Lisa Lenzo
On the night the '67 riots began, my family had just come home from vacationing in northern Canada. As we slept, still lulled by the place we'd just left--a stately lodge and pine cabins, a deep, ice-cold, clear lake--enraged Detroiters were setting fire to the city. We found out about it the next morning, around eleven o'clock, from Mrs. Willis, our next door neighbor, who was returning from church as my father stepped out on our porch to get the paper. The police had raided a blind pig on 12th street, Mrs. Willis told my father, and had arrested everyone in it. They'd beaten up one man pretty badly--thrown him up against a wall and clubbed him in the face. A crowd had gathered in the street, and after the police left the crowd started breaking windows and setting fires.
That was all Mrs. Willis knew, my father said, standing in our living room, paging through the paper's first section. He looked through it twice, scanning the sheets carefully, then tossed it aside without reading it and turned on the radio.
I was sick with pneumonia, as yet undiagnosed, and all that day I dozed and slept on the couch, waking sometimes at the radio or the TV or the sound of my father's voice. "What is this, some kind of blackout?" I heard him say once.
"Why don't you leave it for a while," my mother answered, "and wait for the news at six?"
"Because I want to find out what's happening now," my father said. He had the radio on again and was fiddling through all the stations.
Most DJs didn't mention the riot at all, and those that did spoke of it indirectly. On WJLB, the soul station, Martha Jean the Queen talked about God and praying for Detroit and cooling it and staying home, and a male DJ from another station announced a super discount day on 12th Street, prices slashed to nothing, all you could carry for free. "Might be another price to pay, though," he added. "Might be higher."
Finally my father hit a station with hard news. The police had cordoned off a twenty-four-square-block area, the announcer said, but the "area of devastation" was much larger. Whole blocks of stores were going up in flames. Three people had been killed--a looter, a bystander, and a sniper. The governor had declared a state of emergency in Detroit, in Hamtramck, the small city to the east of us, and in our city, Highland Park. Two thousand extra police had been called in from all over the state, along with 3,000 National Guardsmen.
"Damn, damn, damn," my father said softly, and he remained crouched by the radio without changing the station, even when a commercial came on.
I woke on the couch not knowing where I was until I heard my father and my brothers and some of the kids from our block playing ball in our front yard. I lay listening to the hard thunk of the tennis ball hitting the stoop, the deeper, softer sound it made when it connected with the bat, the cries and shouts of my brothers and of the Jones boys from across the street, and my father's loud and, to me, comforting voice. "Good hit," he'd call, or "Good try," or "Watch what you're doing--keep your eye on the ball." With my eyes closed, I listened to the sound of feet running the baselines (leading to and from home, these were dirt paths where the lawn had been worn away), and when I drifted off to sleep again, I dreamed of my father and my brothers and Darryl and Dennis Jones running baselines that had been set on fire.
I woke again when my father came in and asked me how I was feeling.
"Okay," I said. "Tired."
He sat down beside me, laid his hand on my forehead, and looked off into space. I held still without watching him, relishing the way all his energy paused in that moment of almost-stopped time before he made his pronouncement. "Well, you're cool," he finally said. He rubbed my forehead as if lost in thought. Then he asked me if I was hungry.
I concentrated on my belly and the abstract idea of food. "Not really," I said. In the area of my belly I felt only the slight cramping caused by my period, which I'd begun for the first time just a day ago, a couple of hours before we started home from our vacation.
My father rubbed my forehead some more and then my shoulder, his large eyes frowning. I'd started our vacation with a bad cold, and on our second night in Canada I'd grown sicker. My parents had moved me into their cabin, where I proceeded to sleep night and day for the rest of the week, except during mealtimes, when my father woke me and led me as if I were elderly or blind up and down the rolling boardwalks to the central lodge.
The lodge was run like a restaurant, with menus the size of two placemats hinged together, and all week long my father had sat beside me and helped me to order: he'd look over my shoulder and prompt me in a gentle but enthusiastic voice. "How about the chicken? Your brothers claim it's great. Or soup is very easy to eat. Or you can just have dessert if you want."
I'd order the chicken or some soup and once strawberry shortcake but each time only take a bite or two. "I'm not the least bit hungry," I'd apologize, setting down my spoon or fork.
