{"id":143224,"date":"2020-03-04T09:00:58","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143224"},"modified":"2020-03-03T16:43:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T21:43:12","slug":"detroit-archives-on-hello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/04\/detroit-archives-on-hello\/","title":{"rendered":"Detroit Archives: On Hello"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her column, Detroit Archives, Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Interior, Detroit public library (photo: Jason Mrachina)<\/p><\/div>\n

When I went to my parents\u2019 house the other day, in what has become a popular area of Detroit, a group of white twenty-somethings walked by in all beige\u2014capes and boots and leggings\u2014looking 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\u2019s belongings from his childhood home. \u201cCheck for Aunt Cora Mae\u2019s photographs,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cA guy named Jeffrey Martin lived here. There was a house about here, that\u2019s where Danny Collins lived. And you cross Forest, that\u2019s where Rodney grew up.\u201d As he spoke, the streets came back to life with the remembered sound of boys screaming with laughter.<\/p>\n

Halfway between the house where he lived as a child and the one where he lives now, there\u2019s a street called Goethe. When my father was young, he and everyone he knew pronounced the word phonetically, \u201cGo-thee.\u201d Later in life, he went on to learn German and began to pronounce the street with all the necessary \u201cr\u201d sounds. Whenever we cross it, it is as if we have located the exact intersection that would determine his life\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re being accurate, the threshold that more realistically marks where my father stepped into the larger world was the Detroit Public Library, located at 5201 Woodward Avenue. While he attended school at Wayne State University, he worked as the manager of the page pool at the main branch. For as long as I\u2019ve been alive, my father has told me stories about a guy named Kurtz Meyers, who was the head of the library\u2019s music and performing arts department. Kurtz is the guy who suggested that my father perform in the opera Aida<\/em> when Leontyne Price came to town. Kurtz took him on a trip to the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. When Johnny Mathis was on tour, Kurtz said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you go over there and say hello?\u201d My dad, who might never have done something like this on his own, walked across the street and knocked on Mathis\u2019s door.<\/p>\n

In the Detroit Public Library\u2019s Burton Historical Collection, which I\u2019ve accessed online, there is a photograph from 1967 of Kurtz Meyers looking straight at the camera. He is white, gray haired, and modestly dressed, in a suit with a thin tie, surrounded on either side by four exquisitely dressed African Americans, three of whom are decked out in furs. Two women, gazing down at pictures on the table in front of them, are Eloise Uggams and Eva Jessye, from a touring company of Porgy and Bess<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The photograph was taken by my father, who had recently become curious about photojournalism. He walked his negatives over to Life <\/em>magazine\u2019s\u00a0Detroit office, and his career began. They directed him to go to Newsweek<\/em>, where he would work for the next twenty-five years.<\/p>\n

What this archival photograph captures is not just an encounter between a music librarian and a crowd of touring musicians, but the gaze of a mentor to his mentee. The look on Kurtz\u2019s face is specifically for <\/em>my dad. It is one of such quiet delight. He seems to be saying, \u201cGet a load of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his life as a photojournalist, my father would interview black artists and actors to collect their life stories before they were forgotten by history. In 1991, he sat in Rome with a man named Al Thomas, who reminisced about touring with Porgy and Bess<\/em> in Moscow. It is as if, all those years later, my father was still chasing Eva and Eloise.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Back in the sixties, my father was near the entrance to the library when he picked up the phone at the guard\u2019s desk and called the loan bureau desk. He wanted to talk to the cute Italian girl who manned the phones. He asked her out. She was my mother.<\/p>\n

One recent winter day, I ask my parents to take me on a tour of the library where they first met. I\u2019m surprised by how extraordinary the space is. Designed by Cass Gilbert and opened in 1921, the building was constructed in the Italian Renaissance style. At the Woodward Avenue entrance, you pass through bronze doors, and you\u2019re greeted by a mosaic by Frank Vega depicting Copernicus. Above the grand staircase, ceilings designed by Frederick Wiley show figures from Aesop\u2019s fables. The arched, painted windows in Strohm Hall stand almost three times the height of a human being, letting in light through depictions of the zodiac.<\/p>\n

My parents reminisce about what other couples met for the first time at which elevator: their friend the Jamaican choreographer who went on to world renown, the lady who dated the Motown artist I\u2019m not allowed to mention here, their friend Mary, who passed out tampons and repaired the flag every day until it began to shrink. They\u2019ve made such a mythology out of this place, this cast of characters. In person it\u2019s at once larger and smaller than I imagined. They seem at a loss as to how to beckon it all back on cue. My dad points to a cart and says, \u201cWhen he was a page, your uncle used to curl up on one of those things and read.\u201d It is a point of pride for my father, who respects my mother\u2019s brother deeply, that he was once my uncle\u2019s boss.<\/p>\n

