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Long-time Detroiters refer to the historic African American districts of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom as if the names are interchangeable, but they originally referred to two different inner east-side areas sharing the border of Gratiot Avenue. Black Bottom, proceeding south from Gratiot to the Detroit River, was the older of the two. Paradise Valley—which attained its identity in the 1920s and 30s—spread north with the growing African-American population from Gratiot along the major thoroughfares of John R, Brush, Beaubien, St. Antoine, Hastings, and Russell, eventually stretching to the area known as the North End beyond the northern loop of East Grand Boulevard.

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1. The Paradise Valley Poems of Robert Hayden and Dudley Randall

 

Two well-known poets, Robert Hayden (1913-1980) and Dudley Randall (1914-2000), grew up in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. Hayden, born in what was to become known as Paradise Valley, lived with his foster-parents in homes on St. Antoine, Beacon, and Napoleon Streets, and East Vernor Highway; worshiped at Second Baptist Church; attended Detroit schools, graduating from Northern High School and Wayne University; and worked as a reporter and columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, a radio host for CKLW, and a researcher and writer for the Federal Writer's Project before leaving the city in 1940 to attend graduate school in Ann Arbor (Williams 3-12). Randall--whose family moved to Detroit when he was five years old--lived on Joseph Campau Avenue and then on Russell Street, attended Duffield and Barstow Schools--graduating in 1930 from Eastern High School--and, after serving in the army in World War II, Wayne University. He was a member of Plymouth United Church of Christ and worked at the Ford Rouge plant and as a mailman before leaving for military service (Boyd, Wrestling 35-39). As Melba Joyce Boyd relates, poetry brought the two young men together in 1937. Hayden and Randall became friends, discussed the writing of poetry, and shared political and cultural interests, both aiming Boyd says, “to master their skills and knowledge of poetry.” Boyd observes that even though Hayden left Detroit in 1941, the two stayed in contact throughout their lives (Wrestling 48-51).

 

Commentators describe the Black Bottom/Paradise Valley area as both a crime and poverty-ridden ghetto and a vibrant center of racial and cultural identity. Gloster Current, a former resident and one-time president of the NAACP, called Paradise Valley “a mixture of everything imaginable—including overcrowding, delinquency, and disease. It has glamour, action, religion, pathos. It has brains and organization and business” (Sugrue 36). Robert Hayden considers both dimensions in his own memoir, appreciating the area's “beauty,” “gentleness,” “vividness of life,” and “intensity of being,” as well as its “violence and ugliness and cruelty.” He recalls the “people who retained . . . a sheltering spiritual beauty and dignity . . . despite sordid and disheartening circumstances” (Collected Prose 141). Hayden's poetry reveals both dimensions. His first book, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), contains several poems set in Paradise Valley. “Bacchanale” (44) and “Shine, Mister?" (42) are “no-job blues” that describe unemployment in Depression-era Detroit. In "Sunflowers: Beaubien Street” (12), Hayden writes of the members of his foster parents’ generation who, after coming north, “set the solid brightness” of sunflowers on Detroit's “bitter air” to remind them of the South. He bases four poems—"Obituary” (Heart-Shape 28), “Rosemary” (Heart-Shape 37), “The Crystal Cave Elegy” (Collected Poems 206) and the well-known “Those Winter Sundays” (Collected Poems 41)—on the character of his foster-father, William Hayden, who, dreaming of better things, arrived in Detroit from Kentucky's coal mines, only to find back-breaking work as a driver for a local coal company (Hatcher 5-7). Other Hayden poems—“Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers” (Collected Poems 130-31), “The Rabbi” (Collected Poems 9), “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sundays” (Collected Poems 38), “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” (Collected Poems 32), and "Double Feature,"(Collected Poems 172)—also use specific Paradise Valley settings: St. Antoine Street, New Calvary Baptist Church, Second Baptist Church, and several theatres: the Koppin, Dunbar, Castle, and Arcade.

