Intervention Held For Detroit Mayor

By Bill Matthews

 Kilpatrick                                              Waters

(DETROIT) The Peoples News has learned that aides to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick held an intervention with the mayor a few weeks ago to scare him into straightening up his act.

They asked 112-year-old Sergeant Vernon Waters to meet with Kilpatrick while the mayor spent the night in jail. The hard-driving Alabama native, portrayed by Adolph Caesar in the movie A Soldier’s Story, spent a half hour with the proudly trifling mayor.

Kilpatrick was singing when Waters walked into the jail.

“Well it’s a low-down dirty shame,” he sang. “Well it’s a low-down…”

“Knock it off,” Waters told the mayor. “We don’t need no more guitar-picking, sittin’-around-the-shack music today.”

Kilpatrick, imprisoned overnight for violating terms of his bond, shrank back into his cell.

“It’s hard to breathe in these little spaces, Sarge,” the mayor said. “Man wasn’t made for this here. I lost my dust! Got no protection, nothin’ to keep the dogs from tearin’ at my bones.”

Waters, who later said he didn’t know what Kilpatrick meant by ‘dust,’ was unsympathetic. In World War I, he slit the throat of an African American soldier who embarrassed his race, and during World War II, he survived being shot several times by one of his own men.

“Don’t feel too bad, Kwame. It has to be this way. You see, there’s a whole lot of people just can’t seem to fit in to where things seem to be going. Like you,” Waters said.

“See, the Black race can’t afford you no more. There used to be a time we’d see someone like you singin’, clownin’, yassuh-bossin,’ and we wouldn’t do anything. Folks liked that. You were good, a homey kind of nigger.”

Waters told Kilpatrick those days were over. The gains of the civil rights movement and sacrifices of hundreds of people have ended the days where blacks could act like they don’t have any sense, he said.

“The day of the Geechee is gone, boy. And you’re going with it,” Waters said.

Kilpatric grew angry at the comment and stood up. At 6-ft., 5-in., he towered over the diminutive Waters. He made a sarcastic comment that Waters was too little and old to tell him what to do. Waters pressed his face against the bars and glared at the mayor.

“You trying to mock me, Kwame?”

Kilpatrick again lost his nerve. “No, sir, Sarge,” he said.

“Good. Because whatever an ignorant, low-class Geechee like you has to say ain’t worth paying attention to. Is it?”

When Waters’ half hour was up, two guards came to get him. He looked at them as derisively as he looked at Kilpatrick.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Waters said. “If it ain’t the white boys.”

Kilpatrick aide Stephen Remnick said he didn’t know whether the exchange would straighten out his boss.

“But there’s this other guy, Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, we’re thinking of bringing in,” Remnick said. “The guy’s tough as hell and doesn’t like steers or queers. You might say he’s an officer and a gentleman.”

Foley, with plebe

Note: This article is satire, brought to you by the creative minds at The Peoples News. Kwame Kilpatrick, however, was in jail in early August, and remains as trifling as ever.

© 2008 The Peoples News

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