Real Life in Flint
I walk through Flint’s poor neighborhoods nearly every day. On the East side where the streets are named for states, probably fifty percent of the houses are burned out shells. Chimneys stand like the pistils of tulips after the petals drop off. Trees of Heaven grow in the cellar holes. There is the occasional altar of candles and notes on the porch steps that remain—prayers and love for family members who died in the blaze. Graffiti on one house reads “R. I. P. Grandpa—Gone But Not Forgot.” Life goes on in the occupied homes, evidenced by the plastic backyard kids’ toys, the open windows, the dogs tied up and sleeping in the sun or standing at attention. There’s one house that seems more like a homestead with a bright green John Deere tractor, a vegetable garden, and bee hives that are painted in Crayola colors. A homemade sign on the corner of the property places it at the corner of Kansas Street and Kansas Street. Every time I pass, I feel like I may not be in Flint anymore. As I walk, I often wonder why I am drawn to neighborhoods like these and why I could never live in Grand Blanc or Flushing or Davison or even in the desirable neighborhoods of the city proper. Why? The simple answer is that poorer neighborhoods feel more real to me than perfect houses sitting on perfectly manicured lawns or those monstrous beige tract houses that we used to call “McMansions.” I’ve lived in different cities around the world, and in each one, I gravitated to the poorer places: the squatters’ shacks on the hillsides around Ankara, Turkey and the wooden Russian houses in the outskirts of Semey, Kazazkhstan. When I was lucky enough to be invited inside, the furnishings were nonexistent or very simple, but the fabrics, the colors, the cooking, the crude bathhouse in “kitchen garden” with bushes of black currants spoke of life. I feel the same thing in Flint: in ruined neighborhoods, life shines out because it isn’t being choked off by middle-class conceptions of what is good. When you think about it, aren’t most of our conceptions of what is desirable inspired by magazines and fostered by the media. They are image-driven, but life is found in the blowing clouds, the running stream, the jumping dog—life is active—doing, making, thinking, being. I can hear the objections: she is romanticizing poverty! There are real people suffering in Flint without clean water, without access to nourishing food. How is there more life in such blighted, forgotten places? I maintain that even in the miserable poverty of many Flint neighborhoods there is the force of direct human experience, misery, compassion, ignorance, and warmth all mixed up together. There is an honest life there. And there are backyards with homemade ponds and beds of flowers that a couple works hard on together. There is a swing where a lonely teenager goes at night to listen to her music while fireflies rise and fall around her. Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.
I moved to Flint from a very desirable city, Boston, where I’d lived for ten years while I was in graduate school. I was very happy to be offered a job here, and despite Flint’s bad press—my mother and I had watched Michael Moore’s Roger and Me at Easter after I’d accepted the job—I was so thankful not to be moving to a college town like East Lansing or Ann Arbor. Something told me that I needed to be in a “real” place to begin a “real” life. So that gut feeling about Flint being more “real” has been with me for a long time, but I didn’t really take my own thought seriously until I encountered related ideas in a couple of books I happened to read for pleasure this summer. News flash: that’s why good books are essential: they help us attend to our own experiences, to take them seriously, and to make something of them. In short, literature helps us learn to think.
Summer Reading
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854)
For years I’d wanted to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I finally read it the first week of June and found it to be much deeper and more challenging than I’d anticipated. The main take-away for me was that all of us ought to live more purposefully. As you may recall, Thoreau, who’d lived in the village of Concord decides to give up village life and build a house on Walden Pond. His was an experiment in discovering what he really needed to live a satisfying life. He believes that most people don’t think they have a choice in how they live but spend the best part of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of life—old age. Thoreau recommends that we take a deeper interest in the things we love to do—in our reading, our gardening, our thinking, our walking. “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.” Thoreau arranged his life so that he had time to walk, to fish, to swim, and lots of time to read, reflect, and study. Because the cost of housing and the cost of living is significantly lower than in Flint than in many other American cities, it is possible, with a little conscious effort, to arrange our lives so that we are not slaves to our jobs or our needs for a certain high lifestyle. We can, if we desire, live in Flint as lifelong students—of Truth.
As I read Walden, I had a strong desire to buy a ruined house on the east side and rebuild it. But the more I thought about this urge, the more I realized that I can work on the house and garden I occupy on Avon Street in the East Village. Thoreau’s book actually did move me to clean out my closets—to pitch and purge—to work my way through the layers of delusions and illusions to see if the life that I am in is “real”—and by “real,” I mean a life that I am choosing. Here is how Thoreau puts it:
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui (a base), below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer*, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.”