"That's all right," my father would assure me. "Don't eat it if you don't want it. You'll get your appetite back once you're feeling better."
I had never felt so tired and weak, but I wasn't worried at all. My father was a doctor, and, apart from this, I took for granted that he would keep me safe from any sort of harm. On the trip up to Canada, someone had cut off the car in the lane next to us, and the driver of the clipped car had slammed into the back of our station wagon, forcing us off the highway. My father had shouted, "Hang on!" and, grappling with the steering wheel as the wagon bounced along the weedy roadside, he had wrestled the car to a stop. No one was hurt, and nothing was damaged except for the wagon's back right corner, which was completely staved in. I had been lying with my head in that corner just a few minutes before we were hit but had moved to escape the shoes poking me from inside a duffel bag that my father had packed.
Now, as my father sat beside me on the couch, gathering wisps of hair from the edges of my face and smoothing them back against my head, I said, "Dad? What's going to happen?"
"You're going to start feeling better soon," he said. "Your mother is going to take you to the doctor tomorrow. You're looking a little better already--your eyes have lost that glazed look."
"I'm feeling a little better," I said. "I mean with the riot."
"Oh," my father said, and he pulled in his breath and let it out loudly and looked across the room while he thought of how to answer me. "It'll be over with in a little while, too," he said. "But it'll do more damage than your illness." He breathed in and out again, deeply and a little unsteadily, as if he needed more air in his lungs than he could get just by taking breaths. "I don't know exactly what will happen, honey," he said. "But you don't have to worry about it. Nothing will happen to you."
At supper that evening my appetite returned, and I ate more during that meal than I'd eaten all week. Afterward my whole family watched the news in the living room, gathered around the set: my little brothers, Danny and Zachary, sat to one side of me on the couch; my oldest brother, Michael, sat on the couch's far end; Arthur, who was twelve, a year older than me, knelt by the couch arm closest to the TV, my mother pulled up behind him in a dining room chair; and my father stood in front of us, to one side of the set, his gaze never leaving the screen.
The national newscaster talked about B-52 raids and firebombs exploding in a Saigon hotel, and the local newscaster talked about firebombs and fires and looting and sniping in Detroit. Rioting had broken out in other parts of the city, he said. Five more people had been killed during the day, and several hundred had been wounded. The area where the riot originated had spread to encompass 140 square blocks, south to downtown and north to Chicago Boulevard, with isolated fingers reaching out in all directions.
"Where's Chicago Boulevard?" Danny asked in his shrill little voice.
My father sighed and turned to look at him. "Do you know where Metro Hospital is?"
Danny nodded. Detroit Metropolitan was the hospital we went to when we needed to see a doctor and where our father worked as chief of psychiatry.
"Chicago Boulevard is about ten blocks south of Metro Hospital," my father said.
Michael and Arthur glanced at each other along the length of the couch.
"Are they going to burn the hospital?" Danny asked.
"No," my father said. "The hospital helps people. Now be quiet and let me hear this."
He began to pace, trying not to block anyone's view of the set, addressing the police commissioner when he came on the screen as if the man could hear him. "What did you think would happen," my father asked, "when you sent policemen who act like Klansmen into one of the poorest slums of the city, at a time when black people are so frustrated and angry that they're rioting all over the country?" When the newscaster said that Governor Romney had given the police and guardsmen full authority to protect life and property, my father said, "In other words, he gave the go-ahead to shoot." He turned away from the set and paced and cursed a stream of curses.
I had watched my father rail all my life, against politicians on TV and whatever else displeased him. But that evening I watched more closely than I had before. This was our city on the news, not hundreds or thousands of miles away, but close enough for me to ride my bike to.
The following morning, my mother ushered me into our station wagon, backed out of our driveway, and headed west up McLean, gliding under the huge elms that formed an archway over our street and cast the big, old houses and front yards in deep shade. My father had left for the hospital a couple of hours before us--he had an eight o'clock patient--but my appointment wasn't until ten.
