Ruinaissance in Flint

                Cities rise and fall, and I have been teaching hard for twenty years (since 1996) in the saddest of fallen beauties, Flint, Michigan.  A twentieth-century powerhouse of industry, she was proud.  Now, she lays by her riverbank … recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat.  We’re north and east of the center of America but might as well be at the end of the world.  Flint made the national news during the 2016 presidential campaign because of our lead-contaminated water, which many read as a sign of malicious neglect.  In fact, Flint is just like forgotten places all over the world where the only news is bad news:  war, contamination, genocide, birth defects, epidemics, and ruin.  From the time I arrived in 1996, I’ve never thought of living elsewhere—the idea of a nice suburb makes me physically sick, I haven’t been able to stop wandering through the ruins of neighborhoods, but I’ve also never understood my compulsion.  Am I here to be a witness?  Am I called to be an active sharer in this bleak reality?  Am I supposed to knock on doors and help?  Oh, Flint, what shall I cry?

Street after street of ruins on Flint's east side.

                I don’t think of myself as a poet, but I share the obsession of Renaissance poets (Italian, French, and English) with ruins of a bygone past.  When Petrarch gazed at the obsolescent grandeur of Roman decay in the 1340s, the dilapidated city was little more than sad farmlands: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city, there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins lay before our eyes.”  In the cultural efflorescence of the fifteenth century, Rome’s gleaming churches, palaces, and monuments were built from stones pilfered from ancient buildings.  This salvaging of the past to rebuild the present seemed like a good metaphor with which to begin a course in the classics of the English Renaissance to University of Michigan-Flint students; it was a metaphor I hoped that would challenge them to figure out how the potshards of Renaissance texts could be collected and pieced together to mend the gaping holes in our city—a city whose emblem could be the Delphi plant, looking like an amputee, almost completely dismantled or the McDonald Dairy reduced to rubble, whose motto carved in stone used to read that “the farm is still the enduring base of America.”  My husband thinks that surely someone saved the engraved marble, but I know better. 

                For writers, the site of the ruin is the birthplace of poetics.  Why?  Because what Shakespeare calls the “dressings of a former sight,” ask us to remember and imagine the way things once were.  The biblical poets Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied and cried over the destruction of Philistine cities and of their own beloved Zion.  As I walk through neighborhoods that most people speed past, run from, or walk through as if nothing has happened or as if it always looked like that, I am grateful that at least the exoskeletons of houses exist for the sake of the historical record.  When General Motors closed factories, they tore down, with stunning speed, the massive Buick City and Chevy-in-the-Hole so that people didn’t have time to think, to be angry, to grieve.  They didn’t want to leave behind evidence that the corporation made and marred, that the corporation used and abused, that the corporation is nothing but a tyrant that took from the people, polluted the land, and left it desolate.  Oh, Flint, what shall I cry?  But it’s hard to feel angry at the faceless acronym GM and easier just to go about one’s day numb, stunned, walking as if drugged through a world of eyesores (chimneys standing awkwardly amidst weed trees) or a world where the eyesores are torn down.  It’s desolate either way. 

Buick City brownfield.  You can tell the date of the plant's destruction from the plants
growing among the ruins.

What really makes me mad are my university colleagues who commute from Bloomfield Hills, East Lansing or Ann Arbor.  What kills me are all those robots living comfortable middle-class lives in the nearby College Cultural neighborhood, in the mansions off Miller Road, or the suburb, aptly named, Grand Blanc.  Big white flight is largely responsible for making areas like the east side ghost towns.  But what happened to the people who once lived in these neighborhoods, those who lost jobs and aid checks and witnessed the death by fire of house after house?  Some live on in varying degrees of numbness with no places to buy food nearby—just churches, tattoo studios, and St. Vincent DePaul.  Others flew off to other factories, to other places, like starlings in their thick clouds of bird bodies, black clouds, that remind me of the black soot that fell on the backyards and discolored the curtains of immigrant women trying to keep house in the Saint John’s Street neighborhood.  Where’s that?  It is gone from a landscape wiped clean by urban renewal.  Give me the ruins.  Let them stand.  They are a call to action, to speech, to art.  “I know people who left Flint and did well, and I know people who stayed and did well,” says one of my students.  “What do the ones who stay do,” I ask naively.  “They’re mostly artists, musicians, or chefs.”  “Because that’s all there is to do—make art?”  “Right.  Or do drugs.”

