Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  Hudson stood up from the card table, stretched, yawned. He had liver lips and rhinoceros ears. His gleaming skull was dented in several places, and Willie had often wondered what had caused those dents. Wrenches? Bottles? Cops’ nightsticks? Maybe they were just badges of a childhood spent in Paradise Valley, the inevitable marks left on the son of an autoworker who, according to Hudson, liked nothing better than to get drunk and beat on people, especially his wife and children. As often as he’d puzzled over those dents on Hudson’s skull, Willie wasn’t about to ask how they got there.

  “Whatchoo readin now, Professor?” Hudson said, looking up at Willie. The nickname was not meant to be flattering. Hudson had dropped out of the sixth grade, and he had no use for knowledge that came from anywhere other than the street. More than once he’d expressed the opinion that a fair-skinned bookworm like Willie would have made a perfect poster boy for the United Negro College Fund. Willie didn’t take it personally. He’d learned long ago that black people who can’t get at the real oppressor wind up lashing out at one another.

  He looked at the book lying open on his chest. “It’s called Black Like Me.”

  “What’s it about?” Hudson asked without interest. He was watching his ace boon coon Wiggins stack his winnings in a very neat, very tall pile. Hudson was smiling. Losing was delicious torture for him. It was his way of life.

  “It’s about this white dude who dyes his skin and travels around the Deep South passing for a brother.”

  “No shit,” Wiggins said, licking his thumb as he counted his pot. “Why some honky do a fool thing like that?”

  “To find out first-hand what prejudice feels like. The book’s not bad. Only trouble is, the writer buys into that jive about race relations down South being a blot on the whole country. Like whitey’s treating us like princes up here.”

  Hudson actually chuckled. “What this gray dude do bout his hair, Professor?”

  “He shaved his head.”

  “Ah.”

  “Well,” Wiggins said, adding his winnings to his roll and tucking it into his tuxedo pants, “that ofay wanted to know about prejudice, he shoulda come see me. I could write a motherfuckin book about prejudice.”

  He and Hudson guffawed and slapped hands, the poker game already a dim memory. Willie watched them, thinking that James Wiggins, with his fried hair, rhiney skin and bloodshot eyes, had probably never read a book from cover to cover in his life. The man couldn’t string two grammatical sentences together, let alone write a book. The whites of his eyes were the color of cold piss, and Willie guessed it was from something much worse than drinking.

  Just then the swinging doors squealed open and Bob Brewer strode in, carrying his ocher waiter’s jacket, a white shirt and a pair of tuxedo pants in a dry-cleaner’s plastic bag. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said, hanging the clothes in a locker. When he noticed Willie on the top bunk he said, “What up, Cuz?”

  “Not much, Uncle Bob. What’s up with you?”

  “If you get your narrow ass down off that bed and come outside, I’ll show you.”

  Willie yawned and hopped down off the bed. He put his white shirt back on and, smoothing his hair, followed his uncle out the door and down the scabbed concrete hallway. This netherworld, the service end of the rambling clubhouse, smelled of rotten fruit and ammonia, stale beer and starch and steam. Willie thought of it as the second worst thing that had ever touched his nostrils: the stench of servitude. Bad as it was, though, it couldn’t touch the smell inside that garage at police headquarters last summer. That was in a league of its own: the stench of degradation.

  As he passed the clattering ice machines, one of the bar boys went by pushing a cart stacked with cases of top-shelf liquor—Canadian Club, Cutty Sark, Beefeaters—the fuel for tonight’s festivities. All the busboys and waiters at Oakland Hills were black and all the bar boys and bartenders were white. The reason was obvious to Willie. Dick Kowalski didn’t think niggers could be trusted around all that pricey booze.

  Willie was still yawning when he and his uncle stepped out of the clubhouse and into hazy sunshine. The day had turned almost hot and the trees beyond the caddy shack were bearded with green buds, aching to burst. Maybe winter really was over.

  Uncle Bob led the way across the members’ parking lot to the employees’ lot. From fifty yards away Willie saw it, tucked off in the corner by itself. He knew right away it was his uncle’s car because of the way it gleamed, because everything about Uncle Bob was clean. He dressed conservatively and he was always freshly shaven, impeccably groomed, didn’t even have razor bumps. He wore his hair short and natural, like Willie’s, in that tasteful middle zone between Wiggins’s conk and Angela Davis’s big-ass black power Afro. It was obvious from the way Bob had parked the car off in the corner that he was gripped by the new car owner’s terror of sideswipes, door dings and bird droppings.

  The car was a fully loaded, two-door 1968 Buick Electra 225 with a muted bronze paintjob and creamy vinyl top, elegant and understated, a far cry from the loud color schemes Willie was accustomed to seeing on cars in the city: lizard green, salmon pink, fire-engine red, burnt orange. And then, for good measure, some gaudy, fake-gold shit around the license plate, wide whitewall tires, spoke wheels, curb feelers, the finishing touches that announced to the world that this car was owned by a man who was black and damn proud of it. When Willie first got to town he thought those city brothers were unaware that the bulbous lines and gumball paintjobs that distinguished cars like his pink-and-black ’54 Buick had given way to something more subdued. Oh sure, the muscle cars drag racing up and down Woodward were a blur of candy-apple red and canary yellow. But those cars were driven by greasers, who weren’t even all the way white. It didn’t take Willie long to realize that the Detroit brothers had indeed heard the news. They simply chose to ignore it.

