I was trying to travel across cultural landscapes, to look in and try to see and understand them. What gives the sense of place and identity? How does time shape the landscape? Some were very easy to visit, right? Like Historic Sites (Battle Creek + the advent of cereal, Henry Ford's megalomaniacal pursuits), or Vernacular Landscapes (developed through use by people) like Flint, Lansing + Detroit and the automobile industry, but it's the ethnographic piece that is often so elusive. I'm not talking about churches, lord knows there are enough of them EVERYWHERE. It's perhaps more what those institutions do or don't do that I am interested in. So I was able to visit one (Adventist), while the other (Islamic Ctr.) remained impregnable. I didn't get to see or visit community centers ( or even find out if they existed), although I did see more than one YMCA and Salvation Army. Even those places are interesting sites. They can give a quick feel to a community. How open and accessible are they. What do the faces look like, what do they have to offer. I found that the SA I visited up in the "hills" outside Detroit had a very religious feel, with black neo-gospel radio station music pulsing thru the speakers overhead as I shopped. The store was cluttered and not the cleanest I've seen, but the clientele and staff were both mixed and the clerks very sociable and nice. I left feeling good. A few doors down in another strip mall, I went to get my "hair product." Now this was a totally bizarre scene- I assumed black ownership by the storefront and front window display of brown-faced manikins, and was totally thrown by the Asian faces behind the counters. Not only that, they were not sociable nor nice to the customers. They stood sentry behind those counters with taciturn and suspicious looks. In turn, the customer I observed had a angry look of sullen and subtle disdain as she engaged in a rude-ish ping-pong volley of tense words. They each knew just what the other expected and engaged in this minimalist exchange to rapidly complete the transaction. I stepped up to the counter determined to bust this tense feeling that permeated the small shop. I smiled in my affable way and tried some fluffy banter about my inability to bring my "product" on the plane and how I was suffering as a result. Nothing. I mean nothing. I mean like, "yuk" this sucks, and instant anger. I now knew at least one thing, that I felt like the other brown-skinned women I had been observing. Angry, edgy, and unfair prejudicial thoughts flash-flooded across my brain. "You suck-fuckers with your totally overpriced and predatory ways should go back to your own country/neighborhood/
I stayed in Bed and Breakfast's as much as I could to talk to folks, and went to public sites to observe and photograph people and places. I had anchor places I wanted to see and also just wandered. I was a gad-about. I'll always be a gad-about. a perennial peripatetic person, that's me. I looked at houses a lot. I dined w/ real estate booklets whenever possible. I wondered what affordable meant in this place and that, and how relative it all was to the place and circumstance. With the exception of the incredible amount of urban decay in the cities, much of the landscape was what one would expect of middle America.
As i journeyed, I was looking at the past as I wondered about the future. how come some things never change (racism), how come some things change too much (Urban renewal + destruction of vibrant neighborhoods), and where have all the flowers, jobs, and decency gone? these were some of the questions I was questing after. I chased myths, facts, and lore. at the heart of my journey was the ever burning questions- why can't we be friends, why can't everybody just get along. I went searching for those "Black and Tan" establishments that the jazz and blues era of the past ushered in. I knew that most had been destroyed and new Jim Crow and new segregation, and new discrimination, and new hatreds had been born, but surely peace, hope, and working together was happening somewhere. Somewhere over rainbows. I found rainbows of color and hope in different pockets of Detroit, brightness in the blight. sadly, I saw little of it anywhere else. The closest I came to seeing Black and Tan were some old photos from the now defunct (destroyed by the removal/ moving of one of those vibrant neighborhoods, the Bottoms) social club that had mixed race sports teams in Battle Creek. I think the same is and has been true ever since my father told me as a kid (when he pushed them on me)= sports and music are unifying activities. find those + you'll find the mixing. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to ferret out much of that (there was a Tigers game my last night in Detroit, but I loathe baseball). I saw a band playing on the riverfront in Battle Creek that had drawn a mixed crowd, but the band was all white + I couldn't tell what kind of music they were playing.
My heart always goes to the music. I wonder if Sojourner sang? Did she sing black folks spirituals or did she shake like her Quaker and Shaker friends? a little of both I hope, for she owed it to them both. As do I, as do I. I want to go out of this great place called earth having been a triple threat though- a singer, and a mover, and shaker. I will sing sing and shout, and jump, shake, and move my way thru the prednisone and beyond! I just have to that's all.
