West to East

Our family moved from the east to the west side of Detroit in 1967. Since all of our relatives on both sides of the family remained on the east side, at least once a week, my parents, siblings, and I would take a drive across town. While this particular type of pilgrimage may be familiar to others, for instance, to other people who left relatives in older neighborhoods, or while it may be familiar to suburbanites who also left family behind in the city, such trips back are very common to black Detroiters of The Sixties Generation. These fifteen or thirty-minute journeys--one by freeway, one through the streets of the west side--are very common because our parents claimed the spaces whites abandoned. White flight became both the advantage and disadvantage of Black Detroiters.

Most of the time, we traveled back "topside" as my father used to call it. Down Fenkell, also known as Five Mile, until it veered right and turned into Linwood. Was there a yield sign there? I cannot recall. But there was a huge Catholic boarding school or orphanage (I'm not sure which) on the right. St. Francis, now Paul Robeson? South a short jog to Davison, then left. Focus Hope, a block long on the left. I feel cold as I remember going there in the winter time with my aunt to pick up "commodities." Powdered milk in a big white box, canned chicken, canned beef, and a huge can of rock hard peanut butter. She shared some with us; it bent our cheap forks.

Another short jog to 14th Street--the Heart of the Westside. I will live in this neighborhood one day I tell myself as we pass the apartments at LaSalle Gardens. Yes, this is my standard. Enough of the tiny brick bungalows of my northwest neighborhood! When I'm grown and have my own house, I'll have a four-square if not a Tudor! By Chicago and Edison boulevards I am speechless. I just gaze and dream. Daddy looks at me and smiles.

Onward to West Grand. There are shiny new Fords on the Conyers lot. It feels like the Seventies now. I see black people driving fourteen-foot LTDs and Grand Marquis. All is well, I suspect though I cannot quite understand my father's response when he informs us that John Conyers' brother is the owner of the dealership. Daddy seems happy-sad when he should just be proud, right?

I suspect there is an ongoing history lesson in these trips, and I don't want any such lesson, or at least I don't want Daddy to know that I'm open to any such lesson. I don't yet want him telling me anything or showing me anything. I can make sense of Detroit on my own. Thank you very much! What? Can he hear me thinking? Why has he dispensed with the lesson? Why this time and not others has he decided to abbreviate the journey?

We're "hitting the ditch," he announces as we turn left onto the Ford Freeway, right before an underpass and a big boxy blue and white building whose paint has been peeling for as long as I can remember. There will be no Murray Wright today, no park on Chene, no Mt. Elliott. The freeway bypasses all of that and lets us off at Van Dyke. We've only a mile and a half to go now, past a church on the left. I smell barbeque. We pass Warren and approach Forest. Which way will we go? Which way will we turn? Choices still. Another church, this one on the corner of Van Dyke and Forest. Was it always a church? Its dark brick facade and red and green stained glass windows are depressing. I would like it very much if Daddy would not turn here forcing us to look at that church and, worse, to drive down toward the new store on the corner of Maxwell--an Arab-owned liquor store with plexi-glass obscuring the bottles. There is no plexi-glass in my grandfather's building a few blocks down, the store he rents to Obadiah and his sons, who are black. Have they tired of selling Better Made Potato Chips and Faygo I wonder when I wander into the store by myself. Besides the Stanback Headache Powder that my aunt, who lives with my grandparents in the house on Norvell and who sleeps all day so that she can work the crane at Chrysler all night, has sent me to the store for, these are the only items left on the store's shelves.

Perhaps obfuscation is good, but I want to see even less than one sees through plexi-glass. I want to continue down Van Dyke and turn onto Norvell. It is my preference, or at least it was when I was a kid--to choose at times not to see--in spite of so much to see not to mention to feel.