Author Susan Messer Discusses The Detroit Riots Of 1967 And Her Book, 'Grand River and Joy'

Wed, 12/20/2006 - 1:45pm

When: November 4, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Susan Messer's 2009 novel, 'Grand River and Joy,' offers a fascinating glimpse of several northwest Detroit neighborhoods during the long, hot summer of 1967. This fascinating work weaves the stories of a Jewish shoe wholesaler, his family, and the African-American father and son who live above his business at Grand River and Joy. The book has been chosen by the U-M Honors College to be read by its incoming 2010 freshmen over the summer. Join us as Messer, of Oak Park, Ill. discusses the book and the issues it raises - racial strife, white flight, blockbusting and how learning about Detroit's past might help in planning for its future. A booksigning will also occur and books will be for sale at the event.

Transcript

• [00:00:24.06] SPEAKER 1: Thank you very much, everyone, for coming to the library tonight. It's so nice to see you here. We have a special night in store for us with Susan Messer. She is from Oak Park, Illinois. Her work, her fiction and nonfiction, has been published in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, and The Colorado Review. She has won the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Prose, also the Illinois Council Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, and she has won a prize in the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition from the Center for Jewish Culture.
• [00:01:02.06] I read about her because her novel was chosen this past summer for incoming students in the honors program to read the summer before they came in for classes in the fall. So I would like you all to join me in welcoming Ms. Susan Messer.
• [00:01:20.43] SUSAN MESSER: Thank you all for coming. Thank you to Cecile for inviting me. I just have to start by saying I lived in Ann Arbor for many years, and when I-- but I've been away for 25 years. But when I come back to Ann Arbor, it's like every street corner is resonating with memories. It's like waah waah waah. Everywhere I go, it's just such a wash of feelings when I'm here. So I just needed to say that, because I'm sort of in this otherworldly state.
• [00:02:06.99] Last March, I was in Ann Arbor and gave a reading at the University of Michigan with another novelist, and the topic was setting in literature, establishing setting in literature. And the person who organized the event asked us each to write just a short piece for their blog. So I just want to read you what I wrote about setting.
• [00:02:37.63] A few years back, around 5:30 AM, I heard an NPR report about Roanoke, William Faulkner's home in Mississippi. What I thought I heard was a quote from Faulkner along the lines of, I wanted to portray my Mississippi world in a way that made it feel like the center of the universe. Granted, 5:30 AM is 5:30 AM, so I am not surprised to learn that I didn't get this quite right. In fact, as I discovered, it wasn't Faulkner who expressed this idea. It was Richard Howarth, Oxford, Mississippi's mayor and bookstore owner. And what he said in the NPR interview was "good writers know that no place is really the center of the universe and every place can be made to seem so."
• [00:03:29.66] At the time, I was working on my novel about Detroit, a place with a dramatic and troubling story, a place that within a handful of decades went from arsenal of democracy and automobile capital of the world to America's first third world city, a soulful place where much was grand and much was lost. In my fuzzy morning mind, on hearing the NPR story, I thought, I want to do what Faulkner did-- what Faulkner did-- make Detroit the center of the universe.
• [00:04:04.12] I've had people at reading to say to me, when writing about Detroit, don't you think you're sort of limiting yourself? And I think that is such a such a weird question, because every story has to take place somewhere. And you think about Alice Munro and the tiny towns in Ontario or Philip Roth in Newark. That's certainly not a glamorous place. But I think maybe it's people who lived in Michigan or Detroit who somehow feel that it might not be worthy, a place not worthy of literature. But certainly it is, just as any place is. So I just want to say that about Detroit as the subject of literature.
• [00:04:55.90] And I think if you've read my book, you know that my book starts on Halloween. And I'm just going to read the first opening about Halloween and talk a little bit about Halloween and why Halloween.
• [00:05:12.38] He was working with his sister at the time, so it was just the two of them. And he stopped to pick her up on the way down, which was how he described the trip: "I'm heading down," he would say to her when he called before leaving the house. "Are you ready?" All he meant by "down," or all he thought he meant, was that the route to the business took him more toward downtown than not. He drove his silvery blue Dodge Dart, a new model, 1966, through the streets of his neighborhood over to hers, the autumn elms and oaks and sugar maples arching over the streets, stopping in front of her house, her waiting on the porch when the weather was fine, as it was that day, a perfect, golden day for Halloween, something you couldn't rely on in the Midwest.
• [00:06:00.88] They said their hellos, Harry and Ilo, not much new since yesterday. He'd come to feel that this was his life, and this was how it would be, from today until tomorrow and on and on. Not a bad life. With his wife. His daughters. Your basic comforts. Summer vacations at the Michigan lakes, the great and the small. Then he and Ilo were nearing the end of their well-worn route down, making the turn onto Grand River, crossing Joy Road.
• [00:06:33.15] It was Detroit, and by 1966, Grand River south of Joy was all concrete and brick, with barely a tree or shrub, barely a patch of grass. Joy Road-- now there was a misnomer. That stretch had broken windows and traffic snarls and grown man with nothing to do during the day. Up and down these broad streets, buses belched clouds of black smoke as they roared past the metal-grated building faces. And as if inviting trouble, Levine's was the only business along the stretch that lacked one of those grates.
• [00:07:10.46] Whenever Harry talked about the place, his sisters-in-laws and cousins, with their stiff beauty parlor bouffants and manicures held their faces and said schwarze this and schwarze that. Same for the big bellied brothers-in-law, with their ruby pinkie rings and slicked back hair.
• [00:07:28.62] On Grand River, the un-grated Levine Wholesale Shoes stood beside the tiny White Castle hamburger building with its crenellated top. Across the street and down a few blocks was the magnificent, decaying Riviera Theatre, or "the Iviera," as his sister called it. the R in the towering vertical marquee had become a jagged hole; farther down, the upper bar of the E appeared gangrenous, and the final R and A were also festering.
• [00:08:01.19] In the alley behind the business, two small boys scuffed along, kicking the alley stones as they went on their way to school. Ilo checked the door locks. The boys switched to single file so Harry's car could pass. No costumes, Harry said. "Halloween is for people who've got something to give away." She shifted her purse from lap to floor. Harry pulled into the parking space under the wooden fire escape that led to the upstairs apartment.
