by Bill Morris
MOTOR
CITY
BURNING
BILL MORRIS
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
For Marianne, with my love.
Contents
Part One
Opening Day
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Tinderbox
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three
World Champions
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
Oh, the Motor City’s burnin’,
It ain’t no thing in the world that I can do.
Don’t ya know, don’t ya know, the Big D is burnin’,
Ain’t no thing in the world that Johnny can do.
My hometown is burnin’ down to the ground,
Worster than Vietnam.
—from “The Motor City Is Burning”
by John Lee Hooker
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning
MOTOR
CITY
BURNING
PART ONE
OPENING DAY
1
UNCLE BOB WASN’T LYING. Can’t miss it, he’d said of the hippie house on Plum Street where it would be safe for Willie to park his baby, his immaculate classic Buick. And there it was now, right side, halfway down the block, painted up like a bad acid trip—orange walls, purple trim, some of the windows missing and others cracked and milky, the front door covered by an American flag with a peace symbol on the blue field where the fifty stars were supposed to be. A kid with stringy blond hair halfway down his back was waving cars onto the back yard. Music poured from an upstairs window, jangling electric guitars and a woman wailing, “Go ask Alice when she’s ten feet taaaaaaaaall. . . .”
The driveway was pocked and cracked so Willie took it slow. He had the Sonomatic radio tuned to the pre-game show on WJR—Uncle Bob told him he absolutely must not miss it—and a guy with a folksy southern drawl was reciting some kind of poem:
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth,
The time of the singing birds is come
And the voice of the turtle is heard on the land . . .
Voice of the turtle? Man, that cracker must’ve been smoking something good, Willie thought as he switched off the radio, parked and locked the car.
He paid two dollars to a chubby girl wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tight sweater, no shoes, no brassiere. She flashed him a smile and the peace sign and said, “That’s a pretty far-out car you got there. What is it?”
“It’s a ’54 Buick Century.”
“Wow, looks brand new. I love that trippy pink-and-black paintjob.”
“Thanks. So do I.”
“Looks like something Elvis would drive.” She noticed the license plate. “You really from Alabama?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ma’am!” She laughed so hard her breasts jiggled under the nubby sweater. It was the sort of thing he would not have dared to notice back home—until the day he did dare to notice, and then proceeded to learn the high price of noticing. The girl said, “You don’t gotta call me ma’am. My name’s Sunshine.”
“And I’m Willie.” He shook the offered hand. Her fingernails were painted turquoise and they were gnawed down to the quicks. Weren’t her feet cold?
“How come you’re way up north here, Willie?”
“That’s a long story . . .” He caught himself before he called her ma’am again. “Got some family up here. Thought I might find a better job.”
“So did you?”
“Not really.” He managed a chuckle. It was a reflex. He knew how important it was not to let white people see his pain, not to even let them suspect that he might be in pain.
“Um, Willie . . . ?” She touched his arm and looked into his eyes. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were glassy and pink. Must be nice, smoking reefer before noon. “Listen, I’m . . . we’re . . . everyone here in the house, we’re, like, all real sorry about what happened to Dr. King.”
He stiffened. “You’re very kind to say so, Sunshine, but there’s no need to be sorry.”
“There’s not?” She looked confused. “How come?”
“Cause you didn’t kill him.”
“Of course not, but. . . .”
“Sides, there’s a lot of us brothers think the man was a sell-out.”
“Dr. King? A sell-out?” Satisfied when Sunshine’s jaw dropped—he loved to fuck with white people, especially the ones who believed their hearts were full of good intentions—he turned and left without another word.
The neighborhood was shabby—glass glittering on the sidewalks, houses in need of paint, black bruises on the street where cars had leaked their vital fluids. In the shadows between houses there were still gray slag heaps of unmelted snow. In April. Surviving his first Detroit winter was not something Willie was going to forget anytime soon. One day he was sitting in buttery sunshine in Palmer Park reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, watching swans glide across the pond, marveling at the palette of the trees, the bloody reds, the juicy oranges, the richest colors he’d ever seen. The next morning he awoke to a blizzard, the first of his life, a storm that had come howling down out of Canada in the night and dumped a foot of snow on the city.
This neighborhood, the shabbiness of it, reminded Willie of something he picked up from a Chicago brother named Clifford Jenks who’d shared a cell with him at Parchman Farm in Mississippi back in ’61, during Snick’s “jail, no bail” phase. Unlike the other Freedom Riders, Clifford and Willie weren’t big on singing or Scripture. They spent most of that long night talking about sports and girls. They were still wet from the hosing they’d been given, shivering from the chill breath of the fans the guards had trained on them.
What Clifford said was: “Must be some kinda unwritten law that all stadiums is in shitty neighborhoods. Look at my hometown. Comiskey Park’s on the South Side, in a black ghetto. Look at Yankee Stadium, South Bronx, a Puerto Rican ghetto. And look at D-troit. Tiger Stadium, in a white ghetto—which is the worst kind a ghetto they is.” Clifford Jenks was something, a man who could make you laugh inside a cage in Parchman Farm.
