Detroit Residences

I visited Brazil's hometown of Detroit, looking for his ghost. I wasn't really sure what I would find. I hoped to stitch together a story from finding out where he lived and talking to people who knew him. 

To understand the surroundings of Joe's childhood, I had to know more about that place and time. The year of Joe's birth was when Ford Motors consolidated manufacturing at its River Rouge Complex. 

Raw materials were shipped into the world's largest integrated factory, a mile long and a mile a half wide, for 90,000 workers to make steel and glass and assemble the Model A, successor to the Model T. In Detroit, Brazil's childhood was surrounded by this hub of American manufacturing. Brazil's story was Detroit's story. Detroit's story was America's story. As an American, I needed to know my story.

But by the time I visited Detroit decades later, American manufacturing was a distant memory, like Brazil himself. The city's population had shriveled to 40% of its high in 1950. Six decades of urban decay left tens of thousands of buildings abandoned, houses empty, lots vacant. I was searching for traces of a dead man in a ghost town. 

Coincidentally, my visit to the remains of Detroit fell on Halloween, a night to remember the dead. These days, people from Detroit called Halloween "Devil's Night," when many structures, always targets for arson, ignited in greater numbers. In the history of Devil's Night, 1984 was the worst. Eight hundred fires burned across the city. 

After decades of destruction, Detroit had thrown in the towel, declaring bankruptcy in 2013. Only skeleton crews of firefighters and police were left to protect this ghost town from arson. Infrastructure was so emaciated that fire precincts didn’t have an automated alarm system. Instead, a central dispatcher sent a fax with the fire's location to the closest station, where the incoming fax paper would knock a perched empty soda can to the floor so that the firefighters would hear and respond. I hoped fire stations had enough of a budget to keep paper trays full on their fax machines.

I ventured to the Detroit Public Library, in search of Joe's addresses in old City Directories. Hopeful for clues, I reached to open the Library's front door, but paused to read a posted sign. A three-day curfew had been declared, stretching from six at night to six the next morning for everyone under 18, not to keep them safe, but to discourage them from lighting fires in the dark. At least the materials in the library were safe from flames.

Inside the cavernous library there were few patrons and fewer librarians. I found shelves laden with thickly bound City Directories. I pulled the tome from 1928, the year after Joe was born, and leafed through its thin pages. I scanned columns of names and found the entry for Joe's parents, Hilliard and Ida Brazil at an address on Illinois Street. This residence was in a neighborhood known as Paradise Valley, a neighborhood just north of downtown that absorbed many of the 80,000 blacks migrating from the south during the decade of Joe's birth. Many black businesses -- drugstores, salons, restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, and bars -- served the residents of Paradise Valley and the adjacent neighborhood of Black Bottom. Joe had told an interviewer, "I grew up in a poor... ghetto area around what you call downtown Detroit."

In the directory, Joe's father was listed as "Laborer." According to this listing, Joe, his older brother Zodis, and his parents shared a dwelling with Louis Steinberg, Mrs. Gertrude Williams, Louis Williams, and Richard Collins. I imagine that in the residence where Joe turned one, quarters were close, and pennies were pinched. If they had a radio, maybe they heard Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," the song used in the first feature film with synchronized recorded dialog, The Jazz Singer.

Ida and Joe Brazil 

The 1928 volume was the only directory that listed Joe's parents together. Each following year, Hilliard was listed at a new address and moved in with his younger brother Moses in 1934. Ida lived nearby with her two sons and three other tenants. She was listed as "Maid." All of the Detroit addresses for Joe's parents were within a few blocks of each other.

"I always kind of enjoyed music," Joe told an interviewer, "and my mother sang in like church quartets and choirs and that sort of thing. I’m from a family just raised by my mother because my father and mother separated."

Hilliard and Ida divorced in 1940. I chuckled at Ida's 1941 entry, listing her as a "widow" even though Hilliard was living a few blocks away. Was Ida's ex "dead to her?" Would Joe have thought the listing humorous? I chose to think he would.

With Joe's parents separated soon after he was born, and divorced when he was fourteen, I imagined that Joe did not have a close relationship with his father. Ida's parents lived nearby in Detroit; but Hilliard's had stayed home in Georgia. Was Ida the main adult in Joe's life?

I let my mind drift. Joe had attended the large, all-city Cass Technical High School. In between home and school were many music venues, usually dark during daylight hours. On Woodward, the main arterial toward downtown, stood the large Greystone Ballroom, with room for 3,000 dancers, and the Paradise Theater, a 2,000-seat hall that hosted the Detroit Symphony until 1939 and national jazz acts like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong after 1941. Joe may have strolled past jazz venues on sides streets, past bars with names like Club Tuxedo, Harlem Cave, or Cozy Corner, seeing deliveries arrive and catching earnest sounds of a combo rehearsing through an open door. In the decades the Motown sound, local blues and jazz flourished and fertilized the musical ground in Detroit for Barry Gordy's crops to come.

City directories in the Detroit Public Library yielded the following information about places where Joe Brazil and his relatives lived:

1928-29

Hilliard (Ida) Brazil Laborer h 1020 Illinois

with Louis Steinberg

Mrs. Gertrude Williams

Louis Williams

Richard Collins

1929-30

Hilliard Brazil Laborer R 13526 Lumpkin Ave (H)

1930-31

Hilliard Brazil Autoworker h 2289 Maple

1931-32

Harrison Hill Laborer R 984 E Vernor Hwy Apt 17

1932-33

Harrison (Queen V) Hill h 1427 St. Joseph

Harrison Hill Driver City Garbage Plant r 3137 Brush Apt 10

1934

Hilliard Brazil Laborer r  12903 Riopelle

With Moses Brazil

James Warsaw

1935

Mrs. Ida Brazil h 1034 Theodore

With Fred L Dodson

Samuel Hollis

1936

Hilliard Brazil Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave Apt 11 (Seeman Ct. Apts)

Mrs. Ida Brazil Domestic h 1008 Benton

1937

Hilliard Brazil Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave Apt 11

Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard

With John Stokes

Ben Anthony

1938

Hilliard Brazil Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave Apt 11

Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard

With John Stokes

Ben Anthony

Stanford Cooper

1939

Hilliard Brazil Laborer h 1014 Hendrie Ave Apt 11

Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard

With John Stokes

Ben Anthony

Stanford Cooper

1940

Mrs. Ida Brazil Maid h 5941 Rivard

With Henry Peoples

Ben Anthony

Stanford Cooper

1941

Mrs. Ida Brazil (widow Hilliard) h 5941 Rivard

With Roosevelt Muller

Ben Anthony

Stanford Cooper

1942

Joseph Brazil 15763 Woodingham

1944

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

1945

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

1947

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

1948

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

Ida Brazil 17846 Fleming

1949

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

Ida Brazil 17846 Fleming

1951

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

Joseph Brazil 17846 Fleming

1952

Hilliard Brazil 536 Holbrook

Joseph Brazil 17846 Fleming

1953

Zodis Brazil (Rosalin J) Coremaker Ford h 2452 S. Deacon Ave

Hilliard Brazil 5125 Helen

1954

Joseph Brazil Laborer Chrysler h 17846 Fleming Ave

With Ali Jackson

1956

Zodis Brazil (Rosalin J) Coremaker Ford h 2452 S. Deacon Ave

1957

Joseph Brazil Laborer Chrysler h 17846 Fleming Ave

With Ali Jackson

1963

17846 Fleming Ave (vacant)

1964

17846 Fleming Ave (Elliot Nichols)