• [00:08:29.71] Curtis, Harry's tenant, stood on the landing. Harry waved to him has he got out of the car. It was a warm day, with a Technicolor blue sky, promising a smooth road straight through to evening, a gift for the children, who could run through the leaves without blustery cold wind or driving rain, without arguments about sweaters that would bulk out costumes or stupid codes that would obscure them entirely. "Morning, Mr. Levine," Curtis said. "Any work today?"
• [00:09:01.40] So Halloween. By starting on Halloween, I set up a frame for the book as a book about identities, because on Halloween we say, what are you going to be on Halloween? And you can be anything you want on Halloween. But of course we know that there are limits to what we can be. And some of those limits are already suggested by this neighborhood where Harry's business is, the decay. There's the boys in the alley who don't have costumes, that not everybody has the same access to being whatever they want or to whatever identity they choose. Well, none of us really. Do We do to an extent, but we all have constraints based on who we are, where we live, where we're born, our gender, our race, ethnicity, religion.
• [00:10:08.47] So these are some of the issues that play out, resonate throughout my book. Harry Levine, the main character, has certain dreams and aspirations that he's put aside for various reasons, a sense of duty to his father to go into the business, a lack of confidence that he has the aptitude to perhaps be more than what he is.
• [00:10:44.89] His wife, Ruth, a woman growing up in the '30s, '40s has certain limitations, but she has aspirations too. She's an intellectual. She's learned. She at one point confesses that she might have dreamed of being a rabbi. But . in her time, it would have been impossible. A woman and that era didn't even have a bat mitzvah. And you see how that impacts her, the limitations of her life. She's always annoyed. Everything annoys her. There's a certain level of frustration, a sort of boiling over about her.
• [00:11:28.39] And the third person who we know something about their aspirations is Alvin, the teenage boy who lives upstairs from Harry's business. We sort of intuitively know what the limitations of his life are: African-American teenage boy with not a lot of financial resources. But still, he is I'm aware of the political rumblings that are going on around him, the black power ideas. He's interested in that. He has musical aspirations. The music culture of Detroit resonates for him. He has the satin jacket that he wears that says chic on the back. He has an idea of himself as a leader, a wise man.
• [00:12:29.50] So we see that people-- so starting on Halloween can act as a frame for some of those issues of identity and aspirations of what you want to be. And then another thing about Halloween is that, from an anthropological point of view, it's a time where norms are overturned. Children go out at night. They go door to door. They go to strangers' homes. They make demands. And so in this book, certain norms, ways of life, what we're used to are also overturned or questioned.
• [00:13:22.99] And then at a final thing about Halloween is anybody from Detroit knows that, in this era, when the book takes place, the night before Halloween was devil's night, but it was a night of innocent mischief, ringing doorbells, soaping windows. But not too many years later, it became something much more dangerous with arson, and it became a time of fear and dread. So the thing is that the people in this book are living in an innocent time. But, as with any innocent time, we don't know when we're in it, because we don't know what's going to happen next. So the idea of Halloween in this book has a special resonance for people who know about that later history of devil's night.
• [00:14:23.30] So having said that about Halloween-- I also will now confess that when I wrote the book, I had no idea about any of that. I just made all of that up since I wrote the book. It's like with anybody who does any form of art, you sort of know how much magic there is about it, that the unconscious in a way is so much more brilliant than the conscious mind. And so these things, these connections are being made that you don't even know what you're doing until later, when you're standing up in front of a group and, oh, wow, this really makes a lot of sense. I'm just being honest.
• [00:15:09.61] I'd like to read a couple other sections. I'm going to read a little bit about Ruth. She, early in the book-- this is also on Halloween, the same day that the book opens. She's been invited to make a presentation to the Detroit Council of Jewish Women, which was an organization I thought I was making up, but turns out really exists. It's the '60s, and women want to have a say in what their families do.
• [00:15:50.04] In the past, the way it worked in Detroit, and in cities all over this country, the Jewish community would settle in one area, and for some reason the black community would have an easier time settling around the Jewish community. But the black community started getting to be too much, then the Jewish community would move, and then it would just keep happening. And in Detroit it just kept going north and west. So Ruth and Harry's generation have already been through several of these moves.
• [00:16:27.28] And the women feel that we can make a recommendation about whether we want to stay or whether we want to go. This is not inevitable. It doesn't have to happen that way. So they've asked her to lead a meeting, and they're going to discuss this, and then they're going to make a recommendation to the men in the community, the community leaders. So she's going to this meeting. She's very nervous. She's tried on multiple outfits, which also has this little Halloween resonance about how we dress up and how we present ourselves to the world and how people judge us because of we've presented ourselves or what we are because of how we appear. So here she is. She's on her way to the meeting.
• [00:17:19.29] The subject of her meeting was white flight, which always made her think of a flock of birds, wings beating against each other in beautiful, frantic, and chaotic patterns, as each white creature attempted to clear a space for itself among many others, all rising at the same time, or trying to. In the past, men had made the decisions about when to take flight, but this was the '60s, and the Detroit Council of Jewish Women wanted a voice. The topic was changing neighborhoods, a subject even the closest friends tip-toed around. She could be as sociological as she wanted, but the truth was that what everyone wanted to know was when you were moving and how they could find out without revealing their own plans.
• [00:18:04.06] She and Harry had no special plans to move, though they had made the Sunday drives to the northern suburbs. Probably everyone had, to see the homes and subdivisions and roads as they emerged from the wooded lots. She thought about starting the meeting by asking straight out. She'd go around the circle and have people say what they were thinking, what they were planning.
• [00:18:24.79] Harry looked at her like she was nuts when she had mentioned that idea two nights ago. They were in their bedroom. She stood in front of her dresser mirror, dabbing night cream on her face and throat. "You can't ask people questions like that," he said. What if someone asked you? "I'd tell them the truth." We're talking about. It we drove around, but we never got out of the car. "Yeah," he said, "what about at Greentrees in Southfield? We got out of the car there." "No one has to know about that," she said. And before long, he was snoring while she was pacing.