If only people would stay.

It's been this way for twenty years

Making my rounds

Thirty years and out

GM time till freedom

And I’ve wondered why

I felt called here

“Here I am!”  “Send me!”

Like a little prophet

From Boston all the way

To Flint to bring water out of rock

With words.  I speak to the students

Gently but walk mechanically

Not sure what to think or say

And students flee the humanities

Because they are products on an inhuman

Environment.  Just thirty years till freedom.

Houses burned from the inside out

And I walk and walk, taking it all in

Counting the lives lost to greed

But what should I cry? 

I wasn’t born here yet I feel bleak.

I didn’t choose to live

In the outskirts, didn’t choose to look away

I chose this life; so Prophet, look:

Candles on a corner

Tents in Kearsley park

RIP Grandpa—gone but not forgotten.

Houses in ruins

A city in ruins

And my life, too

Wrecked by repetition

And numbed service with a smile.

No!  God I don’t want this

Give me a word to speak

To the people, a role to play

That matters.

I see the houses in flames

And sleepers rubbing tears away

Awake in the cold

Where are you in all this?

God!  The great “I Am”

Who spoke from a bush that burned

But wasn’t consumed like these lives

But not my heart.

And I’m crying out

For all the lost ones

Who fled and for the

Sick and out of work who

Stayed and for the dogs

That wander the streets

And it’s not enough

To notice the perfect gray

Tear of a hornet’s nest in a tree

Along the Flint River

Or the one domestic duck in the flock

Of water fowl who dip down into a river

That a half a mile away is being dredged

For toxins.  Clean-up is not enough

People have to stay and they have to cry

Even if they don’t know quite what to cry

And maybe God—up there—flashing rose

on this gray December day

Would deign to come down with

some soft rags of cloud and

wipe all the tears away.

In class I showed my slides of Flint ruins, many of which were taken along Lewis Street, Jeannie spoke up, “I lived on Lewis Street.  It’s my home.”  After class, I asked her if she’d be willing to meet me so that we could walk through her neighborhood together.  We’re over twenty years apart.  I’d known that she was an orphan and that her mother was murdered when she was just 14.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I never expected it to feel so happy, so good.  She got out of her car smoking a Marlboro and pulled down her big round sunglasses.  We headed north as Lewis parallels the Flint River, and the December wind blew strands of Jeannie’s purple hair around her face.  “I was born on Bennett, and I lived all over this neighborhood.  I was a street kid.  We rode bikes anywhere.  It felt safe.  It was home.  I knew people on every block, and there was a place up on Franklin where you could get a free bag lunch—bologna and ketchup.”  Along the way, she points out the churchyard where they “stole” forbidden apples, the substation on the river where she used to climb the girders and hide out, the restaurant side of Art’s Pub and Grub, that her mother owned.  We peer through the glass door:  “my mother laid those tiles.”  We moved into some pretty bad places and she rebuilt them.  She cooked, too.  I never knew what an instant mashed potato was until I went to my friend’s house over there.”  She points to a burned out shell of a house. 

All dressed up for the holidays off Lewis Street.  The shops,
 bars, and eateries are mostly all closed.

