Grace

the eyes of another woman. They had far more common ground than Leah ever had wanted to admit as a teenager, but she saw it and understood it now in one glance. Patty Wendt was a woman and a mother. How could Leah fault her for hardening her heart in a world that treated her like a piece of property, that used and defiled her, that abused and demeaned her at every turn?

Leah lived in that world too. Nothing had changed. But her mother had loved her and had tried to protect her from it all along, just like Leah loved Grace and she knew she would do everything in her power to protect her daughter from the same mistakes she’d made. Funny how the universe repeated patterns ad infinitum, generation after generation, until someone finally turned around and started walking in the other direction.

She felt her mother’s hand slip into hers and Leah squeezed it, smiling. She would never know who her real father was. She didn’t have a father to walk her down the aisle and give her away. But she had her mother, and she knew, finally, that her mother really did love her.

“Mom, Erica’s going to be my maid of honor.” Leah smiled at her friend, feeling tears pricking her eyes. “But I was wondering if you would walk me down the aisle and give me away?”

“Oh Leah…” Patty Wendt’s face crumbled, tears slipping down her cheeks. “I never wanted to give you away.”

Leah smiled. “Is that a no?”

“No, sweetheart.” Leah’s mother opened her pocketbook, looking for a tissue. “Of course I will. It’s just… you’ll always be my little girl.”

“What church are you getting married at?” Irene asked, smiling and fluffing up her veil.

Leah sighed, shaking her head.

“We’ll figure something out,” Leah’s mother said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “To hell with Father Patrick.”

Erica and Leah looked at each other in the mirror, eyes wide and mouths open. Then they both burst out laughing, and Patty looked between them, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth. That turned into a snicker, and then laughter. The three of them couldn’t stop, even though the other bride and her party were staring at them and whispering. It just made them laugh harder, forcing Patty Wendt to dab at her eyes again, using the tissue to wipe away tears of laughter from her eyes this time.

Chapter Six

Curiosity killed the cat. That’s what kept going through Erica’s mind as Clay drove down the back roads of the ironically named Paradise Alley, the black ghetto between the Detroit river in the south and Grand Boulevard to the north, at a crawling five miles an hour with the lights of his Sedan off, the passenger side window cranked all the way down, making Erica shiver in the frigid December air, what was left of a pile of rolled up newspapers between them at one in the morning.

“Do you always deliver them like this?” Erica whispered as if the people sleeping in the houses and tenements could hear them.

“Have to.” Clay slowed to a near stop, grabbing a paper and leaning across her, tossing it with the velocity and aim a major league baseball player would have been impressed by, hitting the front porch stoop square on. “They’re called ‘underground’ papers for a reason. I could be arrested for writing most of this stuff, let alone distributing them.”

“Wouldn’t your parents just throw a fit?”

“Oh hell yes.”

“Is it worth it?” Erica picked up one of the papers, sliding the rubber band off the end and opening it up. It was too dark to read much, but when she held it up in the dashboard light, she saw the headline read, Detroit Plans for ‘Negro Removal.’

“Sit back.” Clay slowed again, grabbing a rolled paper and tossing it. This one missed the stoop and ended up in the bushes next to the porch.

“You missed.”

“You were distracting me in that blouse. Button it up, would you? At least until we’re done?”

Erica grinned, looking down at the cleavage showing and reached for her buttons, slowly unbuttoning one more so that her bra was showing, looking straight at him the whole while. Clay groaned.

“What’s this about ‘Negro Removal?’”

“Urban renewal project plans to tear down all of Black Bottom and Paradise Alley. They’ve already razed a bunch of housing near the river. They call it ‘eradicating blight.’ Yeah, they’re eradicating blight all right-they’re getting rid of the negros in one fell swoop.”

Erica frowned, squinting at the article in the darkness. “But the news said it was a good thing. Something about increasing tax revenue, improving living conditions. You have to admit, some of these houses are pretty shabby. Aren’t they planning on building nice, new high-rises for them?”

“For them?” Clay snorted. “Is that how you think of Solie? She’s one of them?”

“Well… no… I…” Erica floundered, flustered, flushing red in the thankful dimness. Solie was like part of her family, had been for years. She was the closest thing she had to a mother since her own mother had died. But she was ashamed to think that she didn’t know much about Solie’s life outside of the Nolans. Erica knew she had children, a husband who worked at a factory. But that was about it.

“Can you be that naive?” Clay grabbed another paper, leaning over her to toss it angrily out of the window. “They gave the people living down by the river thirty-days notice to vacate their homes. Then they tore them down to the ground. But they don’t have plans to build on the land at all! That empty area they call Cobo Field now? It’s just sitting there. ‘Urban development’ is just code for ‘Negro Removal.’ They’re trying to get rid of their ‘negro problem’ without creating any solution at all.”

“Well… I don’t understand why the news isn’t covering this…”

“They are.” Clay slowed again, tossed another paper. “They’re spinning it all into nice little bits and bites for the whites to swallow so they can feel better about driving down Hastings street after dark. They’re using federal urban renewal dollars to eliminate the only housing blacks are allowed to live in, and they’re doing nothing to build any more. In fact, they’re going to build a freeway instead.”

“Where will everyone go?”

“Good question. I wasn’t kidding when I said that we’re not far from the race riots we saw back in forty- three.”

“Clay, you were, like, fourteen…” Erica didn’t remember the incident very well. Her mother had been sick at the time and they’d been well insulated in their big house on the river. It had all started out on Belle Isle in a traffic jam, and rumors flew about a white woman being raped, and a black mother and child being thrown off the bridge, neither of which were true but which spurred the biggest race riots Detroit had seen.

“I was at Belle Isle that day.” He threw the last paper, hitting not just the stoop this time, but the door beyond it. “We were in a traffic jam on the Belle Isle Bridge. It was hot and everyone was irritable. There was a little black kid in the car next to ours. He was just goofing around, you know, like kids do, making faces at the other cars?”

Erica felt her heart drop to her middle when Clay whipped the car around the corner, pulling it to the curb and looking over at her in the darkness. He turned toward her, his breathing shallow and sharp as he told her his story.

“Four guys got out of their car behind us. White kids, probably just old enough to drive. They grabbed that little boy out of the car and beat him up right there in front of his mother.”

“Oh my god.”

“And no one did anything. His mother screamed and called for help and got a fat lip herself trying to get those boys to stop. And no one did anything.”

“Oh Clay…” Erica reached out, putting her hand over his. “I’m so sorry…”

“I didn’t do anything either.” He swallowed, the clicking sound in his throat huge in the darkness. “I asked my dad-he was driving, and my mom was sitting in the passenger seat, we’d just gone to Belle Isle for the day because