But now Milton heard something. The doorknob, was it? He listened. For the last few hours he’d been hearing things. His eyes had been playing tricks on him, too. He crouched behind the counter, squinting into the darkness. His ears echoed the way seashells do. He heard the distant gunfire and the squawking sirens. He heard the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock. To all this was added the rush of his blood, roaring through the channels in his head. But no sound came from the doorway.
Milton relaxed. He took another bite of the sandwich. Gently, experimentally, he lowered his head onto the counter. Just for a minute. When he closed his eyes, the pleasure was immediate. Then the doorknob rattled again, and Milton jumped. He shook his head, trying to wake himself up. He put down the sandwich and tiptoed out from behind the counter, holding the gun.
He didn’t intend to use it. The idea was to scare the looter off. If that didn’t work, Milton was prepared to leave. The Oldsmobile was parked out back. He could be home in ten minutes. The knob rattled again. And without thinking Milton stepped toward the glass door and shouted, “I’ve got a gun!”
Except it wasn’t the gun. It was the ham sandwich! Milton was threatening the looter with two pieces of toasted bread, a slice of meat, and some hot mustard. Nevertheless, because it was dark out, this worked. The looter outside the door held up his hands.
It was Morrison from across the street.
Milton stared at Morrison. Morrison stared back. And then my father said—this is what white people say in a situation like this, “Can I help you?”
Morrison squinted, disbelieving. “What you doing here, man? You crazy? Ain’t safe for no white people down here.” A shot rang out. Morrison flattened himself against the glass. “Ain’t safe for nobody.”
“I’ve gotta protect my property.”
“You life ain’t you property?” Morrison raised his eyebrows to indicate the unimpeachable logic of this statement. Then he dropped the superior expression altogether and coughed. “Listen, chief, long as you here, maybe you can help me out.” He held up small change. “Came over for some cigarettes.”
Milton’s chin dipped, fattening his neck, and his eyebrows slanted in disbelief. In a dry voice he said, “Now’d be a good time to kick the habit.”
Another shot rang out, this time closer. Morrison jumped, then smiled. “It sure is bad for my health. And gettin’ more dangerous all the time.” Then he smiled broadly. “This’ll be my last pack,” he said, “swear to God.” He dropped the change through the mail slot. “Parliaments.” Milton looked down at the coins for a moment and then went and got the cigarettes.
“Got any matches?” Morrison said.
Milton slipped these through, too. As he did, the riots, his frayed nerves, the smell of fire in the air, and the audacity of this man Morrison dodging sniper fire for a pack of cigarettes all became too much for Milton. Suddenly he was waving his arms, indicating everything, and shouting through the door, “What’s the matter with you people?”
Morrison took only a moment. “The matter with us,” he said, “is you.” And then he was gone.
“The matter with us is you.” How many times did I hear that growing up? Delivered by Milton in his so-called black accent, delivered whenever any liberal pundit talked about the “culturally deprived” or the “underclass” or “empowerment zones,” spoken out of the belief that this one statement, having been delivered to him while the blacks themselves burned down a significant portion of our beloved city, proved its own absurdity. As the years went on, Milton used it as a shield against any opinions to the contrary, and finally it grew into a kind of mantra, the explanation for why the world was going to hell, applicable not only to African Americans but to feminists and homosexuals; and then of course he liked to use it on us, whenever we were late for dinner or wore clothes Tessie didn’t approve of.
“The matter with us is you!” Morrison’s words echoed in the street, but Milton didn’t have time to concentrate on them. Because right then, like a creaky Godzilla in a Japanese movie, the first military tank lumbered into view. Soldiers stood on both sides, not cops now but National Guardsmen, camouflaged, helmeted, nervously holding rifles with bayonets. Pointing those rifles up at all the other rifles pointing down. There was a moment of relative silence, enough for Milton to hear the slamming of Morrison’s screen door across the street. Then there was a pop, a sound like a toy gun, and suddenly the street lit up with a thousand bursts of fire . . .
I heard them, too, from a quarter mile away. Following the slow tank at a discreet distance, I had ridden my bike from Indian Village on the East Side all the way to the West. I tried to keep my bearings as best I could, but I was only seven and a half, and didn’t know many street names. While passing through downtown, I recognized The Spirit of Detroit, the Marshall Fredericks statue that stood in front of the City-County Building. A few years earlier, a prankster had painted a trail of red footprints in the statue’s size, leading across Woodward to rendezvous with a statue of a naked woman in front of the National Bank of Detroit. The footprints were still faintly visible as I pedaled past. The tank turned up Bush Street, and I followed it past Monroe and the lights of Greektown. On a normal day, the old Greek men of my grandfather’s generation would have been arriving at the coffee houses to spend the day playing backgammon, but on the morning of July 25, 1967, the street was empty. At some point my tank had found others; in a line they now headed northwest. Soon downtown vanished and I didn’t know where I was. Ducking aerodynamically over my handlebars, I pedaled furiously into the thick, oily exhaust of the moving column . . .
. . . while, back on Pingree Street, Milton is crouching behind the crenellated olive oil tins. Bullets fly from every darkened window along the block, from Frank’s Pool Hall and the Crow Bar, from the bell tower of the African Episcopal Church, so many bullets they blur the air like rain, making the one working streetlamp look as if it’s flickering out. Bullets pounding on armor and ricocheting off brickwork and tattooing the parked cars. Bullets ripping the legs right out from under a U.S. Postal Service mailbox, so that it falls over on its side like a drunk. Bullets obliterating the window of the veterinarian office and continuing on through the walls to reach the cages of the animals in back. The German shepherd that has been barking nonstop for three days and two nights finally shuts up. A cat twists in the air, letting out a scream, its blazing green eyes going out like a light. A real battle is under way now, a firefight, a little bit of Vietnam brought back home. But in this case the Vietcong are lying on Beautyrest mattresses. They are sitting in camping chairs and drinking malt liquor, a volunteer army facing off against the enlistees in the streets.
It’s impossible to know who all these snipers were. But it’s easy to understand why the police called them snipers. It’s easy to understand why Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh called them snipers, and Govenor George Romney, too. A sniper, by definition, acts alone. A sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen. It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren’t snipers, then what were they? The governor didn’t say it; the newspapers didn’t say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising.
The Second American Revolution.
And now the guardsmen are fighting back. When the riot first broke, the police, on the whole, acted with restraint. They moved off, trying to contain the disturbance. Likewise, the federal troops, the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and 101st, are battle-hardened veterans who know to use appropriate force. But the National Guard is a different story. Weekend warriors, they have been called from their homes into sudden battle. They are inexperienced, scared. They move through the streets, blasting away at anything they see. Sometimes they drive tanks right up onto front lawns. They drive onto people’s porches and crash through the walls. The tank in front of the Zebra Room has stopped momentarily. Ten or so troops surround it, taking aim at a sniper on the fourth floor of the Beaumont Hotel. The sniper fires; the National Guardsmen fire back, and the man drops, his legs tangling on the fire escape. Directly thereafter, another light flashes across the street. Milton looks up to see Morrison in his living room, lighting a cigarette. Lighting a Parliament with the zebra-striped matches. “No!” Milton shouts. “No!” . . . And Morrison, if he hears, just thinks it’s another diatribe against smoking, but let’s face it, he doesn’t hear. He only lights his cigarette and, two seconds later, a bullet rips through the front of his skull and he crumples in a heap. And then the soldiers move on.