Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  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.

  21

  IT TURNED OUT TO BE A SMART MOVE ON JIMMY ROBUCK’S PART to let Alvin Hairston stew in his cell overnight before beginning the interrogation. For on that very night, while Jimmy and Flo were at home eating ratatouille, while Doyle and Cecelia were talking late at his house over a bottle of Chianti and plates of ravioli in puttanesca sauce, a man who was obviously not a newspaper subscriber or faithful viewer of the eleven o’clock news dropped by the Riopelle warehouse to check on Alvin and the Armageddon II arsenal. His name was Kenneth Smith. He was arrested by the detectives staking out the place, and he, like Alvin Hairston, spent the night alone in a seventh-floor cell at 1300 Beaubien, wondering what the morning would bring.

  Though he had a mild hangover from the wine and lack of sleep, Doyle showed up for work before Jimmy. It was all he could do not to take Alvin Hairston into the yellow room by himself, but he knew that would be a mistake. So he drank coffee and read about the Tigers in the Free Press and tried to ignore the clock.

  Jimmy finally showed a little after nine, raving about Flo’s ratatouille. Doyle wasn’t about to tell him that Cecelia had raved about his ravioli and puttanesca sauce—or that she was charmed by the buckets scattered around his bedroom floor to catch the rainwater that came through the Swiss-cheese roof.

  Doyle and Jimmy took turns working on Alvin Hairston. First, Doyle got him to initial and sign the Miranda warning while he distracted him with some ice-breaking small talk and assurances that the paperwork was just a formality. It was a technique Doyle had developed shortly after joining the squad, and it worked so well it had become standard department procedure. It was every cop’s wet dream: The perps did the paperwork, and the paperwork guaranteed that the cases against them wouldn’t get thrown out of court. Kiss my ass, Earl Warren.

  But after three hours Alvin Hairston hadn’t given up a thing, and the detectives adjourned to the hallway for a conference. While Alvin had not yet insisted on seeing a lawyer, he had refused to go for any of their bait. When Jimmy showed him a picture of the .30-caliber Winchester rifle that had just been positively identified as the weapon in a riot-related murder and pointed out that his fingerprints were on it, Alvin shrugged and said he’d handled several of the guns in the warehouse but had never fired a single one. He said he was in Cleveland during the riot attending his mother’s funeral. He even volunteered the name of the funeral home.

  Out in the hallway Jimmy said, “Let’s look at the situation straight on, Frank. We don’t got shit on the nigger and he knows it. I just called the funeral home in Cleveland and his alibi checks out. I say we ship his ass back upstairs and let him go to trial on the weapons charge and get on with our lives.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Doyle said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “We both know Alvin didn’t pull the trigger, but he knows more than he’s letting on. I’m sure of it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as where that gun came from. I know he knows.”

  Jimmy, the great respecter of gut instincts, said, “So what’s your idea?”

  “You go get Kenneth Smith and walk him by in the hall real nice and slow. No handcuffs. I’m going to go back in with Alvin and leave the door open.”

  “Not the oldest play in the book, Frank? You really think Alvin’s that stupid?”

  “I know he is.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Doyle watched Alvin Hairston’s eyes widen at the sight of his fellow revolutionary, Kenneth Smith, being led down the hallway by the big black detective.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Doyle said, glancing over his shoulder. “We picked up your buddy Kenneth at the warehouse last night. Guess he hadn’t heard about the raid. Man, Kenneth’s a pussy.”

  “What you mean?” Alvin sat up straight.

  “What I mean, Alvin, is that Kenneth rolled over in five minutes flat.”

  “Rolled over?”

  “Yeah, Kenneth’s on his way home.”

  “Home? I don’t take your meaning. I thought you just got through tellin me you picked him up at the warehouse.”

  “We did. But it’s not exactly a capital offense to walk into an empty warehouse, is it? I got to tell you, though, Kenneth’s not the smartest guy I ever met.”

  “No, he a dumb motherfucka.”

  “Yes, Alvin, he’s a dumb motherfucker, all right. He’s so dumb, in fact, that he actually believed we’ve got enough evidence to pin a piece of that riot murder on him—accessory before and after the fact. But the reason he’s going home now is because he was smart enough to cut a deal and sign a statement for us.”

  “A statement?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What it say?”

