Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir
Although I read this book for an exclusively personal reason (to learn more about the background and experiences of two people very near and dear to me), I found it to be extremely engrossing in its own right. Clemens, a white man in his 30s who grew up just inside the boundaries of a city whose population, well before his birth, was on its way to becoming predominantly black, writes with a mixture of nostalgia and mournfulness about incidents in his childhood that brought the races together in the best of circumstances (a grade-school football team) and the worst (numerous incidents in which young men took one of his father’s cars for a joyride).As he matures, Clemens becomes fascinated with the literature of race—Faulkner, Ellison, Baldwin, Malcolm X—first as a way of slaking his curiosity about those whom his life circumstances had cast in the role of Other, and then, with increasing dismay, as a way of attempting to plumb the depths of what he perceives as their utter incomprehensibility. (Chief among the targets of his dismay is Detroit’s inflammatory five-term black mayor, Coleman Young.) Clemens never reaches a degree of understanding that satisfies him, and it could even be argued that he loses his own way during the process by becoming consumed with anger over the discovery that his future wife had been raped by a black man.
Overall, Clemens exercises his razor-sharp observational skills not only on his upbringing but also on the history of Detroit and the destructive effects it has had on neighborhoods, families, races, and classes. (In fact, some of his most incisive prose deals not with the racial divide but with the line between the professional classes of nearby Grosse Pointe and the working-class people, such as his mother, who made their livings cleaning Grosse Pointe houses.) In doing so, Clemens manages to make the sufferings of a specific urban landscape resonate with readers anywhere who take an interest in the life and death of American cities and the hearts and minds of those who dwell within them.
Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Paul Clemens, Detroit
posted by Colophon at 4:48 PM
3 Comments:
I am 18 years older than Mr.Clemens and grew up in working class Detroit. We left Detroit in 1973 not because Coleman Young was elected but because the neighborhood was turning bad. Several of our senior citizens were robbed in their homes and backyards. Moving was a matter of personal safety and not racial. I share a lot of the feelings that Mr. Clemens writes about. Even in '73 a lot of people in the suburbs looked down their nose at us whites still living in Detroit.
At the risk of sounding redundant, let me state that I too, was raised in Detroit, and, in fact, played football for Heilmann and even enjoyed the same high school English teacher as Mr. Clemens (although several years before him). Needless to say, I was fascinated by this book. Mr. Clemens makes several keen observations and a number of his passages are even quotable, but I wonder if Made in Detroit would have kept my interest had I been raised in, say, California.
As an aside, I wonder why, though, after naming seemingly every other Roman Catholic church and school on the east side, he neglects to specify his own high school (Notre Dame)?
I'm aout the same age as Clemens, and grew up Catholic on the west side and still live in the city now, so this book (which I am halfway through right now) has a lot of resonance with me. I am uncomfortable with the racist tone of some of what he says, but some of it rings really true (the anger over Coleman Young and the refusal to accept White Guilt). Not sure what I think yet.
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