Motor City Burning (20 page)

“Watch out for that one!” Bob said with a chuckle. “I hear she shagged the golf pro. You just now getting back?”

“No, I . . . couldn't sleep. Went for a long walk on the golf course.”

Bob started dressing. “You hear the news?”

“No. What news?”

“About Bobby Kennedy?”

“What about him?”

“He got shot.”

Willie slumped into the pillow, picked up his flashlight and went back to his book.

“You ain't even gonna ask what happened?” Bob said.

“Sure. What happened?”

“Some A-rab shot Bobby in the head. He'd just given his victory speech after the California primary—and the motherfucker shot him while he was walking through the hotel kitchen. I still can't believe it. I bawled like a baby when I heard the news.”

“He dead?”

“Last I heard he was in surgery—critical condition. But you figure it out. Shot in the head isn't usually good news.” Bob turned on his transistor radio and held it to his ear. After a while he shut it off and put it in his locker. “No change,” he said as he finished dressing.

On his way out the door Bob remembered the other thing. He walked back to Willie's bunk. “By the way, Cuz, a Detroit po-lice was here last week asking me questions.”

He watched as Willie snapped into the sitting position, then took a deep breath and eased his head back down onto the pillow. “What kind of po-lice?” Willie said.

“A homicide detective.”

“He white or black?”

“White.”

“Big guy with white hair and bad skin?”

“No, he was kinda thin, actually. Reddish hair, tall, dressed too good to be a cop, I thought at first. But he damn sure talked like a cop.”

“What all he want to know?”

“All kindsa shit about that apartment building I own down the street from you. The one where Wesley use to stay.”

“What about it?”

“Like I say, all kindsa shit.” Bob leaned in, close enough to whisper. “Say, Cuz, how come you so interested in this detective?”

“I'm not interested, Uncle Bob. Just curious is all. You're the one brought it up.”

“Bullshit. I stand here and tell you the next President of the United States has a bullet in his brain—and you go right back to reading your book. Then I tell you some honky cop stopped by—and you bout jump out your black hide. I'm holding on to my patience, Willie. What's going on?”

“Nothing, Uncle Bob.”

“Don't lie to me, boy. Since when you know what color hair Detroit cops has got?”

“Since I saw one on the TV news the other night. Something about a murder during the riot. I thought maybe it was the same guy came out to talk to you.”

There was a long silence, both of them trying to figure where this was going. Bob said, “Since you so curious, Cuz, he wanted to know if any of my tenants drives an older model car with a red-and-black interior and lots of chrome.” Bob let that sink in good and deep before he went on. “He wanted a list of my tenants from last July.”

“All your tenants? I mean, he know how many buildings you own?”

“He knows exactly how many buildings I own. He knows all kindsa shit. He just wanted to know about my tenants in the Larrow Arms. And he wanted to know who has a key to the roof.”

“The roof? Why?”

“Cause he already talked to a widow lady lives alone on the second floor name of Mizz Armstrong. She told him she saw a shiny older-model car pull up under her window early in the morning last July 26th. That was during the riot. She saw two men get out—two black men, one fat, one tall and thin—then saw them come inside the building. Then she heard voices and nine gunshots coming from the roof. The cop didn't say so, but I'm guessing somebody died right about then, otherwise he wouldn't be asking so many questions. You hearing all this, Cuz?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you drive Wesley home one night after curfew during the riot?”

“I guess . . . maybe . . . yeah, I did. Once.”

“You got rocks in that nappy head a yours?”

“He was in trouble, Bob. He'd been beat up. Bad.”

“Now here's the strange part. The last thing the cop asked me was whether any of my tenants in that building ever served in Vietnam.”

This time the silence was so long and so deep that they could hear water rushing through pipes, could hear the building groan.

Finally Willie said, “So what you tell him, Uncle Bob?”

“Same thing I'd tell any cop—as little as possible.”

“You didn't tell him bout my Buick?”

“No.”

“Or bout Wes living at the Larrow?”