 

Hayden's most extended Detroit work, “Elegies for Paradise Valley” (Collected Poems 163-170), a collection of eight poems, resurrects the Valley's diverse characters and their struggles. Hayden begins “Elegies” with the memory of a maggot-eaten body of a junkie discovered outside his “boyhood bedroom window.” The speaker recalls watching as the body is "shoved into a van” and then noticing "the hatred for our kind / glistening like tears / in the policemen's eyes.” In this single projective simile, Hayden conveys the paradox and pathos of the African American experience in Detroit. By treating the policemen's hatred in terms of his own sadness, Hayden reveals both the impulse toward community and the impossibility of achieving it, joining his tears with the policemen's hatred are as they are joined in Detroit's history.

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In another poem, “Summertime and the Living,” Hayden writes of anger and violence as responses to economic and racial injustice, of how the adults in Paradise Valley were “so harshened after each unrelenting day / that they were shouting angry” (Collected Poems 39). The sight of an old woman beating a young boy in “The Whipping” reminds him of a beating he received as a child; he understands that, through her violence, the woman is “exhausted, purged— / avenged in part for lifelong hidings [whippings] / she has had to bear” (Collected Poems 40). Hayden's Paradise Valley poems search for the causes of rage and violence in the city and convey an understanding of people who came to Detroit with great hopes only to learn that the hype about Detroit was another bad joke played on the poor: “Detroit's a cold, cold place,” sang blues singer Victoria Spivey in 1936, “and I ain't got a dime to my name.”

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Despite their bleak view of Detroit life, Hayden's poems generally offer a vision of human community. Amid the seething anger of the poor in “Summertime and the Living,” a sudden transforming vision of African American unity emerges when a cultural hero, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, appears in triumph, setting “the ghetto burgeoning / with fantasies / of Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous wings” (Collected Poems 39). In “The Rabbi” African American and Jewish children build community by sharing language. The young African American speaker takes pleasure in the words, Mezuzah, Pesach, Chanukah. The children even learn the derogatory terms—schwartze and Jew Baby—with which adults from each group refer to one another, thereby sharing temporary mastery of the very language that will ultimately separate them (Collected Poems 9). In “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” the “Godfearing elders” and “Godless grifters,” who squabble in daily life, recognize a shared responsibility to protect the neighborhood's children. A major theme of the “Elegies” is the recognition of community—crossing racial, religious, and cultural lines—based on an acknowledgement of human mortality.

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Such visions constitute only one way in which the impulse toward community may be found amid the decay and violence of urban life. Another is to rebuild within the poem a community that no longer exists. In the fifth section of “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” Hayden constructs an extended ubi sunt which resurrects characters who lived in Detroit's African American community in the 1920s and 30s: “Belle, the classy dresser,” “stagestruck Nora,” “fast Iola,” “mad Miss Alice,” “snuffdipping Lucy,” “Jim, Watusi Prince,” “Tump the defeated artist,” “Les the huntsman,” “Tough Kid Chocolate,” “dapper Jess,” “Stomp the shell-shocked,” “taunted Christopher, sad queen of night,” “gentle Brother Davis,” “dopefiend Mel” (Collected Poems 167). Hayden uses the elegiac device that ancient Anglo-Saxon poets employed when recalling their communities destroyed by war. Hayden asks what has happened to the members of a community now destroyed by urban renewal: Where are they? Where have they gone? Although Hayden has no illusions about life in this violent, impoverished, and crime-ridden district, he still insists on the richness of this community and the dignity of the diverse human beings who formed it.