  But Uncle Bob was different. His life was dedicated to blending in. He was as proud as any black man Willie had ever met, but he refused to give the white man fuel for the stereotypes that fed his racism. There was nothing flashy about Bob Brewer—the only jewelry he wore was a Timex watch and his wedding band. He rarely drank, and he didn’t gamble or smoke or take anything stronger than aspirin. So it was no surprise to Willie that his uncle’s new Buick would have been right at home in the members’ parking lot at Oakland Hills, alongside all the conservative, late-model Cadillacs and Lincolns and the hulking, wood-paneled station wagons favored by suburban housewives.

  “Well, what do you think?” Bob asked, beaming.

  “She’s a beauty, Uncle Bob.”

  “You like the color?”

  “Actually, I think you should’ve gone for chartreuse. Woulda fit your personality a lot better.”

  Bob laughed at the jibe. “Guy on the lot where I bought it told me something interesting. You know where the name comes from?”

  “Sure. Everybody with half an education knows Electra was a Greek chick from a messed-up family whose momma—”

  “No, no, not the Electra part. The Two-Twenty-Five part.”

  “Oh. Beats me. Is it the horsepower?”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Come to find out that when Buick started using the Electra name back in ’59, the thing was two hundred and twenty-five inches long. Think about it—that’s damn near twenty feet long.”

  This car wasn’t quite that long, but it was close. The relative lack of chrome and the sharp lines made it seem even bigger and longer than it was. There were four chrome notches in the front fender, which marked it a “four-holer,” a top-of-the-line Buick. The hood was huge, much flatter and longer and wider than the bulbous hood on Willie’s ’54 “three-holer,” and the trunk looked big enough to hold a Volkswagen. Or a couple dozen assault rifles.

  “Hop in, let’s take her for a spin,” Bob said. It was the first time Willie had heard something like childish excitement in the man’s voice.

  They headed east on Maple Road, then left at Lahser. At the touch of Bob’s foot the Bu
ick shot into the warm afternoon, just ate up the road. Willie watched the orange speedometer needle climb effortlessly past 40, 50, 60, up to 70. Bob had the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning on, and Willie wondered if this wasn’t another of his strategies, like the muted paintjob, to keep from drawing attention to himself. This far north in the suburbs, a black elbow sticking out of an expensive new car’s window could attract something a lot worse than stares.

  “Hope you don’t mind the AC,” Bob said, fiddling with the controls.

  “No, it’s fine. Feels good. Man, this thing rides smooth.”

  “What’d you expect? It’s an Electra.”

  There it was again. He called the car an Electra, the way a white man would. To all the brothers in Detroit, the 225 was a Deuce and a Quarter, or simply a Deuce, a term of great reverence, for this car was the pinnacle of status in the inner city, even higher than a Cadillac. Cadillacs were for preachers and pimps and the rich honkies out in Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. The Deuce and a Quarter was the hip Detroit ride.

  “You need to get you one a these,” Bob said. “You still driving that old Buick?”

  Willie took a deep breath and got ready to tell the lie for the first time. He thought of his mother’s sister, Aunt Nezzie, that great repository of mother wit, telling him years ago that if you’re going to lie you’d better have a good memory. He’d been rehearsing this lie ever since the Tigers’ game, when he stowed his Buick in the garage after hearing about Clyde Holland’s client getting taken downtown for questioning. That was Willie’s wake-up call, his return to a world of worry he thought he’d escaped. Now he could see that there would be no escape from that world until the murder was solved. And even that prospect merely tightened the bind he was in. He wanted to learn he was innocent, of course, but what about the unthinkable—what about learning he was not? So he wanted the cops to remain in the dark because as long as the case remained unsolved he could tell himself that he was innocent—and that his brother was innocent, too. Not knowing might be even better than knowing, but uncertainty was its own kind of purgatory, one he was not eager to re-enter. Yet he had no choice. So here he was, getting ready to tell the well-rehearsed lie for the first time. He glanced at his Uncle Bob and said, “Yes and no.”

  “What’s that suppose to mean?”

  “Means I can still drive it, but I’m afraid to. The transmission’s leaking like a faucet, so I parked it in the garage till I save up enough to get it fixed.”

  “How much you pay for that thing?”

  “Nothing. It was a gift.”

  “No shit. From who?”

  “A Navy buddy of my brother’s, a white guy named Sam Malloy. He and his long-legged blonde wife showed up at my place in Tuskegee in late ’63, right after President Kennedy got shot, and handed me the keys and the title.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. I couldn’t believe it either.” Five years later, Willie still couldn’t believe it. He’d spent his boyhood learning to make do with the second-hand and the second-rate—hand-me-down clothes and shoes from his brother, hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools, with all the important stuff already underlined, the covers falling off, entire pages missing. At the colored playground the basketball court was cracked and uneven, the rims bent and rusty, the balls smooth as cue balls. The baseball diamond was pocked, baked dirt with a few shoots of crab grass. He didn’t give these things a second thought, nobody did. And then, when he was a young man putting his body on the line to change the world he’d once accepted as a given, a friend of his brother’s drove up and gave him the most beautiful car he’d ever seen. Gave it to him. It was so miraculous it was almost an insult to the monastic life he was living at the time. But on that day Willie came to understand something that his fellow Snick foot soldiers, those austere warriors, never acknowledged or discussed—that there was another world out there, a world of shiny things that weren’t cracked or bent or used-up, and those things were within reach, even for a black man, and there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with wanting them. Willie loved that Buick shamelessly, and of course he pampered it.

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.