All but one of the houses Jeannie pointed to on our two-hour walk were either gone (empty lots) or burnt black caves.  She tells sad stories:  violent deaths, drugs, teenage homelessness, arson.  “I talked to a lot of the kids who burned houses.  They were anywhere from 9 to 14, and the landlords would give them a hundred bucks.  Kids will do anything for money.  When I asked them why, they said they didn’t like it but figured someone would clean the houses up.”  She told me about stealing bikes and selling them for 20 bucks a piece, about selling marijuana to get through Mott Community College, about sleeping in the empty houses and going to high school with frostbitten toes.  Her mother had died, and she was on the streets.  She remembers characters like Uncle Merle, who she once thought was the coolest, “Yeah, he’s still kicking around Flint somewhere, addicted to heroin.  I don’t talk to him anymore.”  With her nothing feels sad, and the neighborhood is not dismal.  It is what it is—alive with her memories and the energy of a young woman who resists psychological labels, whose character and mind were made here, who has been too busy surviving and educating herself and her kids to get sucked down the holes that take away Flint lives.  She owns land in Highland, Michigan, where her two boys can play outside, where she can fall asleep in a hammock pointing out constellations.  She’s proud of what she’s accomplished, yet she says, “Imagine.  This decaying city is still my home.”  She touches lightly on the inevitable shame but brushes it aside with cliché, “Flint’s a great place to be from.  It builds character.”  I’ve always felt that cliché is a way of covering up or neutralizing experience, and Jeannie resorts to it rarely.  Perhaps this walk gives her a chance to circle back into the past and avoid the amnesia that is, to some extent, necessary for those who get out, for those who seek to fashion new selves and better lives.

 “As strange as it sounds,” I venture to add, “I’ve always felt like these neighborhoods are my home, too.”  My words are like the inconsequential flurries of snow that blow around us.  I feel stupid making this claim.  After all, I did not have to live here; yet, here I am.  Jeannie doesn’t wear a hat, and her cheeks are glowing.  I sense an inward fire, and I feel like I’ve been invited inside.  But the last house she lived in with her mother is gone.  Even though there is no door to open, no kitchen table to sit around while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, no photo album to flip through, I feel sheltered, clothed, and fed.  Then I think of poor Edmund Spenser and his incomplete epic which he wrote from the ruins of a castle in the west of Ireland in the late sixteenth-century.  Book One—The Legend of Holinesse—climaxes when the Red Crosse knight goes to a place called the House of Holinesse that doesn’t really feel like a structure at all.  He ducks in through a narrow gate, and then he’s engaged in talking and listening, repenting and suffering, walking and climbing Mount Contemplation.  What’s new for him is that he has a companion, Mercy, who helps him to the top, where he learns his real name and his purpose.  Jeannie and I walk for blocks, and at the very center of our walk, we are given something like a vision.  Two enormous greenhouses stand in a large space where four or five houses must have been removed, and a group of black men in work clothes, silently spread the frozen earth with metal rakes as snow swirls gently around them.  The world is at rest and is quiet.  Eden.  Gardening never ends.  Flintopia.  Bleak.  Tragic.  Missteps.  Mercy.  Home.

Coda

The day after kicking around the east side with Jeannie, I walked up the creek that runs alongside Mott Community College toward Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and Dakota.  I thought that I would feel loneliness acute with only a dog for company.  Instead I found myself thinking about Jeannie’s utopian suggestion.  “Look at all these empty houses!  Do you realize that there are more abandoned homes than homeless?  What if every person in need were given a house to live in for five years.  People would say, ‘oh, it isn’t fair because they didn’t work for it.  But it would only be for five years, and after that, they start paying on it.”  I’ve long known that we all have it in us to be prophets if we open our eyes and feel with our hearts.  Occupied with such thoughts, I see a man coming down the path pushing a walker with a plastic box attached to the front.  I can see from one hundred feet away that he is grinning broadly.  I think he just climbed down off a bus.  And Moses face glowed when he descended Sinai to speak to the people.  When I get close, he calls to Panda, who races up to him and jumps all over his legs puppy biting the work gloves he wears.  “Hey this dog bites,” he says and I’m not sure whether he is angry or hurt.  You should train him better.  But before I walk away with tail between my legs, he looks at me and brings back that broad smile.

 “You’re a teacher,” he says.

 “Why, yes, how did you know?” 

“Ya look like one.”  In response to the follow-up, “where?,” I say “UM-Flint.”  “English,” he guesses.  I laugh and affirm that he’s right.  

“But tell me what author you think I teach all the time?”

 “Shakespeare,” he says definitively, and I laugh harder.

 “Yes!!!” 

“Well, what do you know.  I’m psychic.”  Then, he looks me up and down, and says, “and you’re going to live one hundred years.  My name is Bob, what’s yours?”