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Although Randall writes fewer poems about Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, he, like Hayden, concentrates on two dimensions of the community. “Laughter in the Slums,” like Hayden's “Sunflowers: Beaubien Street,” contrasts the warmth of the residents' southern past with the cold and “sooty snow of northern winter” that cannot suppress their “bright,” blossoming laughter (More 18). Among their entertainments are the violent outbursts of the tragically drunken “old Witherington” who claims to live “in hell” and starts a fight in which he might die “and put an end / to all this loneliness” (Litany 14). “Ghetto Girls” (originally “Hastings Street Girls”) describes young women with “ivory, saffron, cinnamon, chocolate faces, / Glowing with all the hues of all the races.” Their gay appearance and behavior reveal their obliviousness to the “long, deep night” that lies ahead (Litany 87). In “Vacant Lot” (Litany 86), Randall shows the range of possibilities that city children find in the crowded urban setting’s few open spaces. A vacant lot becomes a “wilderness,” hideout, battlefield, baseball diamond, gridiron, and artists' studio: “It was chameleon stage containing all.”

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2. Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints

 

Like Robert Hayden’s elegies, Alice Randall’s prodigious novel Black Bottom Saints resurrects people and institutions associated with Detroit’s lower east side neighborhoods. However, Detroit-born Randall (who is not related to Dudley Randall) places Detroit’s black communities in a broader context, asserting their centrality to American, even global Black culture: “Black Bottom,” says the protagonist-narrator Ziggy Johnson, “is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud—and Black” (232). In Randall’s novel, Black Bottom is less a place than an identity and an attitude.

 

While actual Detroiters—entertainers, entrepreneurs, doctors, morticians, autoworkers, athletes, politicians, preachers, and poets—make up many of the novel’s characters, even more of Randall’s “saints” are notable non-Detroiters who have touched and been touched by Black Bottom, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Ethel Waters, Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, LaVern Baker, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Moms Mabley, and Ted Rhodes. 

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In this novel, Detroit is “Black Camelot”; its “shining moment” coincides with Ziggy Johnson’s twenty-year postwar Detroit career. Ziggy stays at the Gotham Hotel, writes “a weekly entertainment and gossip column” for the Michigan Chronicle, acts as emcee at the swanky Flame and 20 Grand show bars, and serves as “unofficial Dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre,” a dance and performance school for Detroit children (3). In 1967, as he lies dying in Kirwood Hospital, he prepares his tribute to cultural icons and other Black notables, modeled after the books read by Catholics to honor saints and encourage good behavior.  Ziggy has similar motivations as he composes his own vignettes of impressive Black lives: to toast those who triumph over racism and to inspire achievement in future generations. “They are not your friends, Nephew,” Ziggy’s aunt, Sadye E. Pryor, tells him as she surveys the 20 Grand’s patrons in 1962, “ʻThey are your Black Bottom Saints. The way you talk about them inspires me to proceed’” (62).

 

Ziggy eulogizes famous Detroiters: Robert Hayden, Joe Louis, Night-Train Lane, Della Reese, Lloyd George Richards. He also admires drug-dealers, gamblers, and numbers-runners. He especially celebrates the “Breadwinners,” autoworkers like Billy D. Parker, whose children attend his dance school and whose productions transport superstars, presidents, and popes.

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Consistent with his purpose, Ziggy’s portraits, each accompanied by a Thomas Bullock-inspired drink recipe or “libation,” are mostly celebratory of Black life and lives, of Black Detroit and its institutions, of health and success. The first of the novel’s saints, Detroit-born Robert Hayden, Ziggy’s Michigan Chronicle predecessor, appears cranky and suspicious in a 1966 Detroit conversation at the 20 Grand after the turbulent Fisk University conference at which he alienated other Black writers. Hayden ignores his previous intimacy with Ziggy—described in suggestive detail as occurring in the Gotham’s “liberating privacy”—just as he ignores Ziggy’s proposal for a choreographed tribute to the poet’s work at his Theatre School’s Youth Colossal (11-21).  Despite Hayden’s moodiness, Ziggy proclaims his love for him. The difference between the circumspect Hayden and the affable Ziggy reinforces their contrasting versions of Detroit life. While Hayden’s border-crossers—“taunted Christopher, sad queen of night,” for example—suffer under injustice, those in Randall’s novel—Valda Gray, Ruth Ellis, Ziggy himself, and other “gender nonconformists”—exuberantly reinvent themselves, mentor others, triumph over the obstacles that confront them, or bide their time in hibernation until opportunity presents itself, As Ruth Ellis tells Ziggy, “ʻThe Saints of Black Bottom winter know how to get ready. They understand the power of hibernation’” (210).  Randall’s Detroit, in contrast to Hayden’s, emphasizes their eventual victories.

