Emancipation Day (14 page)

“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.