• [00:18:59.79] So that's what I think the kind of thing that might have been going on in many homes. And as I've often realized so many times since I wrote this book and presented to people, that when you're young, you don't really know very much about what's-- or at least I didn't. I won't judge. I didn't know very much about what was going on around me. When my parents had conflicts they might have been facing along these lines, what they might have been thinking, what the pressures might have been.
• [00:19:36.15] At one reading I did, there was a woman there who said, you know, it's one thing to take a stand a political stand for yourself as an adult. If you want to, you say, I'm going to stay. But if you have children in the school and you're hearing rumors about their safety or that the quality of their education may be compromised, you're in a different situation. So it's one thing as an adult to make that decision for yourself, another to impose it on your children.
• [00:20:13.91] I think it's a really an important issue for the women to be thinking about, because-- and I think the conflicts were-- I think there were probably many conflicts, and unfortunately-- I guess unfortunately, or fortunately, as a young person, I wasn't aware of them in my home, what my parents were thinking or doing about all that.
• [00:20:39.75] So it was shocking, really, when I did a lot of the archival research for this book and discovered some of the things that had been going on in my own neighborhood. There was one-- this was a thing that really happened that-- well, in the book it's portrayed as Ruth and Harry have just moved into their new home, and this person comes to the door with a petition. They're trying to change the borders of the school district so there won't be so many black kids in the school district. And so I was just trying to imagine, what if I'd just moved into a neighborhood and somebody came to my door and asked me to take a stand on an issue like that. And what are they going to think if I don't, and what are they going to think if I do. And is this a friendly place to be? But we just moved in. So people were facing things like that. And I'm just grateful that I haven't had to.
• [00:21:40.33] Now I'm going to read another section. This has proven to be a highly controversial scene in the book in discussions I've been to. The setup for this is that there's been an incident in Harry's neighborhood where a neighborhood boy had his bike stolen from him. And Harry has a hobby of buying old bicycles, fixing them up, and he's got a bunch of them stored, jammed in in his basement and under the stairs and every place.
• [00:22:26.28] And he decided that he is now going to load them all on a truck and take them to this all black, poor public housing neighborhood, and just give them away. Because he sort of has this idea that-- I guess this is his thinking-- that somehow maybe it'll equalize things. Well, he calls it insurance, like if you've got more than you need, and there's somebody who doesn't have anything. And if you equalize it, then maybe it's going to like help. So he's pulled in. He takes his daughter with him, and he pulls into the place where the public housing place is.
• [00:23:06.03] One man came up to the driver's side window. He threw his cigarette into the gravel as he did. He was thin and brown, with a scraggly beard, wiry little black hairs that grew on his chin and cheeks in patches, like the thin patches of grass that dotted the empty fields around the shoebox houses. His brown wool jacket, stained and fraying, hung on him a few sizes too big, like he was in the process of shrinking while everything around him, the jacket as one indicator, stayed the same. Harry rolled down the window. "You moving furniture?" the man asked. The cold morning air came in with the man's voice. Harry turned down the rattling fan on the heater. "I can do just about anything."
• [00:23:49.49] Joanna withdrew into her corner at the, cab pressed against the door. She stared ahead at the little houses, wondering how many people could fit in one. When she'd agreed to come, she'd pictured children, children on bicycles in joy This was something different.
• [00:24:05.30] "I'm sorry," Harry said. "I'm not looking for workers right now," as if not looking for workers was a temporary situation. He might change his mind any minute. Something might come up as he sat there in the truck. Another man came up to the truck. "What's he looking for?" the new man asked. He wore a red scarf tied like an ascot. He didn't look at Harry, but at his fellow day laborer, as if he were the translator, and as if there were no point speaking directly to the foreigner.
• [00:24:34.95] "He ain't said yet," the first man said. He hadn't said because this was not an easy question to answer. The thing was that he wasn't really looking for anything he could say in a way that would make sense to these men, who were looking for something far more tangible and important than what Harry was looking for. At least, that's how it seemed to him at the moment. And he couldn't simply say, "I'm looking for children," because that would probably make him sound suspicious. And he couldn't say "insurance," which was how he'd explained this outing to his family, because these men would know this was not a place that a man like him came looking for insurance, and certainly not in a big old truck with rattling cargo that said Formica City. And he certainly couldn't explain to them what he meant by insurance, because that would be an insult, like saying, "I'm here to bribe you so you won't rob me."
• [00:25:26.29] "I've got a truckload of bikes," Harry said. He indicated with his thumb. "To give to the children." Two more men had come up by now. "What did he say?" one asked. "Something about bikes," said another. "For the children." "Bikes?" said the first one, adjusting his cap. "Bikes?" He paused. What are you, Santa Claus or something? The other man laughed. "You sure don't look like Santa Claus." Which made Harry wonder whether this meant that the man knew he was Jewish, whether they could guess, whether it showed on his face. "Nope," Harry said, "Not Santa Claus. Just have a lot of bikes and want to give them a way where someone might be able to use them."
• [00:26:05.94] "You brought your assistant with you," the man with the red scarf said, "an elf or something?" "She's my daughter," Harry said. Seven or eight men had gathered around the truck by now, all on Harry's side. "Well, come on then," the man said with the red scarf. "Show us what you brought." Harry hesitated. He had envisioned himself surrounded by children, not grown men. But these men didn't seem threatening. Harry was a man too. they were standing near 8 Mile with lots of traffic passing. And if they stole all his bikes, well, he had come to give them away, so what would be the difference?
• [00:26:40.43] He turned off the engine and got out. "You really got a truck full of bikes?" the man in the brown jacket asked. "Yes I do," Harry said. He walked around to the back of the truck. He opened the padlock and slid the door up. What a racket it made, groaning and clanking up its tracks. He stood aside, and the men looked. "He's got bikes," a man with a black cap said. "He sure does," said the one with the red scarf.
