Devil's Night (5 page)

Shortly after coming to the city I was introduced to Tom De Lisle, an engaging man in his early forties who grew up in Detroit and, in the seventies, served as spokesman for the city's last white mayor,
Roman Gribbs. Although he now lives in the suburbs, he still works in town, as a producer for WDIV, the NBC television affiliate. It was from him that I first heard the white version of what went wrong.

“This is the place where the wheels came off the wagon of Western civilization,” he told me in a voice that mixed sadness with anger. “This town has become unlivable. What I want to know is, where's the outrage? There is no outrage here. This is a town that is down for the count—and maybe already being carried out of the ring. You'd think there would be an outcry, or at least some sympathy for the victim. Detroit is as helpless and hopeless a place as any in America.

“Believe me, this town is a goddamned disaster area; it just exists from day to day. I've lived in New York and L.A., but the difference is that here, there's no way to get out. Detroit is one big prison with Eight Mile as the gate.”

Tom De Lisle is not unaware of the conditions that brought the city to its present state. “It was never easy to be a black in Detroit,” he conceded. “Blacks felt—rightly—victimized. There were always racist cops. But the riot never stopped in Detroit. Both the criminals and the cops understood that it was a whole new ball game. In the seventies, it was like a gang war between the blacks and the cops—and the blacks won.”

The flight to the suburbs—by both whites and middle-class blacks—was, in De Lisle's view, a simple desire to escape the endemic violence of the city. “In metropolitan Detroit today, fear is the most pervasive single factor,” he said. “When I worked for the mayor, almost every member of his staff suffered a major crime. One night someone pumped three shots through my window for no reason. One of the mayor's secretaries was brutally raped. In the City-County Building. During working hours.

“My grandparents lived on East Grand Boulevard,” he continued. “Somebody stole their air conditioner right out of the wall. My grandmother used to look out the back window to tell my grandfather when it was safe to get his car out of the garage. There are
thousands of stories like that. And when people report them to the cops, the cops say ‘Move.'

“Everything goes back to the racial situation. Detroit has been the first major American city to cope with going from white to black. And whites left. That's the American way—people have a right to move in, or move out. There's evidence to point out that white people who moved had something to fear. Who wants to put their kids in a situation where they are likely to be crime victims? That's as basic as life gets.

“If I were mayor, I'd declare Detroit a disaster area,” he said. “It desperately needs national assistance. But Coleman Young has no compassion. He says, ‘Things have never been better.' What a goddamned lie! The bottom line is, Detroit is an orphaned city. There's no sense that anyone cares. What's happening here is the death of a city.”

In the following months I heard this view repeated a hundred times. It is a constant refrain—blacks, especially black violence, drove people out of their homes and their city. This is the white way to look at it; but Arthur Johnson reminded me that there is another perspective as well.

Johnson, president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and a vice-president of Wayne State University, is a scholarly-looking man with thick glasses and a white beard. He leads an organization that for many years symbolized moderation and interracial cooperation. But when we met in his office on the campus of Wayne State, he sounded anything but moderate on the subject of his white neighbors.

“Blacks in Atlanta feel their city is loved,” he said. “Here, white people are proud to say, ‘I haven't been downtown in ten years.' We know we're not loved. We know our city has been scarred by the media on an unprecedented scale. I attribute this to the fact that we have a black majority and black leadership. Detroit has unjustly come to represent the worst in America. If they make that stick, it's possible to justify our neglect and separation.”

Johnson, who serves as one of Detroit's four police commissioners, is not naive about the city's problems. But in his view, they spring not from black incompetence, or violence, but from white hostility.

“Whites don't know a goddamned thing about what's gone wrong here. They say, ‘Detroit had this, Detroit had that.… But economic power is still in the hands of whites. It's apartheid. They rape the city, and then they come and say, ‘Look what these niggers did to the city,' as if they were guiltless. Then they go out and vote for Ronald Reagan. I look at white working-class people talking about taxes are too high and I don't know them. I just don't know them at all.”

De Lisle spoke about the death of a city; but to Arthur Johnson and the rest of Detroit's black intelligentsia, something is being born in Detroit—a new, black metropolis.

“Detroit has helped nurture a new black mentality,” Johnson said, pounding his desk for emphasis. “More than any other city, blacks here make an issue of where you live. If you're with us, you'll find a place in the city.”

Whites often say, in their own defense, that many middle-class blacks also leave the city at the first opportunity. I mentioned this to Johnson, but he waved it away. “The majority of the black middle class is here. We are engaged in the most determined, feverish effort to save Detroit. Why? Because Detroit is special. It's the first major city in the United States to have taken on the symbols of a black city. It has elected a strong, powerful black mayor, powerful in both his personality and his office. Detroit, more than anywhere else, has gathered power and put it in black hands.”

My own instincts and experience told me that each man was, in his own way, right. It was hard to deny the harsh portrait of the city painted by Tom De Lisle. Judged by the standards of the white middle class, Detroit is an urban nightmare, a place that offers neither safety nor prosperity to its citizens. The American part of me sympathized with this view; after all, my own grandfather was murdered there, and my relatives moved to the suburbs.