We crossed John R. and then Woodward, the main street of Highland Park as well as Detroit, and, jogging a little to our left, turned right onto Glendale. The houses outside my car window were as large as the ones on McLean, but on the other side of the street apartment buildings crowded the sidewalk--their front yards were small, and the buildings themselves looked a little run-down. So far we hadn't seen any people outside, and almost no cars. I thought of what Martha Jean, the soul station DJ, had said: that everybody should stay home.
The whole next block of Glendale on my mother's side of the car was taken up by Highland Park Junior College and Highland Park High, where Michael would begin when summer was over. Across the street from the high school and college were more slightly run-down apartments and two-family flats. Ahead of us, one block farther west, I could see the open, treeless space of Hamilton Avenue.
Hamilton was, like Woodward, a four-lane street, but Hamilton wasn't nearly as long as Woodward, and, unlike the section of Woodward that ran through our neighborhood, Hamilton was shabby and poor. I'd only seen it in passing, through the windows of our car, except for once last summer when my father and I had joined in a local march.
The march had come about after Highland Park police killed a ten-year-old boy while trying to shoot a fleeing burglary suspect. On the Saturday following the boy's death, about thirty Highland Parkers had marched in protest. We started on the street where the boy had lived and died, and ended up at the police station, where we marched in a circle and then up onto the station steps. One man shouted that the police wouldn't shoot like that if it was their own child out on the street. Some of the marchers started crying and tapping on the station windows with their signs. Three policemen were sitting inside at desks. They didn't look out at us.
I assumed that if the police stood up and came outside, my father's presence would keep all of us safe. He was the only white adult in the march and the only man wearing a suit and tie, and, on top of this, an expansive power emanated from him. This power shone from my father in all places, at all times, whether he was agitated or calm; it showed in the way that he held and carried himself, and in the tone of his voice and in the set of his face, and made people treat him as he expected them to. Five years before the Highland Park march, he had marched from Selma to Montgomery, after the first attempt, in which he hadn't participated, was broken up, bloodily, by police. After the first attempt, King had appeared on TV and asked for doctors to join in a second attempt in case they were needed to treat the wounded, and my father had driven down to Alabama and walked the whole route. During the second march, the police had not harmed a single marcher; all my father had had to do was wrap a sprained ankle.
I knew that my father wasn't solely responsible for keeping those policemen at bay. Yet I couldn't imagine anyone laying a hand on my father or daring to harm anyone who stood near him.
At the Highland Park march, the police remained at their desks the whole time that we stood on the station steps. We walked back down the steps and marched in front of the station some more, and then, finally, we left.
Now, as my mother and I glided across Hamilton in our station wagon, I turned around and tried to see the dead boy's church, which we had marched past. From my vantage point I couldn't recognize the storefront it had occupied. All the storefronts within my sight looked run-down and dirty. One had its windows boarded over. The sun beat down whitely along the length of the street, and broken glass gleamed from the sidewalks. I faced forward, shrinking toward the middle of the car seat, and stopped looking out. A couple of minutes later we reached the back of Metropolitan Hospital and parked in the lot behind the hospital's huge gray shape.
As I stepped from the cool car into the heat of the parking lot, I forgot all about my plan: to look for signs of the riot, happening just ten blocks south of the hospital, on the hospital's other side; as I slid across the seat and stepped into the sticky air, I felt my legs rub against the sanitary napkin between them, and all at once it struck me that this new condition of mine would be revealed, if my doctor asked me, as he likely would, to take off all my clothes.
When I'd started menstruating two days ago it had caught me by surprise--my breasts had begun to develop, but I was only eleven, and, unlike many of the girls in my class, I hadn't been looking forward to or expecting this change yet. I'd mistaken the first few drops of blood for another symptom of my illness until my father explained to me what was happening. Oh yeah, we saw a movie about that at school last year, I'd thought, too sick and listless to care. My mother had bought me a box of sanitary napkins, and I'd held as still as a dog submitting to a collar while she showed me how to hook one to the belt. But now that I was beginning to feel better, I wasn't sure I wanted to be menstruating, and I certainly didn't want my doctor to see the awkward-looking pad and belt arrangement and my very private blood. I wanted to turn around and run back to the car and go home. Without thinking about it, I slowed almost to a stop. "Are you all right, honey?" my mother asked.
"No," I said, "I feel awful--I want to go home."
