In Detroit: A Dream on Hold

Some time between sunset and moonrise, against a blue-white autumn sky, seven geese head south over the Detroit suburbs. They sweep low by a bowling alley and veer purposefully toward the pond at Hazel Park race track.

The parking lot around the Hazel Park Lounge and Bowl is full. The men's Monday-night bowling league has arrived. The cars bear testimony to hard times. In the '70s, the boom years, those cars would have been new. Now only an occasional '82 Buick Regal or Chrysler Le Baron gleams hopefully among older Coupe de Villes, Torinos and Caprice Classics. A Thunderbird stands in ruinous decay next to the embarrassing glint of a new Toyota. An ancient Ford station wagon, held together by spit and masking tape, boasts a bumper sticker that says: THUMBS UP FOR MICHIGAN!

Most of the men in the bowling alley could tell you the year, the model and maybe the serial number of every car there. They probably built most of them. That is why they came to Detroit from the rural South and kept on coming for three decades. Appalachian roots still show in the way the men stand. Pride straightens the spine like nothing else. The Southern community, they are called, or "country people," or — very carefully and at some risk if it comes from an outsider's at some risk if it comes from an outsider's mouth—hillbillies.

Their stories are personal, but so alike that a man named Lowell ("Bud") McKirgan wrote the Blue Grass Opera a few years back, and it seems to apply to almost all of them. It's about people leaving home and heading north (How did Bobby Bare sing it? "Home folks think I'm big in Dee-troit City"), planning to get rich quick and go back and buy a filling station or a hardware store, always talking about going home for good even as the debts piled up and children came along and roots went down and finally they had to admit that Detroit was a friendly place and they had done fine and probably they were, really, home.

Wandell ("Wendy") Smith, 49, came up with his wife on a Greyhound bus from Ranger, W. Va., in 1955. The only work was in the coal mines, and, he says, "I was afraid of the mines. The spring flood had run us out of the house twice in two weeks. After I got it cleaned up, I said, 'Let's go.' " The Smiths left Ranger on a Sunday night, and by Wednesday morning Wendy had found work with a water-cooler firm. The job lasted 13 years. "Then the company moved off and left us," he says. "For eleven years I sold cars until sales got bad." Now working for a construction company, he says, "People talk abou going back, but it's mostly memories talking, and those of hard times. How did Dolly Parton put it? 'No amount of money could buy from me the memories that I have of then, and no amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again.'"

On the side, Wendy Smith plays a mandolin with a country band called Blue Velvet. His friend Donald Clay, a Ford worker in Ypsilanti, Mich., also has a band, North Country Grass. "We was raised up together," says Wendy. "There was only one well on Ranger Ridge, and his daddy had it, and we carried water from it."