Oscar Fate travels to Detroit to interview Barry Seaman

Oscar Fate travels from New York to Detroit to interview Barry Seaman for Black Dawn, carrying the assignment into a journey shaped by recent bereavement and an unsettled sense of direction. What begins as a magazine visit becomes an encounter with Seaman’s layered past and present: his public speaking, his political history, and the modest, precarious life he has made after prison.

Departure from New York

The trip follows Fate’s visit to a neighbor’s apartment after his mother’s death. He returns home with a cup of coffee he cannot drink and leaves it beside videotapes and the urn containing her ashes. The next morning he sees a silent cartoon of rats streaming through a city, changes the channel, and tries to return to work. A towel in the bathroom may have been the last one his mother used, but he cannot find a familiar scent in it. Ordinary objects keep her absence close while he prepares to leave.

Fate tells the magazine that he will miss work because he is going to Detroit, and says he expects to return in three or four days. He packs the Barry Seaman file with a few shirts, socks, and underwear. Before leaving, he stands at the door considering whether to take the urn with him, then decides to do so later. His departure is therefore both practical and provisional: the assignment draws him away, but the question of what to do with his mother’s ashes remains waiting at home.

In the rain, Fate struggles to find a taxi. Just as one stops, he hears what sounds like a shot and asks the driver whether he heard it. The driver answers that New York produces increasingly fantastic things. The exchange offers no explanation for the sound; instead, it leaves Fate’s attention suspended between the ordinary business of getting to the airport and the possibility that something has happened nearby.

Arrival and search in Detroit

Fate sleeps through much of the drive and wakes when the taxi driver asks which terminal he wants. He answers that he is going to Detroit, then falls asleep again. Once there, he rents a car, checks a map supplied by the rental agency, and drives toward the neighborhood where Seaman lives.

Seaman is not at home. A boy tells Fate that he is usually at Pete’s Bar, nearby, so Fate walks through a district marked by the working and retired life of the automobile industry. The buildings are five or six stories high; older residents sit on stoops or lean out of windows, while groups of boys gather on corners and girls jump rope. The parked cars are neither new nor luxurious, but appear to be cared for. The details give Fate a first, concrete sense of the community he has come to visit.

Before entering the bar, he notices a mural on a neighboring building. Its circular form resembles a clock, with twelve scenes of people working through stages of Detroit factory production in place of the numbers. A recurring black figure changes from a teenager to a thin man-child, dressed in clothes that remain too small, apparently cast as a clown. At the center of the scenes, the word fear replaces the clock’s hands or mechanism. The mural offers Fate a stark image of industrial labor and its unease, though he does not learn who painted it.

Inside Pete’s Bar, Fate asks the bartender, a heavyset Black man in his sixties with a scar, about the mural. The bartender does not know who made it and guesses it was painted by a neighborhood boy. Fate then orders a beer and asks the room whether anyone knows Barry Seaman. A short man in a Pistons shirt and sky-blue tweed jacket asks who wants to know. Fate identifies himself as a reporter from Black Dawn, establishing the professional purpose of the visit in a room where Seaman’s whereabouts are known but his presence is not yet confirmed.

Reaching Barry Seaman

On the way back toward Seaman’s home, Fate feels dizzy. Under a rising moon, a man approaches him near a building entrance and says something Fate cannot understand or does not accept. Fate claims to be Seaman’s friend and grabs at the man’s jacket before being told to relax. In the dark doorway, he sees four pairs of eyes. He lets the man go and continues toward the house, following the moon over the rooftops as noises and running footsteps sound in side streets. He checks his rental car, finds nothing wrong with it, and rings Seaman’s buzzer.

After Fate says over the intercom that Black Dawn sent him, an amused voice lets him in. He climbs the stairs and realizes that he is unwell. Seaman is waiting on the landing. Fate asks to use the bathroom and vomits. The episode interrupts the expected interview before it can begin: instead of arriving as a composed journalist, Fate reaches Seaman’s home in a state of physical distress.