"Well, you have to see the doctor first, sweetie," my mother said. "Lean on me if you have to." And she put her arm around my shoulders and guided me forward.
The hospital halls were mostly empty, and the few patients I saw didn't look wounded, though my father had speculated that many victims of the riot would be brought here. Either the riot victims were coming in through the emergency entrance, I thought, or else the people I saw in the halls had wounds hidden under their clothing.
In the examination room, Doctor Chen asked me to remove my T-shirt but didn't say anything about taking off my jeans. After listening to my chest with a stethoscope, he told my mother I had pneumonia. The two of them discussed the progression of my illness and decided that I was over the worst of it. But I still needed lots of rest, Doctor Chen said, and also a penicillin shot.
The two other times I'd had penicillin shots, Doctor Chen had given them to me in the butt; then I had hated the shots because they hurt, but now the pain seemed insignificant compared to the prospect of removing my pants. "I don't want a penicillin shot," I said.
"No one ever does," Doctor Chen answered cheerfully. He went out into the hall; while we waited for him to return, I pleaded with my mother to stop him.
"Honey, please," my mother said. "Why are you making such a big deal out of this?"
I didn't tell her.
Doctor Chen came back with the needle and stood in front of me. "Okay, Annie," he said, "slip your pants down." I had pulled on my T-shirt while he was gone, and now I folded my arms across my chest and frowned at him. He looked me up and down as if I'd turned into some kind of rare bird. He'd been my doctor since I was three years old and had given me shots many times without me giving him any trouble. As he looked at me quizzically, something seemed to register in his eyes. "Would you rather take it in the arm?" he asked.
"I can take it in the arm?"
"You certainly can. Though it'll hurt less if you take it in the buttocks."
"I'll take it in the arm," I said.
He swabbed the flesh below my shoulder, inserted the needle, and slowly drove it in. I pursed my lips and squinted my eyes against the pain. "Antonia's getting to be a big girl," Doctor Chen said, withdrawing the needle. "Almost a young lady."
My mother smoothed her hand against the small of my back. I wanted to move away from her touch. I didn't usually notice the ways she chose to caress me, but suddenly her hand felt out of place.
As my mother and I left the hospital, again through the rear, I looked up at the sky. It was gray and hazy, and the air smelled bitter and sharp. "Is that smoke?" I asked, turning around and trying to see beyond the huge shape of the hospital to the riot and its fires.
"Yes it is, honey," my mother said sadly.
I wanted to stay and look at the sky and peer around the side of the hospital and see what was happening out in front, but at the same time I was relieved that my mother kept walking toward our car.
On the ride home, I slunk down on the seat. The struggle with my doctor had made me tired, my arm was sore from the shot, and there was that other, new pain that tugged at the center of my body. Yet my mind was clear. Now that I was beginning to get well, I felt like I was coming out of a daze; I felt as if I'd slept through much more than just a week of my life, and as if while I was away--far off in Canada and far off in my illness--everything had drastically changed.
That night at dinner my father said he'd seen the fires and some looters from his office window. He said he saw a man walking down the street holding what looked at first like a small pillow but turned out to be a whole ham. "And he was a white man, too," my father said. "This isn't about race. It's about being poor and being treated like shit."
We watched the news again that night after dinner. Seventy-five Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and thirty-six had been killed in Detroit. Toward the end of the newscast, President Johnson came on with a special announcement: he was sending the army to Detroit to quell the riot. Lawlessness and aggression could not be tolerated, he said, and would not be tolerated, abroad or at home. "Whose home are you talking about?" my father asked.
The set showed a clip of Johnson's face, his lips silently moving.
"Whatever happened to your war on poverty?" my father asked. "I guess you meant a war on poor people, you lying son of a bitch."
"Don't be so hard on him, Ralph," my mother said. "There aren't any easy answers."
"I'll give you an easy answer," my father said. "Give people jobs and treat them with dignity and respect."
"That's a good long-range answer," my mother said. "But right now things are totally out of control. This rioting isn't doing anyone any good--it's not doing the rioters any good, either."
"Don't you think I know that," my father said.