At the same time, I was intrigued by Arthur Johnson's concept of Detroit as a developing black polis in the American heartland. He sees it as more than simply another city; it is, to him, an island of black self-determination in a sea of white racism and hostility.

My Israeli side responded to this notion. Israel, like Detroit, is a place where people with a history of persecution and dependence finally gave up on the dream of assimilation, and chose to try, for the first time, to rule themselves. Both are rough, somewhat crude places; both feel embattled and rejected (Detroit by whites, Israel by American Jews who have remained in the United States); and both have learned hard lessons about the limitations of going it alone.

From time to time, American friends, looking at the hard economic conditions and precarious security of Israel, have asked me why I would choose to live there. The answer is simple enough: Israel, for all its faults, is home. It is a place governed by people like me, a place where I feel secure and self-assured about being a Jew. It may not be much by the standards of Scarsdale or West Bloomfield, but it's all mine.

Talking to Arthur Johnson, it occurred to me for the first time that this is what Detroit represents for blacks. I was fascinated by the parallel, and challenged (as he meant me to be) by his assertion that white people don't know a goddamned thing about Detroit. “Don't believe what you read in the papers,” he told me. “If you want to know what this city is all about, go out and see it for yourself.”

Chapter Two
 
COWBOYS AND INDIANS

What you read in the papers about Detroit is not inviting. The two dailies, the
News
and the
Free Press
, relentlessly chronicle the events in America's most violent city. Shortly after I arrived in town, they published the FBI's crime statistics for 1987, a compilation that showed Detroit once again leading the nation's major cities in homicide.

According to the FBI, there were 686 homicides in Detroit in 1987—almost 63 per 100,000. (Since then, the rate has declined slightly, and Washington has become the nation's leader.) Atlanta, second among major cities, averaged 48 per 100,000. Highland Park, a tiny enclave entirely surrounded by Detroit, led all cities, large and small, with a murder rate even higher than the Motor City's. And Pontiac, my old hometown, had the highest number of rapes per capita in the United States.

The papers also published charts showing Detroit's homicide rate over the previous eight years. During that time, the city averaged 47 per 100,000—almost 50 percent more than second-place Dallas.

Since I was about to embark on a long journey into the city, I viewed these numbers with more than passing alarm. The one reassuring note was the contention of some law enforcement officials that most of the murders were underworld or family-related. I had no gang connections, and (as far as I knew) no outraged relatives, so I felt relatively safe—until Tom Delisle explained the local accounting system.

“Back in the early seventies, when I worked for Mayor Gribbs,” he told me, “we had more meetings on how to get rid of the Murder City tag than how to stop the murders. In those days, the big PR thing was, ‘It's an in-family problem; it's not generally dangerous.' I was there when that bullshit was invented. To this day, people still quote it; it's a real pacifier.”

According to current Detroit police statistics, approximately half of all murder victims knew their killers; but even if this is the case, there is still plenty of random slaughter. While I was there I heard reports of women caught in the cross fire of rival drug gangs, little girls raped walking to school in the morning, kids assaulted on their way to evening church services, teenage boys shot and killed on buses or at the movies and tiny children struck by bullets from careless drive-by gunmen. These stories carried a clear message: The police had lost control of the city.

I asked a reporter who spends a lot of time in Detroit if things were really as dangerous as they seemed in the media. “Are you kidding?” he said. “They're worse.” And he took me to meet John Aboud.

Aboud and his two brothers own and operate a small grocery store, the Tailwind Party Store, on the lower east side, in one of the city's toughest neighborhoods. Aboud was born in Detroit, in 1956; his parents, Iraqi Christians known as Chaldeans, came to the city from a village not too far from Baghdad.

The Detroit area has the largest Arab population in the United States, estimated at anywhere from 80,000 to 250,000. Since 1967, Syrians, Palestinians and, especially, Chaldeans (who often do not consider themselves Arabs but are generally regarded as members of the Arab community by outsiders) have replaced the Jews and other white ethnics as the city's shopkeepers.

It was a transition I had seen in my own family. After my grandfather was murdered in 1960, my uncle Jack reopened the store. Going in every morning was painful, especially for my aunt Ruth, who was never able to see a new customer without wondering ‘Is he the one?' But they were working people, the store was their livelihood, and so they stayed on.

Despite my grandfather's death, Jack and Ruth did their best to maintain good customer relations. They supplied local softball teams with soft drinks, donated turkeys to church suppers and gave after-school jobs to their customers' kids. They probably weren't beloved figures—white grocers in black neighborhoods seldom are. But they were friendly and fair and they had a loyal, mostly black, clientele.

Early on a Sunday morning in July 1967, Jack got a call from a customer. “You better get down here,” the man said. “All hell's breaking loose.” By the time he arrived, the store had been looted. “They took everything except some ‘yortzeit' candles and a few boxes of matzohs,” he said. Within a few hours, Jack Fine was out of business.