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history, and the small rain of the present scours the lakes. Transportation is the psychic skein of existence here; it is how the people here hunt whatever lyric winds that blow.
    Twenty years later, riding the whole of New York State through the Ontario region to Michigan, I will understand these people back then , in their lamaseries of kitchen and field, their strange spas and mountain follies, their stiff springtimes—the men all the time so sexually delicate of finger, in the finite distance between them and the machine. I will see enough at last to write in The Last Trolley-Ride about that inland-outland transportational dream, always dying and resurrected, from barge to wagon to rail to car to plane, brought up short only by the easy horizons of the coastal cities, and of mixed peoples.
    All this time, back there, there is a war. In the last years of it, we move to Detroit, arriving on the day of the race riots which have erupted at Belle Isle. At the luxe hotel on Lake St. Clair where the U.S. Rubber Company has temporarily quartered us, the management, joining with the permanent guests, decrees that the Negro domestic staff is to be quarantined at the hotel, since if these “good” ones go back the long route to their homes in the slums of Paradise Alley, “it might be dangerous for them .” Now at last, I too can see those others, the “bad” ones, as in their mythic violence and their real, they hang invisibly from the roof-tree of every white inhabitant.
    In Grosse Pointe, we find a huge house for rent, almost the only one anywhere. Not lake-front—only a six-cylinder-fortune house (as we joke to one another)—whose heirs will rent it cheaply until sold. The lease, when it comes, is “for occupancy by three persons only, of Caucasian race.” When I ask what will happen when we become four, as is plainly to be, Mr. Sutter, the heir, says that when the baby comes, the lease will be so amended. I haven’t the will to ask, “And what if it’s black?”—not from fear (though that does exist—where else would we go?)—as from a deeper depression. I am living, possibly for always, among people for whom the words I use as acids and reliefs, the possibility even of verbal solutions to life, mean nothing. “Even in the hat salon at Hudson’s—!” Mrs. Sutter, a suburbanly pretty woman, adds “—you can’t be sure what you try on hasn’t already been on one of their greasy heads.”
    Detroit itself is in the midst of another twenty-buck silk-shirt war; gas rationing, because of which we had let be carted away our beloved nine-miles-per-gallon classic old Packard, means little here; the lake buzzes with motorboats. Big-wig restaurants and company-clubs serve filet; meat-rationing is for the poor supermarket fools. I now think of the East as more moral; it will take another war, and richer friends, to teach me that bank profiteering is merely more hidden. We are meanwhile meeting the blatant “new” machine-tool-and-electronic rich; by this time I know that there are always these new ones—as opposed to the more elegant, older industrial rich, who have had their “humanities” and sometimes make use of them. Suppliers to the war, these new ones are a thick-psyche’d breed, with the terrifying animal sureness of those who know themselves to be the wave of what is—and do not reflect on it. Fighting a happy, redsnouted, clambake “operation,” they have the fat, satined-up wives of men who go to whores, and the expensive, anemic houses which come out of first-generation military contracts. One of them spends thousands to illuminate the local church like a ballroom for the one night of a daughter’s wedding—and the church allows it. But all the Grosse Pointes, Park to Farm, ring with anti-reform, anti-Roosevelt “sick” jokes, and the Detroit Symphony goes out over the air under the sponsorship—all it could get—of “Sam’s Cut-rate Store”—until an older industrialist (chemicals)