Jack had just turned eighteen, the cut-off age for the Windsor Sea Cadet Marching Band, also known as the Windsor All-Whites. When the bandleader found that out, and that he had quit high school, he would tell Jack it was time to move on. Jack was waiting for the tap on the shoulder, and then what? Meanwhile, he concentrated on learning as much as he could, thinking he might join the Navy Band. When the All-Whites wheeled left, he marched in place for six paces, knees high, left foot turning fifteen points of the compass with each step. On right wheels he marched double time, twelve long paces, eyes right, keeping the line straight. Try doing that without moving the trombone or blowing air through the side of your mouth. Try moving the slide out to seventh position without hitting the marcher in front of you. You had to concentrate. You couldn’t do it if you were thinking about being kicked out of the band, so he didn’t.
They were called the All-Whites because of their white uniforms: hats, tunics, trousers, even their shoes. Privately, they called themselves the All-Whites because there were no coloureds in the band, not exactly by design or decree, it just turned out that way, as everything always did in Windsor. No one blinked when Jack joined the band, which meant no one knew anything about him or his family. Another test passed.
The band practised drills in the Armouries on Saturdays and Thursdays, taking over the polished floor from the Army cadets, groups of sullen schoolboys in oversized woollen uniforms the colour of baby shit. The cadets would come up from the basement rifle range smelling of cordite and idle on the sidelines, drinking Cokes from the machine and, having just fired real rifles, eyeing the band in their white uniforms as though they were so many moving targets. They had that look of aggressive disdain in their eyes, the way all Army men eyed the other forces, which was also the way all whites looked at coloureds. Army cadets were the kind of smug assholes he’d quit Patterson Collegiate to get away from.
There’d been other tests, girlfriends, lunch-counter waitresses, the high-school baseball team, and so far he’d passed them all. His nonresident alien’s card for getting across the border said he was white. He’d hung around with white kids all his life. They’d made him do things for them because he was younger, not because he wasn’t like them. He was. At the movie theatre, where coloureds had to sit in the balcony, he always sat downstairs, right up at the front, sometimes with a girl, sometimes with his buddies from school. If anyone had suspected anything, they’d have asked to see his card, they were always checking for stuff like that. Even the old man knew he was white. His father didn’t understand it any more than Jack did, and he didn’t like it, but he never stood in his way.
But all that could change with a moment’s inattention. Some slip, some fluke, somebody sticking their nose where it didn’t belong. Someone hearing the old man call him Jackson instead of Jack. One false step and he’d be shining shoes down at the train station, or breathing in plaster dust all day with Benny and the old man.
So he was glad when his squad wheeled away from the sidelines and the Army cadets were behind him. His arms felt like lead from holding the trombone up while the fifes and drums fought it out behind him. The All-Whites knew seventeen field drills, twenty-six marches. They even had a symphony section that played in Riverside Park on civic holidays, a band within a band, although Jack wasn’t part of it.
Peter Barnes, first trumpet, two over on Jack’s right, was in the symphony. Peter was white, a doctor’s son, had the world fed to him on a silver spoon. But he was all right. Jack usually went to Peter’s house after band practice, which wouldn’t happen if he thought Jack was coloured. It was the fourth year of the war that was supposed to have lasted only a few months, a year at most. People were still saying it would be over any day now that the Yanks were in it, but the Yanks had been in it for nearly two years and the war was getting worse, if anything. Jack was glad of it. The war was the future waiting for him, his ticket out.
At Peter’s house they sat in an open area on the second floor, at the top of the stairs, usually with Della, Peter’s mother, who talked to him in a way no white woman ever had before. No woman, come to think of it. She seemed to actually like having him around. He never got the look from her, she never talked as though there were things she knew that he would never know. Whatever she knew, she shared with him and with Peter. There was a fireplace, two soft chairs and heavy red curtains held open during the day by braided gold cords, closed at night because of the blackout; he could stand at one of the windows, pull aside the curtain a fraction and look out over the deserted street, above the tips of the chestnut trees, and she would not say, Come away from there.
It felt safe, but it was dangerous for Jack in this house. He was pretty sure Peter and his mother didn’t know anything about his family, but he couldn’t be certain. Peter probably wouldn’t rat on him if he did know, but he couldn’t be sure of that, either. The Barneses were white and they were rich, and he didn’t really understand such people, didn’t know what they were capable of, how fiercely they would protect their own. Coming to Peter’s house, talking to Peter’s mother, even calling her Della, was like putting his hand on a hot stove to see how long he could stand the heat. Even if he could stand it, he’d end up with a burned hand. But if he wanted to join the Navy, he had to pass all the tests, and so far he had.
Doc Barnes had been away with the Navy for a year and a half. The surgery, when he was home, took up half the ground floor, but it was closed for the duration. Passing the pocket doors on the way to the stairs, Jack hardly noticed the antiseptic smell anymore. On the second floor, Peter and Jack and Della drank tea and listened to jazz on the radio, which stood on a low, mahogany table between the windows, beside a photograph of Peter’s father: the doc in his white Navy uniform, his collar insignia that looked like a walking stick with two snakes twisted around it. The radio was tuned to a Detroit station, Detroit bands. Jack liked the big swing bands, it was like being in the All-Whites, the same feeling of belonging, an all-encompassing, tightly controlled sound, each lick, even the improvised solos, strictly choreographed. Harry James ran his band like the ringleader of a circus. Once you were in a band like that, you were set for life. You’d passed. He’d heard that Calloway was making fifty thousand a year in New York before the war. Not that he wanted to play trombone in Calloway’s band. Calloway was coloured, all his band members were coloured. There were plenty of better bands around.
