Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

  There in the street, the three Mulrooney boys were beating the holy crap out of Sammy Good. They first formed a circle around him. I knew that Sammy’s trapped-animal instincts would instantly kick in. He threw the first slap, and with that I couldn’t see any more of Sammy. The Mulrooneys pounced on him like piranhas on raw meat. Let’s just say the Mulrooneys weren’t “slappers,” and the velocity and ferocity of their fists going up in the air and then slamming down on him was a fierce sight to watch, something akin to a National Geographic special. You could hear Sammy’s screams for help, and while my Uncle Jimmy Mulrooney was taking it in with pleasure, my dad, perhaps later than he wished, opened up the screen door and shouted for my cousins to “knock it off!” By that time, Mr. Dietering, who lived next door to the Goods, had also come out to break things up. The Mulrooneys put in a few more kicks and then turned triumphantly in our direction. Sammy lay on the street all crumpled up, crying.

  “Sissy!” “You fight like a girl!” “Go put on your dress!” were the words they left Sammy with as Mr. Dietering helped him up. Sammy didn’t want any help. He limped back to his house. I was pleased that my cousins had taken care of him.

  My dad was not so happy. “You can’t use your cousins to defend yourself. You need to learn to fight. I’m sending you down to the Y for boxing class.”

  What? No! Oh God, I’d rather have taken my sisters sledding—in July! Why was I being punished? Sending me into downtown Flint so Flint kids like the Mulrooneys could beat me up—legally? I begged my mom to intercede.

  “Whatever your dad thinks is best” was all she could muster. I can swear to you I had never heard her utter those words before because, in our house, it was always what she thought was best, and Dad concurred with that line of authority.

  All this because I had to come home crying! Because I saw the Mulrooneys’ car there! I wanted revenge. I knew what they would do. The only thing that would have made me happier is if they would have also smashed every single Supremes record in his collection.

  About three months later, around ten o’clock one night, there was a knock on our front door. It was Mr. Popper, a large but soft-spoken man who lived across the street from the Goods.

  “Frank, the Good boy’s gone missing. His parents think he mighta been kidnapped. Taken out to the woods. They called the police but we thought we’d go searching for him. Can you come?”

  “Sure,” Dad said, though it was already past his bedtime. He went and got our large flashlight and a baseball bat.

  Within minutes most of the men from the neighborhood had gathered on our lawn, each of them with flashlights and sticks or clubs and wearing the kind of hunting jackets one wears in the late Michigan fall. My sisters and I, already in our pajamas and in bed, came out to the living room and watched this scene unfold. What was going on? Kidnapping?! We got instantly frightened. It was the only crime against a child short of murder that they would arrest you for in those days. There was no such thing as “child abuse,” or “neglect,” and nearly all children were accustomed to a healthy dose of spankings and whoopin’s—and worse. Even the school sanctioned it, and teachers were allowed to use a large wooden weapon against the area known as your rump.

  The one thing you could not do as an adult was steal us. If you were not a parent or a relative from the extended family, you could not just take us away without permission. The line had to be drawn somewhere, and this is where it was.

  It was believed that Sammy Good had been taken away (lured?) by someone who was “like him” but “older.” We didn’t know what this meant. Frankly, it was hard to imagine anyone able to pin down and then transport Sammy anywhere, unless they had no use for the eyes God gave them.

  It was determined that if someone was going to molest him (“Mom, what does molest mean?”), it would probably be done in the woods behind our house. And so off the search party went. One thing that struck me about all these men—most of whom probably didn’t appreciate the fact that Sammy was the neighborhood homosexual—was how genuinely concerned they were for Sammy’s safety and well-being, and how they hoped they would find him alive and well. The mothers had come out, too, in order to comfort Mrs. Good, who was standing in the street fighting back her tears. The men assured her they’d bring him back—after all, he probably just ran away and might even be watching us right now! They said this as they tightly clenched their clubs and baseball bats, either ready to roll into action or perhaps scared themselves of going into the deep, dark woods. Yes, they were willing to put themselves at some risk, and if I could sum up their collective feeling, it was, Well, he may be a faggot—but Goddamn it, he’s our faggot—and nobody better touch a hair on his head!

  As the men left on their search, my sisters started to cry, thinking the kidnappers might hurt our dad, too. Our mother told us to go back to bed and that, with more than a dozen men, no harm was going to come to anyone. At that moment, the police chief showed up with one of his officers and proceeded to catch up to the makeshift posse.

  I went with my sisters into their bedroom, which had the best view of the woods. We watched the dads cut through the yards and around the swamp and into the woods, where the silhouettes of their frames disappeared—but the sweeping motion of the twelve flashlights allowed us to know exactly where they were. The movement of those lights looked weirdly choreographed—Sammy would have been proud—as they went up and down and across the trees, crisscrossing each other like the klieg lights at the summer carnival or the Chevy dealer’s Fourth of July sale.

  After what seemed like hours, the dads returned, dejected and empty-handed.

  “He’s not back there,” we heard Dad tell Mom. “No telling where he is. But he ain’t back there.”