• [00:27:06.49] By then, a few women in children, a few teenaged girls had gathered. Harry left the back open and went to get Joanna. "Come on," he said. "It's OK." She set plastered against the door. She didn't want to get out. She wanted to go home. "Come on," he said again. She shook her head no. But then she saw a little boy standing near Harry and watching. Her maybe he was seven or eight, dark and wiry. He wore a striped T shirt, and his hair was closely shorn, looking like a tight, fuzzy cap. He was eating a piece of toast, and she remembered the notebooks used to keep with the rows and columns and check marks, her bike inventory. What the point in keeping track and accumulating and having an inventory if it hung on hooks, jammed in and increasingly tangled in a basement? Bikes were for riding, and here was a little customer.
• [00:27:58.60] She opened her door, slid down from the truck, and walked around the back, staying close to Harry, keeping her eyes to herself, embarrassed that someone might recognize her from school, or that she might recognize them. Harry pulled a wooden step stool from the truck, unfolded, and motioned for Joanna to climb up. He followed her, and together they untangled a small Huffy, one that seemed like it would fit the small boy in the striped shirt, pulling and lifting it out from the rest, moving others out of the way, pedals getting caught in spokes of neighboring bikes, handlebars hitching onto each other. He wheeled it forward. He held it out over the side of the truck, the small bicycle hanging in the air in his hands.
• [00:28:43.19] "Here, son, would you like this one?" The boy nodded, staring at the bike, finishing the last bite of toast, wiping his fingers on his pants. "Go ahead," Harry said. "It's yours." Other people came closer to see what it was about, to see if the boy would take it, to see if this was a joke or a trick that the white man was playing, that he would grab it back once the boy reached out, that he would laugh or insult, call the boy greedy, that he would call the police later in the day, maybe, to give the description of the striped shirt, the shaved head, a boy, perhaps seven or eight. The man with the red scarf was there, as was the man in the brown jacket. They watched.
• [00:29:23.29] "It's real," Joanna said. "Come on, take it. Look how many we have." The boy looked. "Are you going to take it?" Harry asked. He got down from the truck and put the bike on the ground in front of the boy. The boy stooped to look at it. He spun the rear tire. "It's yours," Harry said. "Do you know how to ride?" The boy nodded, while tracing his finger over the handlebars to the blue and white plastic streamers that hung from them. He held the streamers in his hand, as if he were weighing them. "Well, good," Harry said.
• [00:29:55.69] So that's the beginning of the bicycle giveaway. And if you've read the book, you know it sort of escalates from there into something somewhat unexpected for Harry. And I think it's a-- this issue about giving. How does one give? If you have something and you who know of people who have less, how do you give to them? Some people are more comfortable doing it through institutional channels, in a more anonymous way. But he had this idea of just being very direct about it. I'll be interested to hear what people have to say about that. That's been upsetting to a number of readers, but it's always been an interesting conversation.
• [00:30:52.97] I'm just going to read one more short section, and then I'd be interested in hearing a discussion and questions and so forth. This scene comes late-ish the book, and it's a flashback. Harry is working for his father. He's a young man. He's just graduated from high school. He's been working for his father forever. That's sort of what he sees it in his future, and just one day he's just had it with being obedient. And so he just walks out. He just walks out the back door of the business, and he has an adventure. He meets a man, who takes him on a walk, and they end up at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This is in the 1930s.
• [00:31:55.79] They walked through the heavy doors, and compared with the bright light of this fall day, the large room they entered was dark, and hairy stalled as his eyes adjusted. Harry's companion waved to a woman at the desk near the door, and she waved back. They passed into another room, high-ceilinged, one of the highest ceilings Harry had ever seen. It was an enclosed courtyard with a rectangular pool in the middle. Scaffolds lined the walls all the way to the ceiling, with walkways at various levels. Sitting on a bench in one corner with a paintbrush was a fat man in overalls, black, curly hair, and bulging eyes like frog eyes. Others worked around the man, carrying things, moving things, looking at large sheets of paper hanging on the walls or lying on the floor.
• [00:32:43.52] Up on a scaffold was a woman pacing. Her heels drummed on the wooden platform. She looked like someone out of a fairy tale or a Bible story, thin with black hair pulled back tight in braids, wrapped around her head like a crown. She wore a long white dress. He could see the dress through the scaffold, a bright shawl wrapped around her shoulders, the full white skirt flowing as she paced, and all her attention was focused on the man with the paintbrush. "That man's named Diego Rivera," Root said. And as if on cue, the fat man looked up at Root, and he nodded at him. "He's from Mexico, and Edsel Ford brought him here to paint this whole room." Part of the wall were already filled with images, though some were only sketches, outlines that looked like machine parts, and huge hands reaching and grasping. The man on the walls lifted car parts, soldering, drilling, all crowded in together like a dance.
• [00:33:43.11] Root said he worked here preparing the walls for Mr. Diego with all the layers, sand mixed with plaster, smoothed in the final coat to a surface like marble, and that Mr. Diego was very particular about how it was done. If the wall was too wet when he was ready to work, the colors couldn't hold, and if it was too dry, forget it, Root said. Diego had to paint in sections so the wall would be just right. "And he can only do the colors in daylight," Root said, "so he sketches at night, starting around midnight."
• [00:34:15.90] "The lady," he said, looking up at her, and Harry followed his gaze. She just watched. Sometimes she came over and stood close to Diego as he worked, and sometimes Mr. Diego stopped for a moment, went to her, and hugged her. All the men talked about it, the way she dressed, the way she watched, the way the two spoke to each other in their language, like some kind of music with syncopation. Root pointed way up to the top of the room, the sections with the women of the four races like parts of the earth. He liked those, he said, though he wasn't sure what people were going to think about them being naked. Mr. Diego was particular about that too, about making it natural. In one small section, he painted a fetus in the womb. "But loo," Root said, "how he made the womb like part of the earth, showing how the earth contains all life and how a woman was like the earth. It all blends together. It makes sense if you let yourself see it."
• [00:35:13.86] It wasn't only a celebration, this painting. The faces of some of the workers were going to be green, Root said, as if they were being poisoned. And he pointed to the sketches of the weapons, another product of these factories. He pointed out the weary looks on the faces of the workers in the small panels along the bottom, carrying in their lunch pails at the beginning of the day, and even wearier when they were leaving at night. He described what it was supposed to do, giving you the feeling of being enveloped and surrounded by huge, banging machines, squeezed in with all these other men, and having only one small job to do, over and over again.
