Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  She awoke at dawn with her jaw welded to the crook of her elbow. It was like emerging from the deepest sea. There was a note on the other pillow: Had to go to work. Thanks for THE most wonderful day—and night. I’ll call later.

  She felt goose bumps race across her skin, then she was diving back into that deep, deep sea.

  17

  WILLIE WAS BRIEFLY BLINDED WHEN HE STEPPED FROM THE SUNSHINE into the chilled gloom of the Seven Seas. He put a hand on Louis’s shoulder and followed him through the smoke and noise to the bar.

  She was sitting on a barstool in a blue dress that looked like it was spray-painted on her. Clyde had an arm around her bare shoulders, and every man in the place was checking her out. The women were too, but in a different kind of way.

  “Alabama!” Clyde cried. “Come on over here and say hello to Octavia Jackson.” He turned to the woman. “Shug, you know Du. And this here’s Willie Bledsoe from Alabama, cat I been telling you bout, the big civil rights hero. He warrior stock.” Clyde turned toward Willie. “Octavia works for Mr. Berry Gordy.”

  Willie was flustered, as much by Clyde’s introduction as by the woman. She had enormous almond eyes that looked vaguely Asian and skin the color of coffee with a lot of cream. Her hair was shiny and straight, what he called blow hair because the wind could blow right through it. It brushed her shoulders, and the curtain of bangs was chopped at her eyebrows. He couldn’t say for sure if she was black or Hispanic or Asian or some exotic hybrid. She was drinking orange juice through a straw. Her lips were thin and bright red.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Octavia,” Willie said, shaking her hand, her warm and soft hand. His face was burning. He could see that she was laughing softly at his discomfort, with no malice, just a gentle laugh from a woman who was at home in her body, at home in this noisy room, at home in the presence of all these admiring men and envious women.

  “Pleasure’s mine,” she said, “meeting a man who do what you do.”

  “What I do?” He looked for help to Clyde, who was beaming like a proud daddy seeing his son off to the senior prom with the prettiest girl in the class. Willie said, “What’s this noise about warrior stock, Clyde?”

  “Don’t gotta be modest, Alabama. I know all about the shit you done. That bus you was on got fire-bombed. That day you got your mouth busted open at the Montgomery bus station by that cracker hit you with a Co-Cola box.”

  “How’d you hear about that?”

  “Read about it in the Michigan Chronicle while I was doing research for a case I’m preparing. They had a picture of you in Montgomery, bloodier’n a stuck pig, next to that white boy got his teeth knocked out.”

  “You just gettin off work, Willie?” Octavia said. All eyes swung back to her. She was slightly buck-toothed, and Willie found this imperfection even more attractive than her obvious assets.

  “Work? No, we were at the ball—”

  “But them clothes. Looks like you been fixin cars. Or choppin cotton.”

  “Oh!” He looked down at his overalls and brogans. “This is—these are—what we use to wear in Mississippi. . . .”

  She patted the empty barstool next to hers. “Sit down and tell me all bout Mississippi. I ain’t never been to Mississippi.”

  Louis and Clyde took this as their cue and drifted to the back of the place to shoot a rack of pool. After ordering a beer for himself and a fresh orange juice for Octavia, Willie said, “So what do you do at Motown? You a singer?”

  “Lord no!” She laughed, like the idea was ridiculous. “I’m just a lowly receptionist. Don’t try to change the subject. Tell me bout them clothes.”

  He explained the evolution of the Snick uniform. She had never heard of Snick, she confessed, but she had a way of asking questions that set him at ease, made him open up. He found himself telling her about the Freedom Rides, all those bus stations in Rock Hill, Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson. What it was like to be trapped inside a burning bus. What it was like to live in a cage at Parchman Farm.

  A bunch of brothers at the far end of the bar started singing along with the new James Brown song on the jukebox: “Say it loud—I’M BLACK AND I’M PROUD!”

