Low Road (5 page)

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Life was largely a hustle for more than a handful of black men and women in the larger cities of America. In fact, for those who saw too much distance between their education, talents, or training and the requirements of a prohibitive establishment, hustlin' became a career. And it seemed there was always a hustle to be found in the ghetto; in the lower echelon; in the shadow of space and time that left just enough room to walk the line between what was legal and what was necessary. Generally, what was legal wound up stepped on. Although Black Bottom was populated with legitimate, decent, working-class people, there were also the familiar characters who decorated the corner landscape of every other urban center. They might have discreetly held onto something for protection but were generally nonviolent and thought harmless to anyone not interested in what they had to offer. Hustlers like the pimp and the prostitute, the street peddler, the numbers runner. What Donnie lacked in study skills and book knowledge he recovered in less legitimate talents. He observed the various street hustles and developed a knack for card games and shooting craps. As a small-time gambler, he discovered a way to keep pocket money for himself, and it had nothing to do with cleaning other men's funky underwear. It was somewhere near the time he'd reached the eighth grade when he appeared to recognize this alternative lifestyle option. In spite of the Catholic school education, the respectable mother and father, and the stability that came with being the heir to a family business, Donnie had begun to feel the pull of the street. After all, the North End, where the Goines residence was located, wasn't too far from Black Bottom.

Donnie began trading his deficient self-esteem as initiation to the world. Never particularly vain, he had not thought of himself as being attractive or otherwise. In large part, through the bluntness of his peers, however, he had become acutely sensitive about his complexion. Unlike in the South, where its significance was emphasized through omnipresent signs, such as
NO DOGS, NO COLOREDS
, Detroit segregation was less declarative. Yet, despite the headlines and current events that reflected the discrimination surrounding him, Donnie developed his greatest sense of race and place among his own people. It might have seemed inevitable, considering Joe's idiosyncrasies and Myrtle's intriguing ethnic background, that Donnie agonized about his physical appearance, mainly the lightness of his skin. Marie would observe his pale hands as they worked side by side in the cleaning store. One of their duties was to handle men's pants, turning the pockets and cuffs inside out.
He looks just like Momma,
Marie would think to herself, comparing her milky caramel complexion to his. She never teased him about it, though. Never called her brother “high yellow,” “red,” or any of the abusive names she heard the neighborhood boys use to characterize his paleness or the rouge undertones that reflected his Native American heritage. A lot of Donnie's cohorts were likely jealous, having been programmed through television and billboard ads to believe that the closer you were to white, the prettier you were. Like Myrtle, whose broad nose was perhaps the only feature that distinguished her as a person of color, Donnie fit well with what often was regarded as the most enviable image of blackness. After all, fair-skinned, Brooklyn-born Lena Horne was among the few people of color to project an image of elegance and glamour in the mass media as she gave memorable performances on film screens; the similarly hued, slick-haired Calloway was cast in several parts that allowed him to show off his swingin' style in front of the camera. Yet, there were no movie contracts or cameras rolling for ordinary, twelve-year-old, high-yellow kids in Detroit. Not even the ones with Donnie's silklike “good” hair.

It was, at least partly then, due to the self-esteem issues associated with his complexion that Donnie began using delinquent behavior to assimilate. It was during the time when he was enrolled at Cleveland. Away from the stinging rulers of the nuns who enforced zero-tolerance discipline in the classroom. Away from the closely monitored hallways and catechism principles. Where Donnie had found the nerve was another question entirely. He only figured that his willingness to run with the crew would assure his acceptance. Nerve would be the attribute that diverted the attention often focused on his sallow countenance. He would be relieved of merciless taunting. As much as those words hurt, Donnie might have chosen to suffer a physical beating instead.

Even as Donnie began to succumb to peer pressures, he remained fairly stable in his development as a young man, at least to the casual observer. He liked to shoot his mock rifle and pass time with his cousins. Along with Myrtle and Marie, he continued attending Mass and taking Sunday communion. Though Joseph wasn't much of a churchgoer, he volunteered every summer to drive the Sacred Heart parish sisters out to the country where they had their retreats. In March 1949 Donnie entered a speech class at Cleveland, and he dropped his shop course in order to work more at the cleaners. If Joe and Myrtle suspected their only son was slipping from them, they never showed it. The thought never entered their minds that within the next two years he would be living as a full-grown man thousands of miles away.

Donnie's shy but charming smile was surely an attraction to the female students at Pershing High School, where he was admitted in 1951. In his few years as a student at Cleveland, he missed nearly seventy days of class. At Pershing, another public school located on the east side, he continued to go through the motions. It was around this time that Marie began to take an interest in the study of dance. Freshman class member Donnie, on the other hand, found nothing Pershing offered to be of any particular interest. His bonds with the friendly, young, neighborhood criminals, meanwhile, appeared to grow stronger. Riff raff was their specialty, and Donnie played a part in creating it. The words that had previously crushed him, driven him into an ever-present state of self-consciousness, seemed to matter little now. Hell, they were all just little niggers anyway. At least as far as the white folks and the strangers were concerned. So what difference did their shades make, really? Sensing that Donnie needed some sort of private space as he matured into adulthood, Joe made an uncharacteristically thoughtful gesture on the teenager's behalf. He constructed a recreation room above the cleaning plant. He bought a billiards table and opened the space for Donnie to entertain. He and Marie would frequently welcome their nearby cousins and friends from the block up to their little quarters. But Donnie soon developed other ideas about how Joe's rare gift could be used.

