His office smells like horse manure. But James Buchanan doesn’t mind at all.

He’s standing behind his small desk on a sweltering July afternoon, putting on a heavy wool uniform worn by soldiers long ago. Buchanan’s in charge here at the Buffalo Soldiers Heritage Center, which lies at the edge of Rouge Park, on the city’s western border.

The stink comes from the horses down the hall, in the stables that are separated from his office by only a little door. This place belonged to the Detroit Mounted Police until the storied unit was shut down five years ago, another victim of the city’s ever-mismanaged budgets.

The cops left behind an ancient red-brick building, some old wood stables and an abandoned plot of land where Buchanan and a few friends would bring their horses and ride around.

“And every time, before we’d even get the horses off the trailer, kids would come by to see them,” Buchanan says.

So he hatched an idea, contacted city officials, and was given permission to put horses back in the barn, corral the yard with a white picket fence, and give city kids a rare chance to see and ride horses and ponies.

As he pulls on the layers of his uniform in the July heat, families sit outside on a picnic table in the shade of an overhanging tree, waiting for a ride on an animal many out here have never seen in person.

And when he steps outside, Buchanan hopes that maybe one of them will notice the old uniform, or see the small displays just outside his office, the ones with faded photos of black soldiers long ago, and ask him to explain the story behind them, to find out what inspires a man to dress in a thick wool costume on a hot summer day.

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Years ago, Buchanan was riding horses in Canada, the closest place someone from Detroit could do that back then, when a fellow rider told him about the Buffalo Soldiers.

“When I was in school I knew about Billy the Kid, Jesse James, the Dalton boys, but I never heard of someone by the name of Ben Hodges, who was a famous cowboy, and I didn’t know about the Rufus Buck Gang, who were outlaws, but over the years of studying about these young, courageous men I found out there were other ethnicities out there that you don’t have in our history books. So then I was captured by it.”

The name Buffalo Soldiers originally referred to the four all-black army units formed in 1866, staffed with former slaves and soldiers who’d fought in the Civil War. Their name was reportedly given to them by the Cheyenne tribes they were sent out West to fight, and referred either to the troops’ fierce fighting style or their curly hair, which the native fighters, it was said, thought resembled that of a buffalo. Either way, the troops took the name as a compliment.

Buchanan studied their history, found friends and fellow riders who shared his fascination with them, and formed a local chapter under the national Buffalo Soldiers Cavalry Association, dedicated to preserving the memory of the forgotten troops.

They slowly assembled expensive replica uniforms, the old-time horse saddles, the sabers and guns. They held meetings, gave lectures at schools and performed reenactments at Greenfield Village.

But their group had no home. So when the old horse stables became available to them three years ago, along with a lot of office space they didn’t need, they put together a historical exhibit dedicated to their heroes and opened it to the public.

The exhibit’s displays are small and few so far. A cabinet holds some historical items like pictures and documents. An old saddle rests on a stand, next to an easel holding a board featuring yellowed news articles. Trophies line a set of shelves, prizes from parades the group marched in over the years.

There are no official tours, other than when Buchanan shows horse riders around.

“People walk inside and look at the showcase and ask, “What’s going on?’ and then that gives us the opportunity to talk about it,” he says.

The Buffalo Soldiers Calico Troops, as his group calls themselves, are down to four members. Death and the economy have taken their toll. They’ve tried to recruit, but the uniforms are expensive, and in tough times, few people have that kind of money for this kind of hobby. They’ve resorted to a slightly ghoulish solution, and give new members pre-worn costumes. “A lot of the guys who have passed away, we’ve been using their uniform to patch up,” he says.

Those uniforms still grab the attention of the kids they speak to at inner-city schools. Their interest, though, is often for the wrong reasons.

“Of course the first question they always ask is what kind of gun do you carry,” Buchanan says, “and they can almost tell me as much about the weapon I have as I can. And we’re speaking of grade school kids.”

But when his group goes to a classroom, dressed in the blues and grays of the Buffalo Soldiers, all eyes are on them. And when Buchanan sings the Buffalo Soldiers anthem, his voice the lone sound hanging in the air, the students are fascinated.