  Willie didn’t know what to say next. He had never told these stories to anyone but his mother and Aunt Nezzie. Other than Blythe Murphy, whose motives proved to be shamelessly transparent, Octavia was the first person in Detroit who’d shown the slightest interest in what he’d been through down South. Everyone up here was too busy making it to care what had happened in Jim Crow country. Everyone except this woman with the unblinking almond eyes.

  Willie’s eagerness to talk made him wonder if he’d been waiting to find a stranger, the right stranger, to tell his stories to, someone who would simply listen without pegging him for a hero or a fool. Maybe, without even realizing he was looking, he had found his perfect stranger. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Since he didn’t have a snowball’s chance with such a fine woman, maybe he was thinking he might as well lay it all on her.

  She said, “Y’all were some bus-ridin fools, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah, we were. We really were.”

  “So why’d you leave home and come all the way up here?”

  “Work, like everybody else,” he began, but instantly felt dissatisfied with the tired lie. “But there’s more to it than that.”

  “Like what?” she said, sipping orange juice through the straw.

  He couldn’t afford to tell her about the guns or the riot—not yet—but he could tell her a lesser truth. “My mother keeps pushing me to write down the things I went through. She’s a history teacher, see, and she believes every generation has to pass on the lessons it learns. She says future generations gonna need to know what it was like to fight Jim Crow, and the people with first-hand experience, people like me, are the ones who need to do the telling. That’s why I still wear these clothes sometimes. They help me remember things.”

  “You think your momma’s right about that, about passin on lessons?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Sounds like you two pretty close.”

  “A lot closer’n me and my father. My mother’s so damn smart—but she’s not one of those educated Negroes who makes a-gain rhyme with rain, if you know what I mean.”

  She giggled, a blaze of teeth. “I know zactly what you mean. My daddy, he use to sell insurance, he says a-gain. And instead of e-leet he says ee-lite. So you writin down what you been through?”

  He took a deep breath. “I started to write it down, but. . . .”

  Gently, almost whispering, she said, “But what? You can tell me.”

  “I’m not all the way sure. I couldn’t seem to get it together in Alabama, so I came up here thinking the change of scenery would help. But it didn’t. Then the riot happened and everything changed.”

  “The riot didn’t change nothin you ax me.”

  “Oh yes it did. It changed plenty.”

  “Like what? Name one thing.”

  He looked away. This was as far as he was willing—as far as he dared—to go. Octavia patted his hand. “Thas okay, baby.” He could tell he’d disappointed her, and he desperately wanted to repair the damage. But before he could think of anything to say, she stood up. “Don’t go nowhere. I need to freshen up real quick. Be right back.”

  Like everyone in the place he watched her walk to the back of the room, her high heels clicking like castanets on the tile floor. Her blue dress was packed just right, and the way she moved announced that she knew that every eye in the place was all over her and she didn’t mind one bit.

  Y’all were some bus-ridin fools, weren’t you?

  Her words made him realize something that was so obvious he’d never stopped to consider it before—just how big a part buses had played in his journey. Buses could be the thread that tied his book together. The Montgomery bus boycott was the dawn of his realization that there was a momentous struggle taking shape just beyond the fringes of his tiny world. Then there was th
at bus ride to Nashville to help with the sit-ins. Then the bus ride to Raleigh, North Carolina, for the first meeting of Snick. The Freedom Rides. The burning bus outside Anniston. That grim bus ride back from the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. And he was still riding the bus because he was afraid to let his Buick be seen on the streets of Detroit. I’ll probably ride a bus to my own funeral, he thought with a mirthless chuckle.

  “What’s so funny, Alabama?”

  Clyde had glided up with a pool stick in one hand and an empty beer glass in the other. He motioned for the bartender to give them both a refill.

  “Nothing, Clyde. Just thinking bout something Octavia said.”

  “You quicker’n I thought, homes. She just whispered on my ear you the most interestin cat she met in a blue moon.”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “She sho nuff did. What kinda lies you been tellin her?”

  “Oh, just some of the stuff we did down South.”

  “Well keep it up. It’s workin.” He took his beer and went back to the pool table.