• [00:35:53.26] "Mr. Diego keeps working. He doesn't answer to anyone, he says. The pictures come from inside him, he says, like the baby from the earth. Once it's formed, it's got to come out. That's what he says."
• [00:36:05.79] Most people Harry knew worked in family businesses-- scrap metal, auto parts, or they had learned the trades, plumbing, construction. A few from Europe had skills like tailoring or shoe repair. Some young men his age planned to become doctors or lawyers. But who knew there were options like these, like what Mr. Diego did, or even Root? Who knew that an auto plant could be the subject for art? "It's really something," Harry said. He kept saying that, as if being something was the ultimate.
• [00:36:40.00] So that's Harry discovering-- I just think that the frescoes, which I'm sure most of you have seen at some point-- and if you haven't, you should take a field trip. I must have seen them hundreds of times growing up. I never really understood them, where they'd come from, what they meant, why the faces were green, why the women were naked, what that baby was. It wasn't until I went back when I was writing the book, and really sat, and meditated on that room, and listened to the docents going through, bringing school children through and explaining to them. It's just such a perfect a metaphor for Detroit, the melding of art and commerce.
• [00:37:32.36] I said that was all I was going read, but there is one more thing I want to read, this really, it's because of what you said to me, this gentleman back there, about people often-- when they think about Detroit, is it getting better, it's getting worse, what's happening in Detroit, is is it ever going to recover? I think I really feel that it depends on where you look, where you happen to be gazing at the moment. So this is on the last page of the book. And I guess this is what I really think, and this is what Harry thinks. And I guess we think alike.
• [00:38:14.75] Everywhere he looked, he saw various stages of repair and decay. The world was served up as the spectrum from marvelous to ravaged, with an infinite number of way stops and combinations. People's bodies, a building, roads, a house, cars, even car parts. Mufflers, radiators, tires, items in his own refrigerator, a piece of apple pie left too long, a hunk of cheese, tree stumps, relationships. You couldn't say that anything was just one way, decaying or rebuilding, on the upswing or the down, dying or surviving. It all depended on the moment and on where you looked. It was a matter of proportion. You'd see a detail on the crown of a building, marvelous, left over from its glory days in the '20s, while at street level a sloppy, hand-painted sign or heavy metal grate, even barbed wire, covered its face. Or something could look beautiful on the outside, a woman, a tree, and inside there was sickness, something growing that was also destroying. This was what he had come to understand about the world.
• [00:39:21.48] Thank you for listening And I'd love to hear any comments or questions with or without a microphone. Anybody? Yes. Yes, up here. We went to high school together. We graduated from high school together.
• [00:39:45.72] AUDIENCE: High school with Susan. I just wondered, have-- Curtis and--
• [00:39:51.21] SUSAN MESSER: Alton?
• [00:39:53.53] AUDIENCE: And Harry remind me of some of Phil Levine's characters. Have you ever talked to him about that, or?
• [00:40:02.41] SUSAN MESSER: I would love to talk to him. Philip Levine, I'd love to talk to him. I tried to get him to do a blurb for my book, but he said he doesn't do that, because it offends too many people. Is he friend of yours?
• [00:40:15.01] AUDIENCE: Oh, I've been to a couple of readings.
• [00:40:17.50] SUSAN MESSER: His poetry is beautiful. Oh, absolutely. I would have loved to have him-- and his father's name was Harry Levine. He did say that. He said, oh, that's my father's name. I'll read the book. But he wouldn't give me a blurb.
• [00:40:38.00] AUDIENCE: I know, of course, you grew up in Detroit and so on. But with some of these incidents, do you remember some of these incidents? For example, the Marvin Gaye incident and the one where Harry stays all night with [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] Do incidents from your life and inform the story?
• [00:40:58.12] SUSAN MESSER: Well, I would say that my life is-- maybe you would call it the infrastructure of the book, because I did grow up on Abaline I lived on Abaline. My father did own a wholesale shoe business at Grand River and Joy. I'm the middle of three sisters. And Marvin Gaye did move into the neighborhood. But whether he had a party, and whether he invited everybody in the neighborhood-- he didn't invite me if he did that. So those big scenes are imagined, the boiler room, the bicycle giveaway the trip to the art museum, the night in the hotel, the Moroccan luncheon. Those are all imagined. So it has is autobiographical elements, of course. I went to Mumford.
• [00:42:00.46] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [00:42:00.95] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, no questions are ridiculous.
• [00:42:03.75] AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Grand River and more the west side of Detroit [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [00:42:17.49] SUSAN MESSER: Well, it does.
• [00:42:18.37] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [00:42:21.37] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, no, no. It's much farther. Yeah, much farther downtown. If you go, like if you took-- let's see. I'm trying to picture. If you drove south on Livernois when you get to Grand River, where Livernois intersects with Grand River, it's right around there. So I'm it's south of 5 Mile. It's south of-- well, I don't think I have any of my maps with me. If you Google it, it's there. I don't think I have any of my maps, but it does it. Well, the Riviera Theatre and the Grande Ballroom and the Olympia Stadium, which is a really interesting stretch of cultural icons. And I mean, they're all gone or destroyed more or less by now.
• [00:43:22.40] I did get to know Russ Gibb a little bit. He was the man who bought the Grande Ballroom and turned into like a rock and roll venue in the '60s. And so I talked to him a little bit about his memories of the neighborhood then. And some of those are reflected in the book. Yes?
• [00:43:43.39] AUDIENCE: I was wondering, do you delve much into historical antecedents of Motown and the riots? You alluded to the antagonism between different ethnic classes and the Chaldeans coming into Detroit. What years does your book encompass? I haven't read it.