Parting the curtains on one of the windows and squinting through the chestnut trees, he could see the Detroit River and the anti-aircraft barrage blimps anchored to the shore. Detroit was a prime target. If German bombers came up the river, they would hit the chains holding the blimps and crash into the river, or maybe into Detroit. But how would German airplanes get this far inland? They’d have to have flown up the St. Lawrence River all the way from Newfoundland, and then over Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, without being detected. Such a thing was impossible, but every time anyone heard a plane overhead, or train cars shunting together down on the tracks, they looked nervously up at the sky. Jack imagined what a hundred Junkers Ju 88s would sound like as they flew in—a long, steady, low E minor, the first note of a symphony with no end.
“How did you become interested in music, Jack?” Della asked him. She was wearing a cream-coloured blouse with a collar that knotted at her throat and hung down like a tie over the mother-of-pearl buttons that gleamed in the weak light. She seemed young to be Peter’s mother, more like an older sister, like Alvina. Her blouse and skin, their paleness accentuated by bright red lipstick, made her look as though she’d been carved from a kind of stone, alabaster or marble, something that if you rubbed became soft and warm in your hands. She looked like one of those women in the magazines who wore party dresses and high heels while doing housework, or while pouring a cup of Maxwell House coffee for her husband. Jack had never seen her doing any sort of housework. She was the kind of woman who would hire someone like his mother to do it for her.
“My grandfather was a bandleader,” Jack said. “On my mother’s side.”
“Is that why you joined the All-Whites, because your grandfather was a bandleader?” Her knitting needles clicked in time with the music. “Socks,” she’d said on one of his first nights there, “for the boys in the trenches.”
“Foxholes, Mother, not trenches,” Peter had corrected her, and she had smiled.
“My mother says it’s in the blood,” Jack said.
“What is?”
“Music.”
“Is she musical?”
“No, not very.”
“Martin Luther called the trombone ‘the voice of God,’ ” Della said, brushing her blonde hair back over her ear. He didn’t know who Martin Luther was, but he remembered standing beside his mother in First Baptist, watching her sing with her head thrown back, swaying on her feet, mouth open, eyes closed, the pages of her hymnal flapping in her gloved hands like the wings of a frightened pigeon. The voice of God. He’d never felt comfortable in that church; people gave him too wide a berth.
Della paused in her knitting to look up at Jack. “But perhaps musicality skips a generation.”
“It didn’t with us,” Peter said.
“Gracious, look at the time.” Della pressed what she had knitted against her thigh. “There’s one finished. One sock a day, that’s my limit. Time for a drink.”
Peter, still at the window, turned to Jack. “We’re thinking of going over to Detroit. Want to come?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Large city, just across the river? If it weren’t for the blackout we could see the lights from here.”
“But won’t everything be closed?”
“Not everything,” Della said, getting up. “There’s a war on, you know.”
Peter drove and Della sat beside him on the passenger side, with Jack in the back admiring the play of the red dashboard lights on Della’s hair. The nape of her neck glistened. It was June and the night was hot and humid, a typical Windsor night, smelling of heat and overripe vegetation and, as they neared the river, dead fish and creosote. With the top halves of the car’s headlights taped, they couldn’t see very far ahead. Gas was rationed, but Peter could always get it because of the doctor’s licence plates. They drove down into the tunnel and stopped at Customs and Immigration to show their nonresident alien cards. With their windows down, the heat from the tunnel was stifling. The guard looked at Jack’s card longer than necessary. When he finally handed it back and waved them through, Jack showed the card to Della.
He read aloud: “ ‘Height: five-ten; Color: White; Hair: Black.’ Wouldn’t you say my hair was more brown?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in daylight,” Della said, taking the card from him. “It also says you have a scar on your left cheek.” She turned in her seat and looked at him for what felt like ages. “I hadn’t noticed that, either.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. “Long time ago. Cut myself shaving.”
They cruised along Woodward and stopped in front of the Paradise Theatre. The streets were dark but busy with traffic, trolley cars on Woodward and pedestrians on both sidewalks. A long line of people snaked from under the Paradise’s unlit marquee up Woodward and around a corner. Peter drove north as far as East Adams, then turned right and parked in front of the Horse Shoe jazz club, a long, narrow tavern with octagonal windows on either side of a deeply recessed door. Jack had been to the Horse Shoe before, with Alvina. It was a black-and-tan, open to both coloureds and whites, but few whites ventured this far into Detroit’s Black Bottom district. Most went to places on Hastings. Why were they coming here? he wondered, but didn’t ask. Peter dropped Jack and Della off in front of the club and went to find a parking space. Jack held the lounge’s heavy wooden door open for Della, trying not to look like a doorman, and when they were inside Della breezed past the bar and found them a table near a small platform on which three dark-skinned men were sitting on chairs, blowing horns that had cigarette smoke coming out through the bells. Another man, wreathed in smoke, was playing a banged-up set of drums, bass, snare, hi-hat and two toms. The alto sax and clarinet deferred to the tall, lighter man with the trumpet. The tune was fast and jittery, a lick that might have started as one song but long ago had lost its train of thought. At the tables around them, coloured men and women engaged in conversations that had, with the noise and the smoke and the booze, become improvised shouting matches, as though the music were there not to give them something to listen to but to rise above.
When Peter joined them, Della smiled a welcome. Jack thought she looked more at ease here, in this place where the three of them stood out like beacons, than she had in her own house, and it made a kind of perverse sense to him, because he felt more at home in her house than he did at his own. He was faintly jealous of Peter; Peter lived with her all the time, not just on Thursday nights. Peter saw her in daylight.
“Who’s at the Paradise?” Peter asked the waiter, who leaned over to wipe the table and say something close to Peter’s ear that sounded like Billy Eckstine.