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Yet, there is the reality of Ziggy’s—and the city’s—physical decline in the postwar years. As the saints are overcoming the obstacles in American culture, Black Bottom is being destroyed by urban “renewal” and freeway development; the city itself is in decline, spurred by corporate disinvestment and government subsidized suburbanization; and violence and injustice persist. The promises of integration lead to the disappearance of the institutions established under segregation: the Gotham, Kirwood, Lewis College of Business, the Flame and 20 Grand (in addition to the Detroit Stars, Barthwell’s Drugs, and many other Black-centered businesses). Ziggy is writing in the wake of the 1967 Rebellion and after the loss of many of his saints: Elsie Roxborough, Charles Diggs, Sr., Herman “Scatterbrain” Stevens, Milton Winfield Jr. In his moving portrait of 1967’s youngest victim, Tonya Blanding, he imagines her as one of his dance students. Her violent death—rather than his illness—leads him to stop teaching and start writing. As with Hayden, loss is what motivates Ziggy to resurrect the people of Detroit.

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Knowing that his time is limited, he prepares his book so that his goddaughter Mari, “Colored Girl,” who is “Black Bottom to the bone” (7), can finish it. Her story involves her search for and eventual discovery of his manuscript, a set of fifty-six saints (including Ziggy). Colored Girl’s outer narrative contextualizes, complicates, and shapes Ziggy’s stories into Randall’s elegies for Black Bottom, a novel that has a place among the richest, most expansive works in Detroit literature.

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3. Diverse Literary Views of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley

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Other writers—among them Murray Jackson, Toi Derricotte, Albert Michael Ward, Michelle Gibbs, Philip Levine, and Jeffrey Eugenides—have used Paradise Valley and Black Bottom as a focal point of memory and history.

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The Detroit poems of Murray Jackson (1926-2002) concentrate largely on the places and colorful personalities of the expanding Paradise Valley neighborhood. Apartment buildings on East Canfield, Sledge's Barber Shop, Wilfred's Billiard Parlor on Oakland, Barthwell's Drugs, the Flame, Frolic, and Chesterfield Show Bars, the Cotton Club, the Cozy Corner, Club 666, The Garfield Lounge, Trowbridge School, Southeastern High School, St. Josaphat's Church, and assorted saloons, pawn shops, and gambling spots appear in his poems. Switchblade justice controls behavior in the Paradise Valley of Jackson's poetry: Billy Lamplighter draws his blade on Geechee George for kicking a dog in “Things Ain't What They Used to Be” (Bobweaving 14), and Silent Ambrose draws on Ralph, the Merchant for calling him a name during a game of pool in “Eight Ball, Side Pocket” (15). The neighborhood is a place where learning happens—in schools like Trowbridge (“Trowbridge School” 46-70) and Southeastern (“Baby Ray” 29) and in Apartment # 6 at 310 East Canfield, where the young speaker of “Ten No-Trump” (21-2) learns to play bridge by watching a “bragging club” of characters that includes Mellow Man, Papa Steele (“puffing on his two-for-a-nickel John Ruskin cigar”), Henry, and Dot, “the first woman in the bragging club / and the best player in the house.” As Paradise Valley and its African-American community moved northward, it came into contact with the old Polish Catholic community, and the young speaker of one poem, encountering a group of habited Polish nuns in procession up St. Antoine, imagines them stepping to the rhythm of “an old spiritual, remembered from / a sanctified store-front church on Forest” (“The Ladies of Josaphat” 48).

