Black Bottom Saints Read online

  The eastern border of Black Bottom was the railroad tracks at St. Aubin Street. The western border of Black Bottom was Brush Street. The southern border was the river. The northern border was the southern border of Paradise Valley, the Black entertainment district.

  For the first half of the 20th century Black Bottom was the commercial district as well as a residential district more important to and more delightful than any other to African-Americans in Detroit. Its opportunities, institutions, people, and delights lured thousands out of the South.

  By the end of World War I, Black Bottom was established as a municipality (along with New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville) with a clear claim of being one of the three most economically, politically, and artistically powerful Black communities in America.

  For decades, Black Bottom had three distinct advantages over both Harlem and Bronzeville: its close proximity to Henry Ford’s auto factories; its close proximity to Paradise Valley, a Black red-light district where all the primary doors to ecstasy—music, gambling, prostitution, liquor, and drugs—stayed wide open for business twenty-four seven; and its close proximity to Canada.

  When the world was still moving in thick, dark rivers from the farm South to the city North, Robert Hayden made the reverse migration. In 1946 he trained south from Michigan down to Tennessee to teach at Fisk University. When Colored Girl enrolled as a freshman at Fisk in 1977, she arrived on a campus Hayden had departed a decade before, to return to the orbit of Detroit and teach at the University of Michigan.

  Colored Girl didn’t know this. She had forgotten Black Bottom Hayden and Fisk Hayden.

  Robert Hayden

  PATRON SAINT OF: Poets, Orphans, and Migrants

  It’s always hard to leave Idlewild on a summer Sunday afternoon, but Sunday, June 26, 1966, was harder than usual. If I hadn’t had a confirmed date with poet Robert Hayden, I don’t think I would have got gone on time.

  First off, Baby Doll was refusing to return to the city with me. She claimed three hours on the highway at midday with the top down would fry her hair and crisp her skin like she was chicken in a pan. Second, since Detroit was experiencing a record-breaking heat wave and no one else wanted to go home either, Sunnie Wilson had decided, late Saturday night, to host a Sunday noon “Bermuda Shorts and Pancakes Party.” The updated plan seemed to be: long breakfast/lunch/supper at Sunnie’s on Sunday; early to bed in Idlewild; hit the road at 4:00 a.m. in the cool of Monday morning; make it to work in Detroit by 8:00 a.m. Third and finally, everybody was still talking about Youth Colossal ’66 a week after that extravaganza, praising it as “the best ever!”

  I loved hearing that, but I knew this: Colossal ’66 had been the hardest show ever to produce, and ’67 would be even harder. I needed a secret weapon and I thought the sometimes ornery, sometimes awkward, always brilliant Hayden might-could be it. My three second-tier teachers were tearing up the school vying for the top spot that was being vacated by my best teacher, Gloria, who was getting married after Colossal ’66, and then planning to take a sabbatical. Thinking she was winning too much of everything (husband, wedding, and top billing in the program) either on purpose or by accident, the other teachers had sabotaged the costumes for Gloria’s class by taking the measurements wrong and then writing them down as what some of my students called “wronger!” Only by the grace of Maxine Powell’s imagination and George Stanley’s sister’s sewing did we pull off costumes that looked like something my breadwinners should be dipping deep into their pockets to purchase. Toni Lewis, owner of a rival dance school, smelled blood in the water. She scheduled a dance recital at the hoity-toity Detroit Art Institute Museum the exact same time as my Saturday Colossal at the storied but funky Latin Quarter. Every bougie parent with a child on my rolls considered taking that bait and switching schools. I held on to most of my best students, save one significant defection. That baby did the right thing at the last moment (Gloria can be very persuasive) and came to dance a surprise star turn in our show, leaving Toni in the lurch.

  When crazy older mamas weren’t making hard things harder, wild young daddies were doing it. We have a daddy or two: Nual Steele, for one, just in his twenties, a pimp (who we’ve had before), turned drug kingpin (we hadn’t had those before), taking on everybody, deferring to no one, not even the Diggs family, maybe not even George Stanley. Nual’s got seven kids in the school brought in by three different mothers. When he’s late with tuition, it hurts. His oldest kid is profoundly talented, so you can’t keep him out of the show.

