Devil's Night (24 page)

“Doesn't anyone object to this kind of stuff?” asked the reporter. “I mean, how about the people who live next door to the devil worship church?” In the city, people have been known to picket unwelcome neighborhood incinerators, but the ethic in Livingston County is live and let live. “People around here stay out of each other's business,” said the lawman broadmindedly.

The rain began to let up and we cruised out of Hell, searching the back roads for an alternate-site cross burning. We passed through a quiet little town whose residents all come from Kentucky, drove by the devil worship church to look for signs of activity, and went by the survivalist camp, but we didn't see a single burning cross that night.

Half an hour and many miles later, we were about to turn in when we met another patrol car coming down a dirt road in the opposite direction. The two stopped side by side, and the lone officer in the other car rolled down his window. He was glad to goof off for a few minutes and to engage in some friendly banter.

Hoping to salvage the evening, our host did a little fishing. “I hear
rumors that your chief is in the Klan,” he said. “Know anything about that?”

“Yep, I heard that one too,” said the cop. “But I don't know. I don't like niggers much myself, but I ain't in the Klan.”

As cops always do, the two men got to swapping combat stories. “Tell them about the time you busted that beer party,” the other man said, and our host laughed modestly.

“Hell, it was just a bunch of teenagers having a party,” he said, in the tone of the man who captured Dillinger. “Some dickhead and a bunch of his friends, including a guy in a wheelchair, were making a commotion. And their dawg was barking his head off.”

“He wanted to shoot that dawg,” said the other cop.

“Yeah, I sure did. Anyway, these kids started mouthing off, giving me a hard time, so I grabbed the guy that was giving the party and dragged him out in his front yard. In the rain. And I put that dickhead down on his knees and made him recite the Lord's Prayer. Right there in the yard.” He laughed and his friend laughed. Police work, done right, has its satisfactions.

“Made him say the damn Lord's Prayer,” said the lawman, shaking his head. “Right in the damn yard.”

“Yeah, but you still should have shot that damn dawg,” said the other. “That's what you shoulda done.” The two cops raced their engines and thought about the lost opportunity. Then they put it in gear and headed down the dirt road in opposite directions, looking for poachers.

My friend the reporter and I drove back to Detroit. It was late, but the city was only forty minutes away, and we couldn't wait to get back home.

Chapter Six
 
“THANK GOD FOR MAYOR COLEMAN YOUNG”

In the fall of 1988, shortly after the Collins-Crockett campaign, a Detroit television station ran a profile on Mayor Coleman Young. Young's relations with the local media have been stormy, but the documentary was highly complimentary, and the mayor seemed to be enjoying himself. The high point of the show came when he discussed his warm personal relations with former president Jimmy Carter.

In 1976, Coleman Young had, typically, done the unorthodox and endorsed the unknown Georgia governor early in his campaign. Once in office, Carter reciprocated with generous federal assistance. Young talked about the strange friendship between a white southerner and the militant mayor of Motown. “He is a very moral, very religious person,” said Young, and his eyes crinkled and shoulders
shook in the mirthful gesture that usually precedes his one-liners. “Now, I'm not
immoral
, but I've never been accused of being
too
moral, either.”

It is one of the few accusations he has escaped during a public career that spans almost fifty years. Young has been called a communist, a radical and a crook, denounced as a heartless big-city boss and a ruthless dictator. In the suburbs he is considered a black racist; in the city, following his refusal to support Jesse Jackson's presidential bid, some people labeled him an Uncle Tom. There is only one thing that everyone agrees on: Coleman Young, who was first elected mayor of Detroit in 1973, is a formidable and fascinating man.

Many Detroiters can never remember another mayor. Kids at the Whitney Young elementary school believe it is named after Whitney Houston and the mayor—a not-unlikely supposition in a city where Young's name adorns everything. There is a Coleman A. Young community center on the east side and a seventy-five-acre Coleman A. Young civic center downtown on the Detroit River. Accomplished schoolchildren receive financial aid from the Coleman A. Young Scholarship Fund. The mayor's picture hangs in virtually every city office, like the visage of some postliberation African leader—photographs of the young Coleman, handsome enough to have earned the nickname “the Black Clark Gable” in Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood; or of the older, Big Daddy Coleman, light-skinned and gray-haired, with a Redd Foxx twinkle in his eye. Young's name is inscribed on the stationery of city officials, and on their personal calling cards. And a few years ago he had it plastered in huge letters on the tower of the Detroit Zoo, which is located in suburban Royal Oak. This was vintage Coleman Young, an in-your-face gesture to the white suburbanites he loves to taunt and harass.

Political observers in Detroit sometimes call Young “the last of the great Irish political bosses.” There is, in fact, something Skeffingtonian in his audacious, often charming, sometimes ruthless domination
of Detroit. But Young is more than a tribal politician; to many, he is a hero and a savior. Fittingly, there is a hagiographic flavor to the mayor's biography, which is usually depicted as a series of challenges heroically overcome, stations of the cross successfully executed.

