Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Clemens Paul

Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Clemens Paul

Author:Clemens, Paul [Clemens, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 0385515758
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2006-10-10T04:00:00+00:00


Dontrelle, it turned out, was from Flint, and so liked talking with me about Detroit, the even bigger, blacker city one hour to the south. He’d appreciated my comment, at the introductory meeting for our floor (which, as RA, he’d organized), about my never having seen so many white people. That, he thought, was funny. He was thin, almost frail, and had not the least interest in intimidating anyone, despite the clenched fist and strident music. He possessed that strain of enthusiasm common to college students who believe that the four years spent on campus will be the most important of your life and that the most important thing about those four important years is getting involved. Never much of a joiner, I begrudgingly accepted Dontrelle’s invitation at the beginning of the winter semester to attend one of the school’s Martin Luther King holiday events, during which he would be reading a portion of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Dr. King struck me as a little too accommodating for Dontrelle, who seemed more the Malcolm X type, but he said several times that he wanted me at the memorial. My days in Detroit have often served to legitimize me, during the initial stages of friendships with blacks, as a white person whose opinion might—might—matter. “Where you from?” “Detroit.” “Which suburb?” “No suburb—Detroit.” “Really.” Where things went from there was another matter, but I felt a connection with Dontrelle. Shane attended as well, so I was the sole representative neither of my people nor of the first floor of Copeland Hall.

There weren’t many attendees at the event of either race. We sat in a small circle and, after some preliminaries, Dontrelle stood in the middle, clearing his throat, a little unsure, as everyone is at first, what he should do with his hands. It dawned on me almost immediately that he wasn’t going to be reading a portion of the speech, as he’d said; he was going to be doing all of it. And he wasn’t reading the speech; he was reciting it, and doing so without the slightest stumble.

One doesn’t get the full impact of the speech from the snippets one usually hears, and as Dontrelle got into the spirit, sweeping his listeners along with him, his hands now doing more or less what Dr. King’s had done, the sheer forward momentum of those words was enough to knock me back. Shane, whom I could see peripherally, was crying.

“Did you cry?” he asked me afterward, back in our room.

“No.”

This was not to be mistaken for a lack of emotion on my part. Like my father, I was beginning to admire, not the finished product, but the hard work that went into things. The part of the deal where people applaud and pat you on the back is nice, but not nearly so important as the enormous preparation that makes such a moment possible. Instead of being touched by the speech’s sentiments, noble as they were, I was more impressed by



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