  “It says you pulled the trigger, Alvin. We’re talking Murder One here, my friend. Do you know what the punishment is for Murder One in the state of Michi—”

  “You a lyin motherfucka!” Alvin shouted toward the hallway, springing to his feet.

  Doyle had to bite a knuckle to keep from laughing. He’d guessed right about Alvin’s intelligence. Doyle said, “Sit the fuck down.” Alvin sat down. Doyle walked over and closed the door and returned to his chair. “Maybe Kenneth is a lying motherfucker, for all I know. But we’ve got his name on a signed statement, we’ve got your fingerprints on a murder weapon, and I know a guy in the District Attorney’s office who’s an old pro at getting all-white juries. Now let’s you and me do the math here, Alvin. We’ve got a dead woman—a dead white woman—who was shot during the riot. We’ve got a defendant—a black defendant, namely you—who’s been identified as the shooter by an eyewitness. Your fingerprints are on the murder weapon and, to make matters worse, you were caught red-handed in a warehouse full of guns and you’re a known troublemaker who thinks it’s time to get rid of the white race. You with me so far, Alvin?”

  Silence. But Alvin was chewing his lip, so Doyle pressed on.

  “What do you think that all-white jury’s gonna do when it comes time to reach a verdict in this case, Alvin? You think they’re gonna believe you? And I don’t want to hear any more shit about your momma’s funeral.”

  “I ain’t killed nobody.”

  “You know something, Alvin? I want to believe you. I really do. But the only way you’re going to convince me is if you start talking—right now—about where those guns came from and who was planning to use them. And when. And where. I need names, Alvin, and I need them right now. It’s your ass or theirs. You don’t deserve to go down with these people, and they are going down. It’s your call.” Doyle stood up. “I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette. I’ll be back in ten minutes, Alvin, and when I come back in here I want names.”

  Jimmy was standing in the hallway gazing at Alvin through the one-way mirror. “Man, Frank, that was good.”

  “You think?”

  “No, I know. He yours. Since when you start smokin cigarettes?”

  Doyle laughed. “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

  When they got back to the one-way mirror, Kenneth had his forehead on the table. Doyle said to Jimmy, “You got that picture of Wes Bledsoe?”

  “Got it right here,” he said, motioning to the folder under his arm. “U.S. Navy sent it over yesterday.”

  “You got some other mugs to go with it?”

  “Three.”

  “Two’ll do. No sense confusing the man.”

  Jimmy handed over two mugshots and the photocopy of the U.S. Navy’s official discharge picture of Seaman W. B. Bledsoe. Doyle shuffled them and took them
into the yellow room. Alvin actually flinched when he heard the door open. Jimmy was right, Doyle thought, we’ve got Alvin. Doyle laid the photos face-down on the table and sat down.

  Alvin’s eyes danced around the yellow walls for a while and finally came to rest on Doyle’s. Then Alvin looked down at his hands. “I ain’t killed nobody.”

  “You already told me that. Tell me something new.”

  “Alls I can tell you—let me get somethin straight, first.”

  Doyle waited.

  “That jive piece a paper Kenneth signed—you gonna tear it up I give you what you want?”

  “That all depends.”

  “What it depend on?”

  “On whether or not your story checks out.”

  “It’ll check out cause it’s the truth.”

  “Then we got a deal.”

  “I give you a name and you tear up that piece a paper?”

  “No, Alvin, you give me names—plural—and I tear up that piece of paper.” That piece of paper that didn’t exist. “Provided your story about your momma’s funeral checks out.”

  “I only got three names. And that’s God’s honest truth.”

  Doyle asked himself what Jimmy would do under the circumstances. He would say follow your gut. Doyle’s gut told him that Alvin believed he was cornered and he was too scared and too stupid to lie his way out of the corner, so this was the best they were going to get. Way better than they had any right to hope for. “Okay then,” Doyle said. “You give me those names and we got us a deal.”

  “You tear up the paper.”

  “That’s right.”

  Alvin sighed. “The onliest people I ever saw in that warehouse was Kenneth and a brother name Yusef. That’s his Muslim name and I swear to God I don’t know his real name.”

  Doyle waited.

  “You got to realize I only been in that warehouse two, three times—”

  “I’m waiting for another name, Alvin, not another story.”