Motor City Burning (6 page)

Uncle Bob said, “So why'd this white dude give you a car?”

“He told me Wes saved his life on a patrol one night in Vietnam, and he wanted to repay the favor. So Wes told him to give me the car.”

“Well, get that tranny fixed and sell the thing and get you an Electra. All you gotta do is play your cards right.”

“My cards, Uncle Bob? What cards?”

“I been watching you. Your mother was right about you.”

“She's your big sister. She's always right.”

“Listen to me. You aren't like the rest of the Negroes up here. You got a brain and you aren't afraid to work. Plus, you're articulate and you know how to talk to all kindsa people. Those things right there can take a man a long way up here. Even a black man.”

“Uncle Bob, I've got a year of college under my belt and I'm working as a busboy at a honky golf club in the suburbs of—”

“If you didn't want to wind up bussing tables, then maybe you shoulda stayed in college like your daddy and I told you to.”

Willie should have known that was coming. His uncle, like his father, bought into the myth that something as flimsy as a college degree could actually make a difference in a black man's life. On the other hand, Willie's mother, the best educated person in the family, had urged him to listen to the voice in his head and drop out of Tuskegee and join the movement. And she'd never second-guessed him when it all fell apart. Ma BeBe was a rock.

Bob said, “Is there something wrong with bussing tables?”

“No, Uncle Bob. Not a goddam thing. I love it.”

“You're saving money, aren't you?”

“A little.” He wanted to add that he wasn't saving it nearly as fast as he'd squandered it over the past year, but he was too ashamed to admit that to his uncle or anyone else.

“You aren't working in no car factory or turpentine still or cotton patch, are you?”

“Hell no.”

Uncle Bob shifted in his seat, and Willie could feel it coming: The Lecture, The Black Bourgeoisie Pep Talk. He didn't want to hear it again, and suddenly he was angry. Angry at his uncle for buying into all that up-by-the-bootstraps, Booker T. Washington horseshit. Angry at himself for getting painted into a corner and having to take the lowly busboy job. Angry at the white man for setting up the game so the black man's only choices were between bad and worse, between wrong, wronger and wrongest. Yes, he was back in that familiar purgatory.

Before his uncle could launch into The Lecture, Willie cut him off. “You ever read Paul Laurence Dunbar by any chance?” Willie assumed he had, for as much as Uncle Bob was a driven man and a believer in the system, he was no black Babbitt. He'd put himself through night school at Wayne State and he still found time to read serious books, attend symphony concerts, visit the Institute of Arts. He was active in Detroit's Democratic Party and had just been named a delegate to the upcoming convention in Chicago. Bob Brewer's biggest worry was not that President Johnson's Great Society was an expensive joke, but that by choosing not to seek re-election Johnson had ceded the White House to the Republicans. It had long ago stopped mattering to Willie which white man lived in the White House.

“Sure,” Bob said. “
Lyrics of a Lowly Life
. All those stories in dialect.” Suddenly he slipped into a respectable darkie-on-the-plantation dialect: “‘An' ez fur boss, I'll be my own, I like to jest be let alone . . .' Dunbar was a man after my own heart.”

“And look at him,” Willie said. “Cat as gifted as that, wanted to go to Harvard Law School, wound up as an elevator operator in Dayton, Ohio, making four dollars a week. I think of a guy like Paul Laurence Dunbar and I ask myself what's the use of dreaming?”

“You think he let that elevator job stop him from dreaming? And writing?”

“I got no idea.”

“You know damn well he didn't. You want to know what's the use of dreaming? I'll tell you. Once you stop doing it, you're a dead man.”

“Well then, I guess that means I'm a dead man.”

But his uncle didn't hear him. He was already delivering The Lecture. “How you think I managed to pay cash for this Electra? By saving my tips and playing the numbers? Hell no. I had a dream, and even more important I had a plan—and I stuck to it. I bought up apartment buildings dirt-cheap when the white folks got scared and started moving away from the West Side. Then I rented them to Negroes. That riot was the best thing ever happened to me. All my buildings were fully insured, and with the money I got on the four that burned down I turned around and bought six more. And this car.”

