affinity, nor harbor any bad blood. Just another town through which I’ve passed free of claim, like Camden, Maine; Greenville, South Carolina; or Great Falls, Montana. Unlike those other places, however, Flint is only a ninety-minute drive north from where I live, home to fellow Michiganders—trolls like me, living below the Mackinac Bridge. My taxes went to pay the salaries of the men responsible for the disaster and those endeavoring to deflect responsibility and avoid criminal prosecution. Michigan taxpayers and the citizens of Flint will foot much of the bill and endure all of the heartache for a scheme borne of market solution, anti-tax, small government machinations. What happened in Flint could happen to any community. It could happen to mine, but that’s unlikely. I live in a mostly white, financially solvent suburb just north of Detroit. The majority Black citizens of Flint were considered politically irrelevant and socially expendable by those in power long before their water supply was contaminated with lead. Flint, like other poor communities of color around the state, is much more likely to suffer the disastrous consequences of ideological social engineering put to practice.
My mother, Ima Nell Hardin, began showing the first signs of decline that will lead to her eventual death, around the time Flint’s water troubles began. We were inseparable my first five years, moon and planet in symbiotic orbit around my often absent yet omnipresent father.
Gene Hardin had escaped north from impoverished east Tennessee a few years after returning from the war. He fled a dirt-poor tobacco patch in the shadow of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Freed himself from a tyrannical grandfather, a cold, overbearing mother, and a father bullied into submissive silence. He never looked back on the twilight hollow of his unhappy childhood. He was lured to Michigan by good paying union work in the lower tier of the automobile industry—hauling new Chryslers to small towns throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Ima Nell married him straight out of high school, where she had demurred on academics for an independent study in the gossamer web of dewy boy-and-girl romance, patiently waiting for eligible prey to light, unawares. Together, they fled south across the Georgia state line to marry in a hasty civil ceremony, before lighting off for the territories—Hamtramck, Michigan.
Hamtramck, then as now, is a point of entry for immigrants from around the world, hungry for work, opportunity, and a better life for their children. When my Southern parents arrived, they washed ashore well behind established beachheads of Great Migration African Americans, Poles, and other eastern and southern Europeans, refugees displaced by war, pogrom, revolution, and Jim Crow. Many had prospered sufficiently to purchase homes elsewhere. Poles and Italians north along Gratiot Avenue, then out beyond Eight Mile Road. Jews and Chaldeans to points north and west. Latinos to the southwest side, and north to the orchard land of Macomb County. White southerners, south and southwest to cities like Lincoln Park, Taylor, and Romulus. African Americans had thrived since the nineteenth century in vibrant Black Bottom, just east of downtown Detroit, but were red-lined to isolated enclaves scattered throughout the metropolitan area after that neighborhood was razed to make way for a major freeway. Gene and Ima Nell followed Gratiot north, settling two miles beyond the Detroit city limits.
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
