The Best Place To Get Away From Detroit Is Detroit

“You’re not going to like it,” a young black passenger tells me. “You’re at end of the line,” the bus driver announces, saying I have to get off. I’m at Alter Road, the Detroit city limit on the east side, waiting to board another bus back to East Jefferson and to downtown Detroit, where I got on near Renaissance Center. I was hoping not to leave the bus. It’s a run down area, as I had expected, but I was determined to see it all — not just the vibrant redeveloped downtown and river front. I’m here for a week, doing research on the city in the Reuther Library at Wayne State University and in the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library for my book, “A Detroit Odyssey.”“You’re not going to like it,” the earnest young man repeats. The city has been ruined, he insists, by a gay and lesbian prostitution ring. Nothing to do with President Trump, he assures me. It is Barack Obama’s fault for encouraging gays and lesbians. I’m getting nervous and hope that I’m not showing it. He keeps talking, though, sincerely wanting me to understand how everything has changed, including his own family, gone to hell. I listen and listen and he never stops talking, and I never stop hoping I can hop the bus back downtown. There is nothing menacing in his demeanor; he’s just trying to set me straight about a world he knows I know nothing about.This young man thinks I’m out of place, and he has a point. Yet how do I tell him that I’m here to see my mentor and second father, James Allen Jones, now 101? I met him at the age of 13, shortly after my father died. Dr. Jones became the first African American to teach at Nolan Junior High School in 1963 where I was a student. I realize now that 1963 was a pivotal year not only for him, and for me, but also for the Detroit public schools, with pressure mounting to put teachers like Dr. Jones into white schools, breaking down the de facto segregation prevalent all over Detroit.Interior of the DDOT bus. Carl RollysonI’m learning about his family, part of the Great Migration that came from the South to Detroit in the first decades of the twentieth century. I’m also tracing the activities of my Polish American grandparents who came in 1929 to work first in the factories and then own their own bar on Joseph Campau right on the dividing line between the Polish enclave of Hamtramck and Detroit. My account of the parallel stories of a Polish American and a black family both living on Revere, blocks apart, who never meet, is uncannily like John Sayles’s recent novel, “Crucible,” set in Detroit from the 1920s to the 1940s.I have to factor my father into this scheme for my book, a cop who, along with his three brothers, policed Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. A police department report confirms what he told me about shooting and killing a man during a bar break-in, a “colored,” the word that was used then. In every police activity report the criminals my father deals with are “colored.” He was knifed on the Belle Isle Bridge, just off East Jefferson, during the 1943 race riot.And there I’m standing on Alter Road at the end of the line listening to a black man who is sad and angry about what has happened to his city. I want to say more, but the bus is ready to go, and I tell him it was nice talking to him, although he has done all the talking. Well, I have come to listen, even if what I’ve just heard has been unexpected.The buses, by the way, are clean and well run, and the passengers of all colors are courteous, many of them even thanking the bus driver when they exit at their stop. Frequently disabled people board in wheelchairs, and that takes some doing— for both them and the bus driver. But they get it done cheerfully on every bus I’ve ridden on main arteries like Woodward Avenue, Grand Boulevard, and Jefferson Avenue, and over the Belle Island Bridge to an island many generations of Detroiters have used as a getaway from city streets. A billboard right across the from the bridge declares: “The best place to get away from Detroit is Detroit.” That triggers another memory: A poster at the Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, 20 miles from the city, which superimposes the Eiffel Tower over the city skyline with the caption: “Detroit: The Paris of Southeastern Michigan.”The author is in the front row (4th from the right) in this theater group photo taken just before departing for England in 1963. Carl RollysonThe Detroit I left for New York City in 1987 remains largely intact — still many boarded up buildings, vacant lots, and undeveloped open spaces. In terms of its 139 square miles Detroit is a huge city and still looks hollowed out to me.At the Detroit Historical Museum, I meet a group from Manchester, England, and they are comparing the histories of the two industrial revolution cities, finding much in common, as I did when James Allen Jones took me and several other young actors on tour in England in 1963, performing “Julius Caesar,” “Hamlet,” and “King Lear. As I talk to them, a journalist from Chicago who is doing a feature on Detroit, sticks a microphone in my face and I tell him about my mother, a Rosie, who worked in the Packard Plant during Word War II. He says he will be featuring what I’ve told him.As I wait for the bus, cars and motorcycles flash by playing rap music — one track with a lyric about the misunderstood black male — and I hear for the first time the language I grew up with as a middle-aged man on a bike talks on his phone saying in Polish, “Powiem ci,” pronounced: POH-vyem chee. That means, “I will tell you,” and it sounds as though he is laying down the law.What strikes me about Detroit is that it is so in and out. It can change in a matter of a few blocks from well-groomed public spaces to deeply neglected urban surfaces. Even along the RiverWalk, when I turn away from the water, I see derelict factories and homes just a minute or two after having enjoyed a small riverfront park.James Allen Jones in ‘Othello.’ Carl RollysonI want to fill the empty spaces and the ruined buildings with the stories Dr. Jones tells me — what it was like for him during World War II in Mindanao, scared to death, after already experiencing his share of racism — a teacher who threatened to put him in a cage, and a U.S. Navy puzzled about what to do with a black Seaman First Class. He remembers meeting Paul Robeson and asking him about the death threats against him for playing Othello and strangling a white woman on stage. Jones has played Othello over 400 times in the U.S., Canada, and the UK but you’ll have to Robeson’s powerful reply to him in my book.What I have to tell is both a harrowing and inspiring story of a people and a city that still need to know one another much better.

The Best Place To Get Away From Detroit Is Detroit

The Best Place To Get Away From Detroit Is Detroit

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