Colored Girl’s father admired lawyers and wanted her to become one. Attempting to inspire, Father chanted a peculiar litany: “Speak for those who cannot speak for themselves! When someone’s out on the corner, in trouble with the police, they don’t pray to God, they don’t holler for Superman, they dash into a phone booth and call Lawrence Massey. Someday that’s going to be you. And you going to use your words to put a blindfold on justice.” The father did not get that whole wish. Colored Girl became a journalist, fulfilling, she hoped, the part of the dictate about speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.
Lawrence Massey
PATRON SAINT OF: Lawyers, Fixers, and All Who Use Language to Advocate for Others
Lawrence Massey cleaned up other people’s honest messes. There was the time Dinah Washington was driving her Chrysler Imperial, minding her own business, when two deputies, Stephen Book and Walter Bates, pulled her over. The officers violently yanked a fur stole from her shoulders, marking her neck. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was, they snatched the stole while loudly claiming they were checking to see if the fur piece was stolen.
What could they check? Discovering nothing, they returned the garment to Dinah. The damage was done and it was more than a neck bruise. Then the traffic stop escalated. There was an unpaid lien on the car. A nightclub had come after Dinah, enlisting the Music Union’s help, when she had to cancel an appearance due to illness. The union had fined her $1,000, which she was paying. Unions are not always good. Sometimes they get your Imperial seized and the bruise on your neck overlooked.
The case ended up in court, where Lawrence Massey turned the tables. Massey said the seizure was illegal because Dinah was making payments—then he sued the city of Detroit for $1,000,000! Dinah was no longer a damsel in distress; she was a diva watching her own back.
He also worked the Massey magic for Little Richard, when his manager put him in a trick bag—making it seem like the genius had done something strange with some change. It wasn’t so, and Lawrence proved it. And somehow when that fiasco ended, thanks to Massey, there were a few more pennies in Little Richard’s pocket.
And more than pennies. Lawrence’s genius was making people who felt a little illegitimate, a little brilliant but busted, know they were brilliant and flawed—but still worthy of their fair share, their fair day in court, their walk in the fair air, despite their flaws and freckles.
This is not common knowledge. Massey was often labeled crazy, but he made sense to me. He offered uncommon solutions to common problems. He thought the way to solve the heroin problem was to license hypodermic needles. He thought the way to end prostitution was to stop prosecuting Negro prostitutes and start prosecuting white johns. Massey made the case for this in language a child could almost understand. I had heard him make this case at a wake, several different house parties, and holding court at a side table during the rehearsals for the Youth Colossal.
But, best, he liked to make the case at one of his legendary house parties. Night Train Lane, Charles Diggs, Bob Bennett, G. S., George and Bette Stanley, Marc Stepp, Hobart and Lynette Taylor, Maxine Powell, Anna Gordy, Alf Thomas, and me—we were all regulars at Massey’s parties.
We didn’t come to see each other. Didn’t come to see the visiting stars, like Count Basie and Joe Williams. Didn’t come to see the colorful denizens of Detroit’s dusky demimonde who could be found lounging at Massey’s whenever he threw his front door open wide. On Massey’s couches and barstools, certain Black Recorder’s Court judges, traffic court referees, and even some hustlers had reserved and designated seats, but none of us came for the VIP treatment.
We all came for the same thing: Massey’s ham hocks, cornbread, sweet potatoes, pole beans, ribs, and potato salad. The brother could burn almost as good as he could argue.
He talked about wildlife. “Everyone knows the mating habits of rattlesnakes, and whales, but they don’t know why rich white men come into certain Negro neighborhoods.” He was quoted as saying that. Somewhere else, while defending someone accused of running numbers, Massey was quoted as blaming the legal racetracks, proclaiming, “If they didn’t have racetracks, there wouldn’t be any numbers! Start by closing y’alls’ racetrack down!”
But best of all, he defined Black Bottom. I told that in one of my columns.
