Detroit still on my mind.

My brain hasn’t entirely left Detroit.  There are still many, many things that my not-even-a-full-week’s visit left me to think about.  And many of those things are serious and solemn.  But then there the rest of what’s in my head.  Even on the bus tour that drove me to despair, there were distractions.  As if I could have forgotten what Detroit is famous for, we stopped at a light and in my face out the window was this:

 

And then there was the fabulous confusion of knowing that when I looked south out of my hotel room at the Renaissance Center, I was looking at Canada:

There was also this wonderful Cesar Chavez mosaic outside LA SED:

 

(LA SED is Latin Americans for Social and Economic Justice … and “thirst” all at once, which I love.)  I’ve forgotten how many tiles are in there, but each square in the mosaic is a mosaic and the tiles are super tiny.  It’s an amazing piece of work.

There was also this Frida piñata, which was weird, but I liked it all the same.  I’m still not sure I like the idea of beating Frida with a stick, but no one was going to be using this piñata that way, so I guess I’m ok with it:

  The piñata and the mosaic photos came from the last two stops on that bus tour, two of the nice moments from that spin around and through the neighborhoods of the city’s southwest side.  Sadly, sandwiched in between those two lovely bits was being caught in slow traffic and having the unfortunate display of seemingly half the police force arrive en masse to apprehend a kid who looked young enough to be my grandchild, forcing him off his bike and holding him face down on the sidewalk, towering over him as they crowded around his very small, thin body.  No, I have no idea what that child was supposed to have done.  I will acknowledge that he could easily have been a) much older than he looked, b) much harder and tougher and more dangerous than he looked, and c) totally guilty of something.  I will say, however, that he was already subdued before the legion of officers arrived and there was no reason to mash him into the sidewalk like that.

Wait.  I’ve gone off track, back to the dark side.  This is supposed to be about some of the nicer bits of my trip.  And so …

Though I took no photos — too busy marveling at the wacky wonder of it — there are the tigers outside Comera Park (Tiger Stadium):

       

But my most favorite thing of all, even more wonderful than that crazy collection of tigers was the gorgeous and fabulous sculpture down the street from the hotel:

Yes, that’s right: Joe Louis’ fist.  Joe Louis’ fist!  It’s outstanding.  It’s ginormous.  It’s beautiful and strong and silently powerful and bizarrely moving.  I can’t  explain why I like it as much as I do, but I do, I do, I do.  And maybe you’re thinking, “Joe Louis.  Big deal.  Joe Louis.”  Sorry, people, but yes: big deal.  Go watch his knockout reel on YouTube if you honestly don’t get it.  Seriously.  And this sculpture had my heart from the first second that I saw it.  Can’t explain it.  Don’t feel the need to.  Simply stunning.

Had a really great conversation tonight with my coworker about Detroit, about the work we do, about the choices we’ve made in terms of where we live, what careers we’ve chosen, what it means to work in certain neighborhoods and not others, to look like the people you serve or to look nothing like them.  She’s from Detroit (the suburbs of, as she often quickly points out) and still struggles with the fact that she’s not there but here in Brooklyn.  It made me think about the things I’d written in my last post, reminded me that I’d never put up my photos of this magnificent sculpture, reminded me that I still have so much to think about, so many things to wrestle with.

Detroit. Still on my mind.

Motor City Malaise

Even though I was silent for a few months, I was still writing as if I were going to post something.  I have posts in every notebook I’ve carried around during this hiatus, half-written drafts saved here.  For the most part, I think I’ll just let them all die a quiet death.  This one, however, I wanted to put up.  I went to Detroit last month for the Equity Summit.  I’d been very much looking forward to it.  The agenda was interesting, and I thought there was the possibility for some great conversation and interesting connections.  And I got all of that, but I also got body-slammed by Detroit itself.  On the first afternoon, pretty much the second I arrived, I boarded a bus to take a tour of part of the city.  I was with a few co-workers, and we’d all signed up for one of the various tours the conference folks had arranged.  About mid-way through mine, I wrote the next four paragraphs thinking I’d post them when I got back to the hotel … but instead I needed to unpack my bags and register for the conference and meet my boss and get ready to spend half a week talking about equity … and it never got posted.  It stayed with me, though, the despair and anger.  I’ve talked about it with a lot of people since that trip, but I still haven’t gotten it out of my system, still want to put it up here.

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So depressed.  I’m in Detroit today, here for the rest of the week.  I’m on a tour bus for this conference and I’m touring the neighborhoods of Southwest Detroit.