“No.”

“Or bout him serving in Vietnam?”

“Hell no. But something tells me I haven't seen the last of that po-lice.”

“Why's that?”

“Cause he's smart. He does his homework. And I could tell from his questions that he knows a lot more'n he's letting on. Now you listen to me, William Bledsoe. The more I think about this, the less I like it. If there's something you need to tell me—something I need to know—you better do it now. Fore that motherfucker comes back.”

“There's nothing to tell, Uncle Bob. Honest. . . .”

“Suit yourself, but I'm going to tell you right now I don't like all these ‘coincidences.' The car. Vietnam. Someone on the roof right after you and Wesley drove up—”

“That's all they are's coincidences.”

“You be doing us both a big favor you tell me what you need to tell me right now so I know how to handle that cop. You know you can trust me, boy. I'm family. Now tell me if you and Wesley were up on—”

There was a roaring snort from the bottom bunk, then the voice of Edgar Hudson, thick with sleep: “Yallshuttafuckup.”

Bob checked his watch. “I got to go. You think this over, Willie. And you think hard.”

“There's nothing to think about, Uncle Bob.”

“Don't feed me no more a your shit. I'm working the dinner shift tonight. We'll talk when I get back here this afternoon.”

“I may be gone already. I'm working the lunch shift, then I'm off till Thursday.”

“Then I'll call you at home. We going to talk.”

13

A
FTER
B
OB LEFT,
Willie couldn't sleep. His mind was jumping all over the place—from what his uncle had said about the detective, to Bobby Kennedy, to Blythe Murphy, back to the detective, back to Blythe Murphy. Sleep was out of the question, so he decided to go for a walk on the golf course, this time for real.

The grass was soaked from dew and the silvery jets of water shooting out of sprinklers. Willie left his shoes and socks under a bush and started walking across the miles of perfect grass. The sun hadn't come out of the trees yet, and the grass was squishy and cold on his bare feet.

As he walked, dodging the jets of water, he kept smelling his hands, smelling Blythe Murphy's perfume, their mingled sweat and sex. Her hair was brittle to the touch, unnatural, not quite human, but for that very reason even more mysterious and thrilling. Already the whole experience was beginning to seem like a dream, surreal now that it was over. But it was not a dream and it was not over and he knew it never would be.

He had spent his whole life being told that black people had to be above reproach, had to answer to a higher standard and be much better than white people if they ever hoped to be treated as an equal. Willie saw this in his Uncle Bob, the way he dressed and spoke and conducted himself. He saw it in his mother, her impossible standards, the way she insisted that her sons work harder, play harder, study harder and fight harder than other children, black and white, because she knew that nothing would ever be given to them and they would have to scrap like hell if they hoped to get a fraction of what they deserved. While the world urged Willie and his brother to make peace with mediocrity, their mother insisted that they aspire to excellence. Willie loved her for that.

Of course white women were off-limits. It was unthinkable that Beulah Bledsoe's boys could even want a white woman, for this was the very trap the white man wanted the black man to fall into, this was the final confirmation of the disdain that propped up the white man's shaky sense of superiority. To fall into the trap, Ma BeBe said, was to justify that disdain. Worse, it was to admit to a loathing of your own blackness. And that was the one thing she simply would not abide.

She used to tell her sons stories about working as a domestic for rich white people during her college years in Atlanta. Her employers were forever leaving cash and jewelry lying around the house. She understood why. They were baiting her. Tempting her. Testing her. Hoping she would steal so their stereotypes and their sense of superiority would remain intact. Ma BeBe took great delight in disappointing them.

And now Willie had done the very worst thing a black man could do. Yet as he walked across that rolling carpet of cold grass, he could sense something strange beginning to happen. He felt like a snake shedding its skin. He felt himself sloughing off the shame he'd been programmed to feel, and as it fell away he felt anger rising in his throat. He realized he was tired of being told what he was supposed to feel. How he was supposed to dress and act. Who he was supposed to follow. Who he was allowed to fuck. What had he fought for all those years? Why had he gotten his skull cracked, his lip split, his flesh burned? Why had he bled? So he would be free to live under a different set of rules?

