Motor City Burning (32 page)

After working the dinner shift at Oakland Hills several nights later, he was sitting at home listening to some Thelonious Monk and talking to Octavia on the telephone. They talked almost every night now, and he found it strangely soothing to listen to her gossipy monologs about life inside the Motown studios. It was a welcome escape, like watching a soap opera on TV. As the conversation was winding down that night, he was idly thumbing through his files when the picture of him with Bob Moses at the Farce on Washington fell out of a folder and landed face-down on the floor. Only then did he realize there was writing on the back. It said:
Two soulful brothers, Bob M. and Willie B., at the March on Washington, August 1963. With love and respect, D.N.

For days the initials tormented Willie. The harder he tried to place them, the dimmer they seemed to grow. His torment was made worse by his hunch that the identity of D.N. might be the key that would finally unlock the door. He kept returning dutifully to the microfilm room at the library, but nothing jogged his memory. He began to feel panicky. Had his brief run of good luck already dried up?

He kept scrolling through newspaper microfilm and reading back issues of magazines, hoping something would reveal the identity of D.N. Finally he came to the edition of the Michigan
Chronicle
that carried the front-page picture Clyde had mentioned at the Seven Seas. Snapped moments after the Freedom Riders were attacked outside the Montgomery bus station, it showed Willie in the middle of the frame, looking dazed, blood pouring out of his mouth. On the right was a tall lanky white guy named Jim Zwerg, who was reaching into his own bloody mouth for loosened teeth. On the left, looking strangely composed, was John Lewis, his shirt spattered with blood. The accompanying article appeared under the by-line of
Moses Newsome, Special to the Chronicle
. The same writer from Baltimore who had been interviewing Willie when the fire-bomb came through the Greyhound's rear window outside Anniston. Willie knew he was getting close.

Two days later the front page of the May 24, 1961,
New York Times
swam onto his microfilm screen at the library. There was a picture of Jim Farmer, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis at a press conference in Montgomery, announcing after three days of fierce debate that the Freedom Riders would continue from Montgomery into Mississippi and from there on to their original destination, New Orleans. Though Willie was certain he had never seen the picture before, it looked familiar. It was spooky, like déjà vu before the fact. He kept staring until it hit him: He had been standing next to the man who took the picture. He had seen the picture before it was a picture. Now Willie remembered the photographer—a big sweaty white guy named Larry something who worked for the Associated Press and wore a pistol on his hip to discourage people from messing with him or his cameras.

The most arresting detail in the photograph was the bandage on John Lewis's head, which covered the gash where he'd had his skull cracked during the melee at the bus station. The sight of that bandage was enough to make Willie's lip throb. He kept studying the four Negroes sitting at the table full of microphones. Jim Farmer was at the top of the frame. The head of a New York group called CORE, Farmer had come up with the idea of the Freedom Rides as a way of testing new desegregation laws on interstate bus routes in the Deep South. He was on one of the buses that left Washington, D.C., on May 4. He rode as far as Atlanta but had to return to Washington for his father's funeral. When the story started making national headlines—that is, when buses and riders started getting photogenically attacked—Farmer had flown from Washington to Montgomery, eager be part of the blossoming coverage. Willie and his fellow riders distrusted Farmer instinctively. To them he looked like an overfed businessman who'd gotten off a plane at the wrong airport.

Next to Farmer sat solid, decent Abernathy, who, as always, looked like he was melting from the glare of all this unwelcome publicity. Next to Abernathy sat King, who had flown in from Atlanta for the mass meeting at Abernathy's church the night after the riot at the bus station. To King's left sat John Lewis, the only Freedom Rider in the picture, the only one of the four who had put his body on the line.

Willie's eye went back to King's face, that smooth patrician face, so at home in front of all those cameras and microphones. Then Willie heard that voice again, that satiny voice. This time it said,
Where is your body, Dr. King?

And when he heard that voice, he knew what D.N. stood for. Of course: Diane Nash.

She was part of Snick's Nashville contingent, a student at Fisk University, a light-skinned, green-eyed beauty who Willie had first met back in 1960 when he dropped out of Tuskegee and went to Nashville to learn the art of nonviolent protest and help with the downtown sit-ins. The woman had an aura about her. Once, during the lunch-counter sit-ins, she'd walked up to the mayor of Nashville and asked him point-blank: “Do
you
feel it's wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?” The mayor, flummoxed, allowed that, yes, as a matter of fact he did feel it was wrong. His admission made national news. Action didn't get any more direct than that. Later, Diane got thrown in jail when she was pregnant. Like everyone in Snick, Willie revered her.

Now he remembered that it was Diane, resourceful and determined Diane, who'd persuaded a reluctant black taxi driver to take Willie and John Lewis and Jim Zwerg to a house on the outskirts of Montgomery an hour after the attack at the bus station. No doctor in town, black or white, would patch up the three battered Freedom Riders. Too dangerous, they said. Not worth it. Diane, who knew the streets of Montgomery cold, directed the cab driver to a house at the dead end of a leafy, middle-class block. A black woman in her bathrobe let them in through the back door. She eyed their bloody clothes and the bloody towels they were pressing to their wounds, none too happy about it, but she went upstairs to wake her husband. He shuffled into the kitchen in his bathrobe, squinting and yawning. While he was sewing Willie's split lip at the kitchen table, they could all hear Diane in the living room shouting at Jim Farmer on the telephone: “We can't let them stop us with violence! If we do, the movement is dead! You hear me?
Dead!
” Not until they were back in the taxi did Diane tell Willie that the man who'd sewn up his lip was a veterinarian.

