Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

Recently, feeling fractured by competing deadlines, I found myself distractedly stuck in the loop of a particular cinematic moment: the rap battle between Eminem’s character, B-Rabbit, and Anthony Mackie’s character, “Papa Doc” (aka “Clarence”), in the 2002 hip-hop biomythographical movie “8 Mile.” 

Detroit is an uncredited star of “8 Mile.” It’s also one of my homes, my mother’s home. I’ve been thinking of her lineage, as I often am, but especially during Black History Month. Infamously the shortest honorific of a month each year–it grew out of Negro History Week, created by Carter G. Woodson, one of my own ancestors, a cousin on the Woodson side of my family. Her side.

A thing that is often missed about Detroit, a so-called Chocolate City if ever there was one, is that it is actually and historically one of the more notably and spectacularly diverse cities in the country. Long before (and ever since) the great migration north of African Americans–driven significantly by the auto industry’s unusual (for the time) decision to recruit and hire Black workers–Detroit was marked by deeply entrenched ethnic diversity. 

Irish, Jewish, Syrian, Greek, Anishinaabe, Odawa, Ojibwe, Polish, Italian, and German residents together built and expanded the city from its roots as a French trading post to one of the most powerful metropolitan areas in the country. Detroit was so powerful it bent time; its clocks (which, following the sun, should actually match its close-by Central Time neighbor, Chicago) were instead cemented into the Eastern Time Zone to sync with the demands of finance and industry. 

This is why, to me, B-Rabbit’s rap battle victory is so pinnacle–not just with regard to the commentary on class vs race to which it’s so often boiled down–but because Detroit itself has always pushed so firmly both into and against such simple binaries. Detroit is one of the few cities in the U.S. from which one must cross a river, heading south, to reach Canada, and each mile-marker street acknowledges its northward stretch from the national border of its city center.

Today’s poem is one of those that crushes me with its ending. It makes me grasp my chest; I bend at the waist as if being punched, or held tight and sure against a fall. Our Detroit poet manages to whittle the grand and often devastating expansiveness of history right down to the explosive synapses which drive and alight our very gray matter. And in the end, these binaries which so often divide us, if we are truthful, are far more gray than black and white. 

Historical Site
by Tommye Blount

Still it’s dark enough
this morning that I can see
the fireflies going off and on—
recording what angles
the old house’s cameras cannot 
see. Something  is watching me,
so I keep my distance 
when I strain my eyes to read
the lit plaque
to the left of the front door.
My eyes are useless;
vision not good enough
to parse out what part of history
is important enough to warrant
bronze foundry. I overheard at Meijer
one day that some part of this house
was used to hide slaves until nightfall
when they’d follow the stars 
south of here, to Canada. As often with history,
this house has been restaged. Not even the land it squats on
is the original address, the house lifted
from its foundation
a mile down the road,
yet it makes for a lovely setting for white
weddings, picnics, guided tours.
I’m afraid of this big house
when it is dark like this;
when I  am dark like this. 
Not a slave, I can read
and want to run
my finger across the raised lettering,
even though that would trigger some alarm;
would flood the yard with white light; 
would signal the police to come
and the police would flood me with white light—
so many stars spangling all over me.
I’d be the constellation those runaways
angled their necks up to—
blinking and blinking.

"Historical Site" by Tommye Blount from FANTASIA FOR THE MAN IN BLUE © 2020 Tommye Blount. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.