In recent years, a great deal of attention has been directed toward understanding Detroit, Michigan, as a locus of significant national cultural, historic, and economic tendencies. Cultural analysts such as Suzanne Smith (Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, 2000), historians such as Thomas Sugrue (The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 1998) and Heather Thompson (Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, 2002), and filmmakers such as Curtis Hanson (8 Mile, 2002) have taken as their subject the city once known as the "arsenal of democracy," but better known today as a trope for urban decay, an industrial wasteland. My presentation focuses this larger project by analyzing cultural representations of an iconic Detroit space: the island park in the Detroit River known as Belle Isle. Specifically, I will discuss how filmmakers, poets, and fiction writers have represented Belle Isle in their work. After a brief review of the island's problematic history, I will analyze how representations of Belle Isle by nationally recognized artists inscribe surprisingly coherent narratives about the city's complicated relationship with Belle Isle.
The history of Belle Isle goes back to the founding of Detroit in 1701 by Antoine de la Monthe Cadillac. Cadillac declared Belle Isle public domain, and it remained such until 1768, when King George III granted Lieutenant George McDougall permission to live on the island. A year later, McDougall bought the island from the Ottawa and Chippewa Indian tribes (who knew it as Swan Island) for five barrels of rum, three roles of tobacco, three pounds of vermilion, and a belt of Wampum, and Detroiters began using Belle Isle as a retreat from the growing industrialization of the city (Anderson 2001). (It acquired its name not from the French, Beautiful Island, but from visitors who renamed it for then-Governor Cass's daughter Belle; the name by which it was originally known was Hog Island).
In 1879, the City acquired Belle Isle with the double aim of protecting its public water works and building a railroad line to Canada across the river, which was seen as crucial to the area's economic development. In the early 1880s, Park Commissioners engaged Frederick Law Olmstead to design Belle Isle Park. Detroit leaders rejected the plan of the designer of Central Park in New York, as well as many other urban green spaces, in part as a result of a continuing ambivalence about developing the island. From 1884 on, however, the need for the park increased, and the swampy island grew to contain monuments, an aquarium, conservatory, formal gardens, canal system, forest preserve and nature center, athletic facilities, golf course, yacht club, and zoo. By 1895 historian Silas Farmer could note, "The island is the priceless jewel in the crown of Detroit" (quoted in Anderson 47).
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Belle Isle was already assuming the role in citizens' lives it would continue to play. On the one hand, it was a refuge from the ordeals of urban life; Anderson's history points out that on a typical Sunday in 1916, busses carrying twenty-two people each crossed the bridge every four minutes. It was also a contested site between civilization and its discontents. By 1910, citizens were already being arrested for violating decency rules in the woods. In the 1920s, oil slicks caused recurrent beach closures. During Prohibition, the Harbormaster was indicted for rumrunning. (Canadian Club whiskey is manufactured at a plant across the Detroit River from Belle Isle.)
In 1943, one of the nation's worst race riots was sparked when, as Thomas Sugrue reports in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, "the climate of racial animosity and mistrust bred by the disruptions of World War II" (29) boiled over among the nearly one hundred thousand Detroiters gathered on Belle Isle on a hot summer Sunday. Brawls between blacks and whites throughout the afternoon erupted into fights on the bridge connecting Belle Isle to southeast Detroit. Before federal troops subdued the three days of rampaging by blacks and whites, 34 people were killed, including 25 blacks, 675 were seriously injured, and almost 1,900 were arrested (Sugrue 29). Social tensions continued to find their way onto the island; during the 1967 rebellion, the bathhouse on Belle Isle was used as a detention center (Anderson 43).
As Belle Isle grew along with Detroit during the expansion of industrial America, so it has declined along with the city's fortunes; from 1947 through 1967, 10% of manufacturing firms and 30% of manufacturing jobs left the city; since then, 60% of firms and 50% of jobs have disappeared (Anderson 43). As Detroit decayed into the industrial wasteland portrayed in 8 Mile, Belle Isle has likewise decayed; today a Master Plan to rehabilitate Belle Isle is estimated to cost $180 million.
Like many Detroiters, I have my own relationship with Belle Isle, which is considerably more sedate. One of my first memories of living in Detroit was a buggy ride around the island my family and I took shortly after we moved there from Boston in 1954. When I came back to Detroit to teach at Marygrove almost twenty years after moving away, I lived in an apartment on the twenty-fifth floor of a building downtown that had a spectacular view of Belle Isle. Staring out the windows of my apartment, losing myself in the panorama, I saw Belle Isle every morning upon waking; its brooding presence in the Detroit River sent me to bed at night. I charted its changes through the seasons. As my wife and I traveled around the city trying to reconcile what we saw as "new" residents with what we remembered from before, Belle Isle became a kind of symbol of how place was more social construction than topography, alive with conflicts, competing interests and uses, even contending species.
For poets like Philip Levine, Marge Piercy, and Anthony Butts; for fiction writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Baxter; and for filmmakers like Jerry Schatzberg, Belle Isle has evoked similar complex responses, which they represent in their art. While I am conscious of the dangers of oversimplification, I suggest that representations of Belle Isle by those artists have certain elements in common, and that these elements may be said to represent a kind of cultural narrative about Detroiters' relationship with the island.
