In Detroit there is one grocery store, one bakery, and one health foods store that is a hole-in-the-wall. There are sections of the city where you can walk a few miles and not run into any shops, retail, billboards or advertising. In Detroit there are ghosts, there is a haunting over giant phantasmagoric factories, behemoths ushered in on a wave of industry, now just busted windows, crumbling brick, broken teeth. There are houses covered in weathered stuffed animals, three-foot rabbits stapled to the siding, blanketing the steps and the front porch, like parasites, like barnacles, and you dare not touch or cuddle them, they just want you to leave and mind your own business. In Detroit the empty lots are blooming--weeds, or community gardens, flowers straight up through the concrete. The sidewalks are more grass than pavement because there is no public money to maintain them, and yet the lawns of each house are always freshly mowed and made beautiful: pride.
In Detroit there are no good or bad parts of town. Capitalism has given up on it all. And people are living here, still living here, and striving, and struggling, and with more hope and levelheadedness than you might expect, when you stop and think about it. They are learning to embrace the uncertainty of the future; they are swinging their feet and thinking ahead, managing despair, working something new, thinking, thinking ahead; and they are finding that loving each other is more than just a notion.*
*Tip to Baldwin, this language is echoed in If Beale Street Could Talk.
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