Portrait, Michael Moore, 04/03/09. (photo: Ann-Christine Poujoulat/Getty)
A Holy Thursday
25 September 12
on't just stand there, the niggers are comin'!"
Walter was twelve, and he was only trying to be helpful.
"Whaddaya mean?" I asked while standing in his
driveway with my baseball glove and a bat, hoping to get a game going
before sundown.
"The niggers in Detroit are rioting! My dad says they're on their way here right now! We're headin' up north!"
And sure enough they were. They were wasting no time
hurriedly jamming their station wagon full of food and supplies and
shotguns. Walter's mother, Dorothy, was shouting orders to her six boys
about what to load and what to leave behind. I stood there in awe of the
precisionlike nature of this operation. It was as if they had run this
drill many times before. A few doors down, I noticed another family
doing the same thing. I started to get scared.
"Walter, I don't understand. Why are you guys doing this? Are you going to come back?"
"Don't know. Just gotta git. Dad says the niggers from Detroit are on their way here and will be here any minute!"
On their way to where? Here? They're coming to Hill Street?
"Walter, I think Detroit's a long way away from here."
"Nope, no, no, it's not! Dad says they could be here
just like that!" Walter snapped his fingers, as if by doing so he could
magically make a Negro appear to prove his point to me. "They're going
to get together with the niggers in Flint and then come 'n' kill us
all!"
Although I had never heard anything this fantastical
before, I was not unfamiliar with the attitudes in the town of Davison
when it came to the issue of the Colored People. Black people-niggers,
as many wistfully called them-were simply not welcomed. There was not,
to my knowledge, a single black person living among the 5,900 people who
inhabited the city of Davison. Considering we were just outside Flint, a
city with fifty thousand black people, this was not an accident.
Through the years, realtors knew what to do if there were any inquiries
from Negroes looking to move out of Flint and into Davison. And the
unwritten, though not always unspoken, agreement among the city
residents was to never sell your house to a black family. This kept
things nice and orderly and white for decades.
This attitude did not exist a century before. In the
1850s and 1860s, Davison was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a
series of secret destinations that stretched from the Ohio River Valley
north through Indiana and Ohio and into Michigan, all the way to the
Canadian border, where escaping black slaves would find their freedom.
There were over two hundred secret stops along the Railroad in the state
of Michigan. Members of the new Republican Party in Michigan worked
extensively on the Underground Railroad, assisting the runaway slaves,
giving them safe passage, and hiding them in their homes.
But bounty hunters from the South were allowed by
federal law to come into states like Michigan and legally kidnap any
slaves they found and bring them back home to their masters. This was
one of the many compromises the North had made over the years to keep
the slave states happy and in the Union. Thus, a slave was not free by
simply escaping to a free state; he or she had to make it all the way to
Canada.
So it was with some risk that hundreds of Michiganders
set about to protect the victims of this cruel and barbaric system. One
such person owned the home on the corner of Main and Third streets in
Davison, a mere fifty-nine miles to the Canadian border. It was said in
later years that the family in this house had a hiding space in their
cellar and that the townspeople kept this secret from the marauding
bounty hunters. (This house would eventually become my grandparents'
home.)
It became a sense of pride in Davison that the village
was participating in something important, something historic. Many of
the boys in the area would soon be off to the Civil War, and when
slavery ended, the people of Davison were proud of the small role they
played in making this happen.
Such was not the mood on a sweltering August day in
the summer of 1924 when twenty thousand people gathered at the Rosemore
racetrack in Davison to attend a rally of the Benevolent Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan. Looking at the photos from that day, with thousands of
citizens in white robes, one wonders how hot they must have been,
especially with those pointed hoods! Many, though, did not wear the
hoods, as there really was no reason to hide their identities because it
seemed that everyone and their third cousin was a member of this fine
organization dedicated to terrorizing and lynching black people.
But in the summer of 1924, it wasn't so much the
Negroes in Flint (most of whom had learned to know their place and
remain quiet) that were the issue. No, the problem confronting the Klan
on this Sunday afternoon was the "Papists"-the Catholics. Catholics, it
seemed, had starting running for office. They were moving into
neighborhoods meant for white Protestants, and this did not seem like
the natural order of things. Catholics had also started to intermarry,
something that created a deep, sick feeling among the gathered faithful.
Marriage, as you were supposed to know, was to be between a Protestant
man and a Protestant woman (and, yes, it could be between a Catholic man
and a Catholic woman - but not between a Catholic and a Protestant).