  Speaking of shows, we’re competing with Motown now. Why should a student rehearse with us when they can be working up a pro act and sell it to Berry Gordy? Actually, that’s not finally. Then, there’s this: After James Meredith was shot in Mississippi on June 6, four of my kids headed down south to “walk against fear.” I couldn’t tell them not to go. I tucked $100 into each of their pockets (Dr. Bob “Bodywork” Bennett spotted me those funds), prayed they didn’t get killed, then moved up three understudies to fill their roles. Year after year, the challenge is securing a big-name act. After they are signed, it’s always hoping up to showtime that they don’t get called to a paying gig or a spot on a television show and do a last-minute bolt. All of that was between me and “curtain up” at the Latin Quarter last year. I was catching all that hell and probably a bit more the year coming up. It was enough to make me sweat out my curls.

  Except: I had an idea about how I might keep Toni Lewis at bay (Robert Hayden) and who might-could bring Nual Steele to heel (Blaze Marzette). That realization put a funny smile on my face. Baby Doll asked me if everything was all right. I replied, “Everything’s copacetic.” And it was in fact “copacetic”—our word for “fine and dandy.” For that second of Sunday, Idlewild was Eden. Detroit was Camelot. And I might-could be Prospero.

  For sure I was wearing powder blue and sweet cream. So was Baby Doll. Except she had on beige Bermuda shorts and a blue shirt, and had me in contrasting blue Bermudas with a beige shirt. When we arrived at Sunnie’s, we made quite an entrance, pulling up with the top down in that borrowed baby blue Pontiac GTO with shoreline sand interior.

  The two-door coupe convertible was difficult to steer and tough to brake, but it went fast, quickly, and looked good doing it. It wasn’t a long, long car, like a Deuce and a Quarter, or a great wide car, like a Cadillac; it was a short, strong car with great lines. Just like me.

  Inside folks shook their heads when I told them I was leaving extra early to see Robert Hayden before my emcee duties began at the 20 Grand. The parents who sent their kids to Fisk where Hayden was a professor, the folks who had gone to high school with him, the people who had lived down the block from him in Paradise Valley—all shook their heads with particular vigor. Even people who liked Hayden thought he was likely not to like me; that he was color struck, stuck up, and nice-nasty. And those were the folks who liked him!

  The folks who didn’t said he had gone too far (this had been reported in the Michigan Chronicle, in the Pittsburgh Courier, and in the Negro Digest) when he read Yeats to the students and faculty at the Fisk writers symposium and declared he was “no Negro writer.” He was a “writer, period.” All over Idlewild, people were echoing the novelist and poet Margaret Walker, repeating, “That’s like a rose saying I’m not a rose, I’m a flower.” To cut that off I said, “Flowers don’t talk. I love that poem, ‘Winter Sundays.’”

  I love Hayden. Sometimes folks don’t know. You got to see for yourself. And this is what I had seen: Behind his thick glasses, Hayden has sweet, soft eyes. On top of that: I was emceeing a show in the Driftwood Lounge, one of three nightclubs inside the 20 Grand that shared space with a twenty-lane bowling alley. In 1966, the 20 Grand was the top spot in our Detroit. When you’re in the top spot, you want the top emcee, and that was me—once I showered off the sweat of Idlewild and changed into linen long pants, a silk and linen sports jacket, and a crisp tie, held in place with a tie clip. Ninety-five degrees outside didn’t change
any of that.

  Pros get on the road on time. I got. But I started to worry as I donned my driving gear: straw hat and sunglasses; worried as I pecked Baby Doll’s cheek—letting folks who hadn’t seen when we arrived see as I left how good we looked; worried as I headed toward the car, worried, as I slipped into the driver’s seat and cranked the radio up loud. What worried me most? I knew Hayden better than any of them knew Hayden.

  * * *

  Sometime back, Hayden had returned to Detroit to give a reading shortly after Langston Hughes himself had come to the Motor City. Certain civic leaders (including my own Shirley McNeil, PhD; Dr. Bob Bennett; and Dr. Alf Thomas) believed that whatever had been done for Hughes should be done better for our own poet of Black Bottom. So a reservation was made at the Gotham Hotel’s Ebony Room, Detroit’s finest restaurant, where Hayden could be feted on white tablecloths decorated with cut roses and fed squab under glass and cherries jubilee.