The story begins with Coleman the Gifted Student, denied a scholarship because of his race. Then there is Coleman the Officer in the Tuskegee Airmen, who went to a military stockade for opposing wartime Jim Crow regulations; Coleman the Labor Leader, tossed out of the UAW for radicalism; Coleman the Defiant, dragged before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lecturing his white inquisitors on the proper way to pronounce
Negro
; Coleman in Exile, unable to find work for almost a decade, scratching out a living “driving a little taxi, handling a little beef”; Coleman Redux, elected to the Michigan State Senate in the mid-sixties; and Coleman the Underdog, defeating the white establishment and the Negro E-lites to become the city's first black mayor. And, finally, Coleman the Liberator, the man who dismantled the colonialist occupying forces and brought self-determination to the people of Detroit.

An anonymous poem, published as an ad in the playbill of a city program, put it this way:

When I saw the poem, I wondered what Brooks Patterson would think of it, or the boys in Tom Coogan's barbershop. The mayor's
enemies concede that he is smart; some admit that he is brave; and few would disagree that he has personality, at least the kind that appeals to his own people. But
integrity
is not a common adjective for Coleman Young in suburbia; nor do many see him as a man “With A Great, Big Heart.” Unlike other black mayors, such as L.A.'s Tom Bradley or Atlanta's Andrew Young, he has never sought the approval of white people, never attempted to portray himself as a comfortable bridge between the races. Young is not the credit-to-his-race type of middle-class black whom whites find reassuring. You deal with Coleman Young on his terms, or no terms at all.

Young has been divorced twice and lives alone in the Manoogian mansion on the Detroit River. He travels the city in a midnight-blue limousine (“You want a Cadillac mayor, you buy him a Cadillac”) with two bodyguards and a police escort, earns $125,000 a year (the second-highest mayoral salary in the country), and dresses in quietly elegant, double-breasted silk suits. The trappings of wealth and power convey a message, but they don't conceal, and are not meant to conceal, the fact that he is still a street man, a signifying mayor who uses the style and language of Black Bottom to delight his supporters and shock his opponents.

It took me about three days in Detroit to realize just what a powerful man he is. For one thing, whites—in and out of the city—couldn't stop complaining about him. For another, none of the municipal officials I contacted for appointments would return my calls. “In this city, nobody will say anything without Coleman's okay,” a reporter explained. “You better see him and let him know what you're up to.”

I tried, but it wasn't easy; the mayor's press policy could not be described as open-door. You need a sponsor to get an appointment. Finally I found somebody who knew somebody who talked with Young's spokesman, Bob Berg. After a few weeks of negotiation, I was eventually granted an audience.

I admired the technique. Young was letting me know that he
wasn't the mayor of some second-rate town; a meeting with him was a rare gift, something to be valued. This approach worked (it always does); I went to our first interview feeling like the Cowardly Lion on the way to Oz.

I arrived at the mayoral mansion at three o'clock on a sweltering August afternoon. An aide ushered me into the living room and told me to wait. I used the time to browse through a stack of books on the coffee table—
The Holy Koran
,
Billyball
,
The Book of the Dead
and
Rare Breeds—A Guide to Horses
—that testified to the eclectic tastes of a man who educated himself in the public library. The room was filled with memorabilia from his various trips—a Samuri sword and Japanese suit of armor, African sculpture—and a larger-than-life bust of His Honor. It is a bachelor's living room, seldom used except for official occasions.

After half an hour or so, Bob Berg appeared and walked me upstairs to the mayor's study, a cluttered and mercifully air-conditioned room. There, at half past three in the afternoon, I found the mayor of Detroit, dressed in blue pin-striped pajamas and a checkered bathrobe.

The television set in the room was tuned to CNN, and a deck of playing cards sat on the desk. Interviewers often mention the fact that the mayor conducts conversations while watching the tube and playing solitaire. The implication is that he is easily distracted, or perhaps a bit eccentric. But, as I came to discover, there is a white interpretation of Young's actions, and a black one. Toward the end of our conversation that day, I asked him why he kept the television on.

“I don't really watch this thing,” the mayor said, gesturing toward the set. “But I like to have it on in the background. See, I don't want people listening in on my conversations.” This is not paranoia; several years ago, during an investigation into a municipal scandal, the FBI bugged the mayor's private townhouse.

And what about the solitaire? I asked.

“I only play when I get bored,” said the mayor dryly, and his shoulders shook with silent laughter.

Humor is Coleman Young's great solvent. He uses it to shock and deflate, charm and conciliate, or just to amuse himself. Young has the timing of a professional comedian, and the keen ear of an impersonator. Bilingual, he is able to switch back and forth effortlessly between perfectly crafted English and street talk. The latter is used primarily to disconcert what he calls “the black boogie wazzie” and other “phoney-ass people.” Since unknown white visitors are all suspect, he usually prefers to begin with profanity and jive, enabling him to size them up on his linguistic turf.