MOTOR CITY MOURNS DEATH OF FRANKLIN
Residents recall how iconic US singer helped her community
WHEN Aretha Franklin’s death was announced over the PA system, glassmaker Maurice Black says grief was so great at his Detroit auto plant that supervisors briefly shut the line.
“The look on everybody’s face. It was just shocking,” the 53-yearold said outside the city’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where the music icon kicked off her storied career singing gospel as a child.
“Hearts were heavy, people were like trying to get themselves together, so the supervisor was like go to the bathroom,” he said.
“Too many people were going to the bathroom, so they shut it down... they cranked it back up.”
What made it all so raw was many still remembered how Franklin had only visited the factory only four to six years earlier, Black recalled.
“When she came in there, everybody was hollering and everything. ‘Aretha! Aretha! Queen of Soul! Queen of Soul!’”
Cars and the “Queen of Soul” go together here, the largest city in Michigan, where long-standing ties to the auto industry had given rise to the nickname Motor City.
Black grew up in the neighbourhood around the church, where he would eat Franklin’s cooking at lavish meals she provided for the community and the homeless each Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“She made the best oxtail soup, with that cornbread, and it was to die for,” he recalled.
“It would be so much food that you wouldn’t know what to do.”
There was pride in the neighbourhood that the legendary singer shunned the celebrity trappings of cities, such as Los Angeles or New York, to continue to stay close to her roots.
Those who came to pay their respects, braving rain to lay bouquets and bring balloons, honoured her music but also that down-to-earth personality and commitment to giving back.
“I know she was rich, but she never let it out that she was rich,” said Reverend Charles Turner, whose father was a church trustee.
He too treasured her visits, and her dinners for church members and the homeless, who queued around the corner waiting to be fed by Franklin.
“I’m heartbroken,” sobbed Jerome Greear, 52, a recording engineer whose mother Joyce went to high school with Franklin, tears pouring down his face on the muggy summer night.
“I am devastated. However, I am so thankful that I’ve grown up in a time when I actually saw it happen. I saw her rise. I saw her pinnacles. I saw her dips and I saw her true ascension, and I’m proud.”
His 76-year-old mother also cried when she heard of her death, recalling how she used to be jealous of Franklin in their teens for having had a relationship with the man she dated at the time.
“I was thinking how can I compete? This is Aretha Franklin.
“She was popular, people gravitated towards her,” she recalled.
Greear recalled how Franklin would show up at some local chicken wing spot, walk in and be one of the ordinary folk.
Her funeral, he said, would have to be “presidential” to befit the queen that she was.
“The folks that adored her, this ain’t big enough,” he said of her father’s old church.
“This building’s not big enough.”