The following day, four thousand federal troops arrived in Detroit. They came in planes and brought copters and tanks. We saw the tanks rolling up Grand River Avenue on the morning news. My father didn't say anything, except for a soft stream of curses when he burned his mouth on his coffee. The air conditioner was on, and he had just showered, but he was already sweating.
Shortly after my father left for work, Danny came into the house shrieking. "The police are going to shoot! The police have big guns, and they're getting ready to shoot!"
"No, they're not," my mother said in an unconvincing voice. She and Danny and I moved to the front windows, staying back from them a couple of feet, and looked out through the gauzy blue curtains. A Highland Park patrol car was creeping up our street as slowly as a tank with two huge, high-powered rifles propped outside the windows of the car: each policeman, driver and passenger, rested his forearm outside his window, with his hand curved around a rifle butt and the rifle barrel slanted at the sky.
"I was going over to Kelvin's house," Danny said, "and then I looked up, and they were coming to shoot me."
"No they weren't, they wouldn't do that," my mother said, stroking Danny's neck as we watched the car creep past our front yard. But she told all of us, even my two older brothers, to stay in the house or our backyard.
I thought of the ten-year-old boy that the Highland Park police had shot the previous summer. I hadn't thought about him much at the time. I didn't know that he'd existed until after he was dead--he hadn't gone to my school, and I never saw the street he'd lived on until we marched there. The tragedy of the boy's death only hit me when I saw two women marchers--the boy's mother and his aunt, I guessed--weeping on the police station steps. Even then I couldn't imagine their anguish completely, and, after the march ended, the boy and his death had drifted from my thoughts.
But seeing the police flaunting their big guns on my own block brought the boy's death back to me and filled me with immediate dread. I didn't think that the police would shoot me or my brothers--they wouldn't shoot white children, I knew, or almost knew. But they might shoot one of our friends, or one of the kids from our school.
The patrol cars with guns thrust outside their windows crept by our house all day long. I watched them from the curtains twice, then retreated to the couch and stayed there, wishing our curtains were heavier, harder to see through. I was still menstruating, and each time I felt a cramp or went to the bathroom and saw the blood, I thought of gunshot wounds and other violence, though my mother had explained to me that the cramping and the blood leaving my body were natural functions and a sign of health.
That evening when my father came home from work my mother told him about the policemen and their guns.
"Those stupid sons of bitches," my father said, shaking his head bitterly, and instead of going upstairs as he usually did to change out of his suit, he stayed in the living room. "Do you know," he said to my mother, "that it's illegal for our whole family to walk down our own street, even in the daytime?"
She looked at him sadly and a little blankly, the same look she'd had on her face all day.
"No more than three people are allowed to walk or gather together on a public street anywhere in the city," my father said. He paced up and down the living room. "This is like a police state. Our so-called democracy. Do you know that Romney told the Guard to shoot looters even if they're running away? Most of the people who have been killed so far have been looters shot in the back, including a couple of teenagers." He picked up The Fishes, one of the Time-Life nature books he had bought for us kids, and sat down on the blue swivel chair near the living room windows. I watched him flip through the book's pages. I could tell he wasn't really reading but was doing what I did: looking at the pictures, skimming the lengthy captions.
The police cruised by our house about fifteen minutes later, shortly before we were to eat. My mother was in the kitchen, my brothers were scattered upstairs and in the backyard. I was looking at another book from the Time-Life set, propped up on cushions on the couch. My father had put down his book and stood up and was taking off the jacket of his suit. He was standing with his back to the living room windows, and I don't know if the police cars or their rifles glinted or if my father simply sensed them, but he turned as they came up the street and moved to the windows to watch them.
He stood where the air conditioner parted the curtains, his tie blowing askew and his face angry and tense. "Look at those bastards parading their power," he said. "Scared, stupid sons of bitches." He was about to say something else, to comment or curse, when I saw his face change at something new that he was seeing. I sat up straight and looked out through the filmy curtains. The police car had stopped next door to our house, and the two policemen in it were talking to one of our neighbors.
"Annie, who is that? Do you know?" my father asked, jerking his head toward the street.
I got up and joined my father at the window, resting my fingers on the sill. I was standing only inches from the glass, but I felt safe with my father right beside me. "I think it's David Jenkins," I said. "Yeah, it's him."
"Do you know him?" my father asked.
