For Ruby, the bath is an immersive experience, and so she tries to dip a plastic cup in the water and take a big gulp. Little kids are immune to parental squeamishness. They do this all over the world, or at least anywhere little kids take baths in porcelain bathtubs. Squeamish parents cringe and say, “No, no, we don’t do that. We don’t drink water from the tub.”
In Flint, though, our reaction is more severe. We lurch forward, our faces pale. It’s like catching your toddler tottering at the top of a flight of stairs. It’s like seeing a preschooler running headlong toward a busy street in pursuit of a plastic ball. You feel it, visceral in your gut, like someone sucker punched you and you want to puke. They might be making themselves sick from something much worse than suds and whatever scum has been washed away by the day’s play.
* * *
My wife isn’t from Flint.
I am.
Well, I grew up in the city until I was twelve, when my parents moved out to Flushing, a picturesque suburb that finally got its own coffee shop in 1997. That was the year I graduated high school. But even though I had a Flushing address, I auditioned for every play at Flint Youth Theatre and went to the Flint Central High School prom. I always considered myself a Flintstone and spent as much time as I could in the city. When I went away to college in Chicago, I always hoped to come back home. To me, Flint was a place of youthful energy and risk, frisson and connection. I was aware that I was the salmon swimming upstream, against the current of all the other people eager to leave, but I didn’t care.
When I met my eventual wife a few years later, I regaled her with all the stories of my friends and their fucked-up lives. The insane intensity of life in Flint. The city had been abandoned, I said. Physically abandoned by the company that built and nurtured it, and then again by half of its people left struggling in the wake of deindustrialization. Psychically abandoned by a state and nation that had little patience for what they saw as retrograde rust … the unrealistic expectations (they thought) of a populace that expected luxury but lacked the ingenuity and the work ethic to hold on to it. Were these assumptions justified? That was one question she might ask. I would shrug. Occasionally, I might say. Usually not. What was key, though, was that this place broke everyone, and the brokenness made us like Jesus. Conscious suffering, self-aware suffering, opened us up to beatification and grace. We Flintstones cracked open like Easter eggs that offered our provisional yolks as a sacrifice to testify to the flawed construction of the world and its human institutions. Or maybe we were just Buddhas who emptied ourselves inside out so that we could move forward as that best of blank slates: an erased American chalkboard, ready to be filled with knowledge and questions, to offer hope and transcendence to the world at large, and to find peace for ourselves. Inner peace that existed independent of external poverty.
For my wife, practical concerns edged out my visionary rants.
I wanted to go back to the place she said seemed to break everyone I knew (my fault for building the perception, after all, since I told her about the pedo that chased two friends through Woodcroft—the rich neighborhood—in his car, even while my friends in Civic Park and the State Streets—poor neighborhoods—saw neighbors’ houses light like jack-o’-lanterns and burn down on a fiery autumn night) … how on earth was I going to promise my children a happy, stable childhood in this, my fucked-up home?
“I got this,” I said.
I actually felt—and I’m not bullshitting here—more able to deliver that happy, stable childhood in Flint than anywhere else. See, in Flint, I knew the rules. It isn’t chaos. There are rules. There are especially rules if you’re 1) middle-class, 2) white, and 3) educated. And the college education supplied by my father’s almost forty years at GM under UAW-earned contracts got me there. My kids would have friends here. They would live in a stable neighborhood and go to a good school. They would have educational opportunities, we’d keep an eye on them, and it wouldn’t be any more difficult or risky than a life in Chicago, or New York, or New Orleans, or San Francisco. It would be safer, less risky, because I knew how Flint worked. I didn’t know how those other cities worked. I didn’t know their rules. I had the tools to control a child’s experience of Flint. Anything else, I’d be learning from scratch.
I said this with a lot of arrogance and a fair amount of truth, but hubris always lands the punch line.
When our first daughter was born, we decided to leave Chicago and move to Flint. Because of the fallout from the 2008 housing meltdown, we could afford a house south of Court Street, just east of downtown. When I grew up, this was one of Flint’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Now, a family on a single income could land a beautiful 1930s Tudoresque house for a down payment less than that of the tiniest Chicago bungalow, in the middle range of five figures. We could use the money we saved to choose any school for our daughter we wanted. We were close