  I wasn’t invited but managed to be meandering in the lobby when the party let out. Hayden, dressed in a tweed jacket and a white, button-down shirt and bow tie with a sweater over it, wasn’t hard to recognize. I had seen his picture in the papers and also in Ruthie Sheffield’s wallet. He wore suede saddle shoes that I never saw any one of us wear. Someone told me W. H. Auden, his teacher at Michigan, wore the same shoes.

  Soon, Robert was up in my room. I was looking for a picture of his mother to show him. Didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. Could have been a final free drink. Could have been something else we had yet to discover.

  There was a liberating privacy on every floor of the Gotham. There were so many good and clean reasons to enter any of the eight stories of the hotel, designed in the Italian Renaissance style that made it look like it belonged on Park Avenue in New York. You could discreetly disappear behind any number of closed doors, and explore so many ambiguities and quite a few illicit pleasures. I avoided most of the illicit pleasures, particularly the gambling. I savored so many of the ambiguities. Living in the Gotham made my single life simple.

  Hayden and I settled onto the little sofa opposite my bed, and I took a good look at him as he prattled on about new poems. We were the same age. I had read his first collection of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, when it had come out in 1940. It was a birthday gift from the Natchez Belle. I had poked into Heart regularly in the intervening years. It was on many shelves in Idlewild. He took a breath. I quoted a line or two of Hayden to Hayden. He was charmed. I took a breath. He spat out words like others of us wore tie clips and cufflinks, as bits of gleam to attract passionate and positive attention. Soon he had mine.

  There was a chip on his shoulder I wanted to knock off. I anticipated the fun of wrestling with him and having him discover he could stop observing “us,” and at long last join “us” Black folk. As some beckon of invitation, I felt we needed something to look at before I tried to interest him in looking at me, so I opened my jewelry box. I wanted him to see I recognized fine things. I showed him my favorite cufflinks. They were ebony black and blood red on 14-carat gold. The jewelry man had said the pattern was “stylized feathers.”

  “Bought them in a pawnshop in 1932.”

  “Rich folks’ things were going cheap.”

  “It looks like the Black Diamond Express.”

  “Makes twelve stops and arrives in hell ahead of schedule!”

  “Or, it’s an express to heaven?”

  Robert tapped a cufflink.

  “I think it’s a train through hell. Those red bars are hellfire.”

  “Can you write that?”

  “Yes.”

  It was the first “yes” of many that night. Most, I don’t remember. The last “yes” I remember clearly. Hayden asked me if I remembered his “first mother.” I liked the way he put that. “First mother.” “Yes,” I answered. “Yes, we shared a bottle or three, in a blind pig or two. She called you ‘darling Asa.’” He nodded when I said that, then he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.

  “A bar is one place Ruth could be sure she wouldn’t see Sue or Will Hayden.”

  I reached up to take his glasses from his hands and place them on my face as a way of being him for a moment. It was the wrong move. He jerked his glasses back.

  “What?”

  “Four-Eyes. The kids at school used to call me Four-Eyes.”

  Four-Eyes. They probably called him worse than that. Words hurt him more than sticks and stones—particularly, I realized too late, his birthname, “Asa.” Hurt too much for him to hear. I tried to press the cufflinks into his hand as a kind of make-up gift, but he wouldn’t take them.

  * * *

  Everything was hot and irritable once I got near the 20 Grand. Driving “home” from Idlewild, since the Gotham had been torn down, didn’t feel like driving home. The modern high-rise apartment I shared with Baby Doll was a fine place with river views, but it wasn’t the Gotham. I had a higher perch but a lesser home. I drove past my School of the Theatre; it was on Warren not far from the 20 Grand. The simple storefront looked sad, vacant, and plain, like it always did right after Father’s Day. No shiny cars parked in front. No shiny-faced young people preening just the other side of the plate glass window. No beautiful model answering the phone. No big stars walking through the front door. No rich parents double-parked waiting for children to come out. No neighborhood kids running down the sidewalk to class, or dawdling to peek at the students entering my door. No breadwinners dropping off an early tuition check. No Mari skipping out to George’s El Dorado, singing some song she had just made up.

