Middlesex

The streetcar made for Greektown. Desdemona checked her reflection in the window and fixed her hat. Since her pregnancies she had put on weight, thickened in the waist, but her skin and hair were still beautiful and she was still an attractive woman. After looking at herself, she returned her attention to the passing scenery. What else would my grandmother have seen on the streets of Detroit in 1932? She would have seen men in floppy caps selling apples on corners. She would have seen cigar rollers stepping outside windowless factories for fresh air, their faces stained a permanent brown from tobacco dust. She would have seen workers handing out pro-union pamphlets while Pinkerton detectives tailed them. In alleyways, she might have seen union-busting goons working over those same pamphleteers. She would have seen policemen, on foot and horseback, 60 percent of whom were secretly members of the white Protestant Order of the Black Legion, who had their own methods for disposing of blacks, Communists, and Catholics. “But come on, Cal,” I hear my mother’s voice, “don’t you have anything nice to say?” Okay, all right. Detroit in 1932 was known as “The City of Trees.” More trees per square mile here than any other city in the country. To shop, you had Kern’s and Hudson’s. On Woodward Avenue the auto magnates had built the beautiful Detroit Institute of Arts, where, that very minute while Desdemona rode to her job interview, a Mexican artist named Diego Rivera was working on his own new commission: a mural depicting the new mythology of the automobile industry. On scaffolding he sat on a folding chair, sketching the great work: the four androgynous races of humankind on the upper panels, gazing down on the River Rouge assembly line, where auto workers labored, their bodies harmonized with effort. Various smaller panels showed the “germ cell” of an infant wrapped in a plant bulb, the wonder and dread of medicine, the indigenous fruits and grains of Michigan; and way over in one corner Henry Ford himself, gray-faced and tight-assed, going over the books.

The trolley passed McDougal, Jos. Campau, and Chene, and then, with a little shiver, it crossed Hastings Street. At that moment every passenger, all of whom were white, performed a talismanic gesture. Men patted wallets, women refastened purses. The driver pulled the lever that closed the rear door. Desdemona, noticing all this, looked out to see that the streetcar had entered the Black Bottom ghetto.