As Willie joined the river of fans flowing toward the ballpark, he felt the familiar tingling. He’d always loved crowds, their anonymity, their electricity, their animal warmth. This mostly white crowd was in high spirits, like they hadn’t heard the news about Martin Luther King—or didn’t care. For the past week there’d been riots in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and dozens of cities in between, but Detroit had remained almost eerily quiet. Just one death, two cops wounded, a few student walkouts and assembly line shutdowns. Nothing like last summer, when a routine police raid on an illegal after-hours liquor house set the city off, a week of burning and looting and shooting that Willie and a lot of other people had spent the past nine months trying to forget.
And now, just after Willie’s riot night
mares had finally stopped, Martin Luther King Jr. gets himself killed by a white man in Memphis. At least, everyone said it was a white man did it. Almost a week after the shooting they still hadn’t found the gunman, and Willie was convinced they never would. He didn’t think he was being cynical, just realistic. When it was announced that the funeral would be held in Atlanta on April 9, President Johnson, that lame white duck, decreed that the opening day of baseball season would be postponed from the 8th to the 10th, and he ordered all flags flown at half-mast. The Academy Awards show was also postponed by two days. Willie greeted these tokens with a shrug.
Though he had given up on King years ago, the details about the assassination fascinated him. For days he devoured newspapers and magazines and lived in front of his television set. He learned that the embalmers had to spend long hours working on King’s corpse because the whole right side of his face was shot away, the jaw barely dangling. They had to rebuild the face with plaster. In Atlanta the coffin was placed on a crude farm wagon that was pulled through the throngs of mourners by two Georgia mules. This attempt to dress the patrician King in the trappings of the common man struck Willie as calculated and deeply dishonest, downright shameful. But hardly surprising. That, after all, was what mythmakers did. Given some of the things he’d heard King say, Willie even believed the man had pursued martyrdom.
Willie devoured such news not because he was shocked or even particularly dismayed by the killing, but because all the images of King had reawakened something in him. Hard as he’d tried to forget what happened during the riot, now he felt a need to remember something that happened long before the riot. Something he thought he’d buried forever. Something he would need to remember—and confront—if he ever hoped to escape from the purgatory he was living in.
All he had to go on was two little words: de Lawd.
His memory, clouded by the poisons he’d ingested during the past year, could tell him only that he first heard those words somewhere in Alabama and that they were uttered by a girl with a voice as soft as satin. He could still hear her voice but could no longer picture her face or remember her name. He had forgotten so much. The one other thing he knew about the girl’s words was that they were dripping with acid and they were directed at King. Hearing a sister deride King as de Lawd had made the floor fall out of Willie’s world, like a trap door had opened beneath him. Everything in his carefully constructed life fell through that trap door—all his beliefs, his ideals, his idols, his faith that the world could be made to change and that he could play some small part in changing it—everything started falling that day. And on the day after King’s funeral, years after he heard those two killing little words, Willie could see with fresh eyes that he was still falling and he wanted to stop.
Watching those ridiculous Georgia mules pull King’s coffin through the wailing mob in Atlanta, Willie understood that if he could recapture the moment when he first heard those two words—if he could relive that moment—he might be able to reassemble the life that fell through that trap door. Then he might be able to tell the story of that life. For the first time in years, thanks to Martin Luther King’s murder, that was what he wanted to do.
He was jolted from his reverie by the shriek of a traffic cop’s whistle. This edition of Detroit’s finest, an Irishman with a cranberry nose, was holding up traffic with a big white-gloved paw so pedestrians could cross Trumbull. Even now, the sight of a Detroit cop sent a hot flash of terror through Willie. He hunched his shoulders and kept his eyes down as he hurried across the street.
When he made it safely to the other side he exhaled, then looked up and saw the great sooty iceberg of Tiger Stadium looming in front of him. It was lovely. Then came the smell of a charcoal fire warming bags of peanuts, tended by a whiskery old man in a hooded sweatshirt. “Roasted peanuts here!” he barked, bouncing from foot to foot to keep warm. “Gitcher hot peanuts!” The man was wearing gloves with the fingertips cut away, just like the gloves people wore to pick cotton back home.
As Willie waited in line at the ticket window, new smells came to him—wind-borne ash and cinders from the city’s smokestacks, a vaguely briny smell off the river, diesel exhaust from idling buses. And then, after he paid fifty cents for a bleacher seat and began ascending the switchbacks that carried fans from the street to the upper deck, he realized he was climbing into a symphony of smells, a single complex aroma that had been composing itself since the first baseball game was played fifty-six Aprils ago in this, America’s oldest big-league ballpark. It was equal parts mustard, sweat, stale beer, urine, popcorn, wet wool, vomit, perfume, cigar smoke and boiled pork. It was that musty smell iron gives off after it has stood in one place through fifty-six scorching summers and fifty-six Arctic winters and an unknowable number of sleet storms and baseball games and football games, half-time pageants and fistfights and pennant drives, after it has absorbed the shuffling of millions of pairs of feet, heard the guttural animal roar of cheers and boos and taunts, after it has housed the whole range of human emotions, from ecstasy to scorn to despair, that touch the lives of people who live in a sports-mad city like Detroit.
