Freshwater Road Read Online Free PDF

food, for streetcars, for housing, for everything.
Momma Bessie even rented rooms in the old house on Whitewood, bringing down the wrath of the few whites who hadn't run when they'd moved
in. Rocks hurled into windows. It never ended.
    Chink wagged his head from side to side like a sad-faced dog. "It was
bad on Belle Isle. Never forget it."

    Millicent and Iris faced the bar mirrors, thin hazy smoke threads winding from the ends of their cigarettes, heads delicately ticktocking back
and forth.
    "People used to cart their picnic things out there on the streetcar."
Millicent's chin dipped.
    "The day that riot started was no time to be fooling around on streetcars." Posey dried glasses with a vengeance, clanking them down on the bar
sink. "Peckawoods pulled people off, beat them in the street."
    "Whole lot of Negroes got killed," Rodney said.
    "Few white boys, too," Chink added.
    "Right." Rodney's knee started twitching. "A few."
    Shuck went to the jukebox and punched in "Take the A' Train" and
"Broadway," escaping to his New York dream. He sat again, looking at the
night-life Negroes with pearl white teeth and processed hair, Joe Louis
in the ring, Thurgood Marshall on the steps of the Supreme Court, Lena
Horne draped on a Hollywood post, Nat "King" Cole at the piano.
    Evening trucks from the post office jarred the big window across the
front of the Royal Gardens. That big plate glass window irked Shuck, though
he liked seeing his Cadillac parked at the curb, the patterns of traffic, the
twist and turn of the seasons-women in their sundresses, hair up off their
necks, then later the first bustling skips of autumn, the snow when it came
lashing with the wind off the lakes, barreling back and forth across the city.
And spring-hard as it was to see spring on Lafayette Street, all black tar
and concrete. Smaller panes of leaded glass would be more elegant, more
mysterious, make the place look less like a dressed-up storefront.
    The talk about the riot of 1943 went on around him, the voices heavier,
garbled, swimming in and out of the music, in and out of his thoughts. He
reminded himself that children were born to leave, the universe ordered
it, that Billy would stay in New York, that Celeste would run off to Mississippi. And always there was the thought of Wilamena with her new
husband in New Mexico. He kept thinking of the man as her new husband.
It had been nearly ten years. Longer than that since she'd pulled the plug
on Detroit.

     

3

    A hard something landed in Celeste's lap, waking her from a doze. Behind
the continuous murmur of voices in the office, typewriter carriages banged,
bells sounded, and a radio played. "Sign that. I'll take you to the apartment in a minute. I'm Margo." Celeste grasped the clipboard, frowning
up at the short, pretty, blue-eyed white girl with edge-straight blonde hair
cut just above her shoulders. By the time she got "hi" to her lips, Margo
had pivoted into a small army of coverall-wearing Negro and white young
people moving around the airless office /storefront picking up papers, diagramming patterns on a blackboard, sticking pins in a map of Mississippi.
Celeste wondered if the pins marked the locations of dead bodies, burned
buildings, or some other horrendous occurrence. On the walls, pictures of
Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers. Through the front windows, she saw that the police cars hadn't moved.
    Margo huddled over a mimeograph machine near the back wall with a
young dark-skinned guy, she cranking the handle of the old inky cylinder
while he caught the copies. Celeste eyed them through slits. The last thing
she'd expected in this office was a white girl telling her what to do, even if it
was only signing some form. Mississippi and the civil rights movement meant
pushing two years of Ann Arbor's surrounds of white people to the rear.
    Here, both Negro and white student-types were working and talking
together in easy familiarity. Hard to