  Watching the bubbles rise in his beer glass, Willie saw the ending of his book. It was perfect—that grim Greyhound bus ride from Atlantic City back to Montgomery after the 1964 Democratic convention. They’d registered 17,000 black voters in Mississippi that summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sent sixty-eight delegates to Atlantic City, determined to have them seated in place of the regular party’s all-white state delegation. But Lyndon Johnson, that great friend of the Negro, offered the Freedom Party two measly seats for fear of alienating his fellow white Southerners and losing the White House. After Johnson’s brutal arm-twisting carried the day, Willie rode home in that tomb-like bus realizing he was finished. They had jumped through all of Mr. Charlie’s hoops and they came away with two delegates. It had taken Willie four years of playing by the rules to realize the game was rigged, always had been, always would be. In Montgomery he bought a ticket to Tuskegee, and when he got home he closed his door and sat down to write his story. For a while it worked, and then it didn’t. And so he came to Detroit.

  “You ready?”

  Octavia had touched up her lipstick. When she smiled, the lips disappeared and those buck teeth reappeared. She motioned toward the exit. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Where we going?”

  “For a drive. I love Sunday drives.”

  He left his untouched beer on the bar and said goodbye to Louis and Clyde and found himself following her out of the Seven Seas, every leering, jealous eyeball nailed to them, everyone wondering how a yokel like that managed to snag such a sweet piece of tail. Willie could practically hear the men groaning and the women sighing with relief.

  The sun was low in the sky but painfully bright after the bar’s dim interior. Squinting, Willie watched Octavia sashay toward the cars parked at the curb. Passing drivers slowed to get a look. One honked his horn.

  Her car was an immaculate white Austin-Healey convertible with wire wheels, its top rolled back. The dashboard was made of burnished wood. When he hurried to open the driver’s door, she blinked at him. “Why, thank you, Willie. Ain’t you the gentleman.”

  Her surprise surprised him. Didn’t other men treat her like a lady? He watched her swing her legs deftly under the wooden steering wheel, watched her shimmy her hips till she was settled into the snug bucket seat. When she kicked off her shoes so she could work the pedals, Willie flashed on that car ride with barefoot Blythe Murphy.

  “Where to?” she said, blipping the engine as he slipped into the passenger seat. It felt like his ass was three inches from the pavement, yet he could stretch his long legs straight out. Amazing how much room there was in such a tiny car.

  “It’s your town,” he said.

  She headed out Woodward, weaving between cars, even taking on some of the gear heads who pulled alongside them at red lights, revving the engines of their muscle cars, challenging her to drag race. She beat them all. It was obvious she loved the attention.

  She turned left on McNichols, 6 Mile. They passed near Uncle Bob’s new house, passed the University of Detroit. Willie found himself succumbing to her laughter and the engine’s purr, to the way the world whipped past faster and faster as they sliced through the hot afternoon. Soon they crossed the Lodge Freeway and the Rouge River and were leaving the city, entering Redford Township and Livonia, leafy suburbs Willie had never heard of. Amazing. You blinked your eyes and Detroit became a gritty memory.

  When they were free of the city Octavia reached across and popped open the glove box, revealing an eight-track player. She pushed in the tape that was in the slot. Otis Redding was singing again: You got to, you got to, try a little tendernesssssss . . .

  They rode almost all the way to Ann Arbor, not saying much, listening to Otis, then Smokey and the Miracles, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha. Willie felt no need for talk. He was content to be in motion, going nowhere just for the sake of going, and going there with her.

  When the sun touched the treetops Octavia down-shifted and turned onto the Ann Arbor Trail, which ran along a chain of lakes and ponds and carried them away from the sunset, back toward the city. As soon as they passed the Detroit City Limits sign, Octavia lit a cigarette and dragged on it fiercely. She said, “I don’t know how much Clyde’s tole you bout me.”

  “Not much. He said you were a client of his.”

  “Yeah, he helped me out of a jam a couple years back.”

