Motor City Burning (34 page)

22

W
ILLIE HAD THE WEEKEND OFF
, and after working on his book all day Saturday he decided to take Octavia out for a Sunday drive in the country. He'd earned a day of rest. He rose early, washed the Deuce, then fixed a simple breakfast and ate it at the kitchen table while reading about the Tigers' 12-1 victory over the woeful White Sox.

Half an hour later he was watching Octavia slide onto his convertible's front seat. She'd worn her hair up, wrapped in a scarf made of colorful African cloth, and her skin glowed against the white upholstery. She was wearing a long loose creamy linen dress and sandals, gold hoop earrings, very little makeup. Her toenails were painted copper. Willie had trouble keeping his eyes on the road.

He took Jefferson, the same route he'd taken when he took the car for a test drive with Chick Murphy. The lake was even shinier this morning, the air tropical humid, the kind of heat Willie liked. On the north shore of Anchor Bay they passed through towns with nautical names—Anchorville and Fairhaven and Pearl Beach—and they saw men sitting on overturned buckets fishing in a canal, the same way Aunt Nezzie taught Willie to fish in the teeming roadside creeks and bayous. The memory reminded him that the similarities between Alabama and Michigan were not all bad.

As they were leaving Pearl Beach, Octavia reached for the radio. “You got JLB on any a these buttons?”

“Second one from the right.” She turned on the radio and pressed the button and the day filled with the Temptations' familiar voices:
Like a snowball rollin down the side of a snow-covered hill, it's grrrr-owin . . . Like the size of the fish that the man claims broke his reel, it's grrrr-owin . . .

“Oooh, I love me some David Ruffin,” she said, turning up the volume.

David Ruffin, the singer whose limousine was upholstered with mink. For the first time in weeks Willie thought of his brother. He wondered if Wes ever made it to Denver—or if he was still alive.

“You never axed me how someone works as a receptionist managed to afford that Austin-Healey,” Octavia said. “That's usually the first thing men ax me.”

There it was again, the subtle put-down, that northern smugness that had so infuriated Willie the day Octavia took him for a ride in her Austin-Healey. He realized the work he had done on his book so far was fueled by anger—by a desire to show people like Octavia that they were the ones who had a lot to learn and that he, a man who had walked through fire, was the one to teach them. In the past he would have been distrustful of such anger as a sign of an overblown ego. But now he welcomed it. His mission, as he'd known for many weeks, was to repudiate the world that made him. Anger would be a useful tool—as long as he didn't use it recklessly. He took a deep breath and said, “Tell me, Octavia, how'd you manage to afford that fine ride?”

“David gave it to me. Walked up to the switchboard one day and handed me a set a keys and told me to go look what's out in the parking lot. Ain't that somethin? A free car!”

He wanted to tell her she wasn't the only person in the world who ever got a car for free, but he let it go. Trying to one-up her seemed like a puny thing to do.

He parked in the shade beside a restaurant called Roberta's near Algonac that Erkie had recommended, a sun-bleached shack roosting on a pier that jutted out into the St. Clair River. He could see freighters riding low in the silver water, enormous boats named Medusa and Blue Star and Edsel Ford.

Willie ordered smoked chubs and cole slaw; Octavia asked for broasted chicken and onion rings. She explained that her mother had taught her never to order the fish in a dive. Willie's Aunt Nezzie had taught him that the best fish was always found in places like this, where the paper place mats were decorated with seahorses and the menu was a chalkboard on the wall and the waitresses were all fat.

Their waitress had a big round pink face and she brought a pitcher of beer while they waited for their food. They drank and looked out across the river at the flatlands of Ontario, a soothing breeze skating at them across the water. Someone in the kitchen was listening to the Tigers game on a scratchy transistor radio and when the door swung open Willie heard the familiar voice of Ernie Harwell:
“It's deep . . . it might be . . . it's a
HOME RUN
for Willie Horton!”

He decided the time wasn't going to get any more right. “Got some good news,” he said. “I got started writing my book.”

She touched his hand. “Willie, that's wonderful! What happened?”

