Early days in DC. Colored Girl had only small bits of proof that Detroit still existed. Monday through Friday, as The Today Show played on in the background and she got dressed for school and her mother got dressed to look for a job, Frank Blair, the Today Show weatherman, would give the national weather report and sometimes he would mention Detroit. The first days of 1968 had arrived and the only news Colored Girl heard from home was words and sounds floating out of the radio when she tuned the dial to 1450. New songs on the radio meant Detroit must still exist. If Detroit still existed, her daddy was coming for to carry her home.
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” played, and she didn’t tell anyone how Gladys Knight had once helped pull Colored Girl into her tights, brushed blush on her cheekbones, then used her own spit to slick down Colored Girl’s hair to make her stage-ready. If she had told them, she wouldn’t be believed. She learned that in the fancy DC sandbox.
That January, Colored Girl learned that the only connection the Black kids, the white kids, and the Detroit kids all had in common was that they loved Stevie Wonder. When Colored Girl told her new friends that she knew Stevie and that he had sung “Happy Birthday” to her at her last birthday party, one of them threw sand at her knees (she still wore dresses with matching shoes and knee socks) and gaily screamed, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” All the others laughed at her until she chimed in, “Just joking!” and joined in the laughter.
“Lay in the cut, Colored Girl. Choose the moment to act, don’t let it choose you!” The DC kids knew more words, but they didn’t know the important words Black Bottom had taught. They didn’t know “strategy.” They didn’t know “alpha and omega.” They didn’t know all the meanings of “cut.” The father said, You are the alpha and omega of my life. Lawrence Massey repeated, We’ve got to have the right strategy. Strategy is everything. Ziggy said, Lay in the cut. She was Detroit born, and Detroit bred, and when she died, she’d be Detroit-dead. She might not have much, but she had enough.
Then she didn’t. June 14, 1971. An older girl she knew from Ziggy’s school had been bound with surgical cord and shot. She read about it in the New York Times. It was the summer between sixth and seventh grades. She had completed three years at Paliprep, a progressive private school, integrated and innovative, that proudly refused to field a football team, grade student work, or ask students to call their teachers by their last name, but rewarded daily reading of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The short piece left her shaking.
Among the dead: Katherine Winston and Tessie Brown, both eighteen. They would have been thirteen or fourteen when Colored Girl left Detroit. Both of their names sounded familiar. She didn’t know either of the girls well, but she thought she knew one. The event, described as a bloodbath, sounded so unfamiliar. Other girls had been killed, too: Sharon Brown, nineteen, and Katherine Basser. The newspaper reported that five handguns and five long guns were found on the scene. This was no surprise. Colored Girl was raised in houses with guns. This startled: The house where the massacre occurred was described as being “on a street that is lined with tall elm trees and big three-story houses most of which are fronted by rose bushes and well-kept lawns.” The massacre was on Hazelwood. Colored Girl’s grandmother lived on Hazelwood.
* * *
Ten days before her mother died, Colored Girl hosted a luncheon for her and a dozen of her friends. Her mother made the guest list. As the guests gathered around the dining table in the private dining room of the hospice, Colored Girl observed that all the guests (in a city of half a million that was over fifty percent female and over sixty percent Black), save one, were white.
When the guests were seated and wine had been poured, the mother made an entrance. Steroids had blown her once-svelte figure up to nearly 300 pounds. She wore an artisan caftan of raw silk and huge, jet-black spectacles with clear-glass lenses. She thought the glasses created interest and definition to her bloated face by returning some of the bold sharp lines that the meds had stolen from her. Covering her head was a turban, also of silk, but in a contrasting color. She wore a chunky geometric necklace. When the piece was complimented, she said she had found it in the Museum of Modern Art catalog. She did not look like her old self, but she achieved much the same effect; she looked beautiful, powerful, and proud.
The approach of death had removed the mother’s few filters. When one of the guests referred to her as coming from Detroit, she clarified that she was from Ohio. “The only good thing that ever came out of Detroit was Lloyd George Richards.” “What about your daughter?” “As I said!” Colored Girl forced herself to laugh with the group at what the others thought was a joke.
Though Ziggy lived to see a show that Richards directed on Broadway, he didn’t live to see what more this breadwinner’s son became after Ziggy’s death: dean of the Yale School of Drama, appointed by President Reagan to the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the preeminent interpreter of the works of August Wilson. Ziggy’s girls, when they were women, saw that.
Lloyd George Richards
PATRON SAINT OF: Fence Builders, Fence Menders, and Fence Jumpers
Things I won’t live to see? What all my breadwinners’ children become. But I have seen one shining bright on the Great White Way: Lloyd George Richards. In 1960 Richards earned a place in the history books when he directed Raisin in the Sun, starring Mister Sidney Poitier, on Broadway. No sepian achieved that before Richards, a breadwinner’s son.
