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

as fast as he’d squandered it over the past year, but he was too ashamed to admit that to his uncle or anyone else.
    â€œYou aren’t working in no car factory or turpentine still or cotton patch, are you?”
    â€œHell no.”
    Uncle Bob shifted in his seat, and Willie could feel it coming: The Lecture, The Black Bourgeoisie Pep Talk. He didn’t want to hear it again, and suddenly he was angry. Angry at his uncle for buying into all that up-by-the-bootstraps, Booker T. Washington horseshit. Angry at himself for getting painted into a corner and having to take the lowly busboy job. Angry at the white man for setting up the game so the black man’s only choices were between bad and worse, between wrong, wronger and wrongest. Yes, he was back in that familiar purgatory.
    Before his uncle could launch into The Lecture, Willie cut him off. “You ever read Paul Laurence Dunbar by any chance?” Willie assumed he had, for as much as Uncle Bob was a driven man and a believer in the system, he was no black Babbitt. He’d put himself through night school at Wayne State and he still found time to read serious books, attend symphony concerts, visit the Institute of Arts. He was active in Detroit’s Democratic Party and had just been named a delegate to the upcoming convention in Chicago. Bob Brewer’s biggest worry was not that President Johnson’s Great Society was an expensive joke, but that by choosing not to seek re-election Johnson had ceded the White House to the Republicans. It had long ago stopped mattering to Willie which white man lived in the White House.
    â€œSure,” Bob said. “ Lyrics of a Lowly Life . All those stories in dialect.” Suddenly he slipped into a respectable darkie-on-the-plantation dialect: “‘An’ ez fur boss, I’ll be my own, I like to jest be let alone . . .’ Dunbar was a man after my own heart.”
    â€œAnd look at him,” Willie said. “Cat as gifted as that, wanted to go to Harvard Law School, wound up as an elevator operator in Dayton, Ohio, making four dollars a week. I think of a guy like Paul Laurence Dunbar and I ask myself what’s the use of dreaming?”
    â€œYou think he let that elevator job stop him from dreaming? And writing?”
    â€œI got no idea.”
    â€œYou know damn well he didn’t. You want to know what’s the use of dreaming? I’ll tell you. Once you stop doing it, you’re a dead man.”
    â€œWell then, I guess that means I’m a dead man.”
    But his uncle didn’t hear him. He was already delivering The Lecture. “How you think I managed to pay cash for this Electra? By saving my tips and playing the numbers? Hell no. I had a dream, and even more important I had a plan—and I stuck to it. I bought up apartment buildings dirt-cheap when the white folks got scared and started moving away from the West Side. Then I rented them to Negroes. That riot was the best thing ever happened to me. All my buildings were fully insured, and with the money I got on the four that burned down I turned around and bought six more. And this car.”
    It was madness, Willie thought. Even Mr. Clean here was unclean, feeding off the fears of the white man while bleeding the black man. “If you’re so flush, Uncle Bob, why don’t you lower my rent? And quit that boge waiter’s job while you’re at it?”
    He ignored this too. He was talking about his friend Berry Gordy, who was minting money at his record company on West Grand Boulevard. Then he talked about another friend, the black Congressman John Conyers, smart as a whip, a man going places. Then he talked about the classes he was taking at U. of D. toward getting his own real estate license so he could start buying and selling property without giving a cut to Mr. Charlie. Be his own boss, just like Paul Laurence Dunbar.
    But Willie had tuned him out. He was thinking about how to get