Who Teaches Black Boys How to Love? by Aaron Foley
Who Teaches Black Boys How to Love?
Aaron Foley
There’s no room in Detroit for a boy who does too much.
You gather your dreams and debts, pack them in a hand-me-down Hartmann, and fly off to the bigger city, just like Tracy did in the classic movie Mahogany.
Tracy wasn’t from Detroit, she was from Chicago.
Diana Ross, who played Tracy, was from Detroit though, the would-be queen of Motown Records straight from the Brewsters.
Desmond Matthews didn’t grow up in the Brewster Projects, but damn near close enough, and rough enough, in the King Homes off Lafayette.
There, he’d pretend Tracy was from Detroit, and that the peace Martin Luther King Jr. prayed for actually existed in the subsidized housing that bore his name.
There, there was so much for him to do that he knew he had to leave.
Watching Mahogany on repeat was already too much.
So was the following: Helping your grandmother and your sister, both a size eleven in women’s, pick out shoes that would look good on them.
Color coordinating your sister’s outfits, helping her with her hair, showing her Grandma’s beauty tricks—using lipstick as a quick blush, or witch hazel to dry out pimples.
Doodling, constantly. Creating lookbooks and mood boards from ad circulars, Avon catalogs, and magazines swiped from doctors’ offices.
Trying out for the dance team and being rejected.
Trying out for the cheer team and being rejected.
Asking to put on a fashion show and use the cafeteria as a runway and being rejected.
Who teaches Black boys how to love, anyway?
Especially the ones who love other boys?
They’re told to hold open doors and walk on the side of the sidewalk nearest the street, and that’s what love is.
Perhaps Desmond would learn to love—to find it, to practice it, to live in it—elsewhere.
After heartbreak came enrollment. After tears came scholarship applications.
And after this degree, he told himself, he would be packing up his suitcase and going destination: anywhere, just like the Marvelettes once said.
That’s why he didn’t have time to fool with the early-thirtysomething guy in the back of his Intro to Business Management class who kept staring him down in the beginning of the semester.
“I know you,” he said after the first day.
“Man, I don’t think we ever met,” Desmond responded in his most try-hard masculine voice.
“You used to come to Club Heaven with that tall white boy. I play records there on Saturdays.”
Desmond said he must be mistaken, and he never heard of a Club Heaven in Detroit.
The deejay asked if he was sure. Then the deejay said it was okay, he wouldn’t tell.
Then Desmond relaxed his shoulders and asked if he just happened to be playing records this coming Saturday, and the deejay responded he just might be.
There’s no tolerance for a lazy Black man in Detroit.
Folks worked too hard to get here from the red clay spotted with blood specks from whips and cotton sprigs, feet calloused from tending land and running from horsemen who only ride in darkness.
Motor City men ride, for lack of a better term, until the wheels fall off.
For Wilbur—he hated his name, sounding too much like places the great migrants intentionally left behind—he always had to have a backup plan.
He couldn’t put his hands to work anymore at Dodge Main assembly plant after the layoffs.
The Japanese were putting their hands to better use and making cars all Americans—except Detroiters—actually wanted to buy.
Wilbur couldn’t rest, so he immediately enrolled at Lewis.
The laid-off Black auto workers were flocking to Lewis College of Business for another way up.
They found their velocity at the only Black college in the state of Michigan that fast-tracked folks to accounting offices and IBM terminals.
The women wanted off the assembly lines and into the secretary pools.
Men, always wanting more, wanted the office with a secretary.
Wilbur wanted to be the next Berry Gordy, even though Gordy hadn’t been seen in Detroit for about a decade, ever since he hightailed it to Los Angeles.
There was a girl at the plant, Valencia, who also got laid off, that was performing some nights at Club Heaven.
Wilbur thought he could make her his own Diana.
He’d play instrumentals of the newest singles at the club, and she’d sing along—after he’d coached her on vocal tricks and techniques backstage, showing her when best to belt that soprano she’d developed singing in Second Baptist over in Greektown and when to rein it in.
“I wish you liked me for more than my voice,” Valencia said.
“And what makes you think I don’t?” Wilbur asked.
“You ain’t got to be honest with me now but do me a favor and be honest with yourself some point soon.”