It was madness, Willie thought. Even Mr. Clean here was unclean, feeding off the fears of the white man while bleeding the black man. “If you're so flush, Uncle Bob, why don't you lower my rent? And quit that boge waiter's job while you're at it?”

He ignored this too. He was talking about his friend Berry Gordy, who was minting money at his record company on West Grand Boulevard. Then he talked about another friend, the black Congressman John Conyers, smart as a whip, a man going places. Then he talked about the classes he was taking at U. of D. toward getting his own real estate license so he could start buying and selling property without giving a cut to Mr. Charlie. Be his own boss, just like Paul Laurence Dunbar.

But Willie had tuned him out. He was thinking about how to get rid of his '54 Buick. Maybe he should take the Alabama plates off it and just leave it in the garage and take a bus out of town. But what if the police found the car? Surely they could use the serial number to trace it to Alabama. Maybe he should put a brick on the gas pedal and let it take a swim in the Detroit River.

Then a better idea came to him. Maybe he should do exactly what his uncle was suggesting—paint the Buick and trade it in for a used Deuce and a Quarter. Then he could forget the cops and point his new car away from Detroit and just let it take him away from all this bad air and worse history.

But first he would have to get some money together. Again he thought of all the bread he and his brother had made selling those guns when they first hit town, and again he cursed himself for pissing away every last dime of it. He'd lost track of all the stories he'd told himself to justify his behavior. He told himself his brother had leaned on him to make the run from Alabama to Detroit—though Willie was secretly glad for an excuse to get away from the ghosts of the South. He told himself he needed a change of air if he was ever going to get back to work on his book—but the words hadn't come in Detroit any more than they'd come in Alabama. He told himself the world owed him a little fun—and so he gave himself over to pleasure for the first time in his life. He had money to burn, and he burned it. Saw Edwin Starr at the Twenty Grand, Etta James at Baker's Keyboard Lounge, Freddie Hubbard at the Drome, went all the way out to a VFW hall in Mt. Clemens to hear Bobby Blue Bland. After the bars closed at three o'clock he might hit a blind pig for a nightcap or load up on barbecued pigs' feet at the Log Cabin. Everywhere he went he was the life of the party, always a roll in his pocket and a girl on his arm, everyone's stick buddy.

It was the very sort of behavior that made his parents and Uncle Bob see red. They even had an expression for it—“nigger rich”—and it was the most scathing put-down they could utter about a member of their own race. Their scorn applied to all forms of wasteful behavior, the tendency to squander not only money but health, opportunity, good luck, anything acquired through hard work or simple fate. Squandering invariably led to need, and a needy man had an instinctive urge to seek a scapegoat. Willie's parents and his uncle would not abide this yearning for a scapegoat because they believed that all people achieve their own failures as well as their own successes, and the only way to attain true dignity is to accept responsibility for those failures and successes without complaint or false pride. As much as Willie hated to admit it, he knew they were right. This fix he was in was his own damn fault. He'd finally come to understand that the world doesn't owe a thing to any man.

Uncle Bob was saying something about Chick Murphy.

“I'm sorry,” Willie said. “What was that?”

“I said Chick Murphy made me a nice price on this car. He beat Krajenke by almost five hundred bucks.”

“Chick Murphy sold you this car?”

“Yeah, you met him?”

“He was at the wedding reception I worked this afternoon. Man drinks like a fish.”

“Well, he might be a boozer but he's the biggest Buick dealer in Michigan and he damn sure did right by me on this deal. You oughta talk to him. I'm sure he'd take your old Buick in trade.”

It was such a beautiful idea that Willie couldn't get it out of his head. He was in a daze all through the dinner shift that night, unable to stop working and reworking the angles. If he got a cheap paintjob on his '54 Buick and unloaded it on a dealer with a huge lot, the car would as good as disappear. Once it was resold, the cops would never be able to trace it back to him. And once he got behind the wheel of his own Deuce and a Quarter, all his problems would be solved.

He told himself these things so many times that by the time he fell asleep on his bunk in the Quarters, well past midnight, he had actually come to believe they were true.