I read all the time about poverty, about economic and environmental injustice, about urban blight, about graft, corruption, racism.  I have experienced a number of these things.  I work in a community and live in another community that are dealing with many of these things.  I have never in my life felt the kind of pain that’s lodged in my chest right now, have never visited a place that made me want to burst into tears.

I don’t understand how it’s possible to so completely devalue people.  Oh, of course I’m not that naive.  But I am, too.

I know that I should read this pain as a call to action, that I should understand it as a reaffirmation of why I do my work, why the project I’m directing is as important as I know it is.  I know this, but right now my despair is too pronounced, too overwhelming.  The tour leaders are trying to inspire us to fight the power, but right now I’m waving a white flag.  I know I’ll move on from here, but right now the pain and desperation are overwhelming.  Right now all I want to do is cry.

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Yeah, that was a fun-filled afternoon for me.  I kept wondering how I could have grown up poor but not have realized I was actually living a life of obscene privilege and opulence.   No one else around me on that bus seemed to be having the experience I was having.  They were talking to one another, taking pictures and comparing notes on what we were passing compared to wherever they’d come to Detroit from.  And I was taking pictures, too.  I was comparing Detroit to my neighborhoods in Brooklyn, too.  But I was also having a meltdown.  I must have looked miserable and unapproachable.  After our second stop on the tour, no one even tried to make conversation with me.  My feelings were too strong for me to keep them off my face.  I wouldn’t have approached me, either.

Before I left for Detroit, my mother warned me to be careful because the city’s supposed to be so horribly dangerous.  I’m not saying it’s not dangerous, but … you know, my own city can be pretty rough, too.  I figured I was prepared to take care of myself.  What I wasn’t prepared for was what I saw and heard on that tour.  We visited sites where we weren’t allowed to get off the bus.  And that was for our protection from. the. air.  Yes, we were told quite plainly that the air quality was so bad, we’d feel the ill effects in our breathing and our eyes in maybe about five minutes.  We pulled into two locations and people from those sites came onto the bus to talk to us.  We got to sit in our plush seats, listen to their stories and then watch them walk back into the poison.

This is a playground next to a community center, one of the stops where we stayed on the bus.  Notice the yellow plumes of smoke next door, the sulfur filling the air where kids are coming to hang out and play.  That play space used to be on the other side of the community center (a few breaths further away from the sulfur smoke) until a tractor trailer fell off the highway that runs overhead and landed smack on the playground.  I listened to the stories about this center and I stared out the window.  How did anyone think it was okay for children to be playing there?  How did anyone think it was okay for anyone to live there?

We drove past burned out foundations and boarded up houses, past lot after lot after lot where whole communities had been dislocated and their homes razed and the land just left fallow.  For such a big city, I was shocked by how many open fields there were in Detroit.

Open fields and this:

But at the same time, it wasn’t all dismal.  Right next door to these boarded up houses is a mural:  and murals, even when they’re sad or painful, always make me feel a little bit better.  And this one has the Dunbar/Angelou reference, which makes it that much nicer.

I know there are wonderful things happening in Detroit.  I know it because I made a point to do a little research and find out about some of those things.  I know it because my co-worker is a native and she made a point of sharing some of those things with me.  I know it because we got to see a tiny little bit of that at the tail end of our tour.  I know it because the Equity Summit folks showed us fifteen minutes of Lemonade Detroit.  I know it.  I know.  But I also know what I saw on that tour.  I also know all the things I’ve learned over the last year about the group in River Rouge that’s trying to develop the same kind of community revitalization project that I’ve been working on in Brooklyn for the last year.  All of these things fit and don’t fit together.

Detroit made my heart hurt.  It’s definitely not the only place in the country with the power to do that.  No.  I’m sitting in my mom’s house right now in Maryland.  If I want heartache, I can ride up the road to north Baltimore and it’ll be right there to smack me in the face.  I’ll be home tomorrow, and I can find it in my own back yard.  There’s plenty of heartache all over.  It’s not my job to “save” Detroit.  There are plenty of worthier, more capable people stepping up to that challenge.  It was definitely Detroit’s job to wake me up, however.  I needed that slap in the face, needed to see more clearly the importance of the work we’re trying to do in Brooklyn, of the role I play as part of that work.

I need to go back to Detroit.  Any place that grabs your heart as aggressively as Detroit grabbed mine needs more time, needs attention.  So I’ve put the city on my “must return” list, not for a conference and a whirl-wind tour, but for the city itself, to really see and be there.  Even in the places where it’s hard to breathe.  Even in the places that make me want to scream and cry.  If I want the lemonade, I need the lemons.

SOL: This is where I live.

In a house where the doorbell can ring on a cozy cold night and my neighbor’s daughter can be outside with a plate of freshly baked linzer cookies just for me.

