Detroit is a deep well of American history; it is an old city, older
than Chicago by fifty years, the oldest American city not found on the
eastern seaboard. When the daylight shines, the colors of a ravaged
avenue percolate in a visitor’s mind. The way entire structures are
abandoned, a whole block of storefront retail space devoured by the
wake of nothingness is stunning. It goes like this along Woodward
Avenue: building of dubious origin housing a beauty supply store. Fast
food restaurant, a White Castle, Rally’s Burger, Churches Chicken, a
gas station, an abandoned building fenced off, and then a mammoth stone
House of God. A broken and burned out brick block. A Federal Office.
Another stone tabernacle. A wrecked retail plaza with a shrimp shack
restaurant tucked into it like a lone living rat. A house of worship.
Another gas station. A cathedral to Christ the King. A video peep show
theatre. A Soul food store selling banana pudding, peach cobbler, and
pig’s feet. Then again- Christianity’s insistence. Detroit is an
African-American city; the last United States census claimed the city’s
population to be seventy-six percent African-American. This stands
starkly in comparison to Chicago, or New York City, each with about
thirty percent African-American population, even cities like Memphis,
and Birmingham, Alabama, fall short of Detroit’s level of racial
concentration. Therefore, Detroit’s reputation as a racially divided
city is not mere stereotype; it is a heavily populated city of almost a
million, predominantly black, surrounded by millions more of
predominantly white suburbanites.
Woodward Avenue runs out of downtown Detroit past two
major highways, I-75 and I-96 that are buried beneath the earth; it is
quite possible to enter and leave Detroit without ever riding along a
surface street. Their is a device called the Detroit People Mover that
circles the city’s core and helps transport people to their place of
interest- the Renaissance Center, the Detroit Opera House, the Fox
Theatre, Joe Louis Arena and Cobo Hall, Commerica Park, Ford Field and
Greektown. The monorail device is a circuit above the city; it circles
the streets and altogether eliminates the need for interaction between
classes in the downtown core. In Detroit, the streets, the cracked
sidewalks where city buses and bulletproof cars careen about, is a
dangerous place for many persons at any time of the day or night. The
streets truly are the dominion of the poor and disenfranchised because
the wealthier person fears simple interaction. In winter, it amazed me
my first winter there, the snow is not even cleared from major downtown
streets making it almost impossible for older people or disabled
persons from using them. Every winter, I witnessed people in
wheelchairs get hit by passing cars as they tried to navigate the
curbs.
As a newcomer to the city, I could not help think of Nietzsche- Detroit
proves something, but what? Does all this pristine religiosity among
poverty and disorder prove God’s dead, or alive? Had Nietzsche ever
been to Detroit? No. He never left European soil, but another
philosopher did visit. Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to study
penal institutions, for he was a lawyer in post revolutionary France
and sought to understand a new democratic mode of criminal justice. Of
course, anyone who has read Democracy in America
knows that Tocqueville was interested in more than jails. One of
Tocqueville’s modern French biographers, Andre Jardin, extracted from
Tocqueville’s diary that while in Michigan the polite Frenchman almost
drowned. A canoe guide had the physical appearance of a native person,
en francais ‘le savage‘, but to Tocqueville’s amazement he spoke
excellent French, like a good Parisian. This man was a Metis, the
offspring of a French fur trader and a native woman. Tocqueville fell
from the canoe and almost drowned from amazement. The New World was
aptly named- newness and its manifestation won the Frenchman over to
liberty American style. What Nietzsche would have thought is another a
question?
On Sunday morning along Woodward Avenue the women come forth
in elegant dresses, it becomes their street for the stone shrines
blossom brightly. Up and down the church steps young ladies with long
legs and old ladies with slow struts parade to the chimes and car
honking of family and friends. Automobiles clog the curb, dropping off
and picking up loved ones from their house of worship. Why do so many
African-Americans love Jesus Christ? A Jewish Caucasian who never
lived, visited, or spoke of Africa? The pimps, the prostitutes, the
disgruntled groups of corn rolled men vanish- asleep or fearful. They
hide in modesty as the church bells strike the faithful back and forth.
Sunday is church day; even the businesses along Woodward seem to
sponsor the festivities with special deals on large hot meals.
On the bus in Detroit, I once heard a man talking to two
teenage girls. The man was extolling his born-again status, he was
saved and had nothing to fear, he said his church was so-and-so on
Grand River. The young ladies did not disrespect the intrusion into
their private discussion. From the back of the bus, I saw their polite
smirk, and I heard- "oh yes, I saved too, like I got no church now an’
all, but I’m saved, we’s both saved, we’s know that, uh-huh." In the
city of Detroit, religion is indestructible. Christianity is primary;
there are a few black Muslims, they are easy to pick out for they dress
in black suits and white robe dresses with headscarves for women. God
is highly respectable in Detroit. This is the most startling revelation
a life-long Canadian can make in visiting. Like Tocqueville, I almost
drowned in the omnipresent religious waters. Even the criminals, those
accused of rape, robbery, murder, and drug trafficking understand their
misdeeds in spiritual terms, religious terminology is everywhere. Good
and Evil. Satan and God. To dispute these dichotomies, to laugh at the
saying, to giggle at the volume of prayers that go up to heaven each
and every hour from the small patch of soil named Detroit, is to
engender deep distrust and indignant righteous hatred. Religion is
laughed at in so many places in Canada, it is routinely called out to
blame for child molestation, the oppression of women, mocked as cover
for greediness; in total, religion, chiefly Christianity, is
contemptible because it is viewed as corrupt and obsolete. Nietzsche
was absolutely correct, in as far as he went; he said in The Gay Science firstly and then later, more musically in Thus Spake Zarathustra,
that the European mind had murdered God. The bourgeoisie in it’s
acceptance of a type of reason, adopting Darwin’s science as complete,
and coming to value the accumulation of wherewithal as the prime
objective of political existence, had killed God, made him obsolete. Ah-ha,
I came to think in Detroit, He might be only hiding. While living in
Detroit, it didn’t seem totally insane to believe He was exiled in the
rubble of the Madison-Lenox Hotel. Where the ragged broken glass
windows broadcast decay, God lives on candied yams, fried catfish,
green beans, and macaroni and cheese smuggled to him by women with
long, conked black hair.
Mike Russell was born, raised and educated in Toronto. As a
Librarian he has worked and lived in the sister cities of
Windsor/Detroit. His fiction has previously appeared in incunabula,
the University of Western Ontario’s Graduate Journal of Arts &
Literature. He is solely responsible for the content and opinion.
©MikeRussell 2005