“Big crowd,” Peter said. The waiter nodded and left.
Jack didn’t care who was at the Paradise, or here either, he didn’t like this jungle music, this tribal jiggaboo jazz. They really should be over on Hastings, at the Three Star or the Flame Show Bar, where it was busier, better lit, safer. He liked his music smooth and mellow, flowing like a deep, continuous river. There was nothing mellow about these boys, their cheeks and eyes bulging out of their heads, sweat shining on their faces. They looked as though they’d been carved out of hard, wet coal. This music wasn’t the voice of God.
But Della was watching the trumpet player like she was trying to get inside the man’s skin. Her head was turned slightly away so that he could see, in the bluish light coming from the Pabst sign above the bar, the pulse in her throat keeping time with the music. He allowed his eyes to caress the contours of her blouse in the smoky darkness. Everything around her was in motion, moving waves of sound, yet she was calm and still, fearless. He marvelled at her, a white woman in a room full of coloureds, a doctor’s wife surrounded by assembly linemen, machine-shop workers, drill-pressers, tool-and-die punchers, men who made tanks and bombs for a living, who swept floors and cleaned toilets, who eyed white women in ways that could get them arrested if a white man caught them at it. They were eyeing her now, looking her over between outbursts of laughter, calculating, sizing up him and Peter. What’s she doing here? they were thinking. What does she want? When she picked up her glass and put it to her lips they followed the liquid as it slid down her throat. Jack knew she could feel them watching her because she never took her eyes off the stage, not even to look at him.
“They’re good tonight,” she said when the waiter brought their drinks.
“They picked up when you come in,” the waiter said.
Peter was watching the trumpet player. Jack leaned forward, elbows on the table, aware of the men watching him from under soft caps pulled down tight on their foreheads, loose shirts with greasy collars, sleeves rolled up over glistening biceps. The women were bolder, better dressed, probably office workers. They sat with their legs crossed and their sweaters draped over their shoulders, buttoned at the throat, dark skin showing through white blouses. The men met his eyes before looking away. The women held his gaze coolly, like they were reading his thoughts.
The set ended in a long, sinking chord, a train whistle running out of steam, and Peter laughed, picked up his beer and drained it.
“Man!” he said, looking at Jack, eyes glowing. “That has guts!”
“You like guts?” Jack asked.
“Damn right I do.”
“Not really something you could dance to, is it?” Jack said, turning to Della.
“Would you like to dance, Jack?” she asked, smiling at him.
For a second he thought she was serious. “No, not really.”
“Well, then.”
Before leaving, she went up and said something to the trumpet player, who nodded and said something back, looking over at their table. Peter waved at him. Jack saw Della hold the coloured man’s hand for too long, and squeeze it before letting go. He thought, she must have been giving him a tip.
Jack told Peter to drop him off at the tunnel exit and he would walk home. Della turned in her seat to look at him.
“What about your trombone?” she asked him. “Didn’t you leave it at our house?”
“I’ll come and get it tomorrow.”
“Are you sure, Jack?” Peter said. “We can pick it up now and drive you home.”
“No,” Jack said, then added, “Thanks, but I’d rather walk.”
It was after midnight and the Settlement’s streets were quiet, the air still and heavy and sweet-smelling from the Hiram Walker’s distillery in Walkerville. Men and women sat out on their porches, smoking and drinking beer, arguing in low voices about whether or not it was warm for June. The Depression was over, the factories were operating again. There was money to be made. Hiram Walker’s was hiring, Chrysler’s was making Jeeps and personnel carriers, people were migrating up from Georgia and Alabama for the high-paying wartime jobs. A person could make sixty dollars a week at Packard, assembling airplane engines. Jack could hear their lazy drawls floating down from the porches: Detroy-it, Will-It-Run, Forward Motors, Harm Walker. His father could have been making a fortune building houses for the veterans who would be returning any day now, but instead he made petty cash turning Settlement houses into tenements and apartments for the factory workers, who’d be happy living in packing crates as long as they were cheap.
Jack stopped in front of his house. The old man’s Dodge was parked at the side, W. H. Lewis & Sons, Plasterers. Hoe handles and sawhorses stuck out of the box as if they’d been thrown in. The row of whitewashed stones dividing the driveway from the bare front yard glowed like skulls in the light from the house, his mother’s pathetic stab at elegance.
He thought about going inside. His father would be down at the British-American, his mother in the kitchen playing solitaire or baking something for a church supper. Benny would be home with one of his coloured girlfriends. They would be drinking and slapping one another, running up and down the stairs. The saying in the Settlement was, coloured women all wanted to sleep up, and white women all wanted to sleep down.
He didn’t want to go in there. He walked over to the truck and tried the handle, found it unlocked, climbed into the cab and stretched out on the seat. He lay on his back, smoking, looking up through the windshield at the hazy night sky. All he wanted to think about was Della. It frightened him, the way he thought about her, but he gave in to it. When he went to her house to get his trombone in the morning, in the daylight, he half hoped she’d invite him in. He wasn’t sure what he would say to her, and he imagined several ways it could go, each one ending with him kissing her and her letting him. And then her kissing him back. His heart raced with the thought of it, the sweet, shared danger. There would be no test he couldn’t pass after that.
But when he drove the Merc to her house the next day, only Peter was there.
“Mother’s in Detroit,” he said. “She’s buying something there, don’t know what. You coming in?”
“Naw,” Jack said. “I just came for the trombone.”