When Fate wakes, Seaman is writing with a pen beside four thick books and folders of papers. He wears glasses as he works. Three of the books are dictionaries; the fourth is a large volume called The Abridged French Encyclopedia. Sunlight comes through the window, and Seaman offers Fate coffee. The apartment is small and modest, with books, posters, and photographs spread across the room. The scene places the visitor’s temporary dependence alongside the older man’s concentration and accumulated materials.

Seaman makes his living giving lectures, often for educational organizations in poor neighborhoods and sometimes for small progressive colleges with limited budgets. The work is badly paid: he may travel across the country for a return ticket and three hundred dollars. Years earlier, he published Eating Ribs with Barry Seaman, a collection of rib recipes mixed with accounts of where he learned them, who taught him, and under what circumstances. Its most notable section describes preparing ribs and side dishes in prison, where cooking was forbidden. The book briefly brought him back into public circulation, including appearances on morning television, but he has since fallen into obscurity while continuing to lecture and travel.

Public history and the church visit

A black-and-white poster in Seaman’s living room shows two young men in black jackets, berets, and dark glasses. Fate recognizes one as Marius Newell, and Seaman confirms it. The recognition connects the quiet apartment to Seaman’s earlier political life without turning the interview into a simple account of past activism. Seaman prepares to leave, changes into a narrow-brimmed dark green hat, puts in his dentures, and says he is ready.

They drive to Rebecca Holmes Park, about twenty blocks away, and stop near its edge to stretch their legs. The large park contains a half-collapsed fence and the empty Temple A. Hoffman Memorial Playground. A few rats flee as the two men approach. Nearby stands a gazebo with an appearance Fate compares to a miniature Russian Orthodox church; hip-hop plays from beyond it. Seaman tells Fate to include in the article that he hates the music. Asked why, he does not give an immediate explanation.

The men pass the gazebo and a dried-up pond, where Nike sneakers have left tracks in the mud. A boom box lies near shrubs, though no one is there. Seaman says he dislikes rap because, in his view, it offers suicide as the only way out, but not even a meaningful suicide. He adds that he has seen or been near two suicides he considers meaningful, while acknowledging he could be wrong. Fate asks how rap leads to suicide; Seaman does not answer, instead taking a shortcut through the trees. The unanswered question remains part of the encounter: Seaman’s judgment is stated forcefully, but its reasoning is withheld.

The shortcut opens onto a paved area where three girls jump rope and sing a strange song. Its images include a woman whose limbs and tongue have been amputated, the Chicago sewers, a sanitation worker named Sebastian D’Onofrio, and the refrain Chi-Chi-Chi-Chicago; later, the woman acquires wooden legs, wire arms, and a tongue made of braided plants. The song’s unsettling transformation accompanies Fate’s disorientation. He asks where the car is, and Seaman points him toward the other side of the park. They cross the street, talk about sports, walk roughly a hundred yards, and enter a church.

Seaman’s address and the meaning of the assignment

At the church, Reverend Ronald K. Foster introduces Seaman in a manner suggesting that he has spoken there before. From the pulpit, Seaman announces five subjects, in order: danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness. Congregants smile and nod as if prepared to listen. Fate sees five young men in black jackets, berets, and dark glasses watching with impassive expressions, ready either to applaud or jeer. Seaman paces onstage with his back hunched and appears to lose track of his speech.

The preacher signals the choir, which sings a gospel hymn about Moses and the captivity of the people of Israel in Egypt, accompanying itself on the piano. Seaman returns to the center of the stage and raises a hand, his eyes closed. The singing stops, and the church falls silent. The journey that began with Fate trying to fulfill a magazine assignment has brought him into a public performance that joins Seaman’s present work to the memory of his political past. The five announced subjects also widen the interview beyond biography: danger, money, and food belong to material survival, while stars and usefulness open the address toward questions of scale, purpose, and what a life can still offer.