A Detroit man at Wilbur’s age—twenty-nine—should have a family to support by now.
But he had no kids, no wife, not even a girlfriend.
No one ever questioned it until they did.
“I’m not trying to be tied down,” Wilbur would say, and it was as easy as that.
It was also easy to conceal that Valencia had been the only one of his plant co-workers who knew of his Saturday-night moonlighting at Club Heaven, so long as he never told anyone where she was that following Sunday morning.
“I’m gonna start my own production company and record company and make you my first act,” Wilbur said to her about why he enrolled at Lewis instead of looking for another factory job.
“But I have to get the skills first. And we’re gonna do the whole nine.
Alicia Myers is doing it, Anita Baker is doing it. You’re next.”
“I think you’re doing too much,” Valencia said. “But if you say so. I ain’t got all day for you to finish a degree, though, so hurry up and make me a star before we all end up on the welfare line.”
Desmond was grown enough to walk out the apartment without an explanation of what he’d be doing and where but perhaps getting too old to be doing it so frequently without a source of income, so he did inform his grandmother that he was going to see a disc jockey at a club for a little while and that he wouldn’t be out too late.
His grandmother said to be careful and to remember that both God and his mama were watching and to not do anything they wouldn’t do.
He drove his Chevy Vega up Woodward Avenue and parked by a liquor store off Seven Mile and walked into Heaven.
Club Heaven. A mirror ball hung from the center, a spotlight carefully aimed on it to create an electronic snow globe, encircling the boys and men who wanted to dance with each other or themselves.
Desmond made the rounds and greeted the ones he knew before he bumped into Wilbur.
He was taller than he remembered from their first encounter outside of the Lewis classroom. Wearing a ringer tee that accented his biceps, which Desmond didn’t know he was hiding under the Generra sweatshirt he was wearing that autumn day. And the electric snowflakes made his cocoa brown skin glow.
“You made it just in time,” Wilbur said.
“In time for what,” Desmond said, trying not to make eye contact.
“I’m playing a new record tonight to start off my set. I wrote and produced it myself.”
“You write songs?”
“And produce them. You got wax in your ears?”
“I hear just fine, maybe you need to speak up.”
“Listen up. I got my friend from high school to play the keyboards and another one to play drums. Then we got some other folks together for the rest of the instrumentals and all that.”
“What high school did you go to?”
“Henry Ford.”
“Oh, you grew up on the west side.”
“And let me guess, you grew up on the east side.”
“Yeah, and I went to Cass Tech.”
“I can tell.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“You Cass Tech graduates love to tell people you went to Cass Tech,” Wilbur said. “What are you doing over at Lewis? Kinda small for you, right?”
“We all have to get a degree from somewhere.”
“Cass is so big, though. You gotta be feeling trapped in these business courses.”
Desmond couldn’t help but agree. Cass Tech, a massive old schoolhouse, was right outside the tall hulks of downtown Detroit, just across an expressway overpass where sometimes kids would cut class to go to the massive Hudson’s Department Store on Woodward, or skulk around the newly built Renaissance Center.
Lewis was far off in the midcentury west side of Detroit, and almost blended right in. Each building on campus—there were exactly four—was two stories and fell in perfect harmony with the all-brick houses rising to the same height.
“Anyway, my friend here is singing on this. Her name is Valencia.”
Valencia came from behind and gave Desmond a hug, and Wilbur a kiss on the cheek. “I’ve got to go backstage and finish getting ready. See you in a minute.”
Desmond looked at Wilbur. “So she must be your lady.”
“She’s not.”
“Is there anything between you two?”
“Not at all, but she’s real friendly. Why, you jealous or something?”
“First of all, you don’t even know me like that.”
“I know you got a taste for those white boys.”
“Oh, that’s bold. We’ll see how this song of yours sounds then.”
“I’m not trying to be bold. I’m just trying to get you to loosen up.”
“I’m doing fine, thank you. But your little girlfriend isn’t even close to being ready.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Her makeup isn’t done.”
“Oh, so is that something you can help with?”
“May I?”
Desmond made his way backstage with Wilbur pacing behind. “I’m not decent!” Valencia shouted.