Flint's "Rusty Beauty"

            On Sunday, the day I wrote the haikus in my previous post, I took my usual walk through the east side to St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Franklin Street.  The yellow leaves were falling.  The rain was falling.  My tears were falling … for more reasons than I can count or begin to sort out.  More importantly, I don’t want to write about myself but this neighborhood that I wear like a mourning coat.  Walking in the woods, I never feel alone but commune with all manner of intelligent life—trees, ponds, frogs, caterpillars, birds, and the occasional deer.  I rarely cry in the woods but always feel my spirits lift.  So why the tears on Minnesota Street and Iowa?  Well … I know that there is a different kind of solitude to urban walking.  I feel my aloneness more acutely, feel myself to be alone in a world of strangers or alone in a crowded world where I can’t find friends or a place that feels like home.  Walkers report feeling alienated on the crowded sidewalks of New York, London, and Beijing.  It’s no surprise then that I feel the weight of my existence as I walk past homes that have died and families that have gone elsewhere … to happy places.  Nowhere I would want to be though.  Usually, I feel my spirits rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.  But not this Sunday.  Standing on a corner, looking up into the rain and the leaves, I cried out, fierce anguish all over my face.  A big truck slowed.  A window slid down.  I saw a woman’s voice with a concerned face, and I heard, “God Bless You.”  That was enough.  Those three words.  When I got to church, the single man in front of me turned around and asked me my name.  Someone cared enough to ask my name.  “I’m Mary Jo.  And you are?”  “Harold.”  “Harold.  It’s very nice to meet you.”  Human contact.  A miracle.  I cried into my cupped hands.

“Walking here is so much more vivid,” says Hugo, my Chinese student.  “People actually smile and wave instead of rushing along in their own business.”  Faces, voices, yard ornaments (a “Let it Snow” sign hung on the neck of a scarecrow), stray cats, grapes, wet leaves on black branches and dark apples hanging like pendants on slender limbs of trees.  What remains—every little things—can seem precious when so much is wrecked, ruined, burned, emptied out. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was headed to church again.  The morning was gray but clearing up.  There had been rain in the night that freshened the air and sun was peering through a layered serene sky.  I didn’t mind the junked-up yards at all.  In fact, I appreciated the way life seemed to spill out all over the place:  a purple plastic saucer for sledding, overstuffed easy chairs, big screen televisions, bikes, plastic toys, a log cabin playhouse, twinkling orange lights and painted pumpkins for Halloween.  Halloween is a really big deal in neighborhoods like this one.  The people that still live here drape the bushes around their houses with the synthetic cobwebs that will linger through the rains of November and into the snow.  A woman passes and says one word, “church” in a voice hoarse from cigarettes or a freezing cold house or from mere disuse.  She’s walking toward the Methodist church on Davison St. and I’m walking the other way to the  Catholic church on Franklin but we are together on this street shore, picking through things; and I’m glad I’m not in some tiresome taupe suburb.  The sidewalk buckles on a rise, and I push through some wet grass to check out a cellar hole.  After listening for voices for a while, I turn to go my way but a piece of blackened wood sticks to my shoe sole.  I’ve stepped on a nail, and the charred wood is hard to pull off.  I can’t shake this place and still I don’t know why.

I go there every day when I’m out of inspiration.  I go there when I can’t muster the ambition to drive to the woods.  I go there because it’s easy and peaceful.  I go there because no one will judge me.  I go there to face the fact that I’m damaged and that life is damaged.  I go there because I never know whether I’ll be moved to despair or joy:  it can go either way. 

Last time I walked over there, it was a good day.  Gray again.  The most memorable east-side walks are made against the backdrop of the flattest, grayest days.  I was thinking about my freshmen students’ initial reaction to seeing neighborhoods like this one.  They were moved to imagine the people who’d lived in these houses.  The ruins softened them, made them less judgmental and sure, opened their imaginations.  Walking along, dreaming on foot, I saw a man in the distance, wearing a camo jacket and carrying a black plastic sack.  Maybe he’s got a can of beer.  I didn’t indulge my fancy further.  As he approached, I saw that he was young and red-haired.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?”  he said brightly.

“Yes,” I said, “Yes, it IS a beautiful day.”  Before he’d spoken to me, I wasn’t thinking that it was a beautiful day at all.  It wasn’t a particularly beautiful day, but when he said that it was and said it TO ME, the day changed.  I realized that it was warm, that it wasn’t raining, that it was late October and that the leaves were still to be enjoyed and that soon we’d have the oh so pretty early snow.  So much to look forward to.

