The Warmth of Other Suns (22 page)

Inez was quiet. So he repeated himself.

“This year, you going to Tampa. I want you to go to school.”

“I don’t want to go to no school. I changed my mind. I want to go to Detroit with you.”

“What you talking ’bout? You been preaching about Angelo Beauty School, now you want to go to Detroit? You go on to beauty school, where you wanted to go. You can always see the world. You can’t always go to school. You’re not going to Detroit with me. That’s it.”

The neighbors would surely talk now. Some came up to George himself. “Why you not letting your wife go with you? They say you not going to Detroit. You going to D.C.”

He paid them no mind and caught a bus up to Detroit with his friends Sam Gaskin and Charlie Bollar, whom they called Mud.

The day he left, Inez was too mad and too hurt to say good-bye.

She headed to work. “I hope you all take care of yourselves” was all she could manage.

They made B-29 cargo planes at a plant in Hamtramck. George arrived in the late spring of 1943, and they put him to work on a jig making frame covers for the hatch doors and rudders of the cargo planes. They applied chemicals to the covers to make them strong but light. The chemicals were so flammable that anyone caught with a cigarette in his pocket was fired on the spot.

George set about learning the job and adjusting to a gray concrete city he wasn’t particular about when a cousin of his wife’s showed up unannounced. That was the point. Inez had sent him to see if George was really there and not with some other woman. The cousin reported back that George was doing what he said he was, and only then could Inez feel halfway good about going on to Tampa to take a short course in beauty culture.

George worked nights drilling holes around hatch door frames to attach the covers with screws. He had to bend or lie flat or get on his knees and twist himself to drill the holes straight.

The place was swimming with Communist sympathizers and alleged saboteurs, or so people said, in the hothouse of wartime. Because spies were believed to be inside the plants themselves, any missing or wrongly placed screws were enough to draw suspicion and reprisals in an already cheerless endeavor.

“This made it a nervous, nerve-racking situation,” George would say years later. “You know, you drilling all kind of ways and you trying at your very best, and every now and then, you gonna get a hole angle, it’s not gonna be right. But if you got too many of them, then you were in trouble.”

And every minute, George was scared the whole place would blow up from all the chemicals and paranoia.

Then on the humid night of Sunday, June 20, 1943, a fight broke out between several hundred white and colored men on Belle Isle, a park extending into the Detroit River on the east side of town.
⁹⁵
The fighting spread north, south, and west as rumors circulated among blacks that white men had killed a colored woman and thrown her baby into the Detroit River and, among whites, that colored men had raped and killed a white woman in the park.

Neither rumor turned out to be true, but it was all that was needed to set off one of the worst riots ever seen in the United States, an outbreak that would mark a turning point in American race relations. Until the 1943 uprising in Detroit, most riots in the United States, from the 1863 Draft Riots in New York to the riots in Tulsa in 1921, to Atlanta in 1906 to Washington, D.C., to Chicago, Springfield, and East St. Louis, Illinois, and Wilmington, North Carolina, among others, had been white attacks on colored people, often resulting in the burning of entire colored sections or towns.

This was the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites and in which black residents, having become established in the city but still relegated to run-down ghettos, began attacking and looting perceived symbols of exploitation, the stores and laundries run by whites and other outsiders that blacks felt were cheating them. It was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urban phenomena, ultimately centered on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them.

The Detroit riots went on for close to a week, ending in thirty-four deaths and more than one thousand wounded.
⁹⁶
The Sunday night the riots began, as many as five thousand people joined in the stoning, stabbing, beating, and shooting, so many people injured that the municipal hospital was admitting riot victims at a rate of one a minute.

George was living at 208 Josephine near Hastings and Woodward and heard the mayhem in the streets and on the radio all through the night. He was living in the middle of the crowded colored quarter mockingly called Paradise Valley, where blacks were stoning the cars of passing whites, whites were beating up blacks as they emerged from the all-night theaters on Woodward, and an inspector on the scene reported to the police commissioner that the situation was out of control.

The rioting continued into the next morning. It was now Monday, the start of the work week. A co-worker of George’s called him up.

“Hey, Starling, what you gonna do?”

“Do ’bout what?”

“ ’Bout going to work.”

“I’m going.”

“Man, you must be crazy.”

“What you talking about?”

“Don’t you know? Where you been? You didn’t know it was a riot going on?”

“Yeah, but I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. I ain’t in no gang.”

“This ain’t no gang fight. This is a riot.”

“Well, they ain’t gonna bother me. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. I’m going on to work.”

“You gonna get yourself killed.”

George had to take two trolleys to get to Hamtramck. He boarded the first in a colored neighborhood and instantly knew something was wrong. The colored people were sitting up straight; the white people were crouched in their seats so they couldn’t be seen out the window.