Now. reflection. Journey's end. At journey's end, is that the expression? I get all tangled up in idioms, expressions, metaphors, all that shit. What confuses me too is the complexities of people and places. Tangled it all is- too complex to behold sometimes. Yet I can sojourn, enter the matrix and set myself a spin. So many people sit at armchairs length and comment on people and places they know little about. They don't explore, they don't research, they don't inquire. they don't really care. Our culture, my generation and all the millennials after, so wrapped up in the exceptionalism of self. I don't want to be a part of it. so bought into the Mass market, the commercialization that is now global. I loved the bright dots I saw boldly painted free- hand. I loathed the mass market, mass produced and wholly overpriced dots I saw adorning far too many uninspired and unoriginal and probably afraid to be bold woman (they call those dots "coach" and covet them like a child does his/her favorite toy). I liked being able to slip into places, and quietly observe; I am ashamed that as a mixed race woman of lighter complexion I can do this. I am bothered that I did not like the Midwest in general, but honest enough to admit it. I rather enjoyed Detroit and would readily go back + perhaps even find a class or two at the College of Creative Studies. I am bothered that I liked the decay of the rust belt. The morbid fascination of the changing times will always be with me I fear. as I myself grind down to dust, I feel the tick of time and all that it has done and all that it will continue to do. We really are so insignificant here, but at least we are blessed with the ability to connect and time-travel with others for our journey. I want it to be a long day's journey into night. I will not go quietly either, but go I know I must.
There were places that I did not get to visit that I wished I had. From my kids I knew of 8 Mile and its invisible racial divide. From research I also knew of the actual physical wall- 6 feet tall and a foot thick, on Birchwood Street. I was on 8 Mile several times, but couldn't bring myself to go see something as divisive as an actual wall. Seeing China's great one and the remnants of Berlin's was enough for me. I get it. Some people need walls to feel save. Just as some people need religion to feel...what? Connected? That one is a humdinger to me as I understand and see religion as a schism-making machine, crafting deadly walls of separation stronger than anything rocks or cement could create.
From the troubled history of place in Detroit I also knew of 2 other sites I couldn't get to. One I consciously omitted from my itinerary, and the other may have been too dangerous to visit. Always in my mixed-race mind is that construct of "place." Always in my heart I want to expand and manipulate that construct to include all. Always in the realities of a divided world my desires get shut down. I look at tragic circumstances like the case of Dr.Ossian Sweet from the 1920's. An educated black man who had to endure, fight, and defend himself + his family against white mob violence in attempts to get him to leave his legally purchased home in a white neighborhood. I was on the East side for some of my sojourn, less than 5 minutes from it when I was on Heidelburg St., yet I couldn't go. The story has such a horrifically sad and tragic ending, I just couldn't go.
Sojourner Homes was the other. I have known of this place for years. In my quest for information on Sojourner and accumulation of almost useless curriculum and assorted ephemera and source material, is the knowledge that in the Roosevelt era of expanding government public housing funds came to Detroit to supply homes to the "working poor" black folks that had migrated to the city to work in its vast war machine industry. Sojourner Homes weren't the first built, but they came shortly after in the early 1940's. The project was a mess from the start. Both races, white and black were busy at this boom time, working alongside each other in a "parallel universe" sort of way. But when the federal government said it was going to build a housing project in a white neighborhood, NIMBY attitudes caused not only vocal, but violent opposition. The Feds and the Mayor of Detroit were stuck. They caved, rescinded the black only status then changed it up again. By the time the first black families went to move in they were greeted with bricks, clubs, and weapons. An all to familiar response in the on-going oppression of brown-skinned people. This incident was a foreshadowing of the troubled times to come. Race riots in 1943 and 1967 did NOTHING to advance an expanded and welcoming construct for "place." The homes were rebuilt in 1970, are minutes away from the separating wall and the black middle class section of town called "Conant Gardens," and yet remain a dangerous, crime-ridden area that a white-appearing me was not want to visit.
I don't have answers to Detroit's multitude of problems. I know many of them are not unique to that city alone. I know we've come a long way in our history of a democratic country founded on tolerance and the hope of peaceful coexistence. The struggle hasn't been in vain; I think we just need to stay in dialogue with one another. We all need to walkabout to places that are different and sometimes uncomfortable to be in. There is something to that expression "don't judge a person until you have walked a mile in their shoes," only I think it doesn't have to be a mile, perhaps just a few feet.
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