Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

Becoming the Center of Mystery

Becoming the Center of Mystery Hayan Charara Salt I learned how to recite the Fatihah, the opening prayer of the Quran, before I memorized the words to the Star-Spangled Banner. In the basement of the house on Carlin Street, eight houses from the border between the Motor City and the hometown of Henry Ford, I sat beside my mother on a Borden's milk crate while she gutted and scaled fish from neighboring Canada. She reminded me that Detroit was north of Canada and that the salt mines were the greatest in the world. She explained that in her village in Lebanon, if you breathed long enough, you could inhale God in the salt air that drifted eastward from the Mediterranean. I asked why God turned Lot's wife Sarah into a pillar of salt. She had sent me to a parochial preschool and eventually, despite being born into Islam, I attended the schools of the Saints Barbara and Alphonsus. There I learned the bitterness of salt, the taste of it down the back of the throat, how the truth could be compressed into the space of a molecule. When she asked how I knew the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a reference I had heard made about Detroit from the fathers of the black families on the street, I explained that the nun in school lectured on the wrath of God, the God of the Bible and showed Lot and his wife as an example of what happened to those without belief. Knife in hand, scales of fish in the sink, she recited the Quran's first words, over and over again until they would never leave my thoughts: In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most merciful. Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds; Most Gracious, Most Merciful; Master of the Day of Judgment. You we worship, and Your aid we seek. Show us the straight path, the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, those whose portion is not wrath and who do not go astray. Reprinted from Forkroads 1 (winter 1996), 4-15. 401 Life Journeys How could an American city be north of Canada, why were the mines of the old French town of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac unlike the rest of the world, and would I turn into the mineral filling the Morton Salt containers if I did not believe? I prayed to Allah in the basement kitchen, ate fish at the breakfast table and watched my father's blood pressure rise as he lifted the salt shaker, stood without a slouch before the cross in Sister Antoinette's classroom, the father, the son, and the holy spirit gazing down at me, and all the hierarchies of angels waiting for the moment I would turn in disbelief and be cast into stone. Work Hughes & Hatchers kept my father from the route of life most immigrants took when arriving to Detroit—the factories. He refused the late shift, the Ford steel plant at River Rouge, the furnaces at Dodge and the assembly lines at General Motors. An uncle ruined his back at the Buick plant in the Polish neighborhood of Hamtramck, another retired after thirty-odd years to receive a plaque engraved with the smokestacks of the colossal Rouge and cancer in his lungs, and yet still another rises at the break of day to listen to the pounding of presses and the cutting of glass at Chrysler. My father is the oldest of the brothers that left southern Lebanon for the great paychecks of the carmakers. After Hughes & Hatchers he borrowed money to build a beer & wine, the prison he claims he made for himself. He reminds his brothers and anyone with ears to listen that he has had a gun pressed into his back three times, that the third ended with a man explaining that after he robbed him, he would shoot. He lay flat on his stomach in the bottle room of Charara Beer & Wine and examined the cracks of the tile floor and how desperate a man could be to steal as many packs of cigarettes the pockets of a pair of jeans could fit, enough money to get him home perhaps, and then to kill. He could not make excuses for him. I have not taken a day off in thirteen years, he says with authority. He will hold up photographs of himself with sideburns, standing beside a GTO, to display how work...