His barbecue stand is stocked with two grills, a hot dog cart and a group of men who seat themselves at his side every day.

Charles Gaither can be found on the corner of East McNichols and Hoover six days a week, from just before lunch until the sun sinks away, standing over two barrel grills that bathe him in heat and smoke. This is how he supports himself and his four kids.

Gaither’s one of countless grillers in the city who station themselves on sidewalks and parking lots during summertime, selling barbecued meat for a few dollars a meal. But while many do so as a side job to a main business like a barber shop or a party store, Gaither relies on this alone to pay his bills. It makes for long days of work at the mercy of the weather.

“It’s about two or three hours before I get here of preparation — loading the truck up, getting things set up, making sure things are ready to go,” says the tall, thin 38-year-old. “And it’s about two or three hours after I leave here — take everything off the truck, gotta wash the dishes, then I’m always doing something to get ready for tomorrow.”

He calls his business “C” Chef BBQ. It’s posted just like that on a framed, laminated menu that rests on the folding table where customers stand and order their food, and on a hand-painted sign propped near the sidewalk. The parking lot he works in belongs to the church he attends. They let him set up here, under a little canopy.

Besides the usual grilled ribs and sausages, Gaither’s created some unique dishes, like a leg quarter of jerk chicken on wheat bread for $4, Steak-umm sandwiches with onions and cheese for the same price, or $1.25 hot dogs covered in cinnamon-spiced, sweet baked beans on a bun. Drinks like red pop or lemonade go for a buck apiece.
After years of cooking in other people’s restaurants, he resolved a few years ago to start one of his own.

“Nothing’s easy,” he says. “That I have learned the hard way. It’s easier to work for somebody else because here, everything’s my fault. At the end of the day there’s nobody to be mad at but me. But it’s mine.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Don Williams cracks open a tall can of beer in a brown paper bag as he watches the passing cars. “This is one place where you can see everything happening,” says the 54-year-old. He’s sitting next to the “C” Chef canopy with pal Earl Hodges, 63, and Gaither’s 38-year-old brother Anthony.

When Gaither first opened up here, these neighborhood guys would order food and make small talk with him. Later they brought chairs so they could hang around awhile and make a day of it. Eventually they got so comfortable they set up their own horseshoe pit on the long strip of crabgrass between the sidewalk and the street.

People make hangouts out of all sorts of places. Porch stoops, dive bars, front lawns, city parks. For whatever reason, the soft-spoken chef, so polite that almost every sentence of his contains a “yes sir” or “yes ma’am,” found himself the center around which this small group’s social life orbits. His workplace became their full-time hangout.

“There’s a lot of entertainment here,” Williams says, leaning back in his chair. “Pretty ladies go by, everybody rides by, the bus stops right here, picks up, empties off, bus stop over there, officers night-sticking motherfuckers,” he laughs. “We have a ball over here, man.”

Williams is the group’s talker, the one with the contagious laugh, the one always cracking jokes.

“He do not hush,” the chef says about him. “God bless him, but he do not hush.”

Williams, like Hodges, has been in the neighborhood for years. “I’ve been living here since ‘76. The neighborhood over here, wasn’t nothin’ over here black but a shoe and a tire.” They all laugh. “I’m telling you the truth. Matter of fact, we was one of the first black families to move over here.”

After three decades working robotics at Chrysler’s Sterling Heights plant, he retired a few years ago. “It’s been three years of heaven,” he says. “I’ve never been able to sit out here like this ‘cause I always worked afternoons and they’d keep me there, what, 10, 12 hours. But now I ride my bicycle up here, sit up here a couple hours when he starts up in the morning, drink a beer. That’s what I like to do.”

They’re out here even on the short, gray days of winter, sitting close to the hot barbecue pits, sometimes taking swigs of Yukon Jack to keep warm. “Winter’s very challenging,” Anthony Gaither says, understated. It doesn’t stop their gatherings, though.