He looked across the water and realized it would be impossible to tell her the whole truth, so he did the next best thing and told her about remembering the confrontation in the pharmacist's house in Montgomery. Once he got started writing, he told her, fresh information started finding him. There was a story just yesterday in the
Free Press
that he'd clipped and put in his wallet. He took the clipping out and smoothed it on the table. “Check this out. This is a review of a documentary called ‘Revolution.'” He read the opening aloud to her: “‘There are so many American scenes—S.N.C.C. and the Haight-Ashbury in particular—that have gone over-reported and under-recorded, to vanish without any real trace in the novel or on film, of how they were. Day-to-day coverage in the press or on television couldn't do it, and now these scenes are gone, dispersed, or so much changed they do not matter anymore. . . . '”

He returned the clipping to his wallet. “I especially like the part about how Snick was over-reported and under-recorded. It's
so
true. There damn sure wasn't any shortage of reporters following us around—but none of them told it like it was. How could they? Most of them were white and even the black ones were just doing a job, not risking their lives for a cause like we were.”

“So,” Octavia said, “once you remembered that meeting at the pharmacist's house, you was able to start writing?”

“Yeah. I started the next day.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Been writing every morning before I go to work. Sometimes I write more when I get home at night. Sometimes I write all night.”

Octavia squeezed his hand. “I'm so glad for you, Willie.”

“Yeah, me too. You got no idea how glad I am.”

Their food came. It was delicious, as Erkie had promised, and Willie ate with gusto, cleaned his plate and then helped Octavia finish her chicken. Afterwards they sat there gazing at the boats on the shimmering water. The kitchen door swung open with a roar. Al Kaline had just hit a triple with the bases loaded. Octavia lit a cigarette, picked at a fingernail, cleared her throat. “Say, Willie?”

“Yeah?”

“You remember me telling you that Clyde helped me out of a jam?”

“Yeah.”

“Reason I needed his help was cause I got picked up on Kercheval back in '66—you know, when we had that near-riot?”

“I hadn't moved here yet but, yeah, I've heard about it. What happened?”

“Friend a mine, this artist cat name Glanton Dowdell, he picked me up one night to visit some friends a his on the East Side. You may of heard of Glanton—he painted those murals in Reverend Cleage's church. So we're ridin up Kercheval when all of a sudden people's throwin rocks at our car, and we see a po-lice car on fire. Next thing you know, one a them cars packed with cops, you know, a, a—”

“Big Four.”

“Right, a Big Four pulls up in front of us and just stops. Glanton has to slam on the brakes, and then there's cops all around us, pointin rifles, yellin nigger this and nigger that and everybody out the car. They lie us down on the street like dogs, then they break open the trunk and start whistlin and laughin. Turns out Glanton's buddies was some kind a militants and that trunk was full a guns and ammunition.”

“What'd the cops do?”

“They handcuffed us, slapped us around some, called us a lot of salty names. I was scared half to death. I tried to tell em I didn't know nothin bout no guns but they told me to shut up.” She was biting her lip, and Willie could see she was trying not to cry. “They took us downtown, threw me in a cage with a bunch a addicts and drunks and flat-back hookers, some filthy womens, and I tried to tell the po-lice I had a job at Motown records but they just laughed and told me to shut up, wouldn't even let me make a phone call.”

She lit a fresh cigarette and blew a huge cloud of smoke. Her voice had started getting shrill. “It was the awfullest night a my life. So degrading. The hookers was all talkin bout how much they charge for a straight lay versus round-the-world, how they pimps beat em with coat hangers—but always on they back so they can still work.” Another cloud of smoke. “I still have nightmares.” A bigger cloud of smoke. “You got no idea how awful the po-lice is in this town. . . .”

He was looking across the water. Octavia kept talking but he no longer heard a word she said. He didn't doubt that her night in jail was hell, but he could not let this slide. This was his first opportunity to assert himself, which was the only way he would ever be able to repudiate his past and make his voice heard. He needed to finish the job he'd begun during that long walk on the Oakland Hills golf course. He needed to finish shedding the skin of the dutiful son, the compliant kid brother, the faceless foot soldier, the meek listener—it was the only way to become the man he meant to become, shorn of all illusions and causes and messiahs, rid of the world that made him, healthy and breathing free in that sick and suffocating place known as America.

