Crossing Division Street

I envied the white kids who had never known black kids, because it seemed to me that their cruelty toward them was guileless and unwitting. Unlike me, I thought, the other white kids had never known that the black kids were human, had never been fed milk and cookies by their mothers or felt the joy of having them flowing in and out of the house, smeared with cake. I was the only dirty one, the only one who knew better, the only one who committed social annihilation by choice and for the sake of getting elected to the student council.

In the end we didn't make it in Ann Arbor. When Dr. Lewis retired, my father did not succeed him as rector and was banished instead back to the boondocks of Michigan. My father never said anything about why we didn't make it, because he never said anything about anything. Family legend years later is that the cause of our exile had been his crusading liberalism. Apparently he had led a charge for a local open housing ordinance. After he had campaigned for some months, Dr. Lewis informed him coolly, I am told, that three-fourths of the housing south of Division Street was owned by the senior warden of St. Andrews Church and that the senior warden was not at all interested in either urban renewal or the dispersal of his tenants into rental properties owned by persons other than the senior warden.

But at the time we left my beloved Ann Arbor, my understanding of the causes was childish and personal. I blamed our banishment on the church ladies. I knew from overheard whispers and looks I had spied on their faces that they thought my mother was embarrassing. Perhaps I recognized their feelings because, with great guilt, I shared them. In my exquisitely self-conscious preteen years, my mother made me cringe, as well. She had never even tried to become an Episcopal church lady. By then the church ladies all drove Country Squire station wagons and drank martinis in the late afternoon. It embarrassed me to the point of breathlessness to see my mother careering through the narrow streets of Ann Arbor on her balloon-tire bicycle with her artist and potter friends, especially because she was always so insanely surprised to see me and because she never once succeeded in using the brakes to bring her bicycle to a halt. After school I hung out inside Moe's Sport Shop because the big window in front was tinted and I could see her coming before she could see me.

Whether she was the real reason we had to leave, the fact remains that she was too much for Ann Arbor. It wasn't Athens. It was just the Middle West.

History played a nice little joke with my father's exile to the boonies. In the last small town where he lighted--a typical old farming and light manufacturing community in southern Michigan--he seems to have sunk his claws into the soil and made it his business not to be pried loose. No more Roosevelt-liberal hanky-panky with this parish, not this close to the end of the journey. But in the years after his arrival there, Detroit exploded 50 miles away. Immediately after the '67 race riot, white people by the teeming zillions loaded up their Country Squire station wagons and headed for the hills, terrified of black people.

The hick town where my father had made his last stand became a magnet for busing flight, white flight, urban flight, all the kinds of flight and panic and racial retreat that inflamed white culture of the period. Huge shopping malls and vast new traditional neighborhoods flew up all around the town like a tent army that had arrived in the night. My father briefly joined a local militia that was going to defend the community when the black people in Detroit all loaded up on chartered buses and came out to kill them. He was in the catbird seat, smack-dab in the middle of Episcopal heaven. Madonna went to high school in that town.

As a young man I moved to the South, where I have now spent the lion's share of my adult life. Early on in my Dixie sojourn, I heard white Southerners tell a particular kind of story about their own childhoods that I found personally fascinating. I listened with an urgent secret interest while they rambled on about how when they were little they had played with and had been dear friends with black children.

I still don't understand why Southerners tell that story or what point they think they are making. But I know what I heard in it. Those stories, when I first heard them, thrilled me. I thought, "Well, you're all worthless bastards, too."