“A lot of our young black kids, the only thing they know about our history is that we were slaves,” he says. “And it’s very demeaning to them. But we like to tell these kids that all black men was not slaves, that there were black cowboys and blacks in Congress in the 1880s, that there were famous young black men during those depressive times. And they did their job very well.”

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Buchanan fell in love with horses the first time he saw them on his grandfather’s tobacco farm in Tennessee.

“I used to climb a fence, and the horse walked by and I’d grab it by the mane and jump on. That darn horse, it would actually take care of me, because I would start to slide off and it would stop and wait for me to adjust myself and he’d walk again.”

He became infatuated. Didn’t even have to be a real horse to capture his attention. “Mom used to take me to Kresge’s and she made sure she had a couple dimes for that old pony you used to put the coins in,” he says, laughing. “I had the horse bug at that point.”

Kids from the city, he finds, are just as fascinated by horses today as he was at their age. “Sometimes they’re afraid because they’re bigger than they thought, and there’s other times they’re gung ho, just jumping up there. But usually the ones that’s afraid, once they get up there we have just as much trouble getting them off.” Rides cost $4 for once around the fence, $6 to go twice.

“This is the greatest thing ever,” says Ranada Reid, 35, as her 3-year-old daughter Madison rode a horse around the corral, “’cause I wouldn’t be able to afford to go get her lessons. She fantasizes about horses. We’re in the middle of Detroit, so we don’t see horses, but she sees them on TV.”

James Mills, 70, saddles a horse nearby. “They understand what you’re thinking,” he says about his horse. He loves them as much as Buchanan does. “They trust you as much as you trust them.”

Sometimes as the day ends, when everyone leaves, he and Buchanan will saddle up and ride their horses around the woods and fields, looking much like their icons, who probably never dreamed that a century later some strangers would wear their uniforms and tell their story.

“The original soldiers did not get the proper respect that they were supposed to have or should have gotten,” Buchanan says. “Better late than never.”

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

Four people with grim faces walk into the tombstone store.

They’ve come here, to Otto Schemansky Sons Monuments on Van Dyke near McNichols, to get a marker for the gravesite of a 7-year-old girl shot and killed by Detroit police in a bungled raid several weeks back. These four, a mess of street manners and empty pockets, are her family.

After all the news stories and press conferences, and the candles and stuffed animals stacked on their front porch, they’re still burdened with the lonely duty of buying a headstone for a dead little girl.

They’ve come because this place supplied a grave marker for a Detroit toddler who died not too long ago when the car she was riding in ran a stop sign and plowed into a van, throwing her out the window. That family had no money for a headstone, so store owners Paul and Mary Weeks donated one to them. Word spread, as these things do through the neighborhoods, and now another family too broke to buy a decent gravestone found their way here.

Paul slowly takes the time to show them the options, such as the different lettering that’s available. “The gold letters really pop,” he tells them. Won’t cost any extra, he adds.

“How much?” mumbles the girl’s father, wearing cornrows and a white tee. He’s doing all the talking for the family. Normal price for the lettering is about $225. Paul looks at him, thinks it over. “One-fifty,” he says. The father says they’ll talk it over and come back later.

Many customers here can’t afford elaborate monuments for their deceased loved ones. Others can’t buy a marker at all, so someone they cared about winds up an anonymous bump in the cemetery grass, or an urn of powder on a shelf.

You can’t have no marker, though, Paul always insists, so he finds himself whittling down prices for those who show up, grieving and broke, at their doorstep. “I’ll tell you something,” Paul says. “If you do something good like that for ‘em, they’ll be the first ones here to help you out if you have a problem. They remember who helps them out, who walks on them. You gotta remember that.”

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It’s a tough business when every one of your customers comes to you in misery.

“Selling this is not like selling anything else,” Mary says. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. I know a lot of times I have a family in and they can’t make up their mind and they’ll say, ‘Oh I’m sorry’ and I tell them ‘Don’t be sorry. You’re going to do this only one time for them.”