You can tell these guys admire the chef, truly like him, even feel protective towards him. Hodges and Williams call themselves his adoptive uncles. And with his brother Anthony joining them most days when he’s not working at the gas station up the street, the assembled group has the relaxed familiarity of relatives sitting around the yard.

“It’s a family thing,” says Hodges, 63. “We stay up here until 8 o’clock or so some nights, and while he’s loading up we stand around talking, drink a beer, you know? We hate to even leave each other ‘cause this is just what we do. We stay here all day. And when someone is not here one particular day, the whole day, we wonder where they are.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Clang! The horseshoe hits the stake and falls off to the side.

“You ready for this ass whooping?” Williams says to Hodges. “Don’t take it personal though,” he adds with a chuckle. He throws a second one. It bounces off the dry dirt and kicks up a whiff of dust. He’s already way in the lead.

“Aw, he’s just lucky right now,” Hodges counters. But the score is an afterthought. Horseshoes is just another reason for these friends to stick around, something to do between bouts of sitting.
“It’s a beautiful game,” he says.

Anthony Gaither likes its low-exertion pace. “I’m not really a sports person, like baseball, running around and all that. I don’t really want to do all that running and stuff,” he says, rubbing his belly. “Just stand here and let the stomach grow a little more.”

Kids ride by sometimes and ask to be taught how to play. Others come to watch. Rarely, a hustler might show up and want to join in, and before you know it they’re swearing and getting riled up and trying to bet on throws. That ends the game.

As they take turns throwing and talking and throwing again, cars pull up, drivers amble out, and Charles the chef hustles between his grills. Sometimes half-a-dozen cars will be parked around the canopy in the lot, angled in all directions, their stereos blaring, their drivers hungry. The horseshoe guys will wait for everyone to get served and invite the chef to play a quick round. He rarely has the time for it, and doesn’t get to hang out much, but he’s still the center of this group and its reason for being here.

And the chef is perceptive enough to know this, thoughtful enough to appreciate the gesture of these guys showing up one day and adopting him and his spot as their own.

“Some days are better than others, but the relationships and the people I’ve met are more important than the money. I love the customers, and the people I meet out here, and these guys out here,” he says, as his friends stand around joking by the horseshoes pit. “It makes it difficult to come off this corner.”

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

What can it actually accomplish?

It’s just a sign, stark and simple, and in the kind of religious language that saturates the city’s culture it declares that “God said … Thou shall not kill.” And suddenly it was appearing on trees and poles all over town.

The woman behind it says the idea came to her in the dead of night. “I know when you write about the spiritual position, people don’t really like to see that,” Ovella Andreas says, “but I was asleep and the spirit of God woke me up.”

Andreas, 48, is a former church organist who sat for years quietly by the choir until one day she felt the urge to become a pastor. Some years and a lot of training later, she has her own congregation. A few months back, she had a dream telling her to plaster the city with those posters, so at every turn there will be a challenge to the conscience of someone who might take a life.

Andreas admits that her plan is idealistic, an act of faith where nothing else has worked, an appeal to deep-down memories of Sunday sermons about right and wrong in a town where church is still woven into everyday life.

“Of course, there are people who say, ‘What can a poster do? Are you serious? These guys could not care less about Thou shall not kill,’” Andreas says. “But the reality is we’re losing 10 or 15 people a week to senseless death. Even though we don’t know if it’s going to do anything, it’s better than doing nothing.”

She called several printing shops, and a handful made signs for free. She told people about her idea, and some took a few to hang in their neighborhood. A movement began.

If they were carpenters, they’d be boarding up empty houses. If they were cooks they’d be feeding the hungry. But they’re church people, and this is what they do.

“This is really the only thing that we have to work with from this side,” Andreas says.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Some don’t think it’ll accomplish much at all.

Among them is the Rev. Willie Lewis, who waits outside a church as a rally is to begin under a cloudy sky that threatens rain. The Obedient Missionary Baptist Church on the city’s west side organized it, announced it, invited people to stop by and take a stand against the violence that’s so much a part of city life.