4

A
S SOON AS
D
OYLE OPENED THE DOOR TO THE BASEMENT GARAGE,
the smell hit him. It was a layered, physical thing, the smell of ammonia and lye and disinfectant and their failure to conquer the far more powerful smells of human shit and piss and sweat and rage that had stewed in that garage since last July, when it was pressed into service as an impromptu holding tank for hundreds of people who'd been arrested on charges of curfew violation and looting and arson and were waiting their turn to stand before an over-worked, short-fused Recorder's Court judge and learn that their bail was up there in fantasy land, in the neighborhood of ten grand. Doyle guessed the stench would linger in this garage forever.

He climbed into a Plymouth and headed north on Woodward. It amused him that these cars were considered “unmarked.” With their cheap hubcaps, long radio antennas and identical chocolate paintjobs, they might as well have had bull's-eyes on the doors. Couldn't the brass at least spring for a few different shades of paint, maybe a Chevy or a Ford every once in a while just to keep the bad guys guessing?

He took Woodward instead of the Lodge Freeway because he preferred surface streets. For one thing, you were less likely to get a brick dropped through your windshield by some prankster who'd cut a hole in the cage on an overpass. For another, you were more likely to pick up on new strains of street life.

As he passed the Fox Theatre he saw that another Motown Revue was coming. His eye caught a few names on the marquee—Martha & the Vandellas, the Miracles, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. “The Sound of Young America” sounded like fun, but he knew it wasn't available to him. He was much closer to his thirties than his teens, and he wasn't about to pretend he didn't know it. Besides, he preferred jazz.

When he crossed over the Ford Freeway, the atmosphere changed. It wasn't anything on the street; it was something in his stomach, a sudden tightness. Instead of turning left on Grand Boulevard and going straight to the Harlan House, he kept heading north, guided by the tightness in his stomach. He knew where it came from: It came from the neon sign and his need to see it. And suddenly there it was up ahead, on the left side of the street, waiting to remind him of so many bad things. The palm tree with its green neon fronds, unlit at this time of day, topped the familiar metal rectangle. What he saw next came as too much of a shock to be a relief.

They'd changed the name.

What had once been the Algiers Motel was now the Desert Inn. They'd changed the name but they hadn't bothered to take down the sign and get rid of that fucking neon palm tree. The place was a blot on the entire police force, on the city itself.

Doyle slowed the Plymouth as he passed. There were a few black guys drinking out of paper bags in the parking lot beyond the swimming pool, out by the annex building. That was the killing floor. That was where cops killed unarmed civilians in cold blood. He was so mesmerized he almost missed “her”—the six-foot Negro with the copper wig and the hot pink mini-skirt and high heels who was hip-swiveling along the sidewalk in front of the motel, dangling a big white purse and checking each car as it passed. Christ, Doyle thought, now they've got trannies doing the hooking up here—in broad daylight.

He turned left onto Boston, a boulevard of fading but still-grand mansions. The grandest of them all was off to his right, a three-story palace roosting on a green carpet that was being groomed by black men riding a fleet of little tractors. Country living right here in the heart of the Motor City. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown records, had paid a million for the place last year, and the understanding around town was that he'd done so to squelch rumors that the company was planning to move to L.A. But Doyle had his doubts, and he wasn't alone. A million bucks was beer money to a guy like Berry Gordy. Besides, why shouldn't a thriving record company join the exodus? Did it have an obligation to hang on just because it happened to be owned by a black man? Did Ford Motor Company have a similar obligation just because old Henry made his pots of money here? Nobody squawked when he took his show out to snow-white Dearborn.

After crossing over the Lodge Freeway, Doyle turned left onto Twelfth Street, where it had all started. The gutted buildings still looked warm to the touch, like the fires had stopped burning nine hours and not nine months ago. Very few of them had been torn down yet, as though someone—insurance companies? the white power structure?—had left them standing as perverse monuments to the madness that had swept this city. Those that had been torn down had usually been replaced by nothing at all, just pebbly, weed-choked lots that glittered more brightly every day with smashed wine and liquor bottles. Ragweed Acres, Doyle called these vistas. Businesses along Twelfth that were untouched or only brushed by the flames had usually been modified—windows filled in with bullet-proof bricks or cinderblocks, a hideous but necessary architectural trend known locally as “Riot Renaissance.”