Michigan Historical Review

Reading only the afterword in William M. Adler's Land of Opportunity: One Family's Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crackmay bring you up to date on the saga of the Chambers brothers and get you a quick summary, but a full immersion is required to get the historic sweep and dramatic episodes of this cautionary tale. In one sense, the pursuit of the brothers—Billy, Larry, Otis, and Willie—replicates in the underworld the enterprise and entrepreneurial zeal demonstrated by many of the legal capitalists at the bedrock of Detroit's industrial glory. Their assembly line of crack production and distribution in the 1980s was a carbon copy of what transpired in the making of automobiles. The cocaine had to be purchased, cooked into rocks, and then through word of mouth from users and sellers marketed. Just as Wall Street's inside traders cannot be written off as greedy aberrants, Adler writes, "neither can the Chambers brothers be dismissed as aberrant ghetto capitalists—each took their cue from the wider society." (6)

Adler, a widely published freelance writer, drew his inspiration for this book after reading an article by Isabel Wilkerson, the noted author of The Warmth of Other Suns, particularly the line "To assure cheap, dependable labor, the brothers lured scores of young people from the cotton fields of their hometown of Marianna, Ark., in a sad and sinister twist on earlier migrations of Southerners looking for work in northern cities." (317) On the other hand, the brothers, like many of the industrial giants, got their start in the family, principally from their mother, Hazel. Adler quotes a sheriff who knew the family in Arkansas, "Hazel taught those [Chambers] boys everything they know. . . . She was whoring around and selling bootleg whiskey and those kids got a Ph.D. in hustling at home." (23)

Throughout the book, which was published first in 1990 and reissued in 2021, as the brothers move back and forth from the Delta to Detroit, Adler's descriptive prose captures them and the environmental and economic conditions they faced. Here is how he opens the chapter "Land of Cotton": "It was just before sunset, and sixteen-year-old Billy Joe Chambers was waiting on the porch of his family's house. The wood-frame, [End Page 141]four-room bungalow—two bedrooms, a living room, and kitchen—was set on cement blocks about twenty yards off a country road. Surrounding the house was the tabletop-flat expanse of Delta sky and earth, a merged and muted landscape particular to the region's sodden winters." (10) This scene in Arkansas stands in stark contrast to one he describes in Detroit. "Approaching Detroit from the south, on Interstate 75, the highway becomes noticeably bumpier, with potholes only an all-terrain vehicle could love. A witches' brew of vapors spews from an oil refinery and blast furnaces and innumerable smokestacks that punctuate the landscape like industrial exclamation points." (28)

Interwoven in these poignant portraits is the story of young men fleeing one form of poverty to stake a claim in an urban territory no less promising, but they are determined to make the best of the bad hand they've been dealt. From their mother's cache of bootleg whiskey, to their pushing dope, mostly weed and then crack, they are soon rolling in dough. Their business instincts were good, but the products were not, and it wasn't long before their pipe dream vanished and put them behind bars.

The crack epidemic in Detroit—like the riots, the post-industrial collapse, and the detritus of joblessness—burdened the city, ending a relative prosperity, all of which Adler deftly handles. He tries to return to some of the brothers, his informants, and the conversations they shared during his five years of research, but...