My mother's dad (Grandpa Wall) did not understand such
rules (and he was to be forgiven as he was, after all, from Canada). In
1904 he, an Anglican, married my grandmother, a Roman Catholic. For his
troubles, the Klan burned a cross on his front yard in Davison.
"It wasn't much of a cross," my grandmother would later remark. "You'd think we'd rate more than a four-foot-high cross!"
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Davison and other
parts of Michigan were hotbeds of enthusiastic bigotry. From Father
Charles Coughlin railing against the Jews each Sunday on his nationwide
radio show from Royal Oak, to the Sunday Klan rallies in Davison (and
Kearsley Park in Flint), there
was enough to be ashamed of and enough to wonder about
how far the state had drifted from the days of the loving humanity of
the newborn Republican Party, a party that not only ended slavery but
also the death penalty and sought to give women the right to vote. Now
what we had were scenes like Henry Ford getting medals from Hitler.
It was the last week of July 1967, and all that was on
my mind was that we were soon moving six blocks away to a paved street!
But down in Detroit, some sixty miles away, the city was indeed in
flames. It had been on the news the night before. From what I could
gather the police had tried to arrest every black person at an
after-hours club that was holding a party for two returning Vietnam
vets. This offended the neighborhood and triggered immediate protests,
which then turned to violence. The National Guard was called in and much
of southeastern Michigan was convinced that the race riots that broke
out in Watts two years prior-and in Newark, just two weeks earlier-were
now in full bloom in our state.
What was not understood at the time was that, in fact,
this was an uprising of Detroit's poor - and those poor found the
police and the Guard going berserk and gunning down any suspicious
person with black skin. Up in Flint, though, things were different. The
year before, the city had elected the country's first black mayor,
Floyd McCree. McCree was a beloved figure in Flint, a city that was
still nearly 80 percent white. Flint's voters would also soon pass the
country's first open housing law, making it illegal to discriminate when
renting or selling a home.
Although Flint's neighborhoods were by and large still
segregated, there seemed to be some sort of desire to "fix things" when
it came to the issue of race.
Which made Walter's family and their crazed fleeing
seem all the more absurd to me as I stood in their driveway. Flint was
not going to explode, and the black people there were not going to kill
me. I didn't even need to check in with a parent to confirm that.
Actually, my biggest fear was that my mother might have heard Walter
saying "nigger," a word that was never spoken and specifically forbidden
in our household. I would suffer some embarrassment if she yelled out
to me to get back in the house, but there was nothing to worry about, as
she and my dad were busy planning our move to Main Street.
The station wagon was filled to the brim with
provisions and paranoia, and so off they peeled down the street, their
tires kicking up the gravel as they fled to safety.
Flint did not riot, but Detroit raged on for a week.
Each night on the local news, war scenes from Vietnam were replaced with
war scenes from Detroit. It jolted the entire state. Detroit, this
beautiful, bountiful city, would never be the same again. In later years
it would be hard for anyone to understand what that meant, but those of
us who grew up within a stone's throw saw Detroit as our Emerald City,
this place so full of life, its sidewalks packed with people, its stores
the envy of the Midwest, its universities and parks and gardens and art
museum (with its Diego Rivera mural), the Detroit of Aretha and Iggy
and Seger and the MC5, Belle Isle and Boblo, and the twelfth floor of
Hudson's, where the real Santa sat on his throne and promised us a
gift-wrapped future of endless possibilities and eternal cheer, on Comet
and Cupid and...Donner...and...Blitzen...and...and...and in the blink
of an eye, it was gone. All gone. It wasn't like we didn't know where it
went or that we couldn't remember why it went. We knew when it went; we
knew the exact moment when it went. It went up Woodward and down
Twelfth Street, over to Grand River and down past Tiger Stadium and it
didn't stop until it took our last morsel of optimism with it. And then
we ran, da-doo-run-run, to get away from them to leave them behind, to
let them suffer and wallow in the misery they'd never really climbed out
of since we, the Michiganders, led the charge to free them. President
Johnson sent the 82nd Airborne Division into Detroit on the fourth day,
complete with tanks and machine guns a-blazing, the Vietnam War finally
at home. When it was over, forty-three people were dead and two thousand
buildings had been blasted apart or burned to the ground, and our
spirit was buried deep under the rubble.
