Still from Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat”

In 2016, Erykah Badu performed at Chene Park, now called the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, a beautiful, outdoor waterfront venue in Detroit overlooking Canada. Badu donated proceeds from that concert to the African American 490 Challenge, an organization trying to raise money to process 11,341 untested rape kits that had been abandoned for years at a Detroit police department storage facility. The initiative was named 490 after the dollar amount needed to test a single kit, each of which represents, the organization’s president Kim Trent emphasized, “a living, breathing victim.” Four years later, thanks to their work, 11,137 kits have been tested, and there have been 210 convictions. Eighty-one percent of the victims were Black women. You could call this an archive of negligence.

Recently, my great aunt Cora Mae joined a similar sort of archive. A few months ago, she shocked us all by surviving COVID-19 just shy of her ninety-ninth birthday. But afterward, she lost her appetite and, a few weeks ago, we lost her. Her body was held at a funeral home while my parents kept sending in requests for court permission to bury her. She was terrified by the idea of burning. After a maddening couple of weeks of sending and resending forms, converting Word docs to PDFs, getting things notarized, being sent back to square one again only to be told by the funeral director, “If this isn’t resolved by 4 P.M. I’m going to cremate the body,” we finally got my great aunt a proper resting place. She was buried in a plot at Mt. Elliott Cemetery on one of the first days of fall. “That’s the fastest I’ve seen anyone go through probate to bury a family member,” the hospice social worker told my mom. “I’ve seen it take years.” We thought our experience was an aberration, but apparently it’s common for bodies to wait in funeral homes—on ice, or forced into ash—in a kind of limbo that must devastate so many families.

Cora Mae loved to chew tobacco. She kept a covert spit cup in her hand like someone might hold a handkerchief. She’d often summon somebody over by curling her pointer finger, and give them money to go buy her more chew. Her voice was raspy, as if the effort to propel air through her throat took great effort, but there was also a honeyed quality that came through when she told a joke or a story or claimed innocence about something illicit. Both she and my grandmother began to tell stories toward the end of their lives about the men who had hurt them when they were young. Both she and my grandmother had in their arsenal a particularly childish mode of speaking, a gentle croon, a not-quite whine, though they were always also grasping their fingers around a more lethal, hidden option, just in case things got nasty. A story I’ve heard my great aunt tell over and over again involved her first and only husband and an ice pick. The doctor asked, “Cora, how’d this ice pick end up in Mr. Andrews’s foot?” As she reenacted the moment, she would shrug her shoulders and make her voice go up an octave: “I don’t know.” Then her tone would drop again, coming close to a growl: “I guess he stepped on it.”

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In her column “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. 

Part of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan (Photo: Fren Lebalme)

For a period of time in 2014, I couldn’t stop watching the surveillance video of a person setting fire to the Heidelberg Project, a world-renowned art installation by Tyree Guyton in a residential area of Detroit. The recorded arson struck me as a performance piece in itself. In what appears to be the very early hours of the morning, a figure approaches the threshold of a structure called “Taxi House,” a home adorned by boards of wood that have been painted with yellow, pink, green, and white vehicles labeled “taxi.” There is a painted clock, real tires, and toy cars. A meandering, peach-colored line has been painted along a sagging corner of the roof, then it comes down onto the siding, where it moves geometrically, like Pac-Man.

The installation as a whole is like a painting brought to life, imbued with the spirits of Kea Tawana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Rauschenberg. In a recent profile in The New York Times Magazine, Guyton describes how he began the installation with his grandfather, an act of reinvention rooted in nostalgia. M. H. Miller describes the collection of carefully planned assemblages as “an act of Proustian reclamation, as if Guyton were creating a new neighborhood out of the one he’d lost, embellishing his and Grandpa Mackey’s memories out of the wreckage that surrounded them.” In the video of the fire that destroys “Taxi House,” the figure holds something that resembles a gallon of milk; after a short time, a fireball blooms, and the figure runs away.

The Heidelberg installation has the vibe of Plato’s lost city of Atlantis, the mythic civilization that sank into the ocean overnight after its people lost their sense of virtue. It also brings to mind Jason deCaires Taylor’s undersea sculptures, human figures engaged in activities like typing, playing the cello, or watching TV; cement bodies surrounded by schools of fish. What’s so remarkable about Guyton’s effort is that he’s constructed a frame around the present moment. The collapse he draws our eye to is not a myth or a dream of the future, it’s now.

Though Guyton had originally hoped for the installation to be a solution of sorts, the traffic it brings (around two hundred thousand people a year) also serves as a reminder of the tension inherent to a city undergoing gentrification. In a book written about the project, Connecting the Dots, one neighbor explains, “Every summer night we’ve got people riding up and down looking at what we’re doing. It’s an invasion of privacy. They look at us like we’re animals on display.”

From what I can tell, no motive ever emerged for the arson, and no arrests were made. The one person who checked into an emergency room for severe burns on the day of the fire had been trying to deep-fry a turkey. More fires have been set at the installation in years since.

Guyton exhibits widely, and has a special fan base overseas. Recently, he has decided to take the Heidelberg Project down. According to M. H. Miller, Guyton and his wife plan to “transform the buildings that still stand into a series of cultural and educational centers dedicated to the arts, and then build housing and work spaces marketed for artists out of this central core.”