I will begin my look at this narrative with the motion picture Scarecrow (1973). I will use this to establish the terms of my discussion, and refer to the other works as elaboration and evidence.
Scarecrow is a film directed by Jerry Schatzberg and starring Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. It is a downer of a road movie that could be subtitled, "Vladimir and Estragon See the USA" for its allusions to Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It follows two drifters who reverse the westering myth by traveling eastward across the country. Max (played by Gene Hackman) is an angry, brawling ex-con who needs to get to Pittsburgh to get his money out of a bank so he can open a car wash. Francis (Pacino) is a light-hearted jokester who wants to get to Detroit so he can see his child whom he has never known. Francis believes that laughter can solve any problem; the title of the movie comes from his feeling that scarecrows don't really scare crows, but cause them to laugh so hard that crows avoid the cornfield out of respect for any farmer who has that good a sense of humor. These two walk, hitchhike, hop trains, and otherwise trek east through a vision of a nation filled with junk-piles of crushed automobiles, junkyards, broken refrigerators, decrepit railway yards, piles of old clothes. They descend through the detritus of industrial America to land in Detroit for the climax of the film.
As they go, Max and Francis switch roles, with Francis becoming angry and bitter and Max turning into the scarecrow/trickster. In Detroit, Francis loses his nerve at the last minute and decides to call his old girlfriend rather than show up at her doorstep. Furious that he has appeared, she lies to him that their son died in childbirth, and will stay in limbo for eternity because of Francis.
The climax of the film takes place at the Scott Fountain on Belle Isle, where Francis confronts the failure of his hopes. On Belle Isle, where Francis takes Max ostensibly to celebrate his good luck, Francis jokes around and takes a boy into the Scott Fountain; as he has told Max that he is a Catholic educated by nuns, we recognize this as a symbolic baptism (which he believes his own son lacked). His pent-up anger explodes, and he decompensates. In the next scene, we hear from a doctor that Francis has become catatonic, thus entering his own limbo.
This short scene clarifies three themes that emerge from the works I examined. First, Belle Isle is a place where various kinds of sacraments take place. The symbolic baptism is clear; the two men go to Belle Isle in the first place to celebrate Francis's becoming "a man," as Max calls him, a clear ceremony of initiation.
A second theme that emerges is the representation of a visit to Belle Isle as crossing boundaries. That it is an actual island means that a trip to Belle Isle brings about an actual physical journey from land over water; that it is in the strait between the United States and Canada locates it as a borderland between nations. Like the island in Shakespeare's Tempest, Belle Isle for our artists represents a retreat from the rules of every day life and a reflection or clarification of them. In Scarecrow, the boundaries that Francis crosses are, first, the physical boundary of going to an island; second, the boundaries of propriety (he simply lifts up a strange boy and wades with him into the fountain); and third, psychological boundaries (Frances loses his grip on reality and his own identity).
A third theme that emerges not so much from this scene in the movie but from the movement of the film's action toward this scene is the representation of Belle Isle as a kind of Sargasso Sea of the waste of industrial capitalism. The Italian marble of the fountain-with its ornate dolphins, turtles, and lions spouting windblown sprays of water-is at once an ironic counterpoint to the images of junk and railroad yards that permeate the film, and a kind of junk itself as it attempts to reify the natural world. The background of the scene preceding the fountain scene displayed a collision shop sign, reminding us of the piles of junked cars earlier in the movie. The movement of the film-to get the money to open a car wash-could be seen as an attempt to purify and redeem that world of industrial junk-to baptize the machinery of the culture. This fails along with Francis's dream as Max spends his money on Francis's hospitalization instead of the car wash. His effort becomes one of redeeming another person instead of machines, and in that sense the film ends on a guardedly hopeful note.
To see how these three themes operation in another artist's work, I want to turn to Philip Levine's poem, "Belle Isle, 1949" (1991). Again we see imagery related to the first theme, in terms of a baptism (stated quite directly) and of an eroticized encounter between the speaker of the poem and the Polish high school girl whom he doesn't know. It is as if, cleansed by the baptism in the waters around the island, the two strangers are free to follow their erotic urge to connect, to enter a temporary marriage.
The poem also illustrates the second theme I noted, that of crossing boundaries. In this case, the boundaries are the firmly entrenched social and religious boundaries that would separate a young Polish girl and a young Jewish man. Belle Isle is a kind of demilitarized zone where this kind of encounter can take place, where they can leave behind the baggage of their embattled culture, where the island itself (with its own problematic history) disappears and all they can see is "a perfect calm dark as far / as there was sight" (131). Once they are called out of this interlude by the lights of ore boats and lone walkers (industrial society and the loneliness it enforces reasserting themselves), the boundaries reengage and they go back to where they came from-one might say, where they "belong."