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Marie watched the scene in amazement. If she had ever doubted that her little brother knew how to find ways to create trouble for himself, well, now she was a believer. She had no idea where it came from. No idea how they'd gotten hold of it. No ideas about anything except the fact that she was actually seeing it, right there in the rec room: Donnie and the gang had actually stolen a safe. These teenagers were in possession of a storage vessel for valuable, possibly even priceless, items. How they'd actually gotten it down the street and through the door would have been too much to ponder.

Would they be arrested? Would someone try to kill her brother? Had it been stolen from the home of an elderly person who wouldn't know how to survive without its contents? Marie wondered to herself but never quite found the courage to ask. She wasn't even sure she wanted to know. Donnie was becoming bolder and bolder in his lawlessness. To be certain, it could no longer be considered simply mischievous or playful. He and the gang handed Marie a twenty-dollar bill from the safe box. Whether it was to celebrate their crime, to ensure her silence, or simply to calm her obviously frazzled young nerves, she was uncertain. As she watched the band of thieves peering and reaching into the open metal door, she thought only of the solemn truth that things would probably not get better where her brother's descent into juvenile delinquency was concerned. If he would participate in a heist like this, what wouldn't he do? Since they were babies, separated by an insignificant number of years, they had been each other's first real friends. But Donnie was far from an infant. In fact, he was charging recklessly toward the dangerous consequences that came along with being a certain kind of man. If Myrtle ever found out what he was doing, it would only break her heart, Marie knew. She was frightened, but nothing seemed like the right thing to do. It may well have been that nothing was.

Grade nine at Pershing would be Donnie's last year of school. The world around him was preparing for a change, and he would soon find himself in the midst of a personal transformation. As early as May 1950, President Harry S. Truman had received word that Negroes in the navy were “completely integrated with whites in basic training, technical schools, on the job, in messes and sleeping quarters, ashore and afloat.” Three years earlier in July, Truman became responsible for the executive order that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” Top military brass feared public reaction and kept any report of the presidential mandate from the newspapers but accepted their instructions nevertheless. Members of Congress kept the code of silence. It would be well into the new decade before the effects of the policy became generally known. About three-fourths of the blacks in the U.S. Air Force had been integrated into 1,301 mixed Negro and white units, and all of its schools and jobs had been made accessible to all races. The army was slower in its progress than the other branches, however, until the summer of 1950, when a surplus of black troops in Korea was combined with a shortage of Caucasian soldiers. The black servicemen were called upon as the solution to a mounting problem of American casualties during the war crisis. A regimental commander felt compelled to integrate them with his depleted white platoons. The Negro squadrons shined. They fought even more effectively than they had previously.

Korea came under Japanese control in 1895 and was made part of the larger island territory in 1910. Allied forces defeated Japan during World War II, however, and U.S. and Soviet squads moved into Korea. The United Nations General Assembly had declared in 1947 that elections should be held throughout the nation so one government could be chosen, but the Soviets resisted and would not allow the elections to take place in the northern part of the country. It was the first instance in history in which a world organization would play a military role. The UN had been in existence for only five years.

The ensuing war was the first in which jet aircraft battles took place. Initially, Allied bombers and fighter planes supported the ground troops, killing enemy soldiers and damaging their bases. Then the Soviet Union began providing North Korea with planes and so-called “dogfights” became a part of the conflict. In the dogfights, which occurred above North Korea, close to 300,000 Communist troops were killed. Yet, with all the developments and dimensions of the war being waged overseas, back in the States, there was more of a metaphoric battle between communism and capitalism being waged. As the focus of antagonism between Russia and America shifted to other Asian territory, it became apparent that the two powers were facing off in an ideological struggle for world domination. Communists had used stories of color discrimination and social injustice to discredit Western capitalism and so-called democracy for some time. Against such a backdrop, the matter of racial segregation became international in its scope, as daily news in Tokyo, Saigon, Peiping, and Delhi was examined by the U.S. State Department for reactions to explosions of black and white violence in places like the Goines clan's home state or Florida.

One item that would not likely have been regarded newsworthy in the eastern press pertained to a brief filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in late 1952. The filing pertained to cases involving segregation in public schools and included a statement from the attorney general:

It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed … Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubt even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith … The segregation of school children on a racial basis is one of the practices in the United States, which has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere. Other peoples cannot understand how such a practice can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice and democracy.

While statements referencing the “struggle between freedom and tyranny” were surely confusing to black folks who couldn't tell the difference between Communist tyrants and so-called democratic ones—especially black folks who had the prior year's lynching fresh in memory—the government's paranoia was comforting. Along with helping to monitor world peace and military aggression, the new United Nations functioned as an open curtain to the stage of America's domestic policies and practices. Word of Jim Crow segregation laws came as a total shock to many of the delegates from foreign countries who came to the United States, where UN headquarters was established. Among delegates who had heard anything about the system before traveling to America, stories of race restriction and subjugation were often dismissed, but now they witnessed it in action on a daily basis. Still more significant were the UN committees of investigation and their published reports, along with debates that generated unflattering portraits of the moral code in the land of the free. This caused genuine embarrassment to the State Department, which attempted to recover by making high-profile appointments of Negroes to Foreign Service positions. But none of the tokenism and face-saving effort translated into any form of change in the lifestyles or setbacks of the masses in Detroit, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Houston, and elsewhere.