Though he was born in Toronto in 1919, Lloyd George Richards is a quintessential Detroit kid made good. He moved with his parents and his siblings to Detroit in 1923 for the most usual of reasons: His daddy saw a flyer from Ford promising jobs and better wages. Settled into Black Bottom, the daddy became a breadwinner, an autoworker, who toiled on a Michigan assembly line, like so many of the daddies of so many of my students. Then tragedy struck. Albert George Richards died in 1928 of diphtheria. To help support the family, Lloyd Richards shined shoes and swept floors at a local barbershop, the quintessential Black Bottom boy job. Lloyd Richards went to Northwestern High School and Wayne State University, like so many of my students. His early biography has many elements common to most young males in our world.
But it has a few uncommon ones, as well. Those are the key to how it was he had it so hard and rose so high. Lots of boys shined shoes in Detroit—George Stanley and Marc Stepp, to name but two—but none were soaked in the stories that bounced around between cuts and shaves like Lloyd Richards. He turned a barbershop into a storytelling school. He took something that could have beaten him down—sweeping floors—and turned it into a way to lift himself up. He told me that the barbershop became an opportunity to observe the ways different people spoke, what made people laugh, and the kind of stories people never interrupted.
His mother worked as a domestic, earning a dollar a day, until tragedy struck a second time and the mother woke up completely blind. Richards worked harder. The family was forced to go on relief, a blow they dodged until they couldn’t. Richards leaned into his position as an observer and used it to shield himself from the identity of victim.
He had fallen deeply in love with sepian barbershop language, but the first chance he got, he cheated on that language and took up with the Shakespearean language he met in school. He told me he was prepared for loving Shakespeare because of all the time he had spent with the King James Bible in the Black Episcopal Church his family attended. He thought he wanted to be an actor. He went to Wayne State University and majored in speech. He came out scuffling: He was a disc jockey and he wrote and narrated a crazily popular religious radio show called Little Church of the Air, put on by the Detroit Council of Churches. He wasn’t a breadwinner but he was doing that other Detroit thing: servicing the breadwinners and their families.
But when he did it, he put an original Richards spin on it. Richards was always noting little-known facts, like that the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet both got started in Detroit, or that Detroit was a radio center third only to New York and Chicago. In 1945 he founded These Twenty People, which became Detroit’s The Actors Company. Those crazies held shows in a great big house in River Rouge Park near the auto plant. By the very early fifties, the time I was settling down into writing a weekly column for the Michigan Chronicle, Richards was a bona fide legend in the Detroit theater world and a recognized eccentric.
He liked to stop in to see my kids rehearse and hear our plans for the coming year’s Colossal, toting an old copper shoeshine box, using the footrest piece as a handle. He said he saw the thing in an antique store window and couldn’t not buy it. He wanted to polish my shoes. I let him. Stuck one foot on top of his shoeshine box. He had Kiwi polish; he had a rhythm. While he buffed, he talked.
“Zig, you’re a Garveyite, you just don’t know it.” Now I knew his daddy was a Garveyite. And I knew I knew a lot of Garveyites in Detroit and in Idlewild. I didn’t know why Richards thought I might be one. Or why he thought he should be shining my shoes. I asked him to break that first one down for me.
“Racial pride: check. Self-reliance: check. Negro economic empowerment: check. Activating children for a political purpose: check.” Then he started talking about Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, The Negro World, and how it connected Detroit to points around the globe like Afghanistan, Cape Town, Ceylon, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Cuba, Gary, Haiti, Jamaica, Jerusalem, London, New York, Nicaragua, Philadelphia, and Uganda, and I put my other foot on the box.
By the time he stopped talking, his chamois had my shoes gleaming and I had decided I needed to become a card-carrying member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. And I still didn’t know why he shined my shoes. So, I asked him. He had an easy answer: “Wanted to see what it would be to do it, eye to eye, not looking up.”
Then Richards was gone—off to New York. I would bop over to New York to see each play that he put up. And Richards always returned to Detroit and his mama, sometimes stopping in to see me, often staying long enough to put on a show. In the late fifties, every summer Richards returned to Detroit to direct plays at the Northland Playhouse, a geodesic dome-shaped building that eventually housed The Mump Club, a teen discotheque. I would tease him that I was still a Garveyite, a nationalist, working for economic and every other kind of independence, and that he had moved away from his roots and became an integrationist putting on plays with live goats in them. All his plays had goats. He just smiled that shy smile that he half hid in his beard and let his eyes twinkle half hid behind wireframe glasses. But I sent my kids to see him directing those plays at Northland and so that’s how they got to know all about the Chinese Theater of Lao She and his play The Teahouse when that work was still new. When Richards opened his acting school in New York, I told folks he was copying me.
New York has always been cold for your Mister Chills. It was warm for Lloyd George Richards. When he did A Raisin in the Sun, written by the brilliant young sepian Lorraine Hansberry, starring a brilliant brown cast, I told him he was returning to his Black Detroit Garvey-nation roots. He said, “Zig, I never left. I just went out to do a little reconnaissance.” I believed the man: He was the breadwinner’s boy made good.
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF LLOYD GEORGE RICHARDS:
These 20 People
2 jiggers of red wine
1 pony of Jamaican rum
1 pony of simple syrup
¼ lime, juiced
2 jiggers of seltzer water
Place red wine, rum, simple syrup, and lime juice into a red wineglass and stir. Add ice. Top with seltzer water and top with crushed ice.