Yet at the designated hour there are but two dozen people here, seated at tables, holding stenciled posters or standing by the church steps, waiting for something to happen. Andreas’ signs are stacked on a table, ready to be tacked up somewhere. It’s not her event, but she was invited to speak here.

Lewis stands nearby in a dark green suit, his hair salt-and-pepper, his demeanor dignified and formal. “All the publicity and this is how it is?” he says in a gravelly voice, looking over the small group that showed up.

The 74-year-old pastor walked the few blocks from his church, Meditation Missionary Baptist, because the rally’s organizers asked him to be here to lend some heft to the proceedings. He shakes his head in disappointment, not just at the numbers, but also because this rally, like so many of its kind, mostly draws women who come to lament the havoc wrought by men.

“You got to look for the men and boys,” he says, seeing few. “Who’s that doing all the violence out there? Men. How you gonna stop that, except with men? Women aren’t the ones who are gonna stop nothing. The men are doing it.”

Out on the curved road that sweeps past the church, a few church kids shout at the traffic and hold up hand-made placards reading “Give Peace a Chance” and “Thou shall not kill.” Some cars honk as they pass by.

“That’s naïve,” Lewis says. “I don’t call it wasting time because people should do something, but we’re like the wild, wild West. Remember the violence there? How did they stop that? Force — sheriff’s department, police, law enforcement. But there’s no police here today, man. The police department’s in disarray.”

As a church leader, he wants the same thing as these women and children do, but after decades of rallies and killings, he’s come to doubt that peaceful methods like this will do anything.

But as the traffic light out front goes red, a car stops next to a kid on the side of the road.

The driver asks for a sign.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bernice Reed leaves the rally for a moment and drives with Andreas to a curbside memorial a mile or so away.

It was just someone’s tree until Reed’s son got shot next to it. Then his friends and family tied stuffed animals and pictures to it, and now that homeowner has a shrine to a dead kid in the front yard.

When Reed pulls up and sees it, she begins to cry. It’s been more than a year since her son was murdered, yet she’s never been here before. The sight of this tree cuts through a year’s worth of defenses and brings it all back.

What’s worse, he was the second of her two sons murdered. The oldest was killed 10 years ago at age 25. Shot by someone he knew, Reed says, after a fistfight escalated. Her youngest was shot in March last year. He made fun of a friend and the friend didn’t like it. “The guy who killed my baby boy said he played too much,” the 53-year-old says. “He’d play with you until he aggravated you, so that’s why he killed him.” Both died on the same street, Meyers, a decade apart.

Reed had been to one son’s memorial but not this one. “For some reason, with my older son, I would go there all the time and put balloons up, and I would go to the cemetery, but I think by this being my baby at 18 years old, I don’t know how to explain it. …”

Not long ago, Reed heard Andreas on the radio talking about the campaign, called in for signs and started driving around town and leaving them everywhere. If she hears on the news that someone’s been killed, she drives to that spot and posts a sign. If she sees a telephone pole or a tree with stuffed animals attached, she’ll leave a sign there too.

The poster campaign makes perfect sense to her. “Most people are raised up in church,” she reasons. “Even if they stray away, they’re brought up in church, so when you see the word ‘God’ a lot of people fear the name, if they don’t fear anyone else. Somebody might see the posters and think twice.”

Being face to face with the memorial makes the memories tumble out: how she taught her son to save his money, taught him how to work for what he wanted in life, taught him how to be a man. Memories that drive her to put up those posters.

“Whatever I can get them to nail into,” Reed says. A tree. A telephone pole. Anything.

But what can it actually accomplish?

Reed will tell you that if nothing else, if nobody is moved by her efforts, if nothing changes, it still keeps her from falling to pieces. It channels the grief. It’s an outlet for an anguished mother’s helplessness and pain. Something good has to come out of those deaths, otherwise they would be truly meaningless.

“I don’t want another mother to go through what I went through,” Reed says.

After lingering a little while, Reed and Andreas climb back into the car and drive away from the shrine. There’s a rally to return to and signs to be hung.

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

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.

++++++++++++++++++++++

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.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

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.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

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.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

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.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

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.