I’m not surprised.  This is the place where neighbors come to the door to borrow an egg.  This is the place where we walk each others’ dogs and feed each others’ cats.  This is the place where I knit afghans and baby sweaters for my neighbors.  This is the place where a woman can walk up to a teenager at the bus stop this morning and start talking to him about how to plan for college.  This is the place where, once the bus comes, another woman can see that same teenager and say, “Ooo, I saw your mama the other day.  That baby’s gonna be twelve pounds, she’s so big!” and he can just laugh and tell her they know she’s having a boy and they’re trying to pick a name.

I’ve lived in this city for twenty-four years (exactly that as of last week).  I’ve lived in eight different neighborhoods in that time.  And I’ve been happy in almost every one of those places.  There have been things I’ve liked about each neighborhood, about each house or apartment, about certain neighbors in each location.  But there was always something missing, something not quite falling into place in the way I might have liked.  In some neighborhoods — like Cobble Hill, like Park Slope — I was sometimes made acutely aware of that dissonance.  In others, I just felt that something was … off.

This is where I live.  The first place since leaving my mother’s house where I’ve really felt I was home.

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It’s been about forever since I posted a SOL.  Go see what the rest of the crowd is posting today over at Stacey and Ruth’s place.

Breaking My Silence

So before Seagram’s got me all upset, it had been nearly two months since my last post.  And I hadn’t been doing too much posting before that long break, either.  What’s that about, you ask.  Truly, I’m not entirely sure.  Or, rather, I’m not sure which factor carried the most weight.

I’ve been having a bit of an identity crisis for the last year.  Once I stopped teaching, I had a hard time figuring out what my blog was supposed to be.  It wasn’t all teaching all the time before last December, but my teaching definitely informed who I was here.  I was afraid that, without having my students’ fabulous stories and all the things I learned from them, my blog would become the place for me to rant about racism, sexism and my wholly uninteresting pet peeves … and if you look over my posts from the last year, that’s mostly what you’ll see.  I was so busy trying to figure out who and what I was if I wasn’t “teacher lady,” I stopped writing entirely.

Add to that the self-imposed gag-order on writing about the work I left teaching to do.  It’s still true that I don’t want to talk too specifically about my work because doing so will give up the last little bit of anonymity I like to kid myself that I have here.  But, like teaching, my work is so much of what I’m doing.  It’s the reason I was in Detroit last month, the reason I’m having a whole other, off-blog kind of identity crisis right now … and yet I still feel I can’t write about it.  I know that anyone who reads here can easily figure out who I am.  There are so many dots to connect that lead right to me, and yet I still hold back.

In two months, this blog will be four years old, and I’m questioning whether I should just shut it down and move on.  I don’t think I want to shut down, but I’m still feeling stuck.  Certainly it’s true that there will always be things that annoy the crap out of me, and I’ll always be ready to rant about them, but I’m really not looking to just be pissed off online all the time.  So what am I left with?

I could tell you that today, in honor of their election into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and because of the nice memory the song always calls up for me), I had the Beastie Boys’ She’s Crafty playing on a loop on my iPod.  And I could tell you that I know Fox must be pleased that Guns-n-Roses was voted in — in their first year of eligibility, no less.  And you might wonder: Guns-n-Roses?  And I’d say: yes, they’ve been Fox’s guilty pleasure the whole of their 25 years.

And then we’d all say: so what?

Yeah, exactly.  In any case, Seagrams forced an end to my silence.  We’ll see what happens.

Sometimes, Life Is Good

Tonight I met Harry Belafonte.  I left my house this morning with no idea this would be on my agenda.  Yes, my boss had asked if I’d attend some benefit gala with her after work, but there’d been no mention of Belafonte possibilities.

I would love to be posting my lovely photo with this lovely, legendary man.  Alas, my photo op was ruined by a) a man who thought he was being helpful but was camera challenged and took a picture over our heads of a table across the room and then b) the woman running interference for Mr. Belafonte who stepped in just as I was ready for my second photo attempt to say we couldn’t take any pictures.

Fine.  I did get some photos of him on stage accepting his award, including this very cute one of him about to kiss David Ushery from NBC:

There had been jokes all night about the honor, privilege and apparent pleasure of getting a kiss from him, so Ushery was appropriately jazzed to get his.  And yes, I had some grand illusions about snagging one of my own (I am that shameless), but again, no such luck.  I did get to chat with him for a moment, shake his hand and have him thank me for the work I do, and that felt pretty great.

So yeah, life can be so good.  Random, cool and fabulous.  Thank you, cosmos, for dropping a little outrageous surprise into my day.