He set his horn in the back of the Merc and drove out to Walkerville, to the Schuler house. Mr. Schuler was a Jew, an executive at Hiram Walker’s, drove a brand-new Packard with fake whitewalls and automatic transmission. He wanted a wall knocked out and the resulting room plastered and repainted. Jack had done most of the work himself, as usual, while the old man and Benny drank beer down at the British-American Hotel. Della would like this house, he thought as he worked. He imagined her behind him, curled up on the sofa in the living room, listening to Tales of the Texas Rangers on the expensive floor-model radio in the corner. “Come and join me, Jack,” she would say, patting the cushion beside her, and he would put down whatever he was doing. This would be their life, their perfect home.
“You’re doing a fine job in there,” Mr. Schuler said while Jack was cleaning his tools at the end of the day. “Not like those darkies you had working for you these past two mornings.” And he handed Jack an envelope with money in it, a hundred dollars.
His father and Benny had made a mess taking out the wall, hauling out debris in burlap bags through the living room instead of passing them through a window. That morning they’d worked for a couple of hours, then left. Jack knew they’d be in the British-American, celebrating having work.
“They stole from me,” Mr. Schuler said.
“Who did?” Jack turned towards him.
“Just some shampoo from the bathroom. My wife noticed it. Stupid, eh?”
“I don’t think—”
Mr. Schuler interrupted him, clapping Jack on the back. “Niggers,” he said. “What can you do?”
Jack drove the Merc slowly along Wyandotte with the window down. Shampoo, for Christ’s sake. Why would Benny steal shampoo? When Wyandotte hit Ouellette, he turned towards the river and looked for a parking space outside the British-American. The truck was parked a block up from the hotel on Sandwich, as if that would fool anyone. As he turned down Ouellette to the B-A’s tavern entrance, he noticed that the ferry terminal was livelier than usual. Factory workers let out early? Maybe the war was over. He walked through the lobby, past his uncle’s barbershop, which was closed, and opened the door to the tavern, to be hit with the reek of stale beer and air that had already been breathed a dozen times. He hated the place. A dozen sullen men slouched around black-topped tables, smoking and nursing glasses of warm beer. Benny and Uncle Harley could usually be found at the old man’s table, drinking beer, smoking, reading newspapers, eating pickled eggs, talking occasionally, watching the waiter move around the room emptying ashtrays and wiping tables. Uncle Harley came and went according to a schedule known only to him. His entire life revolved around the corner of Ouellette Avenue and Sandwich Street, the hub of Windsor. He was older than the old man, smaller and darker and, when it suited him, livelier. Jack thought of him as a black widow spider and did his best to avoid him.
Jack approached their table and took Mr. Schuler’s envelope out of his jacket pocket. No one looked up. “… You hear about what’s going on over at Belle Isle?” Uncle Harley was saying.
“You finish that Walkerville job yet?” the old man asked, interrupting Uncle Harley. His voice had more gravel in it than usual.
“No,” Jack said. “Couple more days, maybe.”
“Couple more days? What’s the holdup?”
Jack shrugged. The holdup was that he was the only one working on it. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Schuler paid me.” He tossed the envelope on the table. His father looked at it but didn’t pick it up.
“White woman and her baby,” Uncle Harley went on. “Crowd of coloured boys from Detroit …”
“Sit down and have a beer,” the old man said.
“No, thanks.”
“They sayin’ there’s a crowd of coloureds gatherin’ in Detroit right now, goin’ teach whitey a lesson. They throwed a white woman off the Belle Isle Bridge.”
“What’s that?” Benny said, looking up from his paper.
“Jesus Christ,” Jack’s father said, slapping his palm on the table. “Doesn’t nobody ever come in here with good news?” Then he turned to Jack and pushed the envelope back at him. “You go on home and give that to your mother. Tell her we’ll be along. Take the truck and leave the Merc for us.”
Jack tossed the keys to the Merc on the table, picked up the truck keys and headed towards the door.
“And put some gas in the truck,” the Old Man called when Jack was nearly out. “There’s coupons in the glovebox.” Always wanting the last word.
Jack drove the truck home without putting gas in it. He gave the money to his mother, changed his clothes and ate some supper, then walked to band practice carrying his trombone. A stream of cars was coming out of the tunnel, unusual for a weekday, and each city bus he saw was filled. Someone big playing at the Top Hat, Count Basie, maybe, or Cab Calloway. The people looked out their car windows, at him with his trombone, and maybe thought he was with the band. Calloway played at the Graystone Ballroom on Mondays, which was coloured night, and the story was that white musicians climbed up the telephone poles outside the hall to listen so they could copy his licks.
After band practice, he and Peter walked back to Peter’s house. Peter didn’t know if his mother would be home or not, and Jack was hoping that she would be. It was nine o’clock and just beginning to get dark, two days from the summer solstice. Ouellette Avenue and Chatham and Pitt streets were still swarming with people. He could tell they were from Detroit because they didn’t seem to know where to go or what to do with themselves. They milled about on the sidewalks, some leaning against the storefronts, others stepping off the curb to let Peter and Jack pass.
When they got to Peter’s house, there were no lights on and the front door was locked. Peter felt through his pockets for his key, then said he’d have to go around back and come through the house to let Jack in. Jack waited on the porch swing, looking down towards the river. It was still daylight over the water, but there were plumes of smoke rising from the vicinity of Black Bottom. It looked like a house had caught fire or someone was burning tires. Then he felt something in the pit of his stomach, but he didn’t know what it was.
“Mother’s not here and the car’s gone,” Peter said when he opened the front door.