• [00:44:11.12] SUSAN MESSER: OK, basically it's a year. It's 1966, Halloween of 1966 to Halloween, around there, of 1967. Although then it skips 20 years, and there's sort of an epilogue that's 20 years later. And I'll just reveal this little fact to you, which is that in the original conception of the book, there was a scene, a prelude that took place 20 years, before so in the '40s. So the 40s, the '60s, and then the '80s. So it was sort of like a triptych. It was just a short prelude, then the main part of the book. And so it had a little more symmetry, maybe. But my editor didn't like the prelude, so it ended up-- and I was so in love with that. So it's basically a year, and then it skips 20 years. Well, I just felt like it really represented the arc of the Detroit story, the '40s, the '60s, and '80s. So you missed the '40s, but there's a couple flashbacks into the '30s. Hi.
• [00:45:30.16] AUDIENCE: Hi. We read your book--
• [00:45:32.71] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, I'm so excited.
• [00:45:33.94] AUDIENCE: --at school.
• [00:45:34.64] SUSAN MESSER: Thank you.
• [00:45:35.37] AUDIENCE: And my whole family lives in Detroit, in metro Detroit. I'm from Ann Arbor, but I have been to Detroit a lot. My father lives in Harper Woods. I don't know if you--
• [00:45:48.05] SUSAN MESSER: It's familiar. I don't know exactly.
• [00:45:49.91] AUDIENCE: And my grandma lives in St. Clair Shores. So I've been all over there. And there's always this sense of there is no one there. And with your book, I felt that there's this hope within me, that maybe that one day it can actually look like that again. And it makes me want to go back and actually look at the architecture and go to Eastern Market and things like that. My mom grew up in Detroit, so she always wants to take me there. But I just feel this great pull to Detroit
• [00:46:27.61] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was a beautiful, living, vibrant city that we grew up in. And it's just astonishing, really. It could happen anywhere. It could have happened anywhere, but it happened in Detroit. And I often wonder, and people always say, why Detroit? And I think the one industry town aspect of it, being so centered on the auto industry is possibly one factor. But I also can't help feeling that the unresolved racial issues somehow contributed in some manner. I don't exactly know how much, but I'm glad if it give you a hopeful feeling.
• [00:47:14.85] AUDIENCE: Thank you.
• [00:47:15.80] SUSAN MESSER: Thank you for reading it. Yes?
• [00:47:18.45] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] wasn't really that much conflict with them. They just wanted to move to the suburbs and have a suburban type house. And I wonder-- there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of identity in Detroit with a generation. It's almost like each generation has to do something different than the previous generation. There doesn't seem to be any kind of core, and I think a lot of my kids spend all their time Detroit now doing sort of the same thing, almost looking for something that's been missed.
• [00:47:56.82] SUSAN MESSER: Really?
• [00:47:56.99] AUDIENCE: Yeah, and I wonder Detroit's unique in that way, that people go to Chicago, and there's downtown, and they're into Chicago, and they're into being from Chicago, and you get that and other cities.
• [00:48:09.06] But Detroit seems to always have this sort of vacant quality about it. [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] people just walk away from stuff. We appreciate the beautiful art deco buildings now, but in the '60s it seemed like, no, we wanted new. In Southfield, we wanted--
• [00:48:27.98] SUSAN MESSER: Yeah, oh, I totally know you mean. Yeah.
• [00:48:31.32] AUDIENCE: It's sort of like you said [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] it just seem-- I just don't see that in other cities.
• [00:48:44.71] SUSAN MESSER: You mean--
• [00:48:45.52] AUDIENCE: The lack of--
• [00:48:46.13] SUSAN MESSER: Lack of honoring, the preservationist instincts, you mean?
• [00:48:49.49] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] even a place like Grosse Pointe, people identify with being in Grosse Pointe, and they maintain the houses, and a lot of them very proud to be there. But in Detroit, it doesn't seem to be there as strongly. People move away. For years, we've lost, what, 30,000 young people a year out of not just Detroit, but Michigan. And you just think, why don't people want to stay?
• [00:49:18.12] SUSAN MESSER: Well I think you know, I always have to you put a little caveat. I'm not a scholar. I'm not a historian. I'm a novelist. I'm more interested in emotional truth than really what these issues are all about, or how to solve them, or why they even arose. But I do feel that there was kind of a built-in-- the city sort of destroyed itself in a way. Because it was about cars, so they took away all the public transportation. They had a great street railway system at one point. They got rid of that. They divided up the city with highways to get people out, so people could move through. Broke up neighborhoods. All cities did that to some extent.
• [00:50:17.38] As I'm saying that, I'm thinking, well, all cities did that. They put in highways, broke up neighborhoods, built suburbs. But for some reason, Detroit emptied out. People didn't honor what was there. It sometimes seems-- I had somebody in a reading once say, well, it seems like such a waste. Here you've got a whole city. You've got hospitals, schools, roads, museums, culture, and you know and the left it all behind and went out to this denatured-- we were on book tour last, I guess it was spring, and one night we stayed in on Ferry Street downtown. That is such a beautiful place. It is so gorgeous. And then the next night, or the night before, whatever it was, we stayed out in one of the suburbs, and it's just strip mall after strip mall. There's no trees. I just-- I mean, they left this? I mean not they. I don't mean they. We, all of us left this for this? Yes?
• [00:51:23.01] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [00:51:30.34] SUSAN MESSER: '67.
• [00:51:31.42] AUDIENCE: '67. And actually there was the mass exodus of white people, and the taxes, and what was left behind were more the impoverished. And it seems-- I agree with what you were saying. I think Detroit it tends to discard, and it seems dispensable, what they've built. I've noted that also, just an observation.
• [00:52:08.01] SUSAN MESSER: I do want to say one thing about that word, riots. Because you may have noticed in my book that every chapter has a one word title except for that one chapter, which is Riots/Rebellion. And the reason for that is because I think that there are people who see what happened in 1967 as random thuggery and people who see it as having a lot of political intentionality, and all kinds of stuff in between that. And I for marketing purposes, and in even when I talk about it, I use the word riots. But I am not comfortable with that word, as I think it needs-- that we all, for all of us need to kind of open that up a little bit. And so I didn't want to commit to one or the other. And I've had people in readings say, well, we always call the uprising. So I like to hope to expand people's thinking about that a little bit.
