Motor City Burning by Bill Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

ready to tell the well-rehearsed lie for the first time. He glanced at his Uncle Bob and said, “Yes and no.”
    â€œWhat’s that suppose to mean?”
    â€œMeans I can still drive it, but I’m afraid to. The transmission’s leaking like a faucet, so I parked it in the garage till I save up enough to get it fixed.”
    â€œHow much you pay for that thing?”
    â€œNothing. It was a gift.”
    â€œNo shit. From who?”
    â€œA Navy buddy of my brother’s, a white guy named Sam Malloy. He and his long-legged blonde wife showed up at my place in Tuskegee in late ’63, right after President Kennedy got shot, and handed me the keys and the title.”
    â€œJust like that?”
    â€œJust like that. I couldn’t believe it either.” Five years later, Willie still couldn’t believe it. He’d spent his boyhood learning to make do with the second-hand and the second-rate—hand-me-down clothes and shoes from his brother, hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools, with all the important stuff already underlined, the covers falling off, entire pages missing. At the colored playground the basketball court was cracked and uneven, the rims bent and rusty, the balls smooth as cue balls. The baseball diamond was pocked, baked dirt with a few shoots of crab grass. He didn’t give these things a second thought, nobody did. And then, when he was a young man putting his body on the line to change the world he’d once accepted as a given, a friend of his brother’s drove up and gave him the most beautiful car he’d ever seen. Gave it to him. It was so miraculous it was almost an insult to the monastic life he was living at the time. But on that day Willie came to understand something that his fellow Snick foot soldiers, those austere warriors, never acknowledged or discussed—that there was another world out there, a world of shiny things that weren’t cracked or bent or used-up, and those things were within reach, even for a black man, and there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with wanting them. Willie loved that Buick shamelessly, and of course he pampered it.
    Uncle Bob said, “So why’d this white dude give you a car?”
    â€œHe told me Wes saved his life on a patrol one night in Vietnam, and he wanted to repay the favor. So Wes told him to give me the car.”
    â€œWell, get that tranny fixed and sell the thing and get you an Electra. All you gotta do is play your cards right.”
    â€œMy cards, Uncle Bob? What cards?”
    â€œI been watching you. Your mother was right about you.”
    â€œShe’s your big sister. She’s always right.”
    â€œListen to me. You aren’t like the rest of the Negroes up here. You got a brain and you aren’t afraid to work. Plus, you’re articulate and you know how to talk to all kindsa people. Those things right there can take a man a long way up here. Even a black man.”
    â€œUncle Bob, I’ve got a year of college under my belt and I’m working as a busboy at a honky golf club in the suburbs of—”
    â€œIf you didn’t want to wind up bussing tables, then maybe you shoulda stayed in college like your daddy and I told you to.”
    Willie should have known that was coming. His uncle, like his father, bought into the myth that something as flimsy as a college degree could actually make a difference in a black man’s life. On the other hand, Willie’s mother, the best educated person in the family, had urged him to listen to the voice in his head and drop out of Tuskegee and join the movement. And she’d never second-guessed him when it all fell apart. Ma BeBe was a rock.
    Bob said, “Is there something wrong with bussing tables?”
    â€œNo, Uncle Bob. Not a goddam thing. I love it.”
    â€œYou’re saving money, aren’t you?”
    â€œA little.” He wanted to add that he wasn’t saving it nearly