In Detroit: A Dream on Hold

By Jane O'Reilly

Some time between sunset and moonrise, against a blue-white autumn sky, seven geese head south over the Detroit suburbs. They sweep low by a bowling alley and veer purposefully toward the pond at Hazel Park race track.

The parking lot around the Hazel Park Lounge and Bowl is full. The men's Monday-night bowling league has arrived. The cars bear testimony to hard times. In the '70s, the boom years, those cars would have been new. Now only an occasional '82 Buick Regal or Chrysler Le Baron gleams hopefully among older Coupe de Villes, Torinos and Caprice Classics. A Thunderbird stands in ruinous decay next to the embarrassing glint of a new Toyota. An ancient Ford station wagon, held together by spit and masking tape, boasts a bumper sticker that says: THUMBS UP FOR MICHIGAN!

Most of the men in the bowling alley could tell you the year, the model and maybe the serial number of every car there. They probably built most of them. That is why they came to Detroit from the rural South and kept on coming for three decades. Appalachian roots still show in the way the men stand. Pride straightens the spine like nothing else. The Southern community, they are called, or "country people," or -- very carefully and at some risk if it comes from an outsider's at some risk if it comes from an outsider's mouth--hillbillies.

Their stories are personal, but so alike that a man named Lowell ("Bud") McKirgan wrote the Blue Grass Opera a few years back, and it seems to apply to almost all of them. It's about people leaving home and heading north (How did Bobby Bare sing it? "Home folks think I'm big in Dee-troit City"), planning to get rich quick and go back and buy a filling station or a hardware store, always talking about going home for good even as the debts piled up and children came along and roots went down and finally they had to admit that Detroit was a friendly place and they had done fine and probably they were, really, home.

Wandell ("Wendy") Smith, 49, came up with his wife on a Greyhound bus from Ranger, W. Va., in 1955. The only work was in the coal mines, and, he says, "I was afraid of the mines. The spring flood had run us out of the house twice in two weeks. After I got it cleaned up, I said, 'Let's go.' " The Smiths left Ranger on a Sunday night, and by Wednesday morning Wendy had found work with a water-cooler firm. The job lasted 13 years. "Then the company moved off and left us," he says. "For eleven years I sold cars until sales got bad." Now working for a construction company, he says, "People talk abou going back, but it's mostly memories talking, and those of hard times. How did Dolly Parton put it? 'No amount of money could buy from me the memories that I have of then, and no amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again.'"

On the side, Wendy Smith plays a mandolin with a country band called Blue Velvet. His friend Donald Clay, a Ford worker in Ypsilanti, Mich., also has a band, North Country Grass. "We was raised up together," says Wendy. "There was only one well on Ranger Ridge, and his daddy had it, and we carried water from it."

Clay, 46, first came north with a cousin when he was 17. "We was trying all the plants we could walk to. My cousin was 18, but too thin, and I was too young. So we traded wallets, and I hired on in his name. They never noticed. He worked there a long time. Later on, I hired in at Ford. I was really tickled when I got my job. The super offered to buy me lunch. I said no, I have money, I'll buy my own lunch. That was 28 years ago. I've got two years and six months until retirement. Ford's been real good to me."

Clay met and married his wife Thelma, 47, five weeks after she arrived in Detroit from Wise, Va. "I loved working in the factory," she recalls, "but my sister-in-law was working right beside me, and she got her hand cut off up to the knuckles. That scared me to death. On the line, it was bad, but you know, I really liked it I liked the work."

The country people brought their ties with them: families, churches, music (bowling and unions came later) and rooted them in a home. Detroit has a high concentration of owners of single-family homes. Take Hazel Park: block after block of the American dream turned into one-story frame houses with chain-link fences, white ruffled curtains and wrought-iron posts holding up aluminum porches. They sell, in selling tunes, for $28,000 to $42,000. Imminent bankruptcy haunts the shopping streets, but in the homes--crowded, some of them, with relatives out of work--they try not to let on they are worried.

All along 1-75, the highway that runs north from Florida, suburbs branch off, filled with people who, for the most part, found what they came for but expected more for their kids. Near the town of Taylor, Mich., in a house with a Roosevelt commemorative plate on a rail above the table, someone on television is announcing the worst year for car sales since 1961. Lee lacocca, the chairman of Chrysler, insists he is excited about next year. No one listens. The people in the house are talking about neighbors who went to Houston or Tulsa looking for work, and came back to report, "They don't seem to like Northern people. They want to keep the jobs for themselves."

For the Northern children of Southern migrants, the American dream is on hold. Says one union official who earns $200 a year more than the ceiling allows for student aid: "My daughter's at college. They told her to get a job if she needed help. And there ain't no jobs! Something has got to be wrong somewhere." Thelma Clay cans vegetables from her one-acre garden and worries: "It hurts the young ones, it really does. My daughter's been laid off four years and she'll probably never get called back. She's got two kids and she can't find nothing that will pay anything."

There's always hope, tempered thin by reality. "I think good times are just around the corner," says Wendy Smith. "There's work out there. Of course it may be harder and may not pay as much as people are used to, but I think you're going to see an upsweep. Now, it's true, things are too high. We never will see it like it was in the '70s. It's never gonna be the same again."

But still there is the music. Benefits, festivals and jamborees in the summer, and tonight, way south, almost out in the fields, there is Millie's Country Corral, where people are dancing to Bob Sanderson and his Porcupine Mountain Band. The songs are about cheatin' and yearnin' and Daddy bein' home for good. People have been slow-waltzing to those same songs in New York City for the past decade, and wearing wool plaid shirts while hey do it. It's hillbilly chic, a cultural validation.

Maybe that is some small comfort, when the people in neighborhoods like Hazel Park and Taylor, who still have jobs at places like Chevrolet Gear & Axle, get to work at 6 a.m., hoping another day passes without being laid off. At that early hour, in the clear pre-dawn light, the geese rise up from the race-track pond and go on south. --By Jane O'Reilly

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