Devil's Night Read Online Free PDF

steady diet of racially loaded charge and countercharge.
    Most of all, the city and suburbs are separated by a cultural and emotional gap as wide as any that divides hostile nations. The suburbs purr with the contented sounds of post-Reagan America while the city teeters on the brink of separatism and seethes with the resentments of postcolonial Africa.
    Twenty years in the Middle East had given me a good eye for tribal animosity, and in Detroit, even during my first days there, I recognized it. Strangely, it didn’t seem personal. The local disposition is mild, even friendly. A great many people, black and white, were born in the South, and it shows in their manners. Strangers nod to one another on the street and make small talk in elevators. Standing next to one another at public urinals, men smile and say “How y’doin?” Black and white Detroiters rarely meet, but when they do—at work, in suburban shopping malls or at other neutral sites—it is not at all unusual for them to get along amicably.
    In fact, the tribal rivalries, fears and hatred in Detroit tend to be collective and abstract. Each side has an orthodox, almost ritual explanation for what has happened to the city they once shared and no longer do, and, not surprisingly, each side blames the other.
    Shortly after coming to the city I was introduced to Tom De Lisle, an engaging man in his early forties who grew up in Detroit and, in the seventies, served as spokesman for the city’s last white mayor,Roman Gribbs. Although he now lives in the suburbs, he still works in town, as a producer for WDIV, the NBC television affiliate. It was from him that I first heard the white version of what went wrong.
    â€œThis is the place where the wheels came off the wagon of Western civilization,” he told me in a voice that mixed sadness with anger. “This town has become unlivable. What I want to know is, where’s the outrage? There is no outrage here. This is a town that is down for the count—and maybe already being carried out of the ring. You’d think there would be an outcry, or at least some sympathy for the victim. Detroit is as helpless and hopeless a place as any in America.
    â€œBelieve me, this town is a goddamned disaster area; it just exists from day to day. I’ve lived in New York and L.A., but the difference is that here, there’s no way to get out. Detroit is one big prison with Eight Mile as the gate.”
    Tom De Lisle is not unaware of the conditions that brought the city to its present state. “It was never easy to be a black in Detroit,” he conceded. “Blacks felt—rightly—victimized. There were always racist cops. But the riot never stopped in Detroit. Both the criminals and the cops understood that it was a whole new ball game. In the seventies, it was like a gang war between the blacks and the cops—and the blacks won.”
    The flight to the suburbs—by both whites and middle-class blacks—was, in De Lisle’s view, a simple desire to escape the endemic violence of the city. “In metropolitan Detroit today, fear is the most pervasive single factor,” he said. “When I worked for the mayor, almost every member of his staff suffered a major crime. One night someone pumped three shots through my window for no reason. One of the mayor’s secretaries was brutally raped. In the City-County Building. During working hours.
    â€œMy grandparents lived on East Grand Boulevard,” he continued. “Somebody stole their air conditioner right out of the wall. My grandmother used to look out the back window to tell my grandfather when it was safe to get his car out of the garage. There arethousands of stories like that. And when people report them to the cops, the cops say ‘Move.’
    â€œEverything goes back to the racial situation. Detroit has been the first major American city to cope with going from white to black. And whites left.