It was in this backdrop that my dad took the family to
a Tigers ball game in Detroit just a couple weeks later. The tickets
had been purchased at the beginning of the summer, and although my
mother voiced her concern over the wisdom of such a "trip" to Detroit at
this time, I suppose they decided that to throw away tickets they'd
paid for was a worse crime, and so off we went.
It was a Thursday night, an unusual time for us to
drive to Detroit to see a ball game. My dad preferred to drive there
during the daytime; all previous excursions were made to day games on
Saturdays or Sundays. But this was a game against the Chicago White Sox,
who that year had Tommy John and Hoyt Wilhelm pitching for them, and
former Tiger Rocky Colavito in the outfield. My dad thought this would
be a good game, as both teams were in a tight pennant race.
It wasn't. The Tigers lost, 2–1. But it was my first
night game, and it may not make me sound like much of a sports guy, but
it was truly a magical moment for me to see that historic field bathed
in such a bright light, as if it came from the heavens, or at least a
nearby Fermi nuclear plant.
When the game was over, there was a tension in the
crowd as people exited into the neighborhood that bordered the riot
area. It was the March of the Frightened White People, a kind of
walk-run people do when they hear the sound of a tornado siren. Walk,
don't run-but run! Run for your life!
We got to our car, a '67 Chevy Bel Air, which my dad
had parked in a paid lot instead of on the usual free side street.
Saving money on parking in this post-riot month was not on anyone's
mind. Getting out alive was.
We pulled out of the lot off Cochrane Street and
headed down Michigan Avenue until we came to the right turn that would
take us onto the Fisher Freeway north. As we approached the expressway
ramp, steam began coming out of the hood of our car. Thinking there
might be a gas station on the other side of the entrance ramp, my father
continued on the overpass and into uncharted territory. It was there
that the Chevy simply died. I looked up at the street sign. We were on
Twelfth Street, ground zero for the riots. I pointed this out to my dad,
and he became agitated in a way I rarely saw.
"Everybody just stay calm," he said in a voice that was nothing resembling calm. Lock the doors!"
We obeyed immediately, but our father saw the growing
terror on our faces, and he took this as a lack of faith in his ability
to get us out of this mess.
"Dammit! I don't know why we came down here! Wasn't anyone paying attention?!"
That he could be both philosophical about why we were
in Detroit and accusatory over an accidental breech in engine fluids was
impressive, I thought.
My mother and sisters got very quiet. I was sure I
could hear the thumping of our hearts, but the actual thumping was being
caused by a black man knocking on our window.
"You need help?" he asked, as panic filled the Chevy's interior.
My dad answered, "Yes."
"Well, let's take a look at what the problem is," the black man offered.
"Just stay inside," my dad said. "I'll handle this." He did not look like the guy who wanted to handle this.
I looked out the back window to see that the man's car was parked behind us. And in the car was a woman and two or three kids.
"You at the ball game?" he asked my dad, as they met at the steaming hood.
"Yes."
"We were, too! Came down from Pontiac. Man, that sure was some sorry game!"
The two dads lifted the hood and poked around and soon figured out the problem.
"We got a bum radiator hose," my dad shouted back to us. The black man went back to his car and opened the trunk.
He brought out a jug of water and gave it to my dad to pour into the radiator.
"This should get you a few blocks to the gas station," the stranger said. "But I'd go back in the other direction."
My dad thanked him for his kindness and offered to pay him something, but the man would have none of it.
"Just glad I could help," the man said. "Hope someone would do that for me if I needed it. You want me to follow you?"
My dad, probably still wondering if we would indeed
have stopped for him if he'd been in trouble, said, no, we'll be fine,
we'll just head back to Michigan Avenue where surely someone would be
open.
And someone was. The gas station attendant replaced
the radiator hose, filled the radiator up, and we were on our way. "We
were lucky," my dad said somewhere around Clarkston. "That was a good
man we ran into. And that was the last night game we're going to."
Eight months later, and just six days before the
Opening Day of a new Detroit Tigers season (one in which they would go
on to win the World Series), Holy Week was approaching. It was Easter
time, and this year the nuns thought it would be a good idea for us to
see where the original "Last Supper" on Holy Thursday came from.