When I ask my uncle what he remembers of the library, he recalls glass floors. \u201cLight came from the floor up. It was not clear, it was frosted, foggy.\u201d He would turn off the lights and walk around with just the floor lights on, spooky, glowing underneath him. There were floors and floors of stacks unseen to the patrons. \u201cBut the rooms are so tall,\u201d I say, thinking of the majestic space where a mural of a man\u2019s upturned face and neck spans three arched sections, majestic as the Sistine Chapel, a triptych called Man\u2019s Mobility<\/em> by John S. Coppin. My uncle remembers a maze-like place full of wonder behind and below, floors stacked in a way that brings to mind Borges\u2019s \u201cThe Library of Babel.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we walk past an enclosed area, the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, I notice a flyer for an upcoming lecture on Lionel Richie. I\u2019m a child of the eighties, and the sight of Richie\u2019s album covers, especially Can\u2019t Slow Down<\/em>\u2014white room, white pants, small fro, backward chair\u2014transports me right back to the gray carpeted living room where I choreographed dance routines as a kid.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

On the night of the lecture, I return to the library with my parents. The music librarian, Romie Minor, reads from a binder full of laminated pages. He tells us that when Lionel Riche was a child, his grandmother played Bach and Mozart for him. Later, he studied to be a priest. But, \u201che was not priest material.\u201d A man in the back of the room laughs.<\/p>\n

There are folding chairs for around thirty. Eight of us are here.<\/p>\n

Romie Minor says, \u201cLet me play this one for you.\u201d He puts a CD in a boom box situated on a desk at the front of the room. As the music plays, a woman in a yellow pantsuit says, \u201cThere it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we walked into this book-lined room, Minor was prepping. At the top of the hour, he picked up a microphone and began to sing \u201cOh No,\u201d by the Commodores. \u201cI\u2019m going crazy in love\u201d he spoke-sang, then leaned over to the woman in the yellow pant suit, who cooed back: \u201cover you.\u201d<\/p>\n

My dad picked up his camera. We were in the same room where he snapped that picture from the archives fifty-three years ago.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the evening, Minor described the highs and lows of Richie\u2019s career. A slideshow with album covers played on a television standing on a rolling cart.<\/p>\n

The audience thrummed:<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a jam\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis music represents about two-thirds of my kids. That\u2019s how they got here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLord have mercy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCan\u2019t remember my address but I remember that.\u201d<\/p>\n

When \u201cEasy like Sunday Morning\u201d came on, almost all of us sang. The curator\u2019s manner was quiet but totally hooked in. He held court with the audience without raising his voice, or really even modulating his tone. This contrasted beautifully with his body language, which was similarly contained, but with flourishes. When a new song came on, he threw his hands out like he was splashing water. In a monotone, he punctuated the gesture: \u201cCrossover hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

A library security guard, who\u2019d wandered into the lecture on his break, closed his eyes. He said, \u201cI spent a lot of time on the dance floor to that one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minor started to talk about the tension within the Commodores when Richie began to get famous. The library audience was definitively team Lionel. They responded to each fragment of Commodores versus Richie gossip with an elongated, \u201cMmhmm.\u201d<\/p>\n

When \u201cEndless Love\u201d played, and Diana Ross sang \u201cbum bum bum\u201d with Lionel Richie, a member of the audience in a beret impersonated an electric guitar.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what he was doing out on the road,\u201d the curator said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, you do,\u201d somebody responded, insinuating something salacious.<\/p>\n

I got emotional when the curator put on \u201cNight Shift.\u201d It was the Commodore\u2019s first hit without Lionel. It is one of my favorite songs of all time, and I\u2019m not alone. In an interview for the radio program On Being<\/em>, Claudia Rankine talks about the time she sang \u201cNight Shift\u201d from start to finish with a stranger on a plane. At one point, my mother calmed my father as he panicked about his blood sugar, and I blurred my eyes, wondering what their young selves would have thought about this glimpse into their future.<\/p>\n

As we listened to \u201cHello,\u201d Minor told us an anecdote about the song\u2019s famously melodramatic music video. Apparently, Richie disliked the bust that the fictional blind student sculpts of his likeness. He claimed it looked nothing like him. \u201cBut she was blind<\/em>,\u201d the director explained. My dad stage whispered: \u201cSo she was sculpting his voice.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

I told my mother that our parking meter was about to expire. My dad raised his hand and explained that we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that America\u2019s greatest export is our culture. He told the story of being in Berlin as the wall came down. How the East Germans sang black American music, and called out to him in solidarity. \u201cAnyway, we\u2019ve gotta go,\u201d he said. The talk was far from over. I apologized a bit too profusely, cheeks burning, as we all got up to leave.<\/p>\n

On the way out, I saw the security guard, who had since returned to his shift near the exit. \u201cDo you go to these talks often?\u201d I asked. \u201cOh yeah,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

My mother had recently told me about the time when she was in the library basement on a break, and a security guard, a man she liked very much, came down to eat his lunch. He put his plates away, stabbed himself, and later died. \u201cIt was awful,\u201d she\u2019d said.<\/p>\n

That night, I thought of the security guard we\u2019d met, working the remaining hours of his night shift. Ordinary life continues on in this city despite all its extremity\u2014water shut offs and casino lights, Burberry-draped hipsters and foreclosed homes. And amid all that, there\u2019s a small room of people chuckling quietly at the main branch of the public library while listening to albums on a cold winter night.<\/p>\n

As we left the building, we passed the reception desk. My parents restaged their first conversation:<\/p>\n

\u201cI was here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, you were over there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I called.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I picked up the phone, and I said, \u2018Who is this?\u2019 And you were standing right over there.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections\u00a0<\/em>The Fluency of Light\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit.\u00a0She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan Writers\u2019 Program.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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