“We crave only reality,” Thoreau writes; and when I read those words, I could not help but think back to the feeling that led me to Flint. I wanted a “real” life. But I hadn’t the courage to push my thought further, and it was only general feeling of dissatisfaction or desire for something else that Thoreau’s words worked on. One day when I was reading the book, I happened to be walking in Kearsley Park, and I asked myself: “why can’t real life be found in Ann Arbor? What do you have against college towns and ‘cool cities’?” The answer I came up with is that in such places, the good life, comes ready-made. As long as you have enough education to get a job that pays six figures, you can buy a really “nice” house. You can eat in very good restaurants. You can go to concerts, lectures, arts’ fairs—events where you can meet other interesting, educated people. Your sliding debit card satisfies all of your needs. You don’t have to make up a life, you don’t have to pull it out of yourself, you don’t need other people ever. In short, you don’t have to feel hunger, cold, pain. You will be living in padded comfort—warm in winter, cool in summer; and you will never think that this sheltered life is not terribly dissimilar from a padded cell.
William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)
It’s in a prison cell that the eponymous hero of Godwin’s novel—a book I, thankfully, chanced upon this summer—has a key insight, and it is this: with his mind, alone, he can transcend the abjection of his lower-class position. I’ll summarize the plot in a few sentences: Caleb is a very intelligent young servant who enters the employment of Ferdinando Falkland, a cosmopolitan and benevolent country gentleman. Falkland is subject to fits of unexplained melancholy, and Caleb discovers that he harbors a dark secret: he is guilty of murder and, worse, he let two poor men take the rap and be hanged for his crime. When Falkland discovers that his servant, Caleb, knows his secret, he accuses him of robbery and has him locked up. When after his prison awakening, Caleb uses his ingenuity to escape, Falkland pursues him relentlessly. It is a compelling read and offers a searing critique of Britain’s legal system and social system.
But what captured my attention was Caleb’s prison awakening to the reality that, even in the most hopeless-seeming situation, he can be his own master if he learns to control his thoughts.
“I found out the secret of employing my mind. I said, I am shut up for half the day in total darkness without any external source of amusement; the other half I spend in the midst of noise, turbulence and confusion. What then? Can I not draw amusement from the stores of my own mind? Is it not freighted with various knowledge? Have I not been employed from my infancy in gratifying an insatiable curiosity? When should I derive benefit from these superior advantages, if not at present? Accordingly I tasked the stores of my memory and my powers of invention.”
Had Caleb Williams not been imprisoned, would he have been forced to fall back on his own ingenuity? Had I moved to Ann Arbor instead of Flint, perhaps I would have had so much mental stimulation coming from without that I would not have had to use my own mental powers to write two books, many articles, keep a blog, and come up with writing projects and classes to convince students from working-class backgrounds … and you, dear readers, that literature is essential for living a good life. If we don’t discover that “the mind is its own place” perhaps we will never escape the various forms of tyranny that continue to subdue us even in this so-called democratic country.
William Godwin understood society as constituted and maintained by strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Because Caleb was born into the lower-class, it is almost impossible for him to prove his innocence in the face of Falkland’s accusations. A victim of “class profiling,” he will always be vulnerable to lies that derogate his character and criminalize him. Sound familiar? Sure. It’s the injustice that the Black Lives Matter movement was created to address. But Godwin offers a slightly different solution: he thinks that each individual must speak out and share his or her experiences in conversation and in writing. In the course of the novel, Caleb becomes a writer: from hiding, he writes the lives of criminals to make money, and in the climactic trial scene when he confronts a Falkland (radically transformed by guilt and malevolence to the resemblance of a corpse), he decides that the only thing to do is what writers strive to do—”lay the emotions of my soul naked before [his] hearers.” His story proves the strength and goodness of his character to the jury, to Falkland, and to the reader. Black lives matter—yes! Poor lives matter—certainly! But how many individuals, in the throes of loneliness or depression or addiction, wonder if their own life matters? I wager that many of us fight this battle every day. If we would only take the time to read more and better books, novelists and poets would help us be more interested in our own experiences, help us value and pursue our own unique lines of thought, and help us sing--
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.*
Inspiring Flint
Flint is a Realometer that we must check everyday. Some days it can feel like a prison from which we want nothing but to escape. Other days it feels like a laid-back mother that gives us the time and freedom we need to play at what we love. Everyday Flint is, for me, a muse or an angel of Reality that will, if we I her, help me see the earth again, “cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.”* What I felt twenty years ago is true: real life is more possible in Flint than in Ann Arbor because Flint, minus the easy-ride of GM factory jobs, throws us back on our own resources, while the city awaits the much-needed creativity of her people.
*Nilometer, a device used by ancient Egyptians to measure the rise and fall of the Nile.
*W.H. Auden, “Elegy for W.B. Yeats”
*Wallace Stevens, “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”