  The cops delivered the bad news to Mrs. Good and she broke down again. Her husband put his arm around her to comfort her, and they walked slowly back to their house, as did everyone else to theirs.

  The next day Sammy Good was found near Pontiac, Michigan. He had either hitchhiked or taken the bus. He was wandering the streets and he was hungry and he didn’t want to go back home. He was tired of the insults and the bullies and the beatings and the inability to enjoy his dance party in peace. He had made it more than halfway to Hitsville, U.S.A., and it was said later, after he had run away again, that he had wanted to meet the Supremes and help them with their “styling.” I’m sure he could have made a significant contribution, and I’m certain that a more open and diverse place like Detroit might have suited him better.

  We never saw Sammy again. He went to live with an aunt, and that was the last anyone wanted to discuss the subject. One month before his high school graduation, Sammy made his way to New York City, perhaps a more accepting and forgiving place, and it was where he went for a stroll one night, down West 13th Street to pier 54, and threw himself into the Hudson River.

  The Canoe

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my grandmother (my mom’s mother), sat me down to tell me the family history. She had an old, musty book of notes and clippings, and stacks of albums with faded photographs. As I was the oldest of the three kids, she wanted me to have this information so that it would be passed down to future generations. But for her, it was not just about handing over the printed material that had been handed to her. It was also about the Irish tradition of sitting the wee ones down and letting them see your face and look into your eyes as you told them “the stories of your people.” My grandmother explained that these stories were the closest thing we had to family jewels. They were who we were, where we came from, how our lives and values and beliefs came to be. In the generations that came before us, they understood that their good fortune (or tragedy) was not just a series of random happenings. They were the result of how one behaved, what integrity one had, and how carefully each of them made the decisions they made.

  These family stories were told and retold without the benefit of computers and other digital devices. One’s history was stored in one’s brain. Now memory is kept on a Sony sti
ck. But as technology changes each year (see: Profit), we lose family photos in the numerous transfers along the way. The floppy disk from fifteen years ago, the one you have the family history stored on, is hard to retrieve now, and if you ask a kid to help you, you will be met with a confused look or a quiet snicker. If you “stored it” in 1995, it’s already ancient history, its ones and zeroes wiped clean.

  Yet, many of the stories told to me by my parents and grandparents are now lost, not because of a misplaced file, but because I wasn’t always listening. The TV was on, I wanted a Clark Bar, I wanted to go out and play, what did this have to do with the Tigers’ pennant chances? All that mattered was right here, right now, me.

  Thus, many stories were, in a single generation, erased through a lack of attention and no sense of duty or responsibility. I long to hear those stories now, and I regret that I did not in my youth respect them for the power and energy and beauty they had. I have tried to piece many of them back together with what my sisters and cousins remember, but I can see they will never truly be made whole again.

  But there was one story that stayed with me long after my grandmother passed. It was the story of her grandfather and how he came to be one of the early settlers in the Flint area (Lapeer County, to be exact). It was an area, at the time, inhabited by the native peoples. Her father (my great-grandfather) was one of the first white babies born in the township known as Elba. As I was from one of these first families that settled in this area, I recognized that what Elba, Davison, and Flint became had something to do with what these first people did.

  One such person was Silas Moore, my grandmother’s grandfather, a man born in 1814, when James Madison was president. One day, in the early 1830s, Silas Moore, then living in Bradford, Pennsylvania, came up with a plan he wanted to share with his father-in-law, Richard Pemberton (Silas was married to Richard’s daughter, Caroline). It involved leaving Bradford and moving west, into the wild and unsettled areas of a place called Michigan. It would involve traveling first to Buffalo, boarding a ship, and taking it across Lake Erie and up a river to Detroit.

  “We can take the family and our essential belongings by oxcart up through Kill Buck and Springville and then on to Buffalo,” Silas explained to his father-in-law. “That should take us almost a week. Then we will sell the oxen in Buffalo and board the steamer that will take us across Lake Erie to Detroit. In Detroit we can go to the land office and buy land to farm for a dollar twenty-five an acre.”

  “A dollar twenty-five?” Pemberton asked. “That’s a mighty steep price for land unseen. What’s to say there will be any left when we get there? I hear Detroit is busting at the seams, too many people there as it is.”

  “Yes,” Silas replied. “It’s a pretty big place. I hear they have over two thousand people.”

  “Two thousand?!” Pemberton was beside himself.

  “It’s a huge territory,” Moore reassured him. “There’s plenty of land for everyone. We’re not the only ones from Bradford that want to go. We could all help each other.”

  Word had spread through Bradford (a village on the New York State line) as it had through all of western New York State that the Michigan Territory had opened up to homesteaders and would soon be admitted into the Union. Land was cheap in the “West” and mostly unsettled, and for those with the pioneer itch this seemed like an appealing idea.

  The Pembertons and the Moores had spent the previous hundred years as westward-moving immigrants, landing in America from Ireland and England and settling in Hartford, Connecticut, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A Pemberton relation became an early colonial governor of Connecticut. Silas Moore’s father had fought with the Vermont brigade in the War of 1812. His grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War, first with Ethan Allen at the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga, and then with George Washington at Valley Forge.

