created the stage outfits for the Temptations and other Motown acts, and a number of others. She recruited them both for their professional skills and as role models for aspiring teenage performers. They serve as reminders that kids from the streets of the city can do something special.

“Did you ever see any of the old Motown artists?” Weston asked me as we walked down the hall of Northwestern High. It was a sweltering August afternoon, and I had come to see Festival in action.

“I saw you at the Fox Theater in the Motown Revue,” I said. “It was back in about 1962. You wore a tight red dress and you sang a show tune. How's that?”

“Shut up!” Weston said, laughing and embarrassed. “You must have been a fan.”

“A fanatic,” I said. And I was. Our parents didn't understand Motown, but we did. At one time I was even in a group—King Mellow and the High Earls of Jive—that dreamed of becoming Hitsville's first integrated act. I was debating whether to demonstrate a few bars of our unforgettable rendition of “Two Lovers” when Weston was stopped by a pretty sixteen-year-old named Piper Carter. She was scheduled to perform in one of the minishows that Festival puts on at old folks' homes and community centers around the city, and wanted to talk to Kim about her act.

“Is that what you want to do, be a professional rapper?” I asked.

“No, actually I want to be an attorney,” she said. “I'm planning to go to Harvard. What I really like to do is write poetry. But rapping might be a good way to make some money while I'm in college. It's expensive, you know.”