1455: Historical Site by Tommye Blount

I'm Samia 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, a.k.a. Clarence, in the 2002 hip-hop biomythographical movie Eight Mile. Detroit is an uncredited star of Eight 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 there ever 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 Ottawa 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 versus race to which it 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 in a light 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 Sight by Tommy 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 be the constellation those runaways angled their necks up to Blinking and blinking. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. And find us on Instagram at slowdownshow and bluesky at slowdownshow.org. Thank you. in Texas. This special investigates breakthrough transformations and how we build homes for the 21st century. You can listen to this episode now by searching for This Old House Radio Hour in your podcast app.