Lapeer County, August 1966
“Are you starting on a new quilt already?” William asked when he walked into the parlor. “Seems like you just finished one.”
“I can’t help myself. The Log Cabin quilt will be good for the second guest bedroom, but it just won’t work on our bed.”
“What’s wrong with the one on our bed now?”
“I don’t know. It just seems too stiff for that bedstead. Too straight and right-angley. That bed is so curvy and asymmetrical. I just feel like it needs something . . . different.”
“What about that green and white one? The drunk one? That’s all curvy.”
“Drunkard’s Path. It’s the wrong size.”
“Okay, well, what do you have planned?” He pawed through her basket. “Just yellow?”
“Yes, it’s going to be all different shades. When all the little hexagons are put together, they should look like a sunset.”
“Dang. How long is that going to take you?”
“At least fifty years.”
He laughed. “Okay, baby. Looks good. Whatever you want to do. Though I did think that blue one was nice.”
“It is. It’s just not right for our bed. And I wasn’t thinking of using it there. I just wanted to use up all those old shirts.”
William shook his head. “See, I guess that’s good. It did kind of creep me out.”
“Why?”
“Those shirts were on dead slaves.”
“Well, they weren’t dead or slaves when they were wearing them, according to Aunt Margaret. They just worked in them. I think the history is what makes the quilt special. If it weren’t for people like them, you’d have grown up in Alabama or Mississippi. Can you imagine that? We thought Detroit was bad.”
“Come on, Nora. Not every black man in Detroit came from fugitive slaves. My daddy’s parents came from Georgia during World War I, and Mama came up with her mother from Tennessee during the Depression. So I would have been born in Detroit all the same, even without the men who wore those shirts.”
“You never told me that.”
“You never asked.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “Actually, my parents and grandparents would never talk about it much. But sometimes you’d catch them talking in real low voices—that’s when you knew to listen up. And then you’d wish you hadn’t spied because the next place you were going was bed. And you didn’t want to dream about all that.”
Nora’s fabric and thread sat impotently in her lap. “What did they say?”
“Never mind.”
“William, that’s your family history, so it’s our family history. Our stories are one story from here on out.”
“It’s not pretty.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
William sat down and took a long breath. “Problem is, I really don’t know much for sure. There’s so little to go on. I know almost nothing about Mama’s family, and she’s still alive to talk about it. She just wouldn’t want to. And I could never ask her. Best I can figure from all the clues I’ve had over the years, her daddy got lynched.”
Nora gasped.
“Never could figure out why. But I don’t think they needed much of a reason. Just someone claiming you looked at a white woman or didn’t move off a sidewalk fast enough.”
Nora felt sick to her stomach. It was one thing to know that lynching existed. It was quite another to have a family connection now with someone who had suffered that unthinkable fate.
“I know more about my father’s father,” he continued, “because my Uncle Chuck knew the story and told it to me. Grandpa was a sharecropper in Georgia. Sharecroppers would only get paid once a year after the cotton was all harvested and sold. But my grandfather’s boss was always cheating, and lots of times he would tell the sharecroppers that they owed him money at the end of the season. That way he had a whole passel of slaves who weren’t really slaves but they actually were, you see?”
Nora nodded.
“Most of them didn’t know how to read or write, so they just had to go on the boss’s word.”
“Couldn’t they challenge him? Take him to court?”
“Oh, come on, you can’t be that naïve.”
Nora was taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”
“A Negro couldn’t take a white man to court.”
“What?”
“Didn’t they teach history in that fancy school of yours?”
Nora sighed. “Well, I guess they missed that part.”
“I guess.”
“So what did they do?”
“One night they hopped a freight train. They had to do it at night so the boss wouldn’t send a posse after them to bring them back.”
“But what grounds would he have for keeping them there? He couldn’t just keep them against their will.”
“Sure could. All he had to do was claim they owed him money and were skipping town without paying their debt. And he wouldn’t just bring them back and put them back to work. He’d send a lynch mob to get them and teach them a lesson.”
Nora sat back in her chair. “I can’t believe that,” she said, shaking her head. “That can’t be true.”
William looked incredulous. “Why not? Is it any less believable than two hundred years of slavery? You think people who had been buying and selling human beings and working them like animals would suddenly see the light and start treating them as equals? Open your eyes, woman.”
