Your truck is lumbering along a side street from Gratiot. It’s the edge of sunrise and you’re on the east side, headed towards downtown in an effort to move. You have nowhere to go. It’s the dead of winter. Your cousin helped you out of a bad living situation in the nick of time. You can hear him in the back of the truck where it’s illegal to store anything beyond furniture, smoking a cigarette and possibly something else, laughing loudly with a friend that came along.

He helped you out, but he needed a few favors. The first is a dropoff on a street you can’t remember. It was dark and you were scared. You’d never been to that part of Detroit before, no matter if you lived near Hamtramck. You sat and waited on a curb where your relative told you to stop. Eventually, someone emerged from an abandoned house — you didn’t even think someone could live there. He exchanged something with your cousin, and they connected hands and you were ordered to drive off again. You didn’t want to ask what happened. It was only the first of three requests.

You went by the code you were supposed to. You did what you were asked and didn’t buck the system, because the system is conformity. The system is not speaking up. The system is not pulling your family to the side and asking where their future is headed. You do what you’re asked when you owe, and when you owe a lot, you don’t make any demands.