But even as he tasted this anger, he understood it was a luxury he could not afford. He was a black man living in America. It was like living in a room without windows or doors, a room where the air is stale and unchanging. He knew there was no place in that room for an angry black man. Look what happened to Malcolm X. Better to keep your head down, go along, get by. When he was still in short pants he'd understood that the best a black person in the Deep South could hope for was a job teaching or preaching, maybe something with the railroad or the post office. His own parents were living proof of this fact. And now here he was up North, walking on a patch of pampered grass that existed for the white man's pleasure and the black man's continuing pain, working a menial job for The Man and despising himself for it, worrying himself sick about the police. Here he was, smelling the sex of a white woman on his skin—and, for the first time in his life, refusing to deny that he'd enjoyed his transgression. This refusal felt like the beginning of something immense. It felt like the beginning of a rebirth.

As he continued walking, he began to see that he was in an impossible predicament: His anger may have been a luxury he could not afford, yet it alone could set him free. His anger, more than anything in his Alabama box, more than anything he was likely to find in old newspapers and notebooks and photographs, was the key to writing his memoir. It was the key to everything.

He could see that there was a word for what he had to do if he ever hoped to be free. He had to
repudiate
the world that made him—his parents' world, the world of the movement, the world of the black striver—and then he had to learn to live by his own rules. That was the only path to true freedom.

He thought of the scene awaiting him back in the Quarters—the dice and the playing cards, the empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts of men who'd done what they had to do to make it through another night. As Willie had known for years, and as the author of
Black Like Me
discovered during his travels in the Deep South, those men understood that they had no options. They had to dull their senses with whatever was available and they had to laugh, had to laugh as hard as they knew how because if they ever stopped laughing they would start sobbing, and once they started sobbing they would be as good as dead. That would be the end of them, admitting how close they lived to despair. But at least those snoring men had never bought into the illusion that Willie once bought into and that his parents and his Uncle Bob still bought into—that education or religion or a change of scenery or political activism or the right president could possibly change the way their lives were destined to play out. There wasn't a romantic or an idealist among those sleeping men. Much as he loathed Hudson and Wiggins, Willie had to admit he admired their toughness and their fatalism. They reminded him of his Aunt Nezzie, the toughest and most fatalistic—the bravest—person he'd ever known. She knew for a fact that there would never be anything new under the sun, and that suited her just fine. She wouldn't dream of registering to vote or going to church, of admitting that some politician or some preacher or some new law might be her salvation. She had no desire to be saved. She was content to live by her own lights. Yes, Aunt Nezzie was the bravest person Willie had ever known.

Again he smelled his hands and thought of the lie he'd just told Blythe Murphy out on the parking lot. She was not his first white woman. Nancy Fegenbaum was his first white woman, his dark secret and, until this night, the source of a scalding shame.

Nancy Fegenbaum was a sophomore at Vassar, a stunning Jewish girl from Westchester County outside New York City, one of the volunteers who came south in droves from the best northern colleges for the Freedom Summer of 1964. Like most Snick veterans, Willie viewed these new arrivals as a bunch of anarchists, dopers and floaters. He dismissed the occasional Negro among them as nothing more than a freedom-high nigger.

But Nancy was different. She truly believed they could change the world. She truly believed the races could, and should, live in harmony. She did menial jobs without complaint, and she didn't make fun of southern accents or boss people around the way so many of the northern students did. She was also a knockout with olive skin who wore her hair in long, thick henna-colored ringlets and believed a brassiere was an unnecessary encumbrance in the Mississippi heat. Willie couldn't take his eyes off her, and every time she caught him staring she gave him an asking look, followed by a smile. Never in his life had he gazed so brazenly at a white woman, and he found it both terrifying and thrilling. Thrilling because it was terrifying. Terrifying because it could get him killed.