Third, we see here more clearly than in the movie the way Belle Isle literally floats in the waste products of American industry: car parts, dead fish (those dolphins in the fountain are also dead), stolen bicycles, the old stove factory. We might follow this thought further and interrogate the way the cultural and social boundaries the speaker and the Polish girl cross have been constructed through the exigencies of the industrial capitalist system. It does seem to draw them apart within the poem, and suppress their desire to continue their connection beyond their swim; they "didn't dare / fall on" the coarse gray beach (131). Part of the impact of the poem for me arises out of the coming together of the two young people to forge a human moment out of the waste of a technological culture that Detroit represents. When they go to Belle Isle, they can, if only for a moment, enter a sacral time/space apart from their culture.
Without the time to take such a detailed look at all other works that take Belle Isle as their subject or setting, I will mention how selected other works imbricate these three themes. Marge Piercy's poem "Detroit means strait" includes a trip to Belle Isle, using the imagery of the essential human sacramental actions I pointed out as our first theme; she describes "girls with their sailors kissing on blankets, / the tiered fountain like a liquid wedding cake" (124 ). In Joyce Carol Oates' novel Do With Me What You Will (1973), Belle Isle is the place where a couple having an illicit affair go to have sex in a car; again, Belle Isle is a site for the erotic urge to connect. In Charles Baxter's story, "The Disappeared," two strangers, a Detroit woman and a Danish man visiting the city, meet on Belle Isle; when they leave together, the man says, "Are we going to do things?" "Of course," the woman says. "Strangers should always do things" (168). In Greg Pape's poem "Birds of Detroit," the poet visits a friend in Detroit, and after cataloguing the violent things that could happen in this town, they go to Belle Isle to share a communion in a place that is, as he says, "between countries" (72). Anthony Butts's poem, "The Belle Isle Men," posits the island as a gathering place of men without women_"The dusk blown into their eyes is the drought / of women twisting in the shoreline silence / of cool evenings dying on the vines // of morning glories" (74)-who form a communion of anger at their own disconnection from the mainstream culture represented by women with murmurs that are "the revenge of lust / exchanged like rage" (74).
Piercy's poem describes crossing boundaries, noting "that radiant magic water space" (124), and crosses a "real frontier" on the way to Windsor. Oates' couple goes to Belle Isle to cross the boundaries of marital propriety. Pape's poem, as I mentioned, points out that Belle Isle is between countries, and observes too that Canada is to the south; even the boundaries of common sense are crossed on Belle Isle.
These artists also take up the third theme of Belle Isle as a pastoral setting arising out of, and being subsumed by, the machinery and scrap of technological society. Piercy compares the river around Belle Isle to "a plain of molten steel / gleaming briefly between foundry and factory" (124). In "The Elephant in Winter," poet Michael Van Walleghen hears the heavy footfalls of an elephant at the zoo on the island and wonders if it is "The muffled / banging of some inscrutable pump / or boiler maybe" (11). Rust, a metaphor of decay, is a recurring image in the literature of Belle Isle: Pape's poem ends with an image of a man feeding gulls from a car with rusted fenders; Baxter's story has the strangers go off in a blue Chevrolet rusting near the hubcaps; the ore boats in Piercy's poem are "rusty and high as buildings" (124). Two images from Pape capture the mechanization of the natural world on Belle Isle: "Mallards / dabbled in cold winter ponds, / and Canada Geese grazed in / a field beyond a chain link fence. One goose wore a Coke can / on its neck like a collar" (72), and the description of a whirling cloud of birds as a "gear made of gulls" (72).
In her essay "Place in Fiction" (1979), Eudora Welty says "the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood" (132). I have tried to suggest how this island in our stream inspires at least a select group of authors to produce art that speaks clearly, passionately, and with surprisingly coherent recurring patterns of imagery. I hope my presentation today has offered a triplet of notes that might comprise the collective chord that Belle Isle strikes within us, a chord heard, and expressed, by some of our best poets, fiction writers, and filmmakers.
Works Cited
Anderson, Janet. Island in the City: Belle Isle, Detroit's Beautiful Island. Detroit: Detroit Historical
Museum, 2001.
Baxter, Charles. "The Disappeared." A Relative Stranger. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.
161-189.
Butts, Anthony. "The Men of Belle Isle." American Poetry: The Next Generation. Ed. Gerald
Costanzo and Jim Daniels. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000. 74-75.
Levine, Philip. "Belle Isle, 1949." New Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1991. 131.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Do With Me What You Will. New York: Vanguard, 1973.
Pape, Greg. "Birds of Detroit." Storm Pattern. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 71-
72.
Piercy, Marge. "Detroit Means Strait." Mars and Her Children. New York: Knopf, 1992. 124-
125.
Schatzberg, Jerry, dir. Scarecrow. Perf. Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. 1973. Videocassette,
Warner, 1992.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996.
Van Walleghan, Michael. "The Elephant in Winter." The Last Neanderthal. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. 11-12.
Welty, Eudora. "Place in Fiction." The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New
York: Vintage Books, 1979. 116-158.
Donald Levin, Ph.D.
Department of English
Marygrove College
Detroit, Michigan 48221
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