Jack stepped into the house and stood in the front hall. Something was wrong. He hadn’t been here before when Della wasn’t home, and without her the house seemed empty. His mother always said that a house without a woman was like a body without a soul. The trombone case echoed loudly when he set it down on the hardwood floor. Suddenly, the house reminded him of somewhere he’d been before. He took in the push-button light switches, the faint whiff of carbolic, even his long, black horn case: it was a funeral home. His aunt Maisie, Uncle Harley’s wife, died when Jack was ten, and there had been this same chemical smell at her viewing. He remembered envying the people who could afford to live in such a fine house, they must have been rich people, he’d said, and Benny had laughed at him. “The only people live in this house are dead people,” he said.
“Want a beer?” Peter called from upstairs.
“Sure.” He climbed the carpeted stairs slowly. “Where do you think she is?”
“Who?”
“Del—Your mother.”
“Search me,” said Peter. “She’s been acting pretty scattered lately, always rushing off somewhere.”
Peter was standing by the radio, tuning in a Chicago station. Della’s knitting was on her chair; she hadn’t finished her day’s sock. “I think she said something about meeting a friend on Belle Isle after finishing her business in Detroit. Didn’t think she’d be this late, though. You hungry?”
Belle Isle. What was it Uncle Harley had said about Belle Isle?
Peter made ham sandwiches in the kitchen and brought them into the family room. They ate and drank beer, listening to the radio, Louis Armstrong singing “Shine.” Peter, eyes closed, long legs crossed at the ankles, was soon lost in the music, barely aware of where he was, but Jack couldn’t listen to Armstrong. He thought about the smoke he’d seen hovering over Detroit, and what his Uncle Harley had said about a woman being thrown off the bridge. He looked at the clock and saw it was after eleven.
“I think we should go out and look for your mother,” he said.
“Why?” Peter asked, and Jack told him.
“We’ll have to go to Detroit,” Jack said.
“Mother has the car.”
“I’ll go get my father’s truck. You call around while I’m gone, see if she’s at some friend’s house.”
The street lamps were off, of course, but there was enough moonlight to see by. He ran down Victoria to Chatham Street and across Ouellette, which was still awash with people. It was a mob now. Had they come to Windsor looking for more whites to throw into the Detroit River? He darted through them, hoping that the truck was where he had left it, parked beside the house. It was. It didn’t start right away, it never did when the weather was humid. Goddamned Dodges. He sat for a moment, catching his breath, then pulled out the choke, pumped the gas pedal and tried again. It caught, and he backed sharply out of the driveway, between the line of skulls poking up through the grass.
Peter was waiting for him on the porch. He came down to the sidewalk, flung open the passenger door and got in.
“Any luck?” Jack asked him.
Peter shook his head. “She’s not with any friends that I know of. And none of the clubs in Detroit are picking up.”
“You think she’d be at a club?”
“I’d say so, wouldn’t you,” he said flatly, “this late at night?”
Jack swung the truck around a corner. A bottle rolled behind the seat.
“I listened to the news on the radio,” Peter said. “Crowds of coloureds fighting crowds of whites, fire trucks blocked, police wading in. We may not be able to get across the river. There’s a full-blown riot going on over there.”
At the border, coloureds were being held up and their vehicles searched, but Jack barely had to slow down to be waved through. He drove to Woodward Avenue and stopped in the middle of the street. What he saw was bigger than anything he had thought about before. There were fires everywhere. Hundreds of people running in every direction, disappearing into the darkness between buildings. Gunshots and explosions punctuated the night. Every store along Woodward had had its doors and windows broken, and people were running out with armloads of goods, clothing, radios, shoes. Some were lying on the sidewalks and in the gutters, not moving. The smoke he had seen from Peter’s window was coming from stores and overturned cars. A trolley had been tipped on its side. The street was awash with flames from burning gasoline and water sluicing from the few fire trucks that had made it through the crowd.
“Jesus,” he said. “We’ll never find her in this.”
He pulled the truck onto a side street and parked, and when he got out he saw a group of white men and women surround a car driven by a coloured man and begin to rock it. He and Peter hid behind the truck. The driver of the car tried to open his door but the crowd pushed against it, keeping him trapped inside. Then they tipped the car over, first onto its side, then onto its roof. There were cheers from the crowd and screams from inside the car, and the sound of collapsing metal. Gasoline spilled from the tank and someone lit a match.
“They’re going to kill him!” Jack shouted, and felt Peter’s hand clamp over his mouth.
There was a tremendous outcry as a large crowd of coloureds, brandishing baseball bats and hammers, a few with hunting rifles and handguns, rushed the upturned car, releasing the man from the vehicle and pushing the white rioters back into the alleys and side streets. Some of the whites fought back, but most ran off, looking for battles with better odds. When the street was clear, Jack and Peter ran down Woodward, away from the fighting. Peter was the first to spot Della’s car in the next block, also flipped onto its side. There was no sign of Della.
“We should split up,” Peter said. “I’ll stay on Woodward, you go over to East Adams. Try the Horse Shoe first.”
“Why?”
“Just a hunch. I’ll go along Hastings.”
Jack turned to go but Peter grabbed his arm. “If you find her, don’t come looking for me,” he said. “Get her to the truck and take her home.”
Jack nodded and watched Peter run off up Woodward.
Before Jack could move, a coloured man came up to him and grabbed him by the shirt, a big man with a thick B of flesh at the back of his neck. His eyes were wide open and unfocused, as though he were staring at smoke, and he smelled of booze. Jack tried to push him away, but the man held on like he was drowning and started yelling into Jack’s face.
“Get your truck down there, man!” He pointed down a darkened alley. Then he laughed. “We got us a liquor store to unload.”
“What?” Jack shouted back at him.
“The truck, friend. Drive it down that alley behind the liquor store.”
“No, I’ve got to find someone.”
“Hey, boy, whassa matter wif you?” He shook Jack, but gently. “You can’t hear what I’m sayin’ or somethin’?”