• [00:53:05.74] But just the other thing I want to say in response is that white flight was well under way by the time of the riots. It was the suburbs. When you read my book, which I'm sure you will, you'll see that a lot of the institutions were already in the suburbs, that there was a lot of sprawl out there already. Yes?
• [00:53:26.68] AUDIENCE: Yeah, I'm really glad we got to read--
• [00:53:28.37] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
• [00:53:30.47] AUDIENCE: Really interesting. I pretty much read it in a night.
• [00:53:33.05] SUSAN MESSER: Wow. Thank you.
• [00:53:35.37] AUDIENCE: I feel like one of the most burning questions for me was, how did you create Harry? What were your thought processes going into that, and why was he your main character? So interesting indeed.
• [00:53:48.32] SUSAN MESSER: Thank you. That's such a hard question. I think if you asked any artist in any art form to say why-- as I said before, so much of it happens on the unconscious level. I will say that-- I guess I would say that my father is in some ways-- my father did own a show business, so I know something about the shoe business. And I think he is my father's personality was-- he was gentle you know-- you would, I guess, say, ordinary, humble, whatever. So he may be at the heart of Harry Levine.
• [00:54:38.34] But so much of it happens in a-- it's like alchemy or something like that once you get going. I wanted him to be more complicated than just like a good man or something like that. He gets himself into these messes. he says things he shouldn't. And one thought I started having about Harry after I wrote the book was that you could say that he's a dutiful man, or you could say he's a humble man or an ordinary man. But I think that maybe he has this feeling about himself, like he knows the world around him is about to change, that things are pretty shaky. He's trying not to give into fear about that. And if he just keeps doing what he's doing, like if he just shows up every day, shows up on time every day, dresses well, presents himself well, does his duty. So he might have this like magical, realistic idea about his capacity to keep things in balance. If there's just one reliable man left in the world, then maybe it'll hold together. I don't know whether that makes any sense to you, but thanks so much for reading it. Yes?
• [00:56:05.35] AUDIENCE: I've been thinking about Harry. [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] bicycle. Think when he gets in that, he's telling that woman, just let the child have the bicycle. And then you compared it to when he's arguing with his neighbors. What was so remarkable, and one of the many things remarkable about the book to me was how just incredibly real Harry was. All the things that went on in his head, and back forth. I just thought it was amazing that you could write that.
• [00:56:40.24] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, thank you.
• [00:56:43.75] AUDIENCE: Because he wanted to be himself, he wanted to be true to himself, and sometimes he was doing that knowing it was really the wrong thing to do. It's just so real. I just don't remember anybody actually putting that into words before, and having poor Harry do it over and over again. You really just felt for the guy just fight for his humanity in a situation that he was in way over his head. And that was another thing, trying to get perspective in a situation that you don't understand, really. With Calvin and just the whole situation, and trying to be who you are, and trying to understand it. And he always had almost a 180-degree perspective. Because historically, we can all look back and say, oh, we wish. But when you're in the moment and there's no one around you has any answers, and both Harry and Ruth are just trying to figure it out. Especially Harry just swings to one side, especially when you have Calvin there.
• [00:57:45.45] SUSAN MESSER: Alvin.
• [00:57:46.99] AUDIENCE: I meant--
• [00:57:48.14] SUSAN MESSER: Curtis. Curtis.
• [00:57:49.46] AUDIENCE: Sorry, mixed the C's up.
• [00:57:51.23] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, in the boiler, their conversations. Yeah, that's right.
• [00:57:55.18] AUDIENCE: And just trying to be real with Curtis, like when he asked him about things that summer. and the other thing I really loved was this little bit of-- was it Joanna, the daughter in the ice [INAUDIBLE PHRASE], her actually raising her head enough to actually look at those homes and realizing [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] Just that little thing [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] what that meant to that girls that day.
• [00:58:22.42] SUSAN MESSER: Thank you. Since you mention that thing, and nobody has ever mentioned that thing about the houses, and I remember so clearly where that came from. I can tell you that I was working on that scene during the Hurricane Katrina thing. And I was looking at all the images from the news, and I noticed-- and it was a picture of houses. And the houses looked like they were in really bad shape. But I looked at it long enough that I started seeing that that they weren't all alike. They each had some individual expression. And that really mattered to me, and that's why I wrote that. That's where that-- to notice the differences, yeah.
• [00:59:08.10] AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm going to admit I didn't read the book. And to tell you the truth, I'm a New York transplant. I've lived here for 13 years. But what I've found over the years is, whenever I'm traveling outside of Michigan, and especially with my family, and we're coming across other people New York and New Jersey, the metropolitan area, I get kind of defensive when they start making comments about, oh, we should just dump Detroit in the river or sell it to the Canadians or something like that. And I was just wowed. And quite frankly, I'm eager to read the book, not because it sounded very interesting in the description on the website, but also because every single time, ever since I've lived here-- and I grew up in New York mostly-- before that, South Carolina, and I've also lived abroad. I came from an immigrant family, and my mother works in one of the worst parts of New York City. So you can't tell me that dilapidated areas of cities that are just so rundown that they look like third world slums are exclusive of Detroit.
• [01:00:04.39] SUSAN MESSER: Of course.
• [01:00:06.66] AUDIENCE: But that's the thing is that-- what I was trying to say was that, having seen all that, I've also seen a lot of-- I've always been very curious about Detroit. Why are there some areas that are so run down? What happened? And whenever I would ask people from Detroit or from Michigan what happened, they always had kind of a one sided answer. I never really got a whole story, to be quite honest, which is why I am actually very eager to read the book.
• [01:00:37.74] SUSAN MESSER: I don't know if there is a whole story.
• [01:00:39.50] AUDIENCE: Right, right. But they're very hush hush. And it was funny. Out of the group of people that I became friends with over the years in Ann Arbor, I'm usually the one that's always very keen to go to Detroit, especially when you go to museums like the African-American museum or the Arab-American museum, which by the way is an excellent museum. You would not only get a sense of the history of these two ethnic or racial groups, but how much Detroit ties into that, not just because the museums are there, but especially with the Arab-American Museum. The question I wanted to ask was, and I'm sorry I came late, so maybe you'd spoken about this before, when you've gone on tour to promote the book, and you've gone outside of Michigan, what has been your response? Just because my response about whenever I talk about Detroit, again, not as an author, but just as somebody who lives in Michigan and actually really likes to go into Detroit, the response I get is quite hostile. So I'm just curious to hear you response.