ZIPPING WITH ZIGGY by Ziggy Johnson
Last Saturday, two of my best students at the ZJ School asked me to settle an argument. One chap insisted Black Bottom was “a real place, like Indianapolis.” The other insisted it was made up, “like the North Pole.” I said they were both right and both wrong.
Black Bottom was a real place in the state of Michigan; now Black Bottom is a state of mind.
My medic pals rattle off specific streets (Hastings Street, St. Antoine Street) and north-south boundaries. My friends in the labor movement, attentive to competing constituencies, note that what many are remembering as Black Bottom was once two distinct neighborhoods, Black Bottom and, just north of it, Paradise Valley. My showbiz kinfolk insist, “I don’t care what the map says, or the taxi drivers say; if you were standing in the lobby of the Paradise Theatre or the Gotham Hotel, you were in Black Bottom.” George Stanley says, “Don’t try to talk about Black Bottom and not include Chene Street, where the original Stanley Dry Cleaners stood on a block between a Polish bake shop and a jewelry store, a city mile to one of Mr. Ford’s factories.”
My favorite schoolmarm, Shirley McNeil, PhD, says, “Zig, you can’t say what Black Bottom is unless you say what year you’re talking about. If you’re talking 1850, it’s farmland, with fertile black soil that gave the neighborhood its name. If you’re talking 1900, it’s Jewish people come over from Eastern Europe and Russia, and Irish folk, and some of us. Now, if you’re talking 1920 or later, it’s us, lusciously us. And after 1964, it’s gone, gone, gone.”
Old folks liked to say that Black Bottom “stank in the summer and froze in the winter, but don’t mind that, down by the riverside, two, three, four families, crowded in a wooden house, with rent paid by factory jobs, we feasted on opportunity and hope.” Young guns claim, “Black Bottom is paved over, long gone, and don’t matter.” I love me some doctor men, but on the definition of Black Bottom I side with my lawyer, Lawrence Massey. “Black Bottom ain’t a place. Black Bottom an attitude. A Detroit attitude.”
Yep, Massey got to the champion heart of the matter. Black Bottom is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud—and Black.
The efficient and exact part comes from the assembly lines. The inventive part comes from the breadwinners, too. We didn’t get credit for all that we invented in the factories—from processes and tools to paint colors—but we invented in the factories. In Black Bottom, we celebrated what we invented as loud as we celebrated what we built. And we celebrated what we finna do loudest.
Straight up from Alabama you might walk down Hastings Street and ask, “What you know good, Son?” Spend a year on Hastings and you learn to ask the harder, sharper, sepia Detroit question, “What’s new?” And when you have become a citizen of Black Bottom, your greeting will be “What I need to know, to do what I want to do?”
Black Bottom is walking tall, chin up, fist balled, brain firing on all cylinders. Black Bottom folk got steel in their spines, steel in their jaws, and steel in their will. But it wasn’t always an attitude. Before it was razed, it was a place.
Hastings Street ran north from the river and was Black Bottom’s commercial spine. Hastings Street was a shiny black ribbon of a road flanked by one- and two-story brick buildings with thick plate glass windows. The sidewalks in front of the stores were studded with sheltering elm trees that towered above the buildings and electric poles equally beloved by the Black community as the elms for the modernity they promised even if some of the houses didn’t have electricity—yet.
But Black Bottom’s Hastings Street wasn’t just commercial. Churches and other houses of worship, bars, and movie theaters that tended to the souls and spirits of Black Bottom’s diverse and increasingly dusky denizens stood tall on Hastings Street.
Every bar on Hastings Street, every single one, had a piano; that’s just the way it was back then in Black Bottom. Just like every church (be it a storefront church or a grand church in an old theater or a synagogue or a purpose-built building) had a piano and a choir.