Wonder why these people down on the floor like they are?
he asked himself.

The trolley made its way to a white neighborhood, and now the colored people crouched down and the white people sat up.

Well, what in the devil is going on?
he said to himself.

The trolley pulled into the intersection. A mob two blocks long stood cursing outside the trolley.

What’s wrong with all them people?
he thought.

The mob became a single organism descending on the trolley. The trolley operator moved fast. “He went back the other way,” George said. “That’s the only thing that saved us. And that’s when I began to realize the seriousness of this thing.”

He managed to make it to work that day. But the trouble wasn’t over. The rioting continued all day Monday and into a second night. When he got back home to Hastings Street that evening, a mob was approaching from Woodward, howling and turning over cars.

“I ran so fast till my heels were hittin’ my back,” he said.

And as he rounded the corner onto Josephine, he could see a colored mob forming. “They were turning over white cars,” he said, “dumping the people out like you dump ashes out an ashtray and setting the cars on fire.”

Some colored men in his block stood on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what to do. They had gathered the empty bottles in their flats to throw at people if it came to that. “We were wondering how it was gonna end up,” George said.

A white undertaker in the block joined the colored men contemplating the situation. He did not leave when the other white people fled. He fixed his feet on the ground with the neighbors who happened to be colored and let it be known where he stood. He might need their protection if it came to that.

“You know, them white folks raising hell over there on Woodward Avenue,” the white undertaker started to say.

“Yeah, they sure are,” George said.

The white undertaker drew closer and into their circle. “But us colored folks is giving ’em hell over on Hastings,” he said.

The colored men welcomed a new brother, and they all laughed at the meaning of that.

George stood on the porch and watched the National Guard tanks with machine guns on top parade through the streets. He sat up all night looking out the window as they passed.

He heard windows smashing and then saw a man with a sofa on his back. Another one had a shoulder of meat. A third had about five or six loaves of bread in his arm.

One morning, as the riots wore on, he passed a Florsheim shoe store while heading to work. People were grabbing shoes through the broken glass and running in the morning sun.

A co-worker was with him and ran over to the store.

“Come on, let’s get some,” he said.

“Man, I don’t want no shoes,” George said. “I don’t need no shoes like that.”

The friend went in without him, grabbed two shoes, and went tearing down the street. He was giddy until he looked at what he had. He had made off with two left shoes.

“Now he gonna go back and try to find the mates,” George said. George told him he was crazy.

“No, man, these
good
shoes,” his friend said. “If I find the mate to these shoes, I don’t have to buy no more shoes for a good while.”

He went back in the store, and in that instant the police showed up and caught him in the act. They fired shots, and one hit him in the stomach. He later landed in jail.

The looters took over after the mob cleared out. Within days, the freight trucks rolled up to Hastings and Josephine and all over Detroit and came to a stop in front of suspect stoops. Out came men in overalls pushing dollies, coming for the stolen merchandise. Minutes later, George saw a sofa come out of a two-flat. Somebody had seen the tenants looting and told.

When the time came to go back to work, George rounded the corner to get to the entrance and felt sick. “I got the feeling like I was walking into Alcatraz or Sing Sing,” he said, “to begin a lifetime sentence.”

At the plant he learned that several men he worked with had gotten shot in the rioting. One or two had been killed. Between the riot and the anti-Communist paranoia and the plant itself, it was time to go.

“Look, I can’t take it,” George told his foreman. “I can’t come in here another day.”

“Well, you know you are frozen on this job.”

“But I’m defrosting. I cannot, I cannot come in here no more. Now, you can take it any way you want. I’m just not coming back.”

“You know, if you walk out of here, you subject to be in the army in the next twenty-four hours.”

“I can’t help that,” George said, knowing he’d already been rejected for army duty. “I’m gone.”

“You have to wait till the pay period to get your money.”

“I want my money now. I’m a sit right here. I ain’t goin’ nowhere until y’all give me all of my money. Now, y’all can do what you want. I’m leaving.”

Finally they cut him a check. “And I left the next day.”

It was late summer now and going into autumn. There were only two places he knew of to go and live. One was New York, where he had aunts and uncles and no job. The other was Florida, where he had a wife, a father, the dim hope of going back to school, and a patched-together work life of whatever came up.

He caught a bus home to Florida with a sense of dread and defeat. He had gone to college and gone up north and now was returning to exactly the same place he had left. He went back to picking fruit. But instead of hundreds of men in their prime standing at the corner of Bates and Palmetto hoping to board the truck, a small cluster gathered there—old men and women, errand boys and domestics, children, too, who would never have made the cut before the war, along with the few young men like Charlie “Mud” Bollar, and Sam Gaskin and George, who hadn’t been chosen to go off to fight.