What made the music?
That statement clung to my thoughts suddenly. Yes, what about this city got the people to sing and harmonize the way they did? You know, like certain places out west in this country inspired beach music, yet nothing else sounded like Motown. Berry Gordy, a Young African American Male (this group of adjectives tends to send people scurrying to their statistic sheets on drugs, crime, and death) who worked in a factory and lived in the city where I was born, decided that the music that he would create would have a certain sound. He did whatever it took to get it done. In creating that Motown sound he affected a city, a generation, and countless lives. In the process of making music, he not only affected the lives of the people he knew but the lives of people he would never meet — people from half a world away.
I was stunned at the significance of that revelation.
I remembered looking at the 45s that my parents owned. The shiny black disc, larger, more pliable, and much less foreboding and antiseptic than the metallic-looking CDs that we listen to today. The funny-shaped little yellow thingy that you popped into its center to play it on the stereo, that was surrounded by the blue label with a little map of Detroit with the red star, showing the entire world where both I and the Motown Sound were born. People who otherwise may have never given Detroit a second thought discovered the city that way, through hearing the music. Young American soldiers found respite as they listened to it while they lived and some died in murky rice paddies and jungles far away from the streets and the house parties of their youth.
There are many times that I look around this city and see nothing other than burned-out and dilapidated old neighborhoods. Neighborhoods filled with homes and buildings whose usefulness has become nothing more than insidious schemes. Lately, whenever I drive around the city where both of my parents as well as all of their children were born and raised, I no longer see the city of my youth, the one that once vibrated — literally — with sounds. The coffee-and-cream voices of Marvin and Tammy crooning, Ain’t no mountain high enough, that wafted up from the convertible Deuce-and-a-Quarters and finned Caddies that rolled up the streets. They are now replaced with hoopties that pump out Jay-Z as he tells me about Big Pimpin’, while his sampled soundtrack, that measures 8.5 on the Richter scale, rattles the windows of the homes that are left standing. I see a city that I once loved creeping along in its fifth renaissance, a town trying to find an identity without the virtue of direction. A town that reflects its citizens, or did its citizens reflect the town? Am I black, African American, or a person of color? Am I angry, upwardly mobile, or just a sellout? A playa, a hoe, or a man? A sinner or saint? Who or what was my town right now? Did my perspective allow me the blessing to care?
Elliot saw none of these things. For Elliot, this wasn’t Detroit, 1999. It was Motown, circa 1960s. Elliot and Diana saw the specters of a lost time that brought joyful memories to their minds and warmed their hearts. Elliot saw the town that spoke to his teen and young-adult years, producing the perfect aphrodisiac to woo the love of his life and eventual mother of his children. He saw Detroit — pre-riot — when downtown radiated with life; when groups with names like The Temptations, The Marvelettes, and The Miracles danced — in the Motown style — in suits and shimmering dresses; when every Friday night the Fox Theatre presented the Motown Review, the proving ground where young men and women perfected the love songs that they performed on street corners and school talent shows. Motown, the city that nurtured the hope that they would be the next Smokey or Marvin, or that their words would join “The Tracks of My Tears” or “Love Child” on the airwaves that floated even across an ocean to waiting ears. A glow rested on Elliot’s face, replacing the shroud of death that had earlier hung on him like a ten-dollar suit. I thought of something from the Bible: Rejoice young man in thy youth. That was what Elliot was right then, this scripture transformed into flesh.
I thought of the times that I had asked — that’s too soft of a word, implored! — my students to “watch what happens when you change your perspective.” At what point had I lost mine? Feeling a bit like the Pharisees, I looked around the house — the house that Berry, Diana, and Smokey built — once again trying to see it through Elliot or Diana’s eyes.
“Ya never realized ya lived in such an interesting city, did ya?” Diana looked me straight in the eyes triumphantly. She seemed to be gloating just slightly, as if she were letting me know that she saw things that I didn’t.
“Thanks for the reality check,” I said sincerely.
“Anytime.”
“You like this music, do you?” Elliot asked.
“Yeah, I grew up just like your daughter did, listening to the music of my parents. They neglected to name any of their children after any of the artists, however. Man, I wish my name was Tito.” We all laughed.
Elliot coughed and cleared his throat. Doing this caused him some pain. He shut his eyes tightly. He sat there motionless for just a few seconds. A lone tear emerged slowly from beneath his eyelid, then slid down his leathery right cheek as if it was in fear of being discovered. The grim, pained expression on his face melted into the calm that he had shown only moments ago when his daughter and my kids sang their rendition of “Stop! In the Name of Love.” His eyes were clear and his face showed no sign of death at that moment, then he spoke. It wasn’t rough and scratchy like it had been previously, a voice that was being infected by the same sickness that had bent his body. He spoke in his voice, clearly yet softly. He sounded distinguished and learned as only the British can.
“Back in ’68, I took my wife — well, she was just a girl I liked at the time — out to a pub one night. We ’ad been dancing to a lot of music, you know, the Jerk, the Twist — my favorite dance was the Camel Walk … Then they put on some Stevie Wonder. She and I socialed together to it.”
Elliot took off his face mask, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back, taking in a deep breath, as if he smelled the fragrance of his girl — his love — right there, his memories having become incarnate.
“Aaah, I can still ’ ear that song,” he said, his eyes still closed in dreamy retrospection. His right hand began to snap his fingers to a melody that played inside his mind, a slow-dance for him and his love.
Then Elliot did something that I was totally unprepared for, he began singing. Not a croaking, raspy-voiced whisper, but actually a pretty good imitation of Stevie Wonder.
“La-la-laa-la-laa-laaaa, La-la-laa-la-laa-laaaa. My cherie ahh-mour, lovely as a summer’s day …” He went on and sang more of Stevie’s love song. As the last of the lyrics eased from his mouth — “Mah cherie amour, pretty little one that I ah-dore. You’re the only one mah haarrt beats for, how I wish that you were mine” — I began to finish the song off for him, and in the middle of the La-la-laa’s, Diana joined me and we finished together.
For a moment Elliot had left his sickness, his twisted body, and his leathery skin. He had become Elliot Taylor — Motown Sound Casanova — singing love songs softly into the ear of his girl as he slow danced with her. A brief respite from reality as he went back to a point in his life when face masks, bottled oxygen, and a wheelchair were as far away as the moon. Elliot’s memory freed him from the confines of the wheelchair, something that doctors, their orders, modern medicine, and technology had failed to do.
“That was the night I fell in love with your mum,” he said to Diana, taking her hand and rubbing it against his cheek tenderly. She smiled the smile of a well-loved child and replaced her father’s face mask, just in time for another coughing fit that knocked a few more moments off his life.