  The week after Father’s Day is the only week of the year when the place is completely dead. Not for the first time I noted: You plan resurrection, sitting in ashes.

  Hayden was formal. He acted as if he had forgotten our earlier encounter. I apologized for my Bermuda shorts. I invited him to stay later for a show. He declined. I offered him a drink. He declined. I offered him a seat. He sat.

  “Massey wouldn’t say why you wanted to meet,” he began.

  “And you can’t imagine?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  I got back to business. I had a show to emcee.

  “You’ve heard of my Youth Colossal?”

  “Seen more than heard. Pictures in the Jet. But Dudley Randall may have mentioned it.”

  “‘Runagate, Runagate,’ and ‘The Ballad of Nat Turner.’ I want your permission to choreograph a dance to those. Maybe get Stevie Wonder to do the music.”

  “Stevie Wonder?”

  “Stevie Wonder!”

  “Stop. Just stop.”

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  He laughed. I had never seen Hayden laugh.

  “You want to adapt my poems for your pickaninny minstrel show?”

  “Pickaninny minstrel show? They eviscerated you at Fisk. Now you savage me?”

  “You know about that?”

  “I read. We were in the paper the same day. May 14, 1966, right next to a photo of Aretha Franklin and right below a photo of Sammy Davis. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a bit in Major Robinson’s ‘On the Line’ column talking about Joe Louis talking about me. Ticket sales for the Colossal were a little slow this year, then Major Robinson gave me that few inches of ink and we sold out. It helped that there was a picture of Aretha right by my name. Across from me on that same page was an article about the writers’ conference at Fisk and how you went crazy and said you were not a Black writer and even Arna Bontemps had to step back from you, his favorite. You in a mess.”

  “How would putting my poems in your show fix that?”

  “How more Black a poet could you be than to have your poems performed in Detroit, land of 80,000 Negro girls, at my Youth Colossal with no white folks on the stage or in the audience? Melvin Tolson would have to tip his hat to that. That’s Black as the winning ace of spades Black.”

  We didn’t say anything except the words necessary to bring a second round. Finally, Robert broke the silence.

 
“Pageant. Your Colossal is a pageant. Like a W. E. B. DuBois pageant.”

  “Why you say that other thing?”

  “I’m a little crazy.”

  Hayden was a little crazy. He had a second mother, Sue Hayden, who had been born a slave in the last days of the Civil War. She had whispered to him stories of enslaved Africans in America who grew wings and flew home, dark men who knew all the stars of Africa. And still he kept thinking on the light, bright, almost-white woman who bore him and left to pursue life as an entertainer on the road, occasionally returning to her son and to Detroit. Night Train always thought about the woman who pulled him out of the bulrushes; Robert kept thinking about the woman who laid him down.

  “You came for me.”

  “For Ruth’s boy, Asa.”

  A year later, when Youth Colossal 1967 had come and gone without the Hayden-Wonder collaboration I said, “Next year,” and I lifted a glass to Ruth and to Robert.

  Yes, on the last day of my last summer, in August 1967, I drank to Robert Hayden, thinking about love’s austere rituals and all the times I swept the dancing school floor at 7:00 a.m. so my girls would have clean shoes.

  * * *

  * * *

  LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF ROBERT HAYDEN:

  I Knew All the Stars of Africa

  A riff on Tom Bullock’s “Gin and Calamus.” Calamus was a particular favorite food of Walt Whitman’s; he even named an entire section of Leaves of Grass after the plant. The hippies down on Detroit’s Plum Street, according to Hippy Dippy, say calamus lets them fly. It became illegal to ingest calamus in the United States in 1969. Gingerroot makes a fine substitute.

  A piece of ginger about the size of your thumb

  A bottle of good gin

  Pour out one shot of gin, and drink. Add the peeled ginger to the bottle. Cap tightly and refrigerate for three days. Strain. Chill. Serve chilled straight up. See stars.