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Toi Derricotte's “Blackbottom” (Captivity 5) describes a middle-class African American family who, in the late 1940s, left the area for the middle-class district of Conant Gardens in northeast Detroit. In the poem, the family returns to the streets of the old neighborhood to observe its characters and experience anew its sights, sounds, and smells: “We rolled our windows down so the waves rolled over us like blood.” In “Barthwell's Drugstore” (Patches 19-22), Albert Michael Ward recalls a romance that began at the soda fountain of one of the ten stores owned by African American entrepreneur, Sidney Barthwell. Michele Gibbs’s “Message from the Meridian” (Boyd and Liebler 135-6) examines the present day sites of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom and anticipates the day when “this valley become the Bottom / Black and blue / will be Paradise again....” Philip Levine's “On the Corner” recounts an overheard conversation between jazz great Art Tatum and his bass player outside the Flame Show Bar on John R.

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The Nation of Islam is one of the many institutions that arose in Paradise Valley. Jeffrey Eugenides spins the circumstances of its 1931 founding and the mysteries surrounding its founder, W. D. Fard, into his 2002 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Middlesex. The narrator, Cal Stephanides, imagines his Greek grandmother, Desdemona, in 1932, getting off the Gratiot streetcar on Hastings Street on her way to apply for a job at the Nation's Temple Number 1. As Desdemona walks down Hastings, she experiences the sights and sounds of depression-era Paradise Valley: people on front porches laughing and arguing, a junk artist, a drunken beggar, a barbershop, flirtatious young men: “The smell of unfamiliar food in the air now, fish caught from the nearby river, pig knuckles, hominy grits, fried baloney, black-eyed peas. But also many houses where nothing was cooking, where no one was laughing or even talking, dark rooms full of weary faces and scroungy dogs” (143). The Temple, at 3408 Hastings, is identified as the “former McPherson Hall” (listed in the Polk's 1929-30 Detroit Phone Directory as Castle Hall). “In lean times,” the narrator says, “the mosque was flush. Ford was closing factories but, at 3408 Hastings, Fard was open for business” (150). Desdemona, attempting to pass as a mulatto, is a silk worker in one of Fard's enterprises, until this venture ends in May of 1933 when he leaves Detroit.

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Although successive grand visions of a renewed Detroit have destroyed virtually every vestige of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, in the city's literature the area still has life, Melba Joyce Boyd writes, as “a metaphor for strength and fortification in black history” (Wrestling 28).

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Postscript: Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert’s Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-1960 and Mark Stryker’s Jazz from Detroit include detailed information about Paradise Valley musicians and music venues. In 2008, Sharon Elizabeth Sexton produced a fine documentary, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley: The Forgotten Legacy.

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Frank D. Rashid is professor emeritus of English at Marygrove College and a scholar of Detroit literature.

 

Works Cited

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Bjorn, Lars and Jim Gallert. Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-1960. University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Boyd, Melba Joyce and M. L. Liebler, eds. Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. Wayne State University Press, 2001.

Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. Columbia University Press, 2003.

Derricotte, Toi. Captivity. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden. George Ronald, 1984.

Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. Liveright, 1985.

---. Collected Prose. University of Michigan Press, 1984.

Jackson, Murray. Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson. Eds. Ted Pearson and Kathryne V. Lindberg.

Wayne State University Press, 2004.

Levine, Philip. New Selected Poems. Knopf, 1993.

Randall, Alice. Black Bottom Saints: A Novel. Amistad, 2020.

Randall, Dudley. A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems. Lotus Press, 1981.

---. More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades. Third World Press, 1971.

Sexton, Sharon Elizabeth, producer. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley: The Forgotten Legacy. Detroit, 2008.

Stryker, Mark. Jazz from Detroit. University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Spivey, Victoria and the Chicago Four. “Detroit Moan.” (1936). The Great Depression: American Music in the Thirties.

Blackslide/PBS. Los Angeles: Sony, 1993.

Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.  Princeton University Press, 1996.

Ward, Albert Michael. Patches on Main Street. Broadside, 1989.

Williams, Pontheolla T. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. University of Illinois Press, 1987.

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Photo by Anna Fedor.

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Originally posted September 2003, revised November 2019 and March 2020.