For my third and final postcard in The Times, I spent election night in Lola’s Restaurant in Detroit. Here’s a link to the version that appeared in the paper, Morning in Detroit, followed by a more complete description of one of the most moving evenings of my life.
DETROIT–As excited as we were to watch the hordes of students voting in Ann Arbor, my friend Marian and I decided there was no place we would rather spend election night than Detroit. And so, as the sun set in the west on a perfect autumn day, we headed east to Motown, passing the landmark Uniroyal tire, as gigantic as the Ferris wheel inside that holds it up. With the auto industry in the shape it’s in, we always half-expect the tire to be flat.
Like most Michiganders, we worry about the devastation to our state if the Big Three go belly up. But we are tired of everyone treating “Detroit” as a synonym for the auto industry rather than the name of a once-vibrant American city whose population is now largely black and poor (not middle-class but poor), with woefully crowded schools, an electrical utility system that often fails, and a bureaucracy that can barely remove the trash and snow.
During the campaign, we stifled the urge to ask what Barack Obama might do to help Detroit. Why stir up voters’ suspicions that the country’s first black president might “share the wealth” with his own people or behave like the city’s recently deposed black mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who held wild parties at his mansion and squandered millions of his constituents’ tax dollars trying to hush up his extramarital affairs.
But as we drove past the city jail, where the former mayor no doubt was monitoring the election from his cell, we couldn’t help but wonder if it was finally safe to ask what an Obama administration might be willing and able to do to save this battered city that so many of us—don’t ask us why—still love.
We dropped Marian’s Explorer at our hotel on Brush, then walked the few blocks to Harmonie Park, a small, recently gentrified, triangular neighborhood near the baseball stadium. On the way, we ran into friends from Ann Arbor, an Israeli therapist and a black professor at the law school, who had also come in to Detroit to watch the returns. “My parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents are all happy tonight,” the professor said. “No matter who wins, America has redeemed its promise at last.”
At Lola’s, our favorite restaurant in Detroit, the headwaiter, Gerald, greeted us with a hug and said he felt like a kid on Christmas Eve, giddy with anticipation but afraid that he might wake up and be disappointed. Lola’s was still quiet, so he had the time to deliver an eloquent disquisition on the possibility that Barack Obama might allocate more resources to southeast Michigan and help unify Detroit with the largely white counties that surround it, as well as Windsor, Ontario, across the bridge.
Tonia and Michelle, who were eating at the bar, said they were on pins and needles, hoping an Obama presidency would improve the country’s image abroad and “not just help the rich but the people who are really struggling.” George, a distinguished older man in gold hoop earrings and a porkpie hat, opined that Barack Obama would be “sensitive to the auto industry, not punishing it or bailing it out, but providing, you know, a corrective.” More than that, George felt confident that an Obama presidency would give Detroit “a psychological uplift.” (The man ought to know. Not only does he own art galleries in Detroit, Chicago, and New York, he holds a PhD in psychology.)
Reggie, our waiter, brought the spinach-stuffed chicken that Marian and I like to order whenever we come here before a game. (Marian, who grew up in Detroit, has been a Tigers’ fan for more than fifty years.) Everyone seemed to be one-upping each other with the originality and flair of their Obama T-shirts, but Reggie had the house beat, with huge images of Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, and an American flag emblazoned across his chest.
By then, a hundred and fifty customers, all but six of us black, had crowded into Lola’s. We nibbled our food and sipped our drinks as the map guy on CNN chalked up the obvious wins for Mr. Obama and John McCain and a female vocalist belted out a jazzy tune about all the emotion she could feel inside. Then someone switched the channel to MSNBC, where the numbers showed that Michigan had gone for Barack Obama, and everyone broke out in cheers.
The giant bald black man behind me—he seemed to be ten times my size—told me how thrilled he was that his daughter had gotten so involved in the campaign this year. Then Barack Obama was declared the winner in Pennsylvania, and then in Ohio, and we all jumped up and screamed and hugged, except the giant bald man, who sat a while longer weeping giant tears, after which he climbed on his chair and waved his napkin, smiling and crying and swaying to the beat of “Obama ’08, Obama ’08.”
All of us took pictures of one another, and Marian and I were happy to think we would end up in photos that people we didn’t even know would be showing to their grandkids years and years from now. “It don’t get no better than this,” George told me, closing his eyes, shaking his head, and smiling, after which his son announced that he and his wife had just decided to have a baby because they finally believed it was possible for a black child “to grow up in an America that chooses the best person for a job, a country where black people can lead not just black lives but normal American lives.”
The DJ drowned out Mr. McCain’s concession speech with chants of “One America!” But when Mr. Obama took the stage in Grant Park, everyone at Lola’s stood in silence and faced the TV with arms raised, nodding and crying and murmuring “amen, amen.” After the speech, the DJ began to chant, “We all need to come together and heal and set that race thing apart. We need to come together and heal, one nation, one Michigan, one Detroit.” Marian and I danced for another hour, then wandered outside, where steam rose from the manholes in that eerie way steam rises in Detroit and a drunken panhandler hit us up for a dollar, then stumbled away mumbling something that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.
The next morning, as the sun came up, we drove west along the river, past the enormous sculpture of Joe Louis’s forearm and fist. The sculpture usually creeps me out, reminding me as it does of a black man’s shackled, severed arm, or the fists of all those militants in the sixties who lashed out at their city and knocked it down. But this time, I asked Marian to pull over and let me out so I could stand on my toes and raise my arm and bump Joe the Boxer’s giant black fist with my own.
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