"Sort of. He's in Michael's class. He lives down at the end of our street."
Abruptly, my father left his place at the window and went out the front door. The screen door slammed, and I started after him; by the time I reached the edge of our porch, my father was out in the street. I stayed on the porch, halfway hidden behind a pillar, resting my hands against the rough bricks. The dirt baseline from home to first ran in a straight line from me to my father and David and the patrol car with the policemen in it.
"This young man lives here," my father said to the policemen sitting in their car. "He's thirteen or fourteen years old, and he lives on this street."
The police said something I didn't hear. Huge black sunglasses hid their eyes, and their lips looked as pale as their skin. Their rifles, thrust outside their windows, still rested on their forearms, angled toward the sky.
"He's half a block from his house," my father said. "He was just walking down his own street in broad daylight."
The police spoke again, still too softly for me to hear, and again my father answered them: "You're the ones who need to be checked--what do you think you're doing, riding around with your guns hanging out all over the place? You're just looking for trouble--you're going to start trouble."
My father was standing three feet from the policemen and their rifles, but he didn't seem the least bit frightened. Maybe he was too angry to be afraid, or maybe he assumed, as I did, that the police wouldn't shoot at him no matter what he said to them.
While my father and the police spoke, David stood very still, not saying a word or even opening his lips, his dark face turned partly away from my father and the policemen and me; he was looking up the street toward Woodward, looking at nothing in particular, or at something I couldn't see.
"The curfew doesn't start until dusk," my father said. "Three more hours, at least. You have no reason to stop him."
David was still staring up toward Woodward, without moving a muscle of his body or face. But then, unseen by my father, David's face shifted toward us, and his eyes burned at my father with hatred.
I felt my cheeks flush and grow hot, and I glanced down at the stoop, my hands gripping the edges of the pillar's rough bricks. I wanted to disappear without effort and find myself returned to the living room couch. But I also didn't want to leave. I looked along the baseline to David and my father and the policemen with their guns and imagined running to them along the bare line of earth. Maybe that would be enough to break things up, and I'd stop when I reached the edge of the group. Or maybe I'd keep running toward them and burst like a fireball into their midst. But even as I thought of it, I knew I wouldn't do either of these things or anything else; I knew that I was wholly powerless to change things for the better. And besides, I was suddenly afraid, even with my father to protect me.
"I don't care if there's been looting on Hamilton," my father said. "There's been no looting, no trouble of any kind, in this neighborhood. And by riding around like this, flaunting your muscle, you're just making everything worse."
The policeman next to the curb got out of the car, holding his rifle close to his chest. He spoke to David, and David spread his legs and placed his hands on the car's hood. Then the policeman slid the barrel of his rifle up and down the insides of David's legs. My father looked between the two policemen, the one standing behind David and the one still in the car, and said something I didn't hear. Years later he told me that he'd said something like "Come on now, that's enough."
At my father's words, the policeman standing behind David lifted his chin up and laughed. Then he leveled his gun until it was pointed at David; from where I stood, it seemed to be resting on David's back. My father turned slowly to the policeman still sitting in the car, and a note came into his voice that I'd never heard there before, a note that made me think of my own voice when I was about to cry. "Will you talk to your partner?" he asked. "Will you please talk to your partner?"
I had never seen or heard my father come anywhere close to tears. Years later, I saw him weep many times--once, when Michael reached draft age, at the prospect of his going to Canada or to jail; and again and again, when Danny was nineteen, after his legs were severed at a summer factory job; and, a few weeks after Danny's legs were amputated, at the death of my newborn child. But when I stood watching my father plead with and exhort the policemen, these things were far in the future, and my father was to me, or until that moment he had been, invincible, incapable of losing.
My father continued to talk with the police. David remained with his hands on the car hood, the gun still pointed at him. I drew all the way back behind the pillar and leaned against the roughness of the bricks. I should go into the house, I knew, and, when my father came in, act as if I hadn't followed him out. And that's what I did. But first I stayed hidden behind the pillar a little longer, my arms and hands wedged between my body and the bricks, feeling, from deep inside me, the pull of my blood leaving and listening to the faltering sound of my father's voice.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)
Three (Summer/Fall 1996) Two (Winter 1996)