When Celeste was young, her mother told her stories of a time when Detroit was the doe-eyed, fresh-faced belle of the nation’s ball.
Her mother’s melodious voice had whispered to her in the dark nights of her childhood when she could not sleep, telling her old stories of a mermaid hidden in the river. When she snuck off to look for it one day after school, the stench from the sludge at the side of the river was so mustardy that she’d held her nose all the way home and showered twice to clear it from her hair. She’d reported back to her mother that a hobo had said the mermaid was dead and now there was a river monster that could live in the stink.
As Celeste grew into adulthood, Detroit declined into a gaunt, overlooked old woman whose stringy hair was sown with weeds that grew taller than the rusted cars left behind on abandoned lawns when their owners escaped the paroxysms of choking near-death that had episodically gripped Detroit since the gas crisis in the 1970’s. From her commuter bus, Celeste could see that time had eaten out the hearts of neighborhoods, leaving ghost homes half crumbled into architectural graveyards.
The downtown core of tall buildings sits flush up to a walkway at the edge of the flowing Detroit River. Today, sky-high shiny office windows loom over half-dead streets and murky waters polluted with mercury, dioxin and PCB.
Around the Financial District core and its low rim of broken down office buildings, there lay a decaying, interlocking series of half-circle neighborhoods where people lived lives battered by long term unemployment, home foreclosures and a seemingly relentless whirlpool of theft and drug abuse that focused all the challenges of a nation at the end of its empire onto her streets of flare-ups and breakdowns.
The closest half-circle held the blue-collar neighborhoods and townships previously populated by the auto industry’s assembly-line workers who were able to make a living wage to provide for their families, have a few luxuries with their necessities, protected from the whims of their profit-driven bosses by their strong unions.
Then the educated middle class had its own further half-ring. They hoped that their children would grow up to be bosses, not workers on the line who might some day be replaced by robots.
No one had seen correctly into the future though. It wasn’t robots that massacred Detroit as thoroughly as an ancient rampage of the Huns. It was a seemingly innocuous play for money, a creation of intricate mathematical equations scratched out on yellow pads of paper up in office towers in New York City by young white bucks who wanted to skew the game, to make profits off of other people’s labor without having to put on a heavy white denim jumpsuit, without strapping on safety goggles, without having to stand at a conveyor belt for four straight hours until you earned a twenty minute break, then another hour, then a forty minute lunch break, then three hours and ten minutes until your eight hours on your feet was over.
House values in these former bustling areas had plummeted so low that deserted homes could be bought for $5000, $10,000, but there was always the odd house in the neighborhood where tree branches grew into windows and an almost feral energy came forth from ivy vines and creeping mint or toughened wisteria trunks that once had been small accents in a yard.
Families were locked out by the Sheriff when banks didn’t get their monthly checks, the townships were broke and Celeste avoided many areas as the City of Detroit chose to implode some of its 100,000 empty buildings and rip down streets that couldn’t seem to right themselves.
Then there was another, far wealthier half-circle, where the executives of the car companies and their manufacturing suppliers had lived in luxury before their own lives were ripped asunder by the cannibalistic greed of investment bankers who had bought their companies, off-shored jobs, cashed out and then left them to writhe in a death spiral as international car companies became competitive.
Detroit’s Wall Street attackers enjoyed their $1200 bottles of wine behind their damask silk curtains in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut so that they didn’t have to look into the eyes of the children of Detroit, whose future they’d raped, Celeste’s mother had told her.
Ask a Detroiter, Celeste knew, and you’d see chagrin about the economic collapse that eats their city away like a lethal black mold, but you would hear the vision of a remade Detroit where children could get to school without being accosted with offers of a free hit of an addictive illegal drug.
Residents stare off into the distance, telling stories about how easily stick-ball games in summer or hockey games on frozen water sprayed from hoses onto driveways in the winter used to bring everyone out into the open so that families could play together.
The remnants of Detroit’s beauty came from the scrappy hope of its residents that someday things would get better, that the people would come back, the jobs would return, paychecks and health insurance could be counted on again, the elderly would feel that they could safely toddle out onto their front porches and someone would see them and know whether or not today was a day that could use a helpful visit, an offer to change a light bulb too high for age-gnarled hands.
As deeply as she knew Detroit was asleep in its pain, she wanted to awaken with it.
That hope felt dreamlike, Celeste thought. Like a movie shown on a 30-foot screen in a darkened theater, it couldn’t hold in the light of day. But she’d felt that brokenhearted loneliness herself since her mother had died, since she’d last known what she was doing for her days, her weeks, her months. It was time to get back in charge of herself, even if Detroit had gone unconscious.
