Half the Story: Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

Paul Clemens has an important story to tell in this memoir,¹ but it is not the story we expect. Born in Detroit in 1973, he grew up as part of a rapidly shrinking minority: white people in the Motor City. We anticipate a literate Eminem, but Clemens is honest enough to admit that his real contacts with the life and culture of black Detroit have been minimal. He had no love for the music—the best locus for racial crossovers—indeed almost no real contact with black Detroit, because he was educated in the still largely white Catholic parochial system.

The real story in this memoir is the story of Clemens's father. He is the one genuinely "made in Detroit," born in 1944 when the city was truly "the arsenal of Democracy," a man who, in his son's words, "worshipped at the altar of the internal combustion engine." His work was making cars, and his only leisure was repairing and racing them. As Clemens observes, his father was part of

that hardbellied stratum of white America where, to borrow from Heller in Catch-22, the men were possessed of a variety of useful, necessary skills that would keep them in a low-income group all of their lives. There was nothing the men couldn't build, nothing they couldn't fix, no problem they couldn't solve—and it would never do them a bit of good economically. . . . Though largely uneducated, they were skilled enough to go into business for themselves, running towing services, bump shops, and pinstriping places, only to find that being self-employed meant long hours, huge headaches, a lack of health insurance, and—when one's clientele is also working-class— being entirely at the whim of an economy in which very little trickles down (p. 34).

Clemens's memoir is the tragedy of that "hardbellied stratum," at least those like his father who stayed in Detroit. They asked for relatively little: a tough, demanding job in "the industry" that paid enough to afford a modest bungalow for their family without the wife having to work outside the home; a stable neighborhood of people like themselves; a nearby parish church and good parochial schools; and a city government that provided basic services and security.

Asking little, they got less. Despite his skills and work ethic, Clemens's father was caught in the backwash of the declining automobile industry. For some reason that Clemens never makes clear, his father never attained the relative security of a job in one of the Big Three plants with UAW membership benefits. Instead, he bumped from one specialized parts supplier to another as the companies went bankrupt. From a bungalow near Six Mile on Detroit's east side in the sixties, the Clemens family followed a dwindling remnant of whites to Seven Mile in the seventies and Eight Mile in the eighties. The neighbors tended to be retired people on fixed incomes with an even more blinkered mentality, who kept the house in Detroit so that a cop or fireman son could pretend that he was still living in the city. Meanwhile, Clemens's mother worked cleaning other people's houses in Grosse Pointe so that Paul could attend Catholic schools in Macomb County (those nearer by in the city having closed.)

If Clemens's father with his working-class values is the unexpected hero of the memoir, the antihero is equally unexpected: Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, who held office an incredible twenty years, from 1973 to 1993. For Detroit's white population, Young symbolized their powerlessness. "White people," as the mayor once put it, "find it very difficult to live in an environment they don't control" (p. 19), and he was not inclined to ease their difficulties. Clemens quotes with obvious approval Ze'ev Chafets's description of Coleman Young's Detroit as "the first major Third World City in the United States. The trappings are all there—showcase projects, black-fisted symbols, an external enemy and the cult of personality" (p. 15...