As buildings around the country were set on fire in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, I thought about the Heidelberg arsonist. Widely dispersed memes featuring the Martin Luther King Jr. quote “The riot is the language of the unheard” have encouraged more and more people to see fire in the context of social upheaval not merely as an act of destruction but as an act of ritualized desecration. What language looks like at wit’s end. A kind of screaming. Read More

In her column “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. 

Kerry James Marshall, 7am Sunday Morning, 2003 (Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago)

My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard.

Cora Mae has a bawdy sense of humor. Most of the time when she speaks, it’s to crack a joke that would make most people blush. She wears leopard print and prefers for her hair to be dyed bright red. I have tried to imagine her in the hospital, attempting to make sense of the suited, masked figures gesticulating at her. She doesn’t know about the pandemic. She doesn’t know why we’ve stopped visiting. All she knows is that she has been kidnapped by what must appear to be astronauts.

The film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, begins with a little black girl gazing up into the face of a white man wearing a hazmat suit. A street preacher standing on a small box asks: “Why do they have on these suits and we don’t?” He refers to the hazmat men as “George Jetson rejects.” It feels wild to watch the film right now, as governors begin to take their states out of lockdown knowing that black and brown residents will continue to die at unprecedented rates, taking a calculated risk that will look, from the vantage point of history, a lot like genocide. The film’s street preacher sounds obscenely prophetic. “You can’t Google what’s going on right now,” he shouts. “They got plans for us.”

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In her column, Detroit Archives, Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. 

Interior, Detroit public library (photo: Jason Mrachina)

When I went to my parents’ house the other day, in what has become a popular area of Detroit, a group of white twenty-somethings walked by in all beige—capes and boots and leggings—looking like they might have wandered away from a Burberry photoshoot. Less than two miles away, in a part of town with far fewer white faces, my father went to gather the last of his family’s belongings from his childhood home. “Check for Aunt Cora Mae’s photographs,” I asked him. But whoever bought the property after it went into foreclosure had already cleared the upstairs out and put a padlock on the door.

The last time we drove around his old neighborhood, he recited the names of his neighbors, repopulating empty lots with a litany of remembered faces: “A guy named Jeffrey Martin lived here. There was a house about here, that’s where Danny Collins lived. And you cross Forest, that’s where Rodney grew up.” As he spoke, the streets came back to life with the remembered sound of boys screaming with laughter.

Halfway between the house where he lived as a child and the one where he lives now, there’s a street called Goethe. When my father was young, he and everyone he knew pronounced the word phonetically, “Go-thee.” Later in life, he went on to learn German and began to pronounce the street with all the necessary “r” sounds. Whenever we cross it, it is as if we have located the exact intersection that would determine his life’s trajectory. A life filled with detours to places like Los Angeles and Sarajevo, only to return. That street is an inception point, ushering him into a bigger world. The discrepancy between these worlds has taken on a greater significance now that his childhood home sits on a largely vacant block, where squatting families power flat screen TVs with giant extension cords that reach out to whatever house still has electricity.

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In her new monthly column, “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. 

Inside the Whitney Mansion in Detroit

A few weeks ago, I met up with my mom and her friend Judy at a Detroit brunch spot, the garden of the Whitney Mansion. Billed as “an oasis in the heart of Detroit,” the outdoor courtyard is the site of wedding receptions and concerts. A bustling crowd of diners clapped politely as a revolving line-up of indie and jazz singers performed in a corner of the garden, their backs facing Woodward Avenue. Built in 1894 by a lumber baron who was celebrated, I guess, as “the wealthiest man in Detroit,” the ornate mansion has been restored to its original splendor. On this morning, the garden was abloom with smiling people and their garden-themed summer wear. The maître d’ had a podium. Our food arrived overlaid by fancy covers.

After we ate, we walked around to the front of the mansion. “I remember the homeless woman who lived there,” Judy said, tracing the lines of the nook that woman had made for herself on the porch. Judy and my mother had worked together at the Whitney Mansion in the late sixties. Gawking mansion-goers drifted in and out of the ornate doors.

Upstairs in the bathroom, Judy and my mom pointed out the architecture of their memories, bisecting the bathroom stalls with their pointer fingers to show where the wall of their office used to be. Downstairs, they gestured at the restored fixtures, at the parquet floors, the paintings on the wall.

“This is where I pierced your ears,” my mom squealed, pointing to the spot where Judy sat while my mother pushed a needle through her lobes to meet “a potato or an apple” on the other side. The two of them giggled as they moved from room to room. “I wonder if we can go in the solarium,” Judy kept wondering out loud. They stood in the place where a switchboard used to be. Sometimes, Judy would relieve the phone operator, pulling chords and pushing buttons to connect callers. “Don’t you remember that Lily Tomlin sketch?” She said, bringing the old technology back to life through her best Tomlin imitation. “One ringy dingy?”

We encountered a tour group gaping at a gigantic safe on the wall. The tour guide gestured vaguely at its mechanics. “I know how it works!” Judy piped up, and the guide ushered her forward to pantomime how the wall-size safe door would have been opened. The tour group seemed intrigued, and Judy and my mom warmed to their audience. They explained that they worked here for the Visiting Nurse Association. “The FBI interviewed me in that room over there,” Judy said, pointing in the direction of the plant-filled, sun-drenched solarium.

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