  After Independence, the Moores and the Pembertons kept moving west, first to Albany, then Elmira, and finally across the Pennsylvania line to Tioga and Bradford counties in the Allegheny Mountains. They helped to establish settlements, and became active politically, but mostly they farmed the land. They believed in cooperating with the Indians, and it was said that they were proud to have “never raised a hand or gun against them.”

  Both Richard Pemberton (who liked to point out he was born the same year that George Washington became president) and Silas Moore were growing tired of farming in the Alleghenies. They wanted to try their luck in more untamed wilderness, where the land was said to be flat, the soil rich, and the freshwater was as plentiful as any place you could find on earth. Silas and Caroline Pemberton Moore (Richard’s daughter) were newlyweds, and that seemed like as good a time as any to put down fresh stakes in a new land, to raise a new family in a new state.

  So the Moores and the Pembertons, along with a few of their neighbors, sold their farms, packed up their families, and left. This included Richard Pemberton and his wife, Amelia, and their five other daughters. With their oxen and two carts, they began their slow and strenuous journey in the spring of 1836.

  Six days later they arrived in the teeming metropolis of Buffalo. There were people everywhere and so many shops that you could stock up for a year by spending just one day in what was already one of America’s largest cities. There was so much activity and commotion, Pemberton encouraged everyone to stay close and keep an eye on their belongings. The Erie Canal had opened in the last decade, and this had brought many settlers and businesses to Buffalo, which was now called “the gateway to the Great Lakes.” The canal, which stretched from the Hudson River in eastern New York, now made it possible to ship goods and people from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the rivers of the West, including the Mississippi River. Silas could not believe the claims made on the posters around town: LEAVE BUFFALO TODAY—ARRIVE DETROIT TOMORROW! They advertised new, large-capacity steamships that could literally whisk you out of New York and have you in the Western Territories by sundown the next day. That just did not seem possible.

  The Moores and Pembertons paid eight dollars apiece and got on the first boat in the morning, one of four ships that left every day between April and November. The following day, they arrived in Detroit. Silas and Richard went to the land office to see about purchasing property near Detroit. They were told they could buy the land on a plot called the “Grand Circus” for thirty-five dollars. But when the men went to check out the land, they found it swampy and unsuitable for farming. Instead, they bought, sight unseen, a large parcel near a lake about fifty miles north of Detroit—“the far, far wilderness,” they were told—in a place near “Lapeer” (derived from the French word for “flint”).

  The Moores and Pembertons took a stagecoach to Pontiac, where they purchased oxen and continued on to Lapeer County. Less than eight years prior, there were no white people in the county. Now there were already a few hundred, but not many in the area near the land purchased by Silas Moore. There were at least three hundred Indians living nearby. When Silas arrived, he was greeted by the chief of the Neppessing band of the Chippewa Indians. Silas explained how he had purchased some land a couple miles away. The chief and his men, familiar with the white man and his concept for “owning land,” showed them the place they were looking for: Lake Neppessing. The chief and his tribe lived on the western side of the lake. There he took Silas to his plot of land. The chief then brought Moore to his village to welcome him. After a while, Silas decided to move to the east end of Lake Neppessing. The idea of living across the lake from three hundred Indians did not seem to worry the Moores.

  These early settlers decided to call their village “Elba,” after the island in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Italy, where Napoleon had been exiled some twenty years prior. But to these settlers, who valued knowledge and education and taught themselves to read the classics, they also knew Elba as the island in Greek mythology that had been visited by the Argonauts in their search for Circe (Medea had sent them on this journey). To reference the classics like this was not u
nusual for people from the New England states, where schooling was considered a necessity. Ignorance was frowned upon, and to come to a new territory that had not a single school seemed quite appalling to them (neither the French nor the British thought it necessary to build schools in Detroit or the rest of the territory). But once the Erie Canal opened and brought New Yorkers to Michigan (where they named their settlements “Rochester” and “Troy” and “Utica” after their beloved hometowns in New York), they also brought certain New England sensibilities with them: town-hall democracy, a strong work ethic, and a belief that a “liberal education” was vital to a civilized society. In the oxcarts and in the steamer trunks weren’t just pots and pans and family heirlooms; there were also books, many books. Throughout the 1830s and ’40s, other radical “New York” ideas began to permeate Michigan, thanks to the new settlers, ideas such as the concept of letting women vote and the abolition of slavery. Their strong Quaker and Brethren traditions, along with their fellow Congregationalists and Catholics, led Michigan in 1846 to become the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment. Such was their state of mind.

  At the beginning of the summer of 1837, Silas and Caroline announced that they would be having a baby sometime near the end of November. This brought great joy to their family and friends from Bradford, as this would be one of the first non-Indian babies born in the area.

  Silas readied his cabin for the new arrival. He had hoped that there would be glass for his windows, but cut glass was scarce and none had arrived from Pontiac for him to use. So, to keep the elements out, a wooden shutter was built. It was not airtight—the wind would howl and find its way through the cracks—but it suited their needs. It wasn’t like they didn’t know what winter was, being from Pennsylvania and upstate New York.