Concrete Jungle

Revitalize the waterfront area, the mayor cried in every campaign speech. The Ambassador Bridge was reinforced with maintenance directed to develop commerce and to avert a potential disaster in the commuter traffic crossings in mid winter, when in the colder twentieth century the Detroit River was often jammed with ice, but soon after the tunnel was repaired there was a panic where people feared being crushed to death and drowned. So the bridge was better the route to take. Downtown Detroit was trying to lure the tourist dollars, yet newspaper scare stories of young black thugs patrolling the streets in a crime wave prevented needed investors.

The bad reputation of the city caused destructive vibrations and infected enough millionaire investors to send them suddenly running for the suburbs. In the same way, the police departments entrenched themselves in a posture to protect humanity from the danger and unpleasantness of the slums and ghettos, minorities were being rounded up and sent off to prisons across Michigan or systematically disenfranchised by the powers that be. Curfews were put into action, directed to relieve the congestion on the street corners. The state began pumping more money into prison systems and less in the urban educational systems. There was more money in the budget to tackle nerve-shattering eyesores that depressed property values rather than to feed and shelter the homeless.

The Renaissance Age propelled the city into modern arenas, yet obliterated God's last gift to the poor – smiles. For most of the population, the changes wrought by man's inventiveness were only promises of a better future, promises that turned out to be empty. The distance between the rich and poor widened throughout the age of technology. Intimacy was sacrificed. A new class of people arose during these times, the working poor. The slavery of the working class continued into the twentieth century, slavery that was in the main unchanged from the beginnings of America's industrial revolution. Workers still lived in hovels. One could not walk on any street in Detroit without seeing the effects of the desperate poverty.

Dion lived surrounded by what his life could have been if Junebug had not rescued him. For instance, his relationship with Sharon had sunk in a round of loathing and self-destruction. They learned to despise each other without ever letting go of, or admitting to the emotional bond between them. They had not touched each other in months. He suspected that she had had more affairs than she could remember, but he knew that she would probably let him kill her before she would tell him anything. Learning this small thing about her, he knew, bit by slow bit over the years, was as much a part of the landscape of his maturing as the changes in the city around them, the optimism the changes made everybody feel, the poverty that haunted him, the lives he had led – and Belle Isle, naturally Belle Isle, the place he took the young ladies when he wanted to convince them that he was the sort of young man they had always dreamed would pull down their panties. He found that the easiest way to do it was to look pleasantly and intently into their eyes and let them talk themselves into it.