Nora frowned. She didn’t like being made to feel a fool. But it wasn’t William’s fault. “Why Detroit, then?”
“There were recruiters down in Georgia trying to get black folk to come up and work in munitions plants. I guess they got run out of town pretty fast by the bosses who wanted to keep their free labor, but word got around anyway.”
Nora took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s amazing to think about all that had to happen to put you and me at the Detroit Artists Market at the same time. Even all the bad things. If your family had been treated better, if my father had treated you better . . . we might never have met.”
A thoughtful smile crossed William’s lips. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. Mama always says that God doesn’t make mistakes. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that.”
The phone rang.
William jumped up. “I got it.”
Nora picked up her needle and thread and started to baste the little hexagon in her lap. She rocked the needle in and out, in and out, around the perimeter, until all six sides were secure. Then she put it in the tiny pile she had started on the side table and picked up another.
Faint murmurings floated out of the kitchen, but she couldn’t understand what William was saying. She was just about to go see who he was talking to when she heard him run up the back stairs. She dumped the needle and the fabric into the basket and rushed up after him.
When she entered their bedroom, William was packing a suitcase.
“What’s going on? Who was that?”
“Bianca. J.J.’s friend Rod got shot, and now J.J. is missing.”
“Where are you going?”
“Detroit, where do you think?”
“Just tell her to call the police.”
“Nora, it was the police. They shot Rod. And now there’s trouble brewing down there.” He stopped packing and looked at her. “J.J. got himself involved with some rough characters. Militants. Follow this Reverend Cleage character.”
Thoughts of the man who had held a knife to her throat at the drive-in rose up unbidden.
“They’ve been agitating all summer. Since Watts. Looking to start something. J.J. may have been involved or he may not, but the fact is that these guys are stirring up trouble and he’s throwing his lot in with them. He’s not in jail as far as they can tell, but they don’t know where he is. So I’ve got to get down there and try to track him down.” He shut the suitcase and headed for the hall.
“Should I come with you?”
“Better not.” He was halfway down the stairs.
“I could sit with Bianca and your mom.”
“Baby, I’ve got to go now. If J.J. gets picked up by the police . . .” He didn’t finish. Instead he planted a kiss on her cheek at the bottom of the stairs.
“Okay, but—”
“It’ll be all right.”
“Don’t drive crazy!” she called after him as he hustled to the car. “And please call me tonight!”
“I will! I love you!”
The car roared to life and spit gravel out behind the tires. And then it was gone.
Nora went inside and picked up her quilt pieces again. She basted a few more hexagons, but soon she was so tense with anger she got sloppy.
Where did J.J. get off dragging William into his problems? William, who did his best to live at peace with everyone. William, who had been the bigger man and shaken her racist father’s hand. William, who worked hard and didn’t expect everything to be handed to him. And here J.J. took it all for granted. Bianca certainly had no control over him. It had always gotten under Nora’s skin when J.J. would say something rude or disappear for hours at a time and his mother did nothing more than sigh. That boy needed a father.
While they were still in Detroit, William had tried to fill the gap. He’d taken the time to play basketball and take J.J. to movies. He’d even taken him to see Martin Luther King. What better figure could there be for J.J. to emulate? And yet all the boy had seemed to hear in that speech were the negatives. He latched on to the injustice and couldn’t hear the solutions. He let the rage he felt grow and fester. He’d lashed out at Nora when she and William lived with Mrs. Rich. She had thought then that he must have just been annoyed that she was taking up too much space. Now she wondered if it was just because she was white.
The phone finally rang at eleven o’clock. Nora snatched it up on the first ring.
“Is everything okay?” she asked before William even had a chance to identify himself.
“Yeah, he’s home now. But things are still heating up here. Cops swarming all over the place. Lots of arrests being made. But J.J. wasn’t one of them.”
A small part of her was disappointed. Maybe a night or two in jail was just what that kid needed to straighten out his life.
“I’ll try to come home tomorrow.”
“What about work?”
“I’ll call my boss in the morning. It’ll be all right.”
She was quiet a moment. “So was he involved in this incident?”
“He says he wasn’t.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I guess.”
“What does Bianca think?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t know what to do with him.”
“I know what I’d do with him.”
William didn’t respond at first. Finally he said in a flat voice, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Then Nora heard a dial tone.