Three nights later, after the big press conference, they all gathered at the home of a Montgomery pharmacist to decide exactly what came next. Willie could see the house again: green clapboards with paint so fresh it looked wet; a broad front porch with rocking chairs and potted geraniums; and inside, gleaming floorboards. He could see the couple that greeted everyone at the front door: the prim little pharmacist with his bow tie and rimless spectacles, his big wife in her flowery dress and the enormous please-don't-sit-in-front-of-me hat she surely wore to church every Sunday. Yes, Willie remembered thinking, these were church people. King's people.

Everyone crowded into the living room. There was a certificate from the NAACP and a diploma from Meharry above the mantelpiece. For once there were no photographers or reporters on hand. The air in that room was thick with humidity and distrust. An ax seemed to be cleaving the air, splitting it between young and old, between the vulnerable and the protected, between the warriors and the generals. The former stood along the walls and sat on the floor; the latter helped themselves to the plush sofas and chairs.

The pharmacist's wife circulated with trays of cold lemonade. “Made it from scratch myself,” she said proudly, though Willie, for one, didn't believe it. The generals all snatched at the sweating glasses and drank lustily in the unseasonable heat. The young people shunned the offering, a small act of solidarity in the face of what lay ahead, both on that night and in the coming days.

Willie sat in a corner. To his right was a white girl named Joan. Her stringy hair was the color of mud and her T-shirt said
JUST A CRACKER FROM GEORGIA
. Hard to believe anything could coax a smile out of him at a time like that—his mouth was hurting like hell, his head was hurting, everything was hurting—but Joan's T-shirt actually made Willie smile. She smiled back.

To her right sat beautiful Diane Nash. She was fidgeting, wound up, obviously spoiling for a fight.

Farmer went first. He called the Freedom Rides “my show” and vowed they would continue with fresh CORE volunteers currently on the way from New Orleans. This was greeted with angry shouts, accusations, vows that no one could tell the riders to get off the buses. Abernathy restored the peace.

That was pretty bad, but they were willing to let it slide because they were more interested in King—and if he planned to board the buses with them in the morning.

That was when Diane Nash stood up. Gripping her Bible, as usual, she delivered a short speech and then said to King, “Where is your body, Dr. King?” They'd all heard the question a thousand times, but this time it took the air out of the room. King looked like he'd stopped breathing. “Where is your body, Dr. King?” Diane repeated, louder.

All of King's flunkies came to his defense, saying he was needed for fund-raising speeches and high-level negotiations with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, important missions that couldn't be accomplished from a bus seat or a jail cell. That got everyone riled up again, and again it was Abernathy who called for quiet. Finally Diane did what she had done to the mayor of Nashville. She asked King point-blank: “Are you getting on the bus with us in the morning or not, Dr. King? Yes or no?”

Again King's flunkies rose up, saying he was still on probation for a 1960 traffic arrest in Georgia, and any new arrest would land him in jail for six months.

When Willie heard that, he felt himself getting up off the floor, heard himself saying through swollen lips, “I'm on probation—and I'm going.”

“Me too,” said Joan, the cracker from Georgia.

“Me too,” said someone across the room.

Willie said, “What's the big deal with going to jail, Dr. King? Most of us have been to jail. Are you afraid of going to jail?”

And then he saw it—a sudden crack in the famed King composure. King looked at Willie, saw the stitches in his lip, then looked away. His tongue darted. He huffed. He knew he was cornered. Finally he said, “I think . . . I think I should choose the time and place of my Golgotha.”

My
Golgotha!

There was stunned silence and then Diane Nash hissed, “Would you listen to that? Man thinks he's de Lawd hisself!”

And that, Willie saw now, seven long years after the fact, was the moment when the trap door sprang open beneath him. That was the moment when he began to fall because he saw, for the first time, the wrongness of his belief that the world—that people, black or white—could be made to change for the better. Martin Luther King was just another garden-variety demagogue who thought he was de Lawd hisself. And that was how Willie had thought of King ever since that night at the pharmacist's house, as a self-anointed deity getting ready to go back to Atlanta to take care of more important business while the Freedom Riders got ready to journey into the lion's mouth. That night in Montgomery was the beginning of the end for Willie, and he owned it at last.

He rewound the reel of microfilm, shut down the machine, and left the library in a daze. The next morning he started writing his memoir. It felt good, but it was painful too. Disillusionment always is. The most painful thing about his disillusionment was its irony, the fact that it sprang not from the expected source—the racism of the white man—for that was a given, something almost comforting because it gave shape and substance to the black man's rage, was as reliable and implacable as the passing of the seasons. No, his disillusionment was painful because it sprang not from the venality of any particular race, but from the greater venality of being human, trapped inside a sack of skin that happened to be black, trapped inside history, trapped by his own imperfect past and by the ambitions and egos and smallness of men he wanted to revere but could not.

His life was simple now. He had a job to do, a story to tell. Now that he knew the framework of that story—the beginning, the middle, the beginning of the end, and the end—he could start telling the truth about men like Jim Farmer and Martin Luther King and Willie Bledsoe. The truth about his first white woman—and his second white woman. Even the truth about carrying the guns from Alabama to Detroit.

Of course he still wanted to know what happened to the last three guns. He was pretty sure one of them was a murder weapon. But which one? Now that his '54 Buick had vanished, the answer to that question was the only thing that could undo him—and then only if the cops were able to come up with the answer and prove it in court. For the first time, Willie was beginning to like his chances.