ROBERT HAYDEN
Paradise Valley
Detroit, Michigan
By Ayesha K. Hardison
Robert Hayden’s poems are artifacts from a long-gone yet storied neighborhood in Detroit. He grew up in Paradise Valley, the near east side commercial district adjacent to the more residential community called Black Bottom (named originally for its rich soil). Similarly, Hayden’s biography is a palimpsest for the lost and resistive. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913, he discovered, at 40 years old, his parents William and Sue Ellen Hayden neither adopted him nor legally changed his name when they committed to foster him. In the poem “Names,” he writes, “You don’t exist—” a problem his narrator struggles to resolve: “As ghost, double, alter ego then?” Hayden’s old neighborhood, like his representation of it, has an analogous complicated history.
Once a mixed-race community with Jewish, German, and Italian households alongside African American families, Paradise Valley was one of few areas where southern migrants could move to in Detroit, and in the 1920s it became a Black enclave. With over 300 Black-owned businesses, including medical offices, retail shops, hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs, the district was the center of Black economic fortitude in the ensuing decades. Throughout the 1930s, the Haydens lived on St. Antoine, Beacon, and Napoleon Streets as well as East Vernor Highway. While these streets still exist, waves of urban development have altered their geography.
By the late 1940s, Detroit initiated its urban renewal by demolishing old, dilapidated housing and, later, constructing the Chrysler Freeway, the northbound section of I-75 and I-375, to accommodate autoworkers who followed manufacturing to the suburbs. The interstate was completed in 1964, destroying Hastings Street, a major Black Bottom and Paradise Valley thoroughfare, and sounding the neighborhoods’ death knell. Since the early 2000s, Ford Field and its parking lots have supplanted some of this landscape, including the corner of Beacon and St. Antoine where the Haydens once lived.
Other landmarks mapping Hayden’s career are distinguished by historic property, new construction, and the space in-between. Falcon Press, which published his inaugural collection Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), was located at 268 Eliot Street, the home of Louis E. Martin. Editor of the Michigan Chronicle, Martin founded the Black weekly newspaper in a one-room office on St. Antoine in 1936 and hired Hayden to join the newsroom stationed in his dining room. Presently, a 5,663 square foot vacant lot sits there, flanked by a Georgian Colonial built in 1900 and contemporary brick condos. The empty space marks the publisher’s absence in the neighborhood now called Brush Park.
Hayden’s poems about the city, then, are artistic signs outlining historic negative space. Paradise Valley is source material for his Depression-era poems, such as “Sunflowers: Beaubien Street” and “Bacchanal.” In the latter, published in Negro Caravan (1941), Hayden’s blues-infused narrator laments his lost factory job and bemoans his lover seduced by “one of these Hasting studs.” Finally, in the fifth poem from “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” published in his last collection American Journal (1978), Hayden invokes the neighborhood’s disappeared:
Where’s Nora, with her laugh, her comic flair,
stagestruck Nora waiting for her chance?
Where’s fast Iola, who so loved to dance
she left her sickbed one last time to whirl
in silver at The Palace till she fell?
Hayden also inquires about the “mad,” “snuffdipping,” “defeated,” “shell-shocked,” “taunted,” and those who passed for white, “who cursing crossed the color line.” He concludes with the repeated line, “Let vanished rooms, let dead streets tell.”
Old street names memorialize such corporeal absence but obscure it with their new orientations. As Hayden elucidates in a 1978 documentary, “I had Beacon Street in mind when I wrote the poem, ‘Dead Streets’ because there are no people there now.” Hayden’s Heart-Shape in the Dust is an elegy for the neighborhood, too, as it eponymously documents Falcon Press’s ephemerality. Paradise Valley is a metonym for the people celebrated in Hayden’s poems, like Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Bessie Smith, and Malik El-Shabazz. In turn, Detroit’s ongoing transition — from suburban expansion and deindustrialization to corporate returns and economic recovery — give added meaning to his compositions. “How clearly you / materialize,” he promises in the fourth elegy to Paradise Valley, “before the eye / of memory—”
* Except where noted, all poems cited from Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996), edited by Frederick Glaysher. This essay’s literary and cultural history draws on the work of Melba Joyce Boyd, Frank Rashid, Ronald Walcott, and the Detroit Historical Society.
Ayesha K. Hardison is a literary and cultural critic of African American writing and representation. An Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, she explores questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory in her research and teaching. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crow and editor of the journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color. In 2021, she will co-direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Zora Neale Hurston. Find her on Twitter at @aykiha.
* Except where noted, all poems cited from Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996), edited by Frederick Glaysher. This essay’s literary and cultural history draws on the work of Melba Joyce Boyd, Frank Rashid, Ronald Walcott, and the Detroit Historical Society.
