Ima Nell adjusted to the isolation of the new suburb, the long, lonely nights, family 600 miles distant. They may as well have been an ocean away in the Old Country. Her constant companion was the radio until I came along. Between that first Hamtramck apartment and our small brick ranch on a tract carved from old orchard, they had rented a flat on East Grand Boulevard near Belle Isle. Only a few years earlier, in the early years of the war, the island park was the scene of a bloody race riot between newly arrived Southern whites and vested Black auto workers. She worked for a time in the office of a downtown Detroit life insurance company, putting her typing skills to use. She loved the work; loved the freedom and the thrill of sidewalks teeming with postwar optimism.
Gene was on the road much of the time during their first decade in Michigan, returning home to shower, sleep, and eat before heading out once again. He didn’t share her enthusiasm for the maddening crowd, her yearning for home. I wonder whether it had ever been his intention to anchor himself to one particular place, the intense desire to escape his guiding light. With a mortgage hanging over his head, a second child on the scene, roots firmly planted in northern soil, Gene’s discontent flowered and spread like kudzu. I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame, but my desire for my father made it necessary to renounce my mother and deny the strong bond we had once enjoyed—I learned to marginalize her in order to curry his favor. Likewise, she was obliged to choose.
If I had to explain in two words our shared dilemma, I would be tempted to offer up the obscure nugget, Hobson’s Choice. I don’t mean to suggest that Thomas Hobson, English liveryman who lent his name to the dilemma of being forced to choose between two objectionable options or nothing at all, is implicated in my decision to volunteer with the Red Cross in Flint. Had I not gone, life would have continued on its familiar arc. Flint wouldn’t have missed me in the slightest. At the same time, my long estrangement from my mother, ending with her death, had everything to do with my going to Flint. Flint transformed me. Or, rather, it was the first step in a long journey of transformation.
She was self-centered, manipulative, and could be childish and petulant when it suited her, but she loved me with singular ferocity, and I, her. We grew apart—gingerly, civilly, but not without mutual wounds of recrimination.
Nearly midway through the second decade of the new century, with her condition deteriorating, independence evaporating, I find myself longing for reconciliation, but wary of entanglement, fearful of succumbing to her overwhelming need. Fearful, too, of facing the truth. I need her badly. Maybe far more than she needs me.
Flint. A river runs through it, though more industrial trough than robust waterway. The river and city are on the cusp of worldwide notoriety. In less than two years, grieving my mother’s death, I will find myself prowling the city’s streets in my official capacity as disaster volunteer. But today, I’m mired in worries of my own.
TWO
Flint is boxed in north and south, east and west, by interstate highway and a bypass, a web of concrete and asphalt built chiefly to serve the needs of industry. On maps, the city is situated on the mound of a sprawling, industrial-sized baseball diamond—the chemical plants and refineries of Sarnia, Ontario at first base; Saginaw’s automotive suppliers and Midland’s Dow Chemical on second; Lansing’s auto plants and the state capital holding down third; Detroit calling pitches behind home plate. Balance a bat along an axis between Grand Rapids and London, Ontario—Flint is your fulcrum.
Beyond the baseline, table-flat farmland extends north into Michigan’s thumb, endless outfield where they raise sugar beets, soy beans, corn, and a particular strain of anti-government libertarianism. The McVeigh brothers, Timothy and James, along with accomplice Terry Nichols, once called Michigan’s thumb home. Budding domestic terrorists, they perfected homemade fertilizer bombs in the endless, isolated, corduroy expanse of plowed fields and distant wind breaks. Hit a long fly ball and, if the wind is right, watch it carry left past West Branch for an out-of-the-park home run, ricocheting among white pine and jack pine forests up north. Unless, of course, it drifts foul into shallow Saginaw Bay.
THREE
I deploy to Flint, wary of the city’s Action News reputation for mayhem, alert to the very real human cost of grinding, generational poverty. My heart is with the city’s residents. My natural inclination, to side with the underdog. Most, but not all, of the people who will invite me into their homes over the coming months are people of color. All, with few exceptions, are poor. My colleagues in the water delivery business are, for the most part, white, from somewhere outside the city. Circumstances have conspired to bring us all together in wholly unpredictable ways. If I’m feeling anxious, uncertain as to whom and what I’ll encounter, imagine the people peering out from behind all those front doors. For all my ambivalence about my reasons for being here—swooping in to save the thirsty people of Flint, or simply lending a hand to neighbors in need—imagine life on the receiving end. Decades of insult on top of injury, a people asked to pay the price, once again, for this nation’s original sin. I’d grown up confused, listening to my father’s casual racism, bias born of resentment. I recall as a small child visiting Tennessee with my family, sitting with him and my maternal grandfather on the screen porch, asking whether there were any “colored people” living there. I’d never seen anyone of color on our trips south. They erupted in gales of laughter. My face burned, the joke on me, neither of them seeing fit to explain the punchline. I’d grown up with every advantage, rejected my father’s bitterness, but was slow to appreciate just how lucky I was. Now, newly arrived in Flint, stoked with righteous rage, I’m keenly aware of just how charmed a life I’ve led. Over the coming months, I’ll meet hundreds of Flint residents. We’ll endure many awkward encounters and enjoy occasional moments of grace.
I begin my first day in the flatly fluorescent bowels of the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department Emergency Command Center in downtown Flint. Uniformed officers, State Police troopers, and Michigan National Guardsman sit around a table in a too-warm, windowless basement. They chat, drink coffee, and manage to look casually lethal, drowsily blasé, and vigilant as Dobermans, all at the same time. We’ve come to retrieve a tactical radio transmitter that will, when activated, summon armed officers faster than a frantic call through the 911 system. At least that’s what I’m told. I feel as though we’re about to leave the safety of some blast-walled Green Zone, heedless of the caution implied by these taciturn veterans. The radio will serve as an unwelcome reminder on this, my first day, and all the days to come, of the messiness of delivering water in Flint. Our business concluded, short and sweet, we head back through the labyrinth of tiled corridors and echoing stairways and make our way outside. The sun is just coming up behind clouds of steel wool loaded with abraded shipyard gray.
Our first stop, a warehouse on the north side where tractor trailers unload pallets of bottled water from all over the lower forty-eight and Canada. We are handed the keys to a Penske box truck, wait in line to back up a loading ramp into a cavernous bay where we will receive the first two of the day’s four pallets. Twenty burly men in camo Carhartt bibs and Cabela caps sit around a long table, chasing cigarettes with coffee, Red Bull, and Mountain Dew. Their role in the water game isn’t readily apparent to me. Warehousing a single commodity in such vast quantities at such a rapid rate of turnover doesn’t appear to require a great deal of manpower. Palleted H2O comes in one set of