I'm calling this one "party politics" but we're talking about a different kind of party here. I got on the road midnight Monday to make the bi-yearly drive to Detroit. Takes about 8.5 hours, so we usually get there around 9:30 or so (we lose an hour because of the time shift between cst and est). We drive this late because I've got a black nation, and we don't want any of them to be awake during the drive.
But we drove this late on MONDAY rather than last night, because I wanted to hit Half Past Three. Now I've talked about the superpromoters before. Whereas Black Diamonds should probably be considered third generation (and half of those folks have Detroit ties) Half Past Three's co-owner JD Simpson is probably second generation. I knew that if I made it there I'd see pretty much all the folks that I wouldn't be able to contact personally to let them know I was back in town for about a week.
The spot has changed...but in a way that is truly refreshing, and indicative of the degree to which class integration is possible in black spaces.
When Half Past Three first opened almost four years ago...maybe a bit more...it was largely a spot for Our Kind of People. In the Detroit case you're talking about either the scions of Jack and Jill or the folks who slipped through the cracks through affiliations created in undergrad or high school.
Me and my wife slipped through because we both went to Michgan.
Whenever I was back in the city, and I didn't know where to find the folks, I'd stop by Simpson's place. And here I'd get the dish. Who made partner, who finished his residency, who got divorced, who just got a fat county contract. So in the beginning it was a spot for male and female professionals.
But try as you might, you simply can't keep a joint like that secret for long. Now usually when the working class brothers and sisters start to come in large numbers, the professionals find another spot. But that didn't happen here, at least not to a significant degree.
So last night I saw plant managers, janitors, doctors, lawyers, judges, millionaire DJs, basketball players, gangsters, drug dealers, social workers, accountants, and executives all in the same spot. All dressed to the nines.
Literally a thousand different shades of black. And when the DJ dropped the new Outkast in the blue room EVERYONE STARTED TO MOVE.
Kwame Kilpatrick is representative of this type of integration. I don't know if it'll get translated into an integrated politics...but on the eve of xmas eve, and I'm seeing Detroit's east and west side meet, I can roll with it.
Posted by at December 24, 2003 10:38 AM | TrackBack