Cancer, Community, and Happy Meals
In 1967, Henry Marsh became one of America’s first Black mayors. Three months later, with the country boiling over with civil unrest and racial tension, riots that began in Detroit spilled north along I-75 up to Saginaw. Some called them riots, some called them revolts, but Henry sought solutions, like forming a 220-member Committee on Civil Rights that represented everyone from factory workers to clergy. It was an act he called, "The most important thing I’ve ever done.”
A few weeks ago, I met up with Jimmy E. Greene for an interview under the Henry Marsh Bridge in Saginaw, and as one can expect with Jimmy, we talked for over an hour about everything other than what we were there for.
We stood next to the fresh paint outlining a new mural depicting the former Saginaw mayor.
"You know," Jimmy says, “When Henry first took me under his wing, he would always say, ‘Treat the community like it's a your bank: deposit, deposit, deposit, by making time and effort and energy for community service.”
While many remember Henry as a mentor, a hero, a father, and a friend, while he was mayor, the actions he took in an attempt to unify the city ostracized him from many.
"People hated me," he said in an interview in 2000. "And people still hate me."
That hate led to death threats, and at one point, he sent his family to live with an unknown friend while he stayed in his home—armed with a shotgun given to him by the chief of police.
Because of his courage to do what he thought was right at a great personal and professional cost, today, saying the name “Henry Marsh” in Saginaw almost requires a moment of silence, a veneration of a Saginaw saint we should all aspire to become.
At his funeral in 2011, former Saginaw Valley State University President Eric Gilbertson said, “We know that Henry held important public offices and received honorific titles. Some people seek these as trappings of importance, hoping to draw dignity from them. But Henry brought dignity to the offices and titles he held, and you could not walk with him into any gathering or watering hole in our town where he was not recognized and greeted— even decades later—as ‘Mr. Mayor.’ He gave dignities to these titles.”
Jimmy also gave a eulogy at Henry's funeral saying, "There’s the utterance that, as long as somebody says your name, then you live forever."
Jimmy and I talked about the mural, about the bridge being named after him, and how Henry would have grumbled at all the attention he was getting.
But that humility, that single-minded focus on doing something in the act of public service, is just another part of his legacy.
“That's going to be part of our legacy, that Saginaw has changed for the better," he says. "People like Henry Marsh can’t die—not really. He’s still alive, in so many ways.”
This was my third interview with Jimmy, but it wasn’t until about six years ago that I even knew who he was. While talking with a mutual friend, she brought up his name and said, “You know who Jimmy Greene is, right?”
I told her I didn’t.
She scoffed. “EVERYBODY knows Jimmy Greene,” she said.
I told her I didn’t.
Based on the description she, I pictured a white, merit shop mob boss with a strange infatuation with Prince and a fetish for baseball caps no one mentions for fear of waking up to a dismembered horse.
It wasn’t until I met him in person two years later that I found out I was wrong about the “white” part, but right about the hats.
It was March of 2020 in a parking lot. Jimmy was dropping off a stack of Happy Meal gift cards at the public school administration building to be given away to students. Eight days earlier, an unknown virus had shut down the schools, and he was collecting these donated gift cards from people around the community.
I still have the recording of our conversation: four minutes and 26 seconds on Friday, March 20th, at 9:58AM.
“Why, in the midst of everything,” I ask him on the recording, “When people are quarantining, hunkering down, and pulling in, did you feel this need to reach out instead?”
“Our children are watching us,” he says. “To me, this is our chance to teach them that when they face challenges in their lifetime, they should respond by doing something: no matter how small it is, no matter how many people support them. Just do something.”
I ask him why he picked Happy Meals.
“Because of that word right there, ‘happy’,” he says. “I wish I had some major epiphany, but it was at 4:30 in the morning while watching an episode of Nightline I had recorded. I remember hearing the word ‘happy’ and thought, ‘Happy Meals!’ Like I said before, this is a time when we need to do something, no matter how small. Some people might look at the Happy Meals and say, ‘That’s not what these kids need. That’s not enough.’ But I can tell you, as a kid who grew up poor and in the projects, I guarantee that when you see the face of a kid getting a Happy Meal, especially in an impoverished community, you’ll know that it's more than enough.”
Eight days after the shutdown, here Jimmy was, making deposits.
We walked from the bridge to the Dow Event Center to sit on a bench. The words he said next are the reasons why you won’t ever hear them, because they for me: a gift, given to me at the right time and in the right way, words that I will unwrap, take out of the box, and listen to again when I need them the most. A deposit I'm not sure how to repay.
On March 12th of this year, Jimmy was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer. A scan only a few weeks later showed the cancer was aggressive and had progressed rapidly to stage three.
It’s a tricky thing, talking to people who have cancer about cancer. On one hand, we want to show love and support for someone suffering a challenge so immense. On the other, people with cancer don’t need to be reminded that they have it, and the gauntlet of well-meaning but constant conversations can become a reminder that the only time other people have to think about cancer is when they talk about it with you.
One thing I know about Jimmy is that he will always be willing to tell you exactly what he thinks. So instead of asking him about his cancer, I asked him what he thought about his cancer.
“Fuck cancer,” he says.
“It’s been a great frickin’ life. And all of it started with Henry. He just told me what to do, and I did it: get engaged, be visible, make it count, invest in people, build friendships and relationships, and make those deposits into the community. I just tried to do all the right things—you hope that at some point it pays off, although I'm not even sure I know what that means at the end of the day.
But I do know that it's been one hell of a journey. I feel like I have gained more than what is possible for someone coming from my circumstances, even now, dealing with cancer. Fuck cancer. I’ve always felt like I was living on borrowed time, anyway. When you grow up the way I did in Flint, you feel like you're just skating by until it all catches up to you. So, every day for me now is just like, ‘Wow, I'm still here!’
So when I got cancer, I thought, ‘'I mean, I kinda saw this coming?’ I didn’t want to die. I didn’t expect to die, but at the same time, it didn’t scare me. It didn’t frighten me, and I wanted to use it as a chip on my shoulder, to show my daughters I could muster courage when facing something like this. I knew I had to show my daughters, ‘I got this.’ I had to let my kids know that I was OK. That cancer was just ‘one more thing’.
I did a speech in Washington state last week, in Spokane, and somebody said, ‘Tell me about the cancer thing.’ So I said, here's what I found out about cancer: I don't get a special parking spot. I don't get to move to the front of the line. I still had to take my shoes off at TSA. I get no discounts on gas. I get nothing, just cancer.
But despite politics and policy, I never lost the thing that mattered the most, which were friendships and relationships. It’s so important to let people know that they matter. Isn’t that what this is all about? That you matter? That people will miss you when you’re gone?”
On March 12th, Jimmy was diagnosed with cancer, but yesterday, he was declared cancer free.
The only thing trickier than talking with someone with cancer about cancer is talking about death.
But we went there, too.
“If there’s such a thing as reincarnation,” Jimmy says, “I'm coming back as a movie critic. I’m gonna sit in the theater all day, every day, reviewing movies. That would be my thing.”
Dear Jimmy,
While we’re sorry that you won’t get that chance quite yet, we’re glad you’re sticking around for a bit because you matter, we would have missed you, and there is another lifetime’s worth of deposits that need to be made.
Let's do something, no matter how small.
Sincerely,
All of us
P.S. Congratulations, Jimmy.
P.P.S. And fuck cancer.