Some of the bars had sawdust on the floor. Some of the bars you ordered a beer they would also give you, if you were a lady, a dip of snuff. Black Bottom was country. Some of the bars had silk hanging at the windows. Black Bottom was also city. If you wanted to fight but didn’t want the other patrons to run out the door, you went to Mary’s Bar. If you wanted to see a movie the rest of the world had seen fifty years before, you went to the Willis Theatre. Want a place to sleep and don’t have a room? Go to the Castle Theatre, with sleeping hours until 5:00 a.m. A man called Detroit Count told all about that in a 1948 record called “Hastings Street Opera.” Black Bottom buzzed every hour of the day and night.
Massey is the only one I ever told this: The first time I ever saw Black Bottom, I was in short pants. It was the early twenties. Back then the residential streets of Black Bottom were flanked with a hodgepodge collection of two-story wooden clapboard rental houses, some in a Queen Anne style with modest bay windows; others rose above the sidewalk, looking like New Orleans shotgun cottages; some even boasted second-story balconies. Many of these houses had porches and lawns spotted with dandelions.
The river and the wooden houses gave Black Bottom a distinct southern rural flavor while the tall downtown buildings of white Detroit, visible from points on Hastings Street, the electric poles, and the neon signs all spiced it up with “citified.”
Mother and I stayed with second cousins who shared, with three other families, a two-story clapboard house that had a balcony running across the second story. From that balcony the neighborhood was on vivid and contrasting display.
Horse carts coexisted with cars on Hastings Street. I watched rag-and-bone men go house to house, some with a handcart, some with a cart pulled by a horse or a mule, buying bones, rags, and old clothes from housewives. The rags were turned into paper, the old clothes into industrial rags. The bones were turned into glue or sometimes carved buttons. The cousins explained all this. Watermelon and other fruit and vegetable trucks rolled through the neighborhood. Dry goods dealers, knife sharpeners, and all manner of street vendors plied their trade in Black Bottom.
Standing on the cousins’ balcony was an exotic joy. In one of Bronzeville’s all-city stone row houses, which were cut up into tiny kitchenette apartments, I had to press my ear to a thin wall to hear a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear. And when I did, I only heard the single language of the current next-door neighbor. On the cousins’ Black Bottom balcony, I heard so many languages the cousins could identify: Alabama English, Toronto English, and Irish English, as well as Lutheran farmer German and Berlin Jewish German, Yiddish, Polish, and even Greek.
And I saw this: Black Bottom sidewalks were full of brown boys and girls who held their heads higher and walked taller than brown girls and boys did in Chicago.
My cousins’ house was within walking distance to the very bottom of Hastings Street where I could stand in America and look out to what I was told was Windsor, Canada.
Perched on an edge of America, looking across a blue river to Windsor, Canada, Black Bottom was one part small southern hamlet and one part global border town.
Pretending to nap on a pallet in the cousins’ front room, I heard grown folk debating whether it was “the wind off the coast of Canada,” the “regular payroll checks,” “the ‘can-do’ influence of the Jews and Poles on Chene Street,” or “deep roots in the strengthening red Alabama clay” that made Detroit Negroes so bold.
In Black Bottom, charm and squalor, nature and industry, opportunity and obstacles, citified and country-time, got all shook up into a strong cocktail that made a person believe they could do what they wanted to do, they could be who they wanted to be. I returned to Bronzeville from Black Bottom a more global and radicalized young citizen. My feet hadn’t gotten to Canada but my gaze had. My cousins had been to Canada. My oldest cousin, Jerome, said, “I ain’t letting this country treat me any which way. It treat me wrong, I’m over the bridge.”
My mother overheard that conversation and decided it would be a very long time before we visited Detroit again. I decided on that same trip that one day I would live in Black Bottom.
Massey and me, we are spiritual neighbors.
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF LAWRENCE MASSEY:
The Uncommon Solution
1 jigger of bourbon
1 pony of sweet vermouth
Club soda
1 lime, juiced
Begin by juicing one lime into a cocktail shaker. Add vermouth, bourbon, ice, and shake. Strain into a cocktail glass or a Champagne flute and top with club soda.