Jack cursed and broke away from the man. He continued running down Woodward towards East Adams. He heard the man yelling after him: “Hey! Hey, boy! Come back here! Where’s your head at?”
Jack turned down a side street, ran a hundred feet from Woodward and stopped to catch his breath. He was in front of a shop with the word “Spirits” scrawled above its window in white paint. Most of the window was in shards on the sidewalk, and the door hung open, half off its hinges. A mob of maybe thirty white people brandishing sticks and baseball bats stood watching the shop and shouting. He tried to cross the street to avoid them but skidded on the broken glass and went down. The crowd surrounded him, and he curled into a ball, thinking they were going to beat him senseless, but instead they helped him up. A woman looked at his hands and a blond man brushed shards of glass from the front of his clothing.
“You okay?”
“Goddamn niggers’re emptying the place out,” another white man said. “Run and find us a cop!”
“I can’t.” Jack tried to pull away.
“We’ll stay and keep them inside. You go now.”
Jack started backing away, then someone in the crowd yelled, “Hey! They’re gettin’ out the back!” and the surge dragged Jack around the side of the building into the alley. In the dim light, he saw two men run from the back door of the liquor store, chased by the posse of whites down the alley to the next street. When the fugitives saw Jack’s truck they veered towards it, and Jack realized with a jolt that the two men were Benny and his father. What the hell were they doing here? People crashed into him from behind, and he started running towards the truck. His brother and father reached the truck just before the mob got to them. Benny tried to open the doors but they were locked. Jack felt the weight of the keys in his pants pocket. He watched as the mob grabbed Benny and his father and shoved them against the side of the truck.
“Goddamn niggers!”
“Get ’em, boys!”
Jack’s mind flew between the mob and his father, but his body was frozen on the spot. He shouted, “No!” but the sound was lost in the uproar. Three men started beating Benny and his father with their fists. The rest of the mob closed in around them, shouting encouragement and obscenities, poking bats and rake handles blindly through the press of bodies. One woman was so excited she began beating on the back of a white man in front of her. Jack lost sight of his brother and father. Then, as though an electric shock had been applied to his limbs, he rushed into the mob, trying to pull people out of his way. Others clawed him from behind. From where he was now he could see Benny again, his arms up around his head, his eyes wide with terror, but the mob was too tightly packed for Jack to reach him.
He saw Benny go down, big as he was, and then the old man, still on his feet, arms flailing, fending off blows. Jack tried to get closer, but could make no headway. He saw his father search through the sea of white faces, saw his eyes find his own, light up momentarily and then turn away. Jack watched as his father went slack, dropping his arms and letting himself be pummelled by the crowd.
He searched for an opening. When he couldn’t find one, he grabbed the shirt of the man in front of him and yelled, “Stop them!”
“Don’t you worry, son,” the man said gleefully. “We’re stoppin’ ’em all right. They’ll be lucky we don’t string ’em up on that telephone pole!”
Just then two policemen came charging down the street on horseback, the sound of their police whistles rising above the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the pavement. The crowd turned and wavered, then broke. Jack caught sight of his father on his hands and knees, Benny lying flat on his face under the truck. A river of fire was flowing along the curb from Woodward, heading directly for the truck and Benny. He saw the old man’s body fall in front of it, engulfed by water and flames. Then his view was blocked by one of the horses, the policemen’s truncheons rose and fell in the moonlight, and he heard the crowd’s blood cries turn to shouts of pain and panic. Gunfire, like a drum roll of firecrackers, reached him from a distance, and then the keening of a siren. He turned from the horror and ran.
He didn’t stop until he reached East Adams, where he collapsed in the alcove at the door of the Horse Shoe Club, curled in the corner like a frightened animal, his eyes squeezed shut. Had he done what he could? Hadn’t there been something in the old man’s look that said, Get the hell out of here, son? Sure there was. What else could he have done, alone against so many?
After a while he straightened and entered the Horse Shoe, half expecting to hear a blast of trumpet music, a lick of jazz, as though what had happened behind him belonged to someone else’s history, a realm of chaos he could simply step out of. Della. He would find her and bring her home. If she wasn’t here, in the familiar headiness of beer and cigarettes and people drinking and talking as if news of the riot hadn’t reached them, then she’d be in the next bar or the one after that. He would search them all until he found her.
Drinkers glanced up at him with incurious faces before going back to their sullen conversations. On the nickelodeon, Billie Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit.” He staggered and gripped the bar, leaving a smear of blood on the polished wood. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
When he saw Della sitting at a table in the back, he almost wept with relief.
“Della,” he said. She looked up and he hurried to her. She was with a group of men and a young woman, all of them coloured. The woman had been injured in the riot. Her eyes were closed and she was sobbing. Della was dabbing with a towel at a cut on the girl’s forehead. Her own dress was torn and there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. A large glass of gin sat on the table in front of her; he could smell it. It had a reddish tinge because Della was dipping the towel in it. Jack recognized one of the men as the trumpet player whose hand Della had held that night. When he saw Jack, the man started to get up, and Jack clenched his fists and braced himself, but Della put her hand on the man’s arm and said, “He’s one of us,” and the man sat down, eyeing Jack uncertainly.
“There’s a war going on out there,” Jack said, sitting down beside Della.
“Haven’t you heard?” she said. “There’s a war going on everywhere.”
He started to tell her what he had seen, what he had been through, but he had no words. There was too much he had to leave out, and nothing he could invent. The look on the face of the coloured man in the burning car. The drunk who had called him boy. The telephone pole rising like a cross in the darkness above the alley. His father and Benny as the flames floated towards them. When he told her about falling in front of the liquor store, she took his hands and swabbed them with gin.
