Chapter 86

You remember last time, the girls had discovered that teasing a Negro in the middle of KKK country was no joke. Not that Ann Arbor was KKK land ... but Detroit ... that's another story.

Henry needed workers ... not skilled workers but people who would work, and living a sharecroppers life in the south was unending work for next to nothing. White trash ... not a nice term ... but they were in the same boat as the 'liberated' blacks. Not even second class citizens. A pretty girl seldom made it out of high school. She was on her back working for some hick country lawman ... or his inbred nephew, and daddy had better not say anything about it.

Advertisements began showing up in the newspapers, Henry Ford had ... Jobs ... five dollars a day!! Big money. There were even folks who showed up with busses and took the poor, dirt scratching, share cropping, farmer straight to the factory. Go to work, son. You can find a place to live after hours.

In 1900, Detroit had a population of almost two hundred ninety thousand. Ten years? ... four hundred sixty-five thousand, and ten years after that? ... a buck and a quarter shy of a million.

By 1930? ... one and a half million ... they built cars. Predominately poor southern white trash making so much money ... they bought yards full of pink flamingoes and called it class. Detroit had more country and western playing bands than Nashville ... and the bars to play it in. And it was bright lights, big city ... why, son ... this here's the biggest hick town in these here United States.

That's in thirty years ... the population didn't increase that fast by fucking ... it was migration ... from the south and those good ole' suthern boys brought their hobbies with them. One of those pleasurable hobbies was hanging the poor southern black man who looked with lust in his heart upon their fine upstanding white pussy. When that black man came north looking for the same El Dorado and looking for that same magic he was competing with another good old boy ... a suthern white boy.

Light pole decoration.

1950 was the peak; a hundred thousand shy of two million. In 1956 Toyota offered the first Japanese car for sale and the downhill slide started. Personally, I remembered the Detroit billboard, Hungry? Eat your Foreign Car. (That was an aside.)

Arnold wasn't kidding about the girls teasing. There were men and women from Detroit going to college in Ann Arbor ... attitude is something learned from your fellow students. High school is full of peer pressure and some college students looked at college as a continuation of high school... I was the big dog. Resentment, Blacks in School? ... and they're doing better than I am? comes easy. Arnold Strong had made half a million dollars in his second year building bicycles. Sure he did. Five hundred bicycles at a thousand each? Do the math.

A'course he worked his ass off doing it ... and still went to classes and got good grades, too. Arnold was black, smart, and working towards wealth. Not a good combination as far as an ingrained southern attitude young freshman was concerned.

No, Arnold and the girls needed to be very careful. And they settled right down. Clarence was the turning point.

While the girls were at the library waiting for Arnold, they kept looking at Maps of New Zealand. Today, click on Google and satellite view and see the mountains. In 1956? ... Look at the flat map ... find the topography map and look at the contour lines, then find a map of forests and lakes ... Google is great ... folding maps are a bitch.

Arnold still wasn't back, but he did call the library and asked the Librarian to please deliver a message to the three blondes ... he was going to be another thirty to forty five minutes but he hadn't forgotten them.