Then I thought of Bryshon and his poem.  Bryshon is a young black man—a student at Whaley Children’s Center.  Some of my students were doing a Shakespeare project there, and this person, who had been through so much trauma that he speaks in a whisper, volunteered to read a Shakespeare’s line.  Standing next to him, he nudged me and pointed to a word on the index card.  “Melancholy,” I said and repeated the word for him.  “What’s that?”  “Well, it’s like depression,” and but I didn’t say is that it is so much softer, wider, deeper—infinite sadness.  He shook his head as if he understood and read his line, “I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.”  Applause followed, and Bryshon smiled.  He read the line two more times, each time a bit louder than the time before.  Two weeks later, Bryshon told us about his Arden, his ideal place; and it is under the ground.  But his underground world is full of life, burrowing animals and little bugs.  He wrote about it in a poem that goes something like this:

The ground cracked,

But the soil is soft,

But the bark of a tee come down.

A bug bit up

And sky turn brown

Then the soil turn hard

Then the tree fall down the ground,

But the soil is always soft.

I love that line, “But the soil is always soft”—Mother Earth.  So much has fallen and died on the east side of Flint.  People have died in house fires.  Families have split up due to drugs and alcohol.  Mothers have been murdered.  “Generous Motors” left town and abandoned all their little kiddos with no bread, no milk.  There are “food deserts” all over Flint—that’s jargon for areas without grocery stores.  The people left, understandably, to find work and to find nourishment.  Here, holes remain where houses were.  The soil is always soft.  Porches sag and roofs cave in.  Moss fills in the cracks.  Ferns, the first plants to come back after mass extinctions, fill empty lots—ferns and grass.  Here, there were and are countless children who whisper because of all they’ve seen.  I wonder how many of them, like Bryshon, who know what it feels like to fall, would still say, “the soil is always soft.”

Zen has a concept of “rusty beauty”—things that are beautiful because they are damaged.  Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.  Though I don’t fully understand why I am so drawn to neighborhoods like the east side of Flint, I know that they are much more alive than the track housing, malls, and fast food joints of Grand Blanc and Davison, where the population has grown in the last two decades by 200% while Flint has lost 100,000 people.  People who live in the suburbs may have found material warmth and wealth—but the direct message of the heart is often less there.  Poverty and dirt allow life to exist, allow life to shine out, because the middle-class conceptions of what is good are not at work killing it.  “In the slum, in some way,” writes architect Christopher Alexander, “the direct voice of the heart is there.”  It is there in the mud hut of an Indian village.  It is there in the shacks built by squatters on the hills around Turkish cities.  And it is there in the poor neighborhoods of Flint.  It is life, the force of direct human experience, misery, compassion, ignorance, and warmth all mixed up together.  It really is life.  Walking through ruins, participating in the affect of them on a collective psyche, wakes me up to the fact that I am alive, and while I am alive I must use my response-ability.  Listen.  Greet others kindly.  On days when I am feeling helpless, join the army of other helpless homeless and add my voice the voices of all who struggle, suffer, and find safety out in the street from the terrors of inside.

Grieving with East Siders on a Sunday

Walking in sad rain
Selfies by empty houses
Life gone long ago.


Long steps up to church
Holiness is such hard work
Driver shouts, "God bless."


Three black cats peeing
Where are all the east side songs
in a burned down yard?

My cypto-dreamhouse

Flint Hand-Me-Down

I’ve always preferred other peoples’ clothes worn to the shape of their lives.  For the last four weeks, I’ve been visiting older adults at the Lockwood Senior Living facility in Burton, and today was my last day—well, for the time being.  A few days ago, I emailed Candace the activities director questions for the participants to think over:  how did your parents or grandparents wind up in Flint?  What would be on your map of the world when you were seven years old?  Can you remember a favorite walk you took in Flint?  The talk was so warm, punctuated with laughter and groans.  At the end, most said, “Oh, I have really enjoyed this.”  Fran didn’t even get up to go to church this time.  “We don’t get to talk like this very often.”  “It helps to learn more about the people you live with.”  Reluctantly, or so it seemed to me, they pulled chairs back from the table around which we’d sat, released the brakes on their walkers, and headed off, either down to lunch or back to their private apartments.  Kurt, whose grandfather had come from the Ukraine with an invention that was “stolen,” got depressed and eventually killed himself, said, “You know, when all the people I knew are now gone, I have to ask myself why I am still here.  It occurred to me that maybe I am here for this,” and he gestured to the table around which we’d been sitting and sharing the memories of lives lived in a very different Flint—“when Flint was THE place to be.”

