Motor City Burning by Bill Morris Page A

He could tell his uncle was digging the attention.
    When Willie got home he was bone tired from the back-to-back double shifts, but he was too keyed up to sleep. He drank a beer and tried to watch “Mission: Impossible,” but his mind kept drifting. He’d made good progress on one half of his mission; now it was time to get started on the other half.
    He went into the bedroom, where his Remington typewriter sat shrouded on the desk between a stack of untouched paper and his old college reading lamp, the one with the dented brown hood over the bulb. He’d brought the typewriter and lamp with him from Alabama because he thought they would provide some vital link to the world he was leaving behind, thought they would spur his memory, make the words flow. He thought wrong.
    He set Chick Murphy’s business card on the desk— Stay on the right track to 9 Mile and Mack! —then he dug in the back of the closet and took out his Alabama box and set it on the bed. There was no doubt in his mind that the moment of his story’s conception—the moment when he heard the girl hiss de Lawd —was inside that box. He started removing the contents and placing them on the smooth green blanket.
    First came the clothes—the white T-shirt, denim bib overalls and clunky brogan shoes. By 1962 this outfit had replaced sport coats and neckties as the unofficial Snick uniform, a way to blend in with the dirt-poor locals and look more like a “been-here” than a “come-here.” Most of the organizers were college kids or recent dropouts like Willie, well-read in the works of Fanon and Camus and other writers who meant absolutely nothing to a poor black sharecropper, a man who, as often as not, lived in a shack with a tarpaper roof and no running water, a number-three galvanized tub for baths, the interior walls papered with pages from an old Sears catalog. A house made of wood and wind. There would be pot-bellied children everywhere, flies, mangy dogs, clucking chickens. There would be an outhouse in the back yard, a clothesline and a vegetable patch, some ancient car hovering on cinderblocks awaiting repairs that would never come. The only book Willie ever saw in any of those houses was the Bible. The sameness of those places, the stupefying monotony—that, to Willie, was the killing thing about poverty.
    He went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee because he sensed he was in for a long night. While the coffee brewed he put his new Gerry Mulligan-Dave Brubeck album on the stereo, turned down low. Then he took off his tuxedo pants and dress shirt and put on the T-shirt and overalls, still smelling of Duz detergent. He left the brogans unlaced. He had forgotten how good the clothes felt, so loose and free.
    He removed an envelope full of black-and-white snapshots from the box. The first one showed Willie holding one of the rifles his brother had shipped to him, piece by piece, from Vietnam, a Remington 700 with a Unertl scope. Wes had snapped the picture one day when they were out in the piney woods near Tuskegee blasting away at Jax beer cans. Willie was wearing shades and smoking a cigarette, trying to look like a badass, but he looked exactly the way he’d always felt around guns: scared pissless.
    There were dozens of pictures of Willie in his Snick uniform, mostly taken in Alabama and Mississippi. The pictures blurred together after a while, but one jumped out. It showed Willie talking to a sharecropper named Jess Hocutt in the swept-dirt yard beside his house near Indianola. Behind them was a Stutz Bearcat with no tires. It was always a good idea to go slow with country people, so by way of breaking the ice Willie had asked about the car. Jess had laughed, glad for the chance to talk about something other than the dreaded topic of registering to vote. The last thing Jess Hocutt needed, on top of the rest of his woes, was to bring down the wrath of the white man. It took Willie a