Those Who Serve

Flint, Michigan, my hometown, the source of everything that formed me, became shorthand for corruption, exploitation, a bleak name, a meme.  But I am interested in the last rations of humanity instead.

I was born in the hospital a stone's throw from the small apartment my parents rented, since foreclosed and demolished last year.  Like other things in Flint, Michigan, it exists only as a photograph now.  For 18 years we lived two blocks from the freeway, in a house I often dream about.  It was hard to leave.  When my folks moved away, I stayed in Flint to paint houses.  I’m a New Yorker now, but Flint is inked into me, a tattoo that faded but you can feel when you run your fingers over my skin.  Flint is eroding, dreamlike, in real time.  Things I saw in June have gone missing by September; a church on Saginaw is now an empty lot sown with dull straw.  My parents are gone, along with nearly every friend that lived here.  There is an urgency to recording this place.  The empty streets feel like a town after the fair has closed.  By “fair,” I mean the media who burnished their careers on the backs of the residents, dropped stakes in the middle of the water crisis and moved on after collecting their awards, video essays, art books and articles.  They’re gone and the city is quiet now.  But too quiet.  People move like animals in the wild, looking over their shoulders, unsettled.  My former home, the source of everything that formed me, became shorthand for corruption, exploitation, a bleak name, a meme.  But I am interested in the last rations of humanity instead.  While some have no choice, others have chosen to stay.  One of my best friends growing up now lives in my old neighborhood, surviving on assistance after staying in homeless shelters.  Not only him, but all of those who remain, those stories, pull at me to return.  When I meet anyone who grew up here, there is an unspoken understanding, that of survival in the face of indifference, which, though, not unique to America, Flint is a uniquely American story.