  He waited, hoping to hear more about Clyde and the jam. When she didn’t offer anything, he said, “So what’s it like working at Motown?”

  “I hate it. Company’s run by white men now—bunch a slave drivers.” She took another deep drag on the cigarette. “I shouldn’t bad-mouth all the white men work there. Joe Messina, he white, eye-talian, plays guitar and just as sweet as he could be. Always buying me presents, telling me how nice I look.”

  “Which band’s he with?”

  “The house band. They call theirselves the Funk Brothers, but nobody ever heard of ’em.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause Berry won’t put they names on any records. I’m tellin you, place is run just like a plantation. They even hired a spy to keep tabs on the musicians after hours, make sure they ain’t breakin they exclusive contracts. Don’t do no good. I know for a fact the Vandellas is singin backup on the new John Lee Hooker record.” Twin tusks of smoke shot from her nostrils. “There’s this brother hangs around the studio, he ain’t like the others. He don’t hit on me or try to get in on the recording sessions. He just likes to hang out and talk. He teaches African history at Cass Tech and he tells me about people I never even heard of—Moise Tshombe, Kwame Nkruma—says every black person in America has a responsibility to know what’s going on in Africa. Shit, I don’t know what’s going on in D-troit half the time. I don’t even read the newspaper. It’s shameful to be so ignorant. I’ve never traveled farther than Chicago, and now on account of Daddy it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to go anywhere for a while.”

  “What’s up with your daddy?”

  “He’s got the sugar, and it’s gonna kill him. I try to look in on him every day. Sometimes when I meet a brother like you who’s gone places and done things, been to college—”

  “I didn’t even finish a year of college.”

  “Well, I didn’t even finish high school. But that’s not the point. Point is you had a dream and you put your body on the line. You tried to change the world.”

  “I didn’t change shit, Octavia.”

  “But you tried.”

  “Trying don’t mean a thing.”

  “Yes it does! Can’t you see that? Tryin’s all there is—and I ain’t never tried nothin.”

  It was near dark now. They were heading south on Woodward and Willie’s euphoria was gone. Listening to her lament reminded him of something Aunt Nezzie had told him: The best listeners are people with the greatest ache to unload their own tales.

  Octavia took a r
ight onto Boston Boulevard and slowed down as they passed the biggest houses Willie had seen inside the city limits of Detroit. The biggest one on the block was lit up, and they could hear music pouring out of the open windows—live music, jazz. Elegantly dressed people were milling beneath a blazing chandelier, a mixed crowd, blacks, whites, even a few Asians.

  “That’s my boss’s crib,” Octavia said, slowing to a crawl.

  “No lie? That’s where Berry Gordy stays?” He turned to get a better look. A woman’s bawdy laughter rolled across the lawn, then the throaty whisper of a saxophone, drums stroked by brushes.

  Octavia pulled over to the curb between two mammoth Cadillacs and cut the engine. They both stared at the house. “I went to the company Christmas party here last year,” she said. “Y’ain’t never seen so much marble and gold in all your life.”

  The awe in her voice disappointed him. It reminded him of his wide-eyed brother telling him, during the long drive from Alabama to Detroit, that the Temptations’ lead singer had a limo upholstered with mink. Flashy displays of wealth had never impressed Willie.

  “There’s a tunnel that runs to a movie theater behind the house,” Octavia went on. “And you’ll never guess what’s on the wall in the living room.”

  “I hate to think. Gold records?”

  “No, a portrait of Berry—dressed up like Napoleon.”

  A Negro Napoleon! It was so sick Willie had to laugh.

  “I’m surprised Berry’s even in town,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He spends most of his time out in Vegas and L.A.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Gamblin, playin golf, tryin to figure out a way to break into the movies. All he cares about anymore’s makin Diana Ross into a movie star. He lets his white slave drivers run the company day-to-day.”

  This was all news to Willie. The few things he’d read about Motown, mostly in magazines like Jet and Ebony, made the company out to be one big happy prosperous black family.