And here I am—a professor and aging woman who may one day live in such a place, whose mother died in a version of this place, and who continues to wander the east side, climbing through weeds to peer into the foundations of burned-down houses, listening intently for what the ruins have to say.  Since coming to Flint, I have found and loved people who help me to fill in the holes and cover the ruins with lives past and present.  First there was Fran, whose family—up from Tennessee—ran a boarding house for factory workers.  “When I’d go to cities without factories, I’d think ‘these are not REAL cities’,” she told me.  I married Paul, in part, because he’d walk down railroad tracks with me through Chevy-in-the-Hole and give me a walking tour of all the mills and buildings that once were and now were no more.  When I met this group of seniors, my joy was genuine (a partial satisfaction of a longstanding desire).  They clearly wanted to share with me memories more sparkling than heirlooms, more vivid than the black and white photo of Dolly kissing Joe in front of a shiny new Chevrolet.  Finally, here I am gazing into the faces of Flint people rather than char-burned holes, and as I listen, my images of the city shift and so do the sounds: instead of crickets and natural sounds that signal neighborhoods returning to nature, I hear the happy sounds of kids playing, the whirr of roller-skates on concrete, the noise of factories working, and voices of people who have lived through a lot and are still joking and laughing.  

The things they have touched are held out to me

Like the sleeve of an old coat

To try on.  I pull one arm in,

Listening to the story of its making:

There was a boarding house with a Victrola playing

European men—crushes—working at Chevrolet.

Baskets half woven in an upstairs bedroom:

“I learned basket-weaving in the hospital

After the electric shock.”  When Fran got cancer

She gave my husband her father’s violin

And told me how her own mother

never wanted him to play.

Norma tells of her father electrocuted at work,

but “GM gave my mother a job in cut and sew. 

I was five years old.  She married again,

and he was real nice.” 

Mercury balls the Papas brought home for toys

We didn’t know then what we know now

They really pinged.

Sidewalks so smooth you could roller skate down ‘em

And we walked everywhere … EVERYWHERE.

On Saturdays we’d go to the theatre

For five cents you could see a show

And if you had a dime you could get a bag

Of popcorn.  A boy threw an apple core at the screen

And the matron yelled, “That’s it,” and the ticket price went

Up to 25 cents.  That was too much.  We nearly died.

In the winter, they’d flood the field by the armory

And we’d ice skate.  There was a warming shed

Where we waited for rides

We didn’t have cell phones to call our parents and say

We’re freezing. 

Missouri, Wisconsin, Iron Mountain, Chippewa lands

Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Ukraine

Languages spoken at home

Beverly still remembers numbers 1-10 in Norwegian

But that’s all.  Rose left home at 12 on the firing end

Of a shotgun pointed at her stepfather:  “he beat me,”

Was all she could say.  Things were hard

The strike, the work, the noise, the neglect,

But when put into a new role, Rose

“didn’t think about it much, I’d just do

What needed to be done.

How?  Well, I liked people.”

No thoughts of suicide then.  Almost none.

“There was a pump in the front yard

And neighbors would bring their jugs--

The water from that artesian well

Was so cold—oh, it made the best iced tea.”

“Pa’s work partner in the factory was a black man.

It was hot in the summer so Pa bought a fan to blow

On both of them.  The man was so happy

He wanted to pay for half the fan.”

Early marriages, no furniture, tales of managing

Cooking, canning, sewing

Learned at the knee of a grandmother. 

Some came from parents who were adopted

Others were shunted from foster home to foster home

“No folk?” Well, my ma and pa made their own

Seven kids. 

The problem today is there is

No communication

Silence except for the click of keys

No talking

No sharing

No mixing of young and old.

We have to work on that, work to find one another again.  I made an effort.  I didn’t know if they would like me.  I didn’t know if they would share.  But I wrote the questions.  I threw myself in.  I ate the fried dough with brown sugar that Betty made every week.  I told them about losing Mom.  I ached when it ended today.  Not over.  Never over.  We have so much to preserve … before the growing season ends, before the snows of winter come.