"The apostles and Jesus were Jews," Sister Mary Rene
told us. "They were not Christian or Catholic. They were Jews and they
observed Jewish traditions. And so during this week, Jesus had come to
Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the Jewish feast commemorating the
time Jews were told by God to smear lamb's blood on their doorposts in
Egypt. This was done so that when the Angel of Death was making his
rounds to kill all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians, he'd know where
the Jewish houses were so he could skip them. This was God's way of
sending a message to the Pharaoh: let Moses and the Jewish people go or
I'll fuck you up some more."*
OK, well, whew, that was some story, and as I was the
first (and only) son in my family, I found it mildly interesting if not
creepy. God, in the Old Testament, seemed to have some sort of chip on
his shoulder. He was constantly whacking whole tribes or tossing guys
inside whales' stomachs. Real attitude problem, I used to think. And why
wasn't his Angel of Death smart enough to know which ones were the
Egyptian homes and which were the Jewish homes without having to mess up
the Jewish front doors with difficult-toremove bloodstains? Couldn't he
just tell them apart from the different styles of architecture each
group employed- the Egyptians with their split-level colonials, and the
Jews with their fixer-upper slave huts? Plus, wouldn't that blood on the
door make the Jews less safe, especially considering the next morning,
all the Egyptians are going to wake up to find they've got a dead kid in
the house and then they're like, "Let's go get the Jews!" But then
someone says, "How the hell will we find them?" and then someone else
runs in and says, "Hey, they've all got blood out on their porches! Just
burn down the huts with the lamb's blood!"
Sister Mary Rene, like Sister Raymond and the other
nuns, took great pains to let us know that, contrary to what we may have
heard, the Jews did not kill our Lord and Savior. The Romans did. Jesus
was Jewish, was born Jewish, and died Jewish and he'd be very upset if
he thought we blamed his own people for his demise - which was supposed
to happen anyway so that he could rise from the dead and start our
religion! Yay!
The nuns contacted one of the three synagogues in
Flint and asked if they could bring some seventh and eighth grade
students over for a Passover dinner so we could learn the Jewish
tradition of this time of year. The rabbi was more than happy to
accommodate and we spent a week learning to sing "Hava Nagila" as a sort
of thank-you to them.
I didn't remember much about this event they called a
seder, other than someone asked four questions and we couldn't put the
chocolate cake on the dish that had what passed for beef.
It was one week from Holy Thursday, 1968, the Thursday
before Palm Sunday, the day that Jesus would enter Jerusalem and
prepare for what would be his last Passover on the following Thursday.
At St. John's during Lent there was either a Lenten service or Mass on
each weeknight. I was asked to be an altar boy on this particular
Thursday. There were gospel readings and Communion and the consecrating
of the altar with incense.
I was given the silver censer that held the burning
coal onto which you placed the incense and then swung it around the
altar and throughout the church. This had all of my favorite activities
rolled into one: fire, smoke, and emitting a strange odor.
When Mass was over, one of my duties was to take the
censer outside the church and dispose of the smoldering incense and coal
onto the ground, putting it out with my foot.
It was a chilly evening on this early April night, and
the vestments that I wore over my clothes were not enough to keep out
the piercing wind that was blowing up into my black robe and making me
want to get back inside as quickly as possible. I emptied the remnants
of the incense out onto the still-frozen ground and rubbed them around,
pressing hard with the heel of my shoe, until they were extinguished. It
was then that a man in the parking lot, a parishioner who had gone out
early to his car to warm it up, had heard a news bulletin on the radio
as it came on. Excited, he wanted to share it with everyone as they were
departing the church. With his car door open, he stood up on the
floorboard so all coming out of Mass could hear his joyful announcement:
"King's been shot! They've shot King! Martin Luther King!"
At that moment - in what I will recall for the rest of
my life as one of the most depressing things I would ever witness - a
cheer went up from the crowd. Not from everyone, not even from most. But
from more than a few, a spontaneous joyful noise came out of the mouths
that had just held the body of Christ. A whoop and holler and a yell
and a cheer. I was still processing the stunning and tragic news about
Reverend King I had just heard-heard from a man who said it with such
surety that all would be well now, this Negro, this nigger, this
terrorist, was somehow no longer going to bother us anymore. Hallelujah.
I jerked my head in the direction of the church door
to see who in God's name was celebrating this moment. Some people had
smiles. But most were stunned. Some remained silent, while others rushed
to their cars so they could turn on their radios and hear for
themselves that this troublemaker was no longer with us. A woman began
to cry. People passed the news back inside the church to those who had
not yet come out. There was much commotion, and all I could think about
was that stupid Angel of Death-and who the hell forgot the lamb's blood
tonight in Memphis? There would be no pass over.
What was special about this night? Every Easter, from then on and for the rest of my life, I would know the bitter answer.
She did not use the F word. I just thought it would be cool if she did.
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