“Where’s Peter?” she asked quietly.
Jack looked down at his bleeding hands in hers. “I don’t know.”
She handed the towel to the trumpet player, stood up and walked behind the bar, where there was a phone. She dialled a number and Jack heard her voice, low and soothing, like the sound of a cat purring. They all listened. It seemed incredible to Jack that anything out there was still working.
Jack looked at the others around him. The trumpet player was now holding the towel against the girl’s forehead. One of the other men said that no white woman had been thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge. “That’s a lie started by whites.” He said a black woman had been raped and killed on the island the day before by a group of U.S. Navy men. “Crackers from the South—Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They go round lookin’ for heads to crack.”
“Peter’s home,” Della said, returning to the table. “He was frantic, poor thing. I told him you were here and that you’ll bring me back safe and sound. You will, won’t you, Jack?”
“Yes,” he said, almost starting to cry. He had failed his father and his brother, but he would not fail her. “Of course I will.”
She turned to the trumpet player. “I’m going now,” she said. “Will you look after Dee-Dee?”
The man nodded. Della walked towards the front of the club. Jack took a last look at the trumpet player, then followed Della out.
Woodward Avenue was in ruins, smouldering and deserted. Jack hurried Della along, but she insisted on stopping to help another woman who was lying on the ground outside a burned-out clothing store. The woman’s coat was still smoking, and she clasped a rolled-up ball of cloth in her arms. Her hands were charred black.
“We’ve got to get a move on,” Jack said, looking around nervously.
“She’s dead.”
Della stood and backed away from the body. She slipped her arm through his and together they hurried on, stepping over lead pipes, shovels and other makeshift weapons abandoned on the sidewalk. The truck was where he’d left it. His father and Benny were nowhere to be seen. Jack bent to examine dark spots on the pavement where they had lain, spots that may have been anything, brake fluid or spilled liquor.
“What is it, Jack?”
“Nothing,” he said. Straightening, he took the keys from his pocket, unlocked her side and helped her in, then turned to see a riderless police horse cantering past the smoking hulks of cars, stirrups flapping, eyes widened with terror. When he climbed in the cab, he let Della wrap his right hand in a handkerchief, but when she reached for the left he pulled it away.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
For once, the truck started on the first try. He put it in gear and decided against the tunnel. “If we can get over a few blocks west, we can take the Ambassador Bridge. It’ll be safer the farther we get from downtown.”
Della didn’t answer. She was leaning back on the seat, her knees pulled up, staring ahead through the windshield. He shifted gears carefully. “That poor woman,” she said. “All she wanted was a nice dress.”
He drove up Woodward, weaving around wrecked cars and broken glass and patches of burning oil. Firemen directed him past a parked ambulance, its panel doors open and its roof light flashing, but he saw few people, and no one told him to stop so he kept going. At Vernor he turned left, taking a longer route to the bridge but one that would keep them above where the worst of the rioting had been. But even here there were smashed windows and downed power lines, shadows moving between houses. At West Grand the streets were almost normal, and he began working his way towards the river and the bridge. He looked at his watch. One o’clock in the morning.
Just as they turned onto Fort Street, still a few blocks from the bridge, the truck’s engine coughed twice and then stopped. “Shit,” he said softly. He should have bought gas when the old man told him to. “Shit, shit, shit.” They coasted for another half a block until they came to a gas station. Closed, of course, but he managed to pull the truck into the lot before it came to a final stop. Della brought her knees down and looked around.
“Well, this is a fine how-do-ye-do,” she said.
After the ruckus downtown, the night was disconcertingly quiet. He lowered his window and heard crickets and the hum of traffic on the bridge.
“Out of gas,” he said.
“Out of booze,” she replied.
He looked at her and smiled. “This truck is never out of booze.” He fished behind the seat for the bottle he’d heard rolling around earlier. Rye, mostly full. He opened it, handed it to her, and she took a sip.
“Is your hand still bleeding?”
“Probably.” The steering wheel had felt sticky but he hadn’t thought about what was causing it.
She exhaled and reached for his left hand. This time he let her. “You need to clean it and I need to pee,” she said. She looked about the truck. They were half a mile from the bridge, miles from home, too far to walk. “What’s that?”
“What?”
“Down the road a bit.”
The Ambassador Motel, the sign unlit but legible in the moonlight. He thought they would spend the night in the truck, but she opened her door and got out. Her light-coloured hair and white skin glowed angelically in the dark. He watched as she walked down the road. He thought about joining the Navy. He imagined his uniformed arm around Della’s waist, their picture on the table beside the radio, wouldn’t that be something? After a time he saw movement down at the motel, and in a few minutes she was standing next to his window, holding up a key attached to a miniature replica of the Ambassador Bridge.
“Cranky old bugger,” she said, “but I explained the circumstances and he gave us a room. I called Peter again and told him to go to bed.”
Jack climbed out of the truck, locked both doors and followed her to the motel. While he’d been waiting, the cut on his hand had stopped throbbing, but now it started again. He tried to stay behind her but she waited for him, took his arm when he caught up to her. A room. Was she going to let him stay in the room? Or had she taken two rooms? “We’re in number six,” she said.
He had never seen a motel room before except in movies. When she opened the door and turned on the ceiling light he was amazed at the tidiness, how everything was reduced to only what you’d need if all you ever did in this room was sleep and wash, or maybe sit and smoke. A bed, neatly made, a sink with a mirror, two towels, a small bar of soap wrapped in paper to show it hadn’t been used, a dresser with nothing on it but an empty ashtray, a single chair. Through an open door he saw a toilet and the corner of a metal shower stall. Della told him to take off his shirt and ran lukewarm water into the sink. He watched her in the mirror above it, but she didn’t look up. His pants were cut through at the knees, he hadn’t noticed that, and the blood on them had begun to dry. He took his shirt off and put it on the bed, then went over to the sink. Della took his wrist and put his hand in the basin and kept it there. Their eyes met in the mirror. Then she looked closely at his palm. “You’re a mess,” she said, as though what happened had been a bad decision on his part. She looked up at him again through the mirror: “Now you’ll have a scar on your hand as well as on your cheek.”