Mary’s family purchased Otto Schemansky Sons Monuments in 1977 from the great-grandchildren of its founder and namesake, who started the business in 1883 on lower Gratiot near downtown.

It migrated north and over to Van Dyke in the mid-1940s, into a square cinderblock building with a workshop out back. When Mary’s dad bought it, he kept its century-old name instead of putting his own up on the sign. After he retired, Mary and Paul took over. There used to be more than a dozen monument engravers along this strip of Van Dyke, which runs between several of the city’s old cemeteries. Now there are only two stores left. This one’s the oldest.

Mary, 57, handles the office work; husband Paul, 43, their kids and Mary’s brother do the heavy lifting outside. They’ve all learned to deal gently with distraught customers, though Mary is the most soothing and comforting, and the first person a customer sees. Sometimes she finds herself hugging the more distraught mourners who come through the door. Most are from this wrecked east side neighborhood. “I love them,” she says. “It’s a different world down here. It makes you appreciate what you have. You feel for them. They have a real struggle, and they’re good people.”

Payment plans are available, but all monuments have to be paid in full before they’re placed in the cemetery. Once they’re in the ground they can’t be repossessed because that would violate state grave-robbing laws.

The markers are granite and come in different colors, shipped from different quarries around the world. Prices range from $200 for a small slab with a name and dates on it to $30,000 and up for tall sculptures, up to hundreds of thousands for a private mausoleum. No matter what, Paul is adamant that something — anything — should be on someone’s grave.

“You can’t just have nothing there!” he says, volume rising. “To me, whenever I see something with nothing on it, it tells me the family never respected them.”

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There’s an old house next door, shuttered and empty. A man named James lived there for years, and after Paul began working down here the two grew close. “One of my best friends,” Paul says. “He taught me so much about Detroit.” One day the family realized they hadn’t seen James in a while; Paul broke into the house and found him lying there, dead. “He didn’t take care of himself,” Paul explains.

After that, the Weeks family tended to James’ old blind dog until he too died. They buried him in the yard, under the spot where he liked to lay. The lawn grew wild and the family kept cutting it. Thieves would try to break in and Paul would scare them off.

Pretty soon, Paul — stocky, thick-armed and quick-tempered — found himself chasing away people trying to get into other houses or cars. Neighbors noticed and started calling him to report crimes in progress. “Whether it’s Mandy or Dave down the street or whoever, they’ll call down here when they see somebody messing around by one of these houses ’cause they know BOOM, I’m gone,” he says, shouting. When Paul gets worked up his face becomes flushed and menacing. “I’ll go right out after them, damn right, and everybody’s yelling at me — ‘Hey wait a minute, you forgot your gun.’ I don’t care.”

Paul moved to the Detroit area from a little town up north years ago, and married his best friend’s sister in the 1980s. After all this time working in the city, it’s gotten into his veins, grown to fascinate him. For a while he was trying to buy James’ house to stay in during the week, to spend the night and live through what his neighbors live through, like the woman who tells him of nights spent lying on the floor with her two kids when shootouts happen out in the street. “What gives me a right to have a business in this community if I’m not part of the community?” he says.

So he chases thieves, and mows lawns, and gives out food baskets during holidays. He’s part of a group that renovated nearby Fletcher Field, installing playground equipment and keeping the weeds cut. He basically adopted himself into the neighborhood, a self-designated caretaker for the old ladies and little kids and the helpless, pretty much anyone who seems trapped or lost out here in this wild, sometimes dangerous neighborhood.

“The ones who are stuck down here, there are some good people,” Paul says, standing in the store’s fenced-in yard. Two guard dogs at his feet glare at strangers passing by. “You’ll meet some wonderful people around here that I like better than even my own family members. They’re a lot better people. But they’re just caught.”

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

The place was a dump. It had been the office of a used car lot that was left to the weeds years ago, fodder for a bulldozer if anything were ever to replace it.

So a fellow named Bird came by one day with a few brushes and some cans of paint and put two paintings here; one on this ugly shack and another on the empty building next to it, both of which he had to look at every day as he walked past.