He was winded when he reached the upper deck. Pausing to catch his breath, he told himself winter was over and he needed to get back out on the basketball court. He noticed something on the concession stand menus called “Red Hots,” and the cryptic words CRUSH ALL CUPS stenciled on the walls at regular intervals. He had entered a house of mysteries and secret codes. The bleachers were reached by long catwalks suspended by cables from riveted iron girders. Looking down gave him a mild sense of vertigo, so he lifted his eyes to the rectangle of blue sky before him. He saw seagulls. And then he stepped into the sunshine.
Arrayed before him was the most beautiful room he’d ever seen. It was painted green, this irregular open-air room, its upper-deck seats sheltered by a tarpaper roof, the field a luxuriously cross-hatched emerald carpet. The infield dirt was tinged with something black. Coal dust? The bases glowed like sugar cubes.
He climbed toward the big black scoreboard at the top of the bleachers, toward the huge A.C. spark plug shooting through a ring of fire. From up there he could see the spires of downtown, but he turned his back on the skyline and studied this lovely open-air room. The longer he gazed out at the park, the smaller it seemed to become. It was hard to believe the place could hold upwards of 50,000 people. It was so . . . so intimate.
The American flag on the roof behind home plate was at half-mast, as he’d expected, and the pennants of the American League teams rimming the roof were all crisply horizontal from the river wind that cleared the roof on the first base side and galloped across the outfield. He was glad he’d worn a sweater under his nylon windbreaker. He wondered how it was humanly possible to watch the Lions play football in this place in the middle of December.
By the time a fat man in a tuxedo stood behind home plate and sang the National Anthem, the bleachers were nearly full. It was not going to be a sellout, but it was a fine surly crowd. After a minute of itchy silence for Martin Luther King, everyone stood and roared as the Tigers were introduced and sprinted out to their positions. The loudest cheers were for Al Kaline, the veteran right fielder, and Willie Horton, a home-grown hero, a powerful black slugger who tipped his cap as he jogged to his position in left.
A black pitcher named Earl Wilson strode to the mound and began warming up. Of course Willie knew there were black pitchers in the major leagues. He’d listened to St. Louis Cardinals games on KMOX radio since he was a boy, and he would never forget the seventh game of the 1964 World Series. He had just returned to his apartment in Tuskegee to write about the fires he’d walked through during that so-called Freedom Summer, and the Series came as a welcome distraction. A bunch of his old college buddies crowded into his apartment for the seventh game because he had the best radio reception and the coldest beer in town and because Bob Gibson, the intimidating black pitcher, was starting the game for the Cardinals. Surely Gibson understood that there were
brothers crowded around radios like this all over the country, hanging on his every pitch, hoping he could put down the vaunted Yankees, the whitest of dynasties, and lay to rest the myth that black people were lazy, that they weren’t as mentally tough as whites, that they couldn’t be trusted with jobs as momentous as pitching the deciding game of the World Series. Gibson pitched brilliantly, then gave up two runs in a tense ninth inning before getting the Yankees’ dangerous second baseman, Bobby Richardson, to pop up, sealing the Cardinals’ victory.
Sitting in the Tiger Stadium bleachers now, watching Earl Wilson throw his last warm-up pitches, Willie remembered feeling a flood of elation and relief when Bob Gibson got that last out. So he was aware that there were black pitchers—black stars at every position—in the major leagues. But knowing this and seeing it with his own eyes for the first time were two very different things.
Just before Earl Wilson threw the first pitch of the 1968 season, two brothers came up the aisle and sat on the bench in front of Willie. One was middle-aged, very dark-skinned, almost blue, what Willie called “African black.” White hair boiled out from under the upturned brim of his Panama hat. He was sucking on a toothpick. He nodded to Willie, who felt an instant kinship with this man, his deep blackness, his warm-weather hat, his silent gesture of greeting. Without thinking, Willie let slip a southernism: “Hey now.”
“A’ight—and y’sef?” the man said.
“Fine, thanks. Got Earl Wilson on the mound.”
“I seen that,” said the other man, who was younger, fairer, tea-colored. He wore a tan trench coat with epaulets over a brown pin-striped suit, his yellow necktie loose, his shirt collar unbuttoned. His brown oxfords were laced tight, deeply creased but polished to a high shine. They looked elegant and businesslike and comfortable, three things that rarely went together. He looked like one of those rich oats you see in Esquire magazine, a successful businessman who could afford to duck out of the office in the middle of the day to catch a ballgame or drop in on his girlfriend.