He said he was all right, it didn’t hurt, but it did. She cleaned the cut with a corner of a washcloth. He smelled her hair. He watched her breathing.
“Your dress is torn.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a dress.” She started to cry and he put his arms around her, but she moved away and dried her eyes with the washcloth.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said. “Couldn’t you see it was dangerous?”
“Someone tipped my car over.”
“Were you in it?”
“No, I was about to be. So I turned and ran to the Horse Shoe.”
“But why—?”
“Shush, now,” she said. “I was there on business.”
“What kind of business?”
“My business.”
She seemed to be staring at his bare shoulder. He thought if he made the wrong move she would leave the room and go outside to phone Peter. She might even call the police, although she’d have a hard time explaining what she was doing in a motel room with him. No, she wouldn’t. He’s my son’s friend. He was hurt. They’d look at her torn dress. Doctor’s wife, white. They’d look at him. She leaned forward slightly and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, her body brushing against his arm. Jack saw her in the mirror above the sink, the tear in her dress revealing one strap of her slip. They wouldn’t believe me, he thought. She smelled of soap and smoke and faintly of rye, and his skin where she touched it sang out.
The bed was unforgiving. They made love with the light on, him arching above her and a red flush spreading slowly up from her breasts to her throat, her eyes shut and then suddenly wide open in a sort of amazement, as though she were seeing something incredibly beautiful taking shape somewhere behind his back. When his release came, her nerveless gaze fixed on his and held him in a state of suspension until at last he collapsed, unable to breathe. After a while he got up to turn off the light, still half erect, and she watched him with a puzzled look that disturbed him. What was she seeing? But when he got back into bed she took him into her mouth, then ran her tongue up his chest until he was in her again, even more urgently than before.
After, they remained clasped together in the dark. He had never actually slept with a woman before. The girls who had come into his room at home, Benny’s castoffs, had climbed on him, had their revenge on his brother, and then slipped back to Benny in the dark. In the morning they’d be gone, or he would see them stumble out of Benny’s room looking for their shoes. Now he realized that it wasn’t sex but sleeping together that completed the act of love. You didn’t have to trust a woman to have sex with her, but you did to sleep with her. Della slept with her back towards him, curled away from him, breathing as naturally as if she were alone, while he lay on his back watching the morning flood around the curtains into the strangely familiar room, the shadow of the light fixture circling the ceiling like an hour hand. Keys on the nightstand, her clothes on the chair by the bathroom door. He strained to make them out until he, too, finally fell asleep.
But the day was a disappointment from the moment he opened his eyes. Della was already awake, already up and dressed. He wanted to talk about their future. He would take her away. They could take the Merc, maybe drive west to Chicago, then on to the Pacific. She was in the bathroom, putting on lipstick.
“Come on, Jack,” she said. She strode out of the bathroom, she even had her shoes on, for Christ’s sake. She opened the curtains. Bright sunlight exploded into the room.
“What’s the big hurry?” He felt awkward about getting out of bed naked when she was watching him, fully dressed. “It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”
“I’ve got to get home,” she said. “Peter will be worried.”
The gas station opened at eight. Della gave him five dollars and he bought gas, then drove the truck around to the motel office. She came out, climbed into the truck and sat facing straight ahead. He didn’t know what he had done wrong.
He drove down Fort towards the bridge and the Windsor skyline. She sat stiffly, rubbing her bare arms. What were they going to do after they got home? He could take her for a picnic out near Amherstburg. He wanted to feel the sun burning his back as they made love, and see again that look of amazed ecstasy on her face, the flush spread up from her breasts to her throat. Just before the bridge they stopped at an intersection to let a line of Army tanks file by, heading downtown. The mayor must have called in the troops. When the tanks were gone Della looked at him sadly, as though she thought the Army had been searching for them and eventually they would be found out. Jack put the truck in gear and drove across the bridge.
When he pulled up outside her house, Peter was sitting on the porch steps. Jack turned off the engine, rolled down the window and waved. Peter waved back, not warmly.
“Better stay here,” she said.
“Why?”
“Let’s give it some time.”
“How much time? When?”
“I don’t know, Jack.” She looked past him and waved at Peter. Then she put her hand on his arm, a gesture he suddenly hated. “There’ll be police reports, insurance people to call about the car.”
“Is it because of Peter?” He looked up at the house. Peter was coming towards them. He would want answers. He would be writing to his father. Would he tell him about this?
Della got out of the truck. Jack watched her embrace her son, wondering what she would say to him. The thought of her lying about him hit Jack like a blow to the chest. There would be no picnic in Amherstburg, no more nights after band practice. No more band practice. In a rage, he started the truck and drove off, slapping the steering wheel with the palm of his right hand until it bled again.
He followed the river, turned up Walker Road, drove along Tecumseh to Ouellette and back down to the river, though not as far as the dock, then made the loop again until he was certain he could trust himself. He calmed down as the city came to life. Smoke or mist still drifted across the river from Detroit. He hoped the city had burned to the ground. He drove home. There was no one there. He changed his clothes and put a fresh bandage on his hand, then went back downtown, parked in front of the Recruiting Office and turned off the ignition. Then he went inside and joined the Navy.
Only then did he remember Benny and his father.