I walk around the side, to Joy Road, thinking there must be another door I’ve never seen. Nothing. There’s a small backyard protected by a tall gate. No entrance there, either.
I come back around to the front and knock on the door really loud. Finally, I hear heavy footsteps. I guess I didn’t hear Matant Jo come in after all. She opens the door, but instead of my aunt’s face, or any one of my cousins greeting me, it’s an older white man.
I quickly apologize and step back away from the door and run down the steps, thinking that I got turned around somehow. But I look back at the house, now with its door closed. It’s still 8800 American Street. So I go back and knock again. Now it’s a white woman who opens the door. I apologize. She closes the door. I don’t move because the number on the house still reads 8800. So I knock again. This time, a younger white man opens the door.
“Excuse me,” I ask. “Is this eighty-eight hundred?”
I must’ve scared him, because his eyes open wide, wide, and he shuts the door. But before I knock again, he’s back. This time I’m staring at a gun. A gun!
And the only thing I can do is throw my hands up to my face and scream.
It goes off with a loud bang.
I scream and scream until I hear my name.
“Fabiola! Fabiola!”
I open my eyes to bright light and Chantal’s face standing over me, calling my name over and over again until I stop screaming and realize that I’ve been in bed all along.
“Are you okay?” Chantal asks.
“No,” I say. As my heart calms down, as my breath softens, I get up to work on my altar.
I tie my head with my mother’s white scarf, fill the white enamel mug with water from the bathroom sink, light another tea candle with a match, and recite my prayer to Papa Legba once again.
THE STORY OF 8800 AMERICAN STREET
There was work here in Detroit—cars, houses, factories, highways. Here was the American dream built brick by brick, screw by screw, concrete over dirt.
So Adrian Weiss and his wife, Ruth, moved into 8800 American Street in July 1924, after that long journey from Poland, and Ellis Island, and the tenements of New York City. He’d been working in the Ford River Rouge complex for the last five years when Ruth gave birth to their first child in the middle of a snowstorm. Adrian came home two days later, drunk, smelly, bruised, and without a job because Henry Ford had zero tolerance for drunkards and their bathtub gin. So why not gin? Adrian loved it just as much as he loved the Model T. And there was more money with the Purple Gang and its bootlegging.
Months later, Ruth hid money beneath the mattresses, in Mason jars, in the ice box, in the backyard. Adrian liked to flaunt his money, even during the Great Depression of 1929, when the other husbands were let go from their jobs, and the women knocked on the door of 8800 American Street for some bread and milk or for some of that well-hidden money.
So maybe it was the jealous husbands on American Street, or unpaid debt owed to some members of the Purple Gang, that led to the shooting of Adrian Weiss on the corner of American Street and Joy Road. And maybe it was because of this first act of violence at the crossroads of hopes and dreams that death lingered around that house like a baby ghost.
So in 1942, Ohio native and father of one Wilson Coolidge, who’d bought the house from Ruth Weiss four years earlier, was struck by a car on the corner of American and Joy.
Father of two, Alabama native, and son of a sharecropper, Lester Charles Walker was one of American Street’s very first black residents in 1947. He was shot and killed by his white neighbor just as he stepped out of 8800.
The old families, whose grandfathers and fathers worked at the Ford plant, were fleeing the neighborhood as if it was the second coming of the black plague. White flight, they called it. And it swept over most of Detroit like a giant bird of prey.
It was no use selling 8800 since kinfolk from Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina were now moving in, and on most days, they gathered on the sidewalks and the porches for gossip and cookouts.
Death had moved away from 8800 American Street and traveled to the many broken parts of the city. So during the 12th Street riot in July 1967, Lester Junior was struck by a single bullet to the head.
The youngest Walker son rented out 8800 all through the eighties and nineties when Death claimed the lives of dealers and junkies alike. Until the day came when a black man in a suit and with a funny accent decided to call it his little dream house. He wanted what the very first residents wanted: to be American and to have some Joy.
So in 2000, Jean-Phillip Fran?ois, the Haitian immigrant and the first occupant to actually land a job at a car factory—the Chrysler plant—paid the city three thousand dollars in cash for that little house on American Street.