• [01:01:41.61] SUSAN MESSER: I haven't had any hostile response at all. Yeah, I haven't had any. I was at a reading in Pittsburgh, and the place-- it was in a sculptor's studio, and I can't remember the neighborhood of Pittsburgh, but afterward somebody came up to me and said, oh, it's so amazing that you're reading here in this place, this space, because this used to be the old Jewish neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and then it became African-American, now it's being revived again kind of as an artists' neighborhood. So I think people all over can-- I was at a reading, a woman from Washington DC. Same thing. It happened all over the country, but for some reason Detroit imploded for reasons-- you know I've suggested some of what I think. There's many other reasons. It's a complicated situation. But I haven't-- I think a lot of people maybe don't even think Detroit exists anymore. They don't understand the importance of this story of Detroit, that it's important to everyone, that it could happen in any city. So I haven't had that kind of hostility. Yes?
• [01:03:02.12] AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you any feedback from African-American readers, especially the Detroit area?
• [01:03:07.02] SUSAN MESSER: Yeah, I have. I did reading at-- Liz and Jim were at the Frederick Douglass branch of the Detroit Public Library, which is on Grand River, way downtown, Trumbull, way into the city, and it was a mainly African-American audience that day. And it was wonderful. It was an amazing-- my friend Liz Culverin was there. She's a makeup artist, and she did makeup on the woman who is the head of the-- it was just so wonderful. They had food. They were so welcoming. And they knew just what I was talking about, about the black and Jewish populations moving around each other. They totally-- some of them talked about how hard it is to live in Detroit. I'm ready to give up on Detroit, one of the women said. My car gets broken into every night. It's hard. But it was a wonderful library. They brought people in on buses to hear me and, it was a great conversation.
• [01:04:10.60] So I haven't had any hostility. I've sometimes felt uncomfortable that perhaps I would offend somebody, or something I said in my book would offend-- and any time you're talking about race, you just never know. But so far so good. Last night I was at an event in Huntington Woods. It was a very mixed race group, and it was really, really interesting, very warm, and people were very interested in talking about these things. yes?
• [01:04:46.70] AUDIENCE: Well, a couple of compliments. I found that the subtlety of different Jewish paths to America and different Jewish families and kind of this resonance of assimilated Jews and [UNINTELLIGIBLE] was really wonderful.
• [01:05:05.79] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
• [01:05:07.50] AUDIENCE: It goes straight back to European history and I just really loved that, being a child growing up in Toledo, Ohio that faced the same kind of issues, and my mother was giving these presentations to the League of Women Voters. I want to compliment you on just the dialogue and this presentation, and just the voices of these differing women.
• [01:05:30.73] SUSAN MESSER: Thank you.
• [01:05:31.19] AUDIENCE: So beautifully done. But here's my question. The book, which I read in a white heat in July over the summer and have since gone back to, really lives very strongly, and even more so. Is it going to be possible for you to write another one? How long is it going to take you to let go of this one?
• [01:05:55.32] SUSAN MESSER: That is a really good question, and it's something I'm struggling with now, because I work full time also. I'm an editor, and I work full time as an editor. So writing is know around the margins of the more renumerative work, shall we say. I do have a second novel, I have 400 pages written, very rough pages, not about Detroit.
• [01:06:26.03] And it's just a matter of getting the time to-- so promoting this book. I don't want to let this go. People are still interested in it. I'm still a year and a half out. It came out in July of '09, and people are still interested in hearing me. So I don't want to let it go. So promoting that, working full time, and working on another novel is very challenging. I also have to say that, now that I see this book has resonated so much with people from Detroit, that there's this little bit of the voice of commerce whispering in my ear, like if you have an identified market, that it helps. I'm not like a famous author or something, like if they see my name, and they go out and get my book. Being able to target it has really helped my book. Even the University of Michigan choosing it as-- because they want to focus more on Detroit and have their students thinking in a more regional way. So knowing that having a market handle-- I don't want to have my art to be influenced by commerce, but-- so I don't know the answer. I'm just saying. Just sayin'. There's that voice.
• [01:07:47.43] Anybody else? Maybe we should-- Yes?
• [01:07:50.99] AUDIENCE: Is your father's warehouse still there?
• [01:07:53.81] SUSAN MESSER: No, no. There's hardly anything there anymore.
• [01:07:57.00] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] he's looking at it, and he must have read part of your book. "I know that warehouse."
• [01:08:02.44] SUSAN MESSER: Oh-- no.
• [01:08:03.64] AUDIENCE: But the description.
• [01:08:07.21] SUSAN MESSER: Yeah, somebody at my reading last night said, well, was his name really Harry Levine? And I said, who? The man in the book. Right, no, so--
• [01:08:20.93] AUDIENCE: Just real quick, can you recommend any other Detroit writers or [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
• [01:08:26.80] SUSAN MESSER: Philip Levine. Yeah, he's a poet. Philip Levine is a poet. Well, you know Jeffrey Eugenides, of course, Middlesex. Joyce Carol Oates wrote about this period in a book called Them.
• [01:08:42.56] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:08:46.89] SUSAN MESSER: I don't know. There was a movie 8 Mile.
• [01:08:48.44] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:08:50.91] SUSAN MESSER: The what?
• [01:08:51.51] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:08:53.75] SUSAN MESSER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. At Mary Grove. I did a reading at Mary Grove with two guys. Oh, yeah. Michael Zadoorian. He lives in Detroit. And what was his name? Peter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're really-- oh, I wish I could remember. If you write to me through my website, I'll tell you his name. I just can't think of it right now. I'm sorry. Peter something. He was cool.
• [01:09:22.46] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:09:24.94] SPEAKER 1: As I said, I'd like everybody to have a chance to get their book signed by Susan, and I want to thank you very much for coming tonight. Thank you.