One is a portrait of Barack Obama, looking skyward. The other is an image of Michael Jackson, dancing under a spotlight. Both are figures revered out here for different reasons, captured in fine art portrayals on unexpected canvases.

The artist carefully chose this spot. “If the building has potential and I think maybe in the future they might open it up or someone might rent it, I don’t bother,” says Lee Walker, the 52-year-old known around town simply as Bird the painter. “It has to be dilapidated — roof gone, no doors, basically abandoned.”

Walker lives and works near that weathered shack, at Gratiot near Burns, in one of the city’s most battered areas — far outside of downtown, deep inside the inner city, a maze of weathered old homes on crisscrossing side streets in what has become Detroit’s hinterlands.

Like other artists who used the city’s empty buildings to create art, Walker has done paintings like this before, but the buildings were either torn down or fell in on themselves, and with them went his art. It hasn’t stopped him from doing others.

“If I don’t see no future for the structure I’ll try to put some artwork up there that beautifies it. It’s like when you see an old abandoned building, you think about the decay of the city, how many people left; you know, the sad part of it. But if there’s some art on it that catches your eye and it’s a nice piece it kind of lifts your spirits.”

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Walker’s art studio sits in an unlit, discount mattress shop on Van Dyke called the Mattress Station, which he runs with a dozen friends and cousins who let him use it as his gallery. In good weather his paintings lean against the front of the building, sharing space with used mattresses. When it starts raining the whole crew scrambles to get them and the mattresses inside before they get too wet.

“The ones I try to sell up here I try to make them as cheap as possible,” he notes, ’cause cheap people come up here, so I’m not going to invest $250 doing a portrait that I can’t get but $75 for it.”

By cheap he means broke. Their store sells used box springs and mattresses to people so poor they have little choice but to sleep on someone else’s discarded bed. “It’s basically ’cause people in the neighborhood can’t afford Gardner-White,” Walker says.

When business is slow, he sits out front, painting in the sunshine. When things pick up, “like the first part of the month, when everybody gets government checks or whatever,” he pitches in, putting mattresses in the back of someone’s truck or else delivering them if the buyer has no vehicle.

His makeshift studio provides not only space, but art supplies too. Most of his paintings are done on bed sheets or on the cloth of a mattress, with part of the wood frame left in place to keep the material taut after the springs have been removed. “I’ve cornered the market on canvases,” he jokes. “I’ve learned to make my own canvases cheap.” Out here, you have to use what you can get.

Sometimes people driving by see his work and stop to purchase something. Framed paintings of cartoon characters are the most popular out here, though he strives to balance those with more serious pieces, like the one near the front door showing a little kid staring at a pile of guns.

“He’s trying to pick the right one for a drive-by,” Walker says. It’s similar to another one he’s working on that shows a toddler on a Big Wheel, riding with a pistol.

Guns have found their way into his work a lot lately. “A few people in my family got killed by guns,” he explains. “I’d like to start some kind of nonprofit organization to do artwork on these abandoned buildings and promote nonviolence. I want to try to save some of the black kids — well, white kids too — but in my neighborhood they’re killing each other with these guns every day.”

Walker learned the art from his grandfather, a house and sign painter who taught him as a young child. “He used to make us paint,” he says. “We’d get our ass whooped if we didn’t paint, ’cause he knew that along further in life that we would need what he knew. And he was right.”

Walker passed the skill onto his own kids, who showed an inclination to paint early on, like the time they painted everything in their new house — carpets, cabinets, fish tank — with flat white latex as their parents slept after a housewarming party. “I couldn’t even get mad at them,” he says, smiling, “’cause I seen what they were trying to do. It’s in their blood.

He hopes his work will appear in a real gallery someday, as it did a few times many years back, though most of his old pieces were lost when his Detroit house burned to the ground long ago. Until then, his paintings are on display at the makeshift studio on Van Dyke, sharing space with the mattresses leaning against the plaster walls.

“My gallery is basically out here on the streets,” he says, sitting on a bucket as he brushes paint onto a stretched bedsheet. “Everybody can see you working, compared to sitting in a building, waiting for people to come in. There’s a lot of opportunity here on the streets.”

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.