“. . . oh, Willie, you got no idea what lockup's like in—”

“You're wrong, Octavia.”

She froze, the cigarette an inch from her lips. Her face crinkled. “Say what?”

“I said you're wrong if you think I got no idea what lockup's like.”

She took a drag on the cigarette. “I'm sorry, Willie, I'm just depress. I know you been thrown in plenty a jails down South.”

“I'm not talking about down South.”

“You ain't?”

“I'm talking about Detroit.”

“You been in jail in D-troit?”

“I damn sure have.”

“When?”

He didn't hesitate. “It was a Saturday night last summer and it was so hot I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep, so I took a near cold bath and dragged my mattress out onto the porch, hoping to catch a breeze.”

She reached for a fresh cigarette without taking her eyes off him. He noticed that her eyes were bigger than before. Good.

“Even on the porch I couldn't sleep,” he went on. “Sometime way past midnight my brother knocked on my door, said there was a party at a blind pig down on Twelfth Street for a guy who'd just gotten home from Vietnam. I told him I wasn't in a party mood. He gave me the address in case I changed my mind, then told me he was going to the Algiers later cause they have a rolling craps game on Saturday night that sometimes runs for days.”

“You mean the Algiers Motel?” Octavia said.

“Yeah. So I try to go back to sleep but it's too hot and too noisy, sirens off in the distance. I musta dozed off eventually cause the telephone woke me up sometime after sunrise. It was Walter Mitchell, an old buddy from college, wanting to know what was going down with the riot. I said, ‘What riot?' There he was, hundreds of miles away in D.C., filling me in on what was happening a few blocks from where I was sitting. Walter told me he'd just gotten back from photographing the riot in Newark, and his editors at
Ebony
wanted him to get on the next plane to Detroit. I agreed to pick him up at the airport.”

“Now this is Sunday morning?”

“Right. Soon as Walter gets off the plane he asks me to drive him to the Sheraton Cadillac Hotel so he can drop off his suitcase and pick up his press credentials. We got stopped at half a dozen police checkpoints on our way into the city. The farther we drove, the scarier it got—police cars and fire trucks with their sirens going, this huge black cloud drifting toward downtown. We saw dozens of buildings on fire, saw a man throw a cinderblock through a plate-glass window at an A&P supermarket and people poured into the store. People were cheering them on, like it was a game or something.”

Octavia touched his arm. “Keep your voice down,” she said. Willie's eyes swept the restaurant. There were only three other customers in the place—a black couple in church clothes attacking a pile of clams, and a white guy two tables away in an ugly Hawaiian shirt drinking a pitcher of beer and reading a newspaper.

Willie lowered his voice. “When we got to the hotel Walter started making calls to police headquarters and a bunch of TV and radio stations. Like a foreign correspondent arriving in some war-torn capital, cool as could be. Someone told him the action was on the West Side, so we hopped in my car and followed a fire truck out Grand River to a burning warehouse. It was horrible but beautiful too—flames shooting through the roof of the building, hundreds of feet into the air. There were gunshots and I saw Walter crouching behind a yellow Cadillac snapping pictures of the firemen as they scrambled back to their truck. Then the windshield of the Cadillac exploded and Walter crawled back to my car on his belly. There were pieces of glass stuck in his hair. He wanted to go, but I told him to look across the street. The flames from the warehouse had jumped to the roof of a little two-story house next door. Women and children were running out of the building carrying the most pitiful shit you ever saw—lamps, hats, dolls—while two men stood in the yard and sprayed the building with a garden hose. A
garden
hose. Walter got pictures of them. Some of the best pictures he took.”

The plump waitress appeared at Willie's elbow. “Anything else here?”

“Just the check, please, ma'am.”

When the waitress was gone, he said, “It was getting dark, so we headed back to my crib. Now there were National Guard at the checkpoints, and some of them were so jittery I could see their rifles shaking. But the scariest thing was the carloads of white men cruising around with shotgun and rifle barrels sticking out of their windows. I thought I was back in Mississippi.”