If the Moon Had Willow Trees (Detroit Eight Series Book 1) Read online

  Praise

  . . . July 1967 and inner Detroit is burning. A gutsy young brunette named Maggie delivers sodas to police manning the barricades, and along the way she meets Sam. “Shaking, released from the tension of her absurd mission, Maggie wanted to hold onto this moment, turn it into a poem, an ode, a prayer.” . . . two graduate students . . . civil rights activists become the “token, but highly valued whites” in the otherwise black “The Eights.” Intrigue, the Mafia and, maybe even, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI are all part of the tangled background. . . . Hall excels at writing natural conversation and witty banter between and among friends and family. Even the minor characters seem real and are well developed.

  —Five-Star Rating by Story Circle Book Review

  In many ways this book is prescient of the current political situation . . . the bigotry, segregation and division that remains with us today. It is a coming-of-age story for the author’s two main characters, Maggie and Sam, (oh, so in love are they) set against the backdrop of Detroit’s racial tension. . . . The dialogue rings true. (It is gripping when Loretta, “a Freedom Rider not a Freedom Coaster,” takes up the cadence of Dr. King to calm the crowd after his assassination.)

  —Santa Fesina, Amazon

  This historical novel is a memoir of the past, a companion for current times, and a thought-provoking journey of civil unrest over fifty years. . . . While Maggie, Sam and the other uniquely lovable characters are idealistic activists energized for change, on a completely different plane they are intelligent, warm, passionate, ordinary people engaged in intriguing relationships while enjoying the adventure, mystery and passion of their youth.

  —Jo Ann P. McFall, Amazon

  IF THE MOON HAD WILLOW TREES

  Copyright © 2017 by Kathleen Hall. All rights reserved.

  A historical fiction, the names and identifying details about named public figures, government entities, places and landmark buildings are based on public records, interviews or the author’s personal knowledge. Dates and times of significant historical events are based on public records. Specific quotes by public figures, including artists, musicians, songwriters, gangsters, civil rights’ leaders, union leaders, presidents, governors, named mayors and J. Edgar Hoover, are based on public records. However, all dialogue and character descriptions or opinions about events, public figures, organizations, places and landmark buildings, are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Although some of the story lines are based on author interviews with ex-Detroiters who experienced the Sixties, the characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people by name, place or occupation is unintentional.

  Published by Collaborative Options, LLC, Austin, Texas. Inquiries should be emailed to [email protected]

  This copyright prohibits the sale or distribution of this book in parts or in its entirety by others. Under the Fair Use Act, permission is granted to reprint specific quotes by the author on your web, blog, social networking sites or print media if you give credit to: If the Moon Had Willow Trees by Kathleen Hall.

  ISBN: eBook: 978-0990390435

  ISBN: Paperback: 978-0990390428

  Cover Design: Kenneth C. Benson, Pegasus Type

  Interior/Print Design: Kenneth C. Benson, Pegasus Type

  Typography: Electra, designed by William Addison Dwiggins in 1935, and Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1927. Either typeface might have been used in this book had it been published in the sixties.

  DEDICATED TO THE PEOPLE OF DETROIT

  For their work and sacrifices to achieve civil rights then and now

  Also by Kathleen Hall

  NONFICTION

  The Otherness Factor: Co-Creating and Sustaining Intentional Relationships

  Oh yes, truth is stranger. That’s why we wrap it in fiction.

  Like holding a conch shell to our ear and listening to the sea.

  Do you hear it?

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Also by Kathleen Hall

  Quote

  Contents

  Chapter 1: The Riots

  Chapter 2: Who’s on First?

  Chapter 3: Let the Games Begin

  Chapter 4: The Fallout

  Chapter 5: Cliff Jumping

  Chapter 6: Bootlegged

  Chapter 7: Adulterated

  Chapter 8: Light My Fire

  Chapter 9: Ashes

  Chapter 10: Resurrection

  Chapter 11: Cartels and Conspiracies

  Chapter 12: Evolution

  Chapter 13: Haute Bourgeoisie

  Chapter 14: The Dance

  Chapter 15: Black Jack

  Chapter 16: Close Encounters

  Chapter 17: Dead Rabbit

  Chapter 18: Trapped

  Chapter 19: Tipping Points

  Chapter 20: Sidelined

  Chapter 21: Mind Over Matter

  Chapter 22: Daylight

  Chapter 23: Moonlight

  Acknowledgments

  The Author

  Preview

  Dear Reader

  1

  The Riots

  By noon, more than fifty sniper attacks had targeted police and firemen, making it impossible to fight the flames. Chants of ‘burn baby burn’ were heard as buildings along Grand River Avenue, Linwood and Twelfth Street raged out of control. Operating under orders of restraint, Michigan’s State Troopers and National Guard could not subdue the rioting. President Johnson authorized the deployment of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to restore order. At 2:30 p.m. today, 4700 Regular Army will arrive at Selfridge Air Force Base; 1800 will muster at the State Fair Grounds.

  —Teletype Tuesday, July 25, 1967 1:00 p.m.

  JULY 1967—Who knew a race riot would rival the Super Bowl for pizza deliveries? Angelo Ciccarelli had owned and operated Angelo’s Restaurant & Pizzeria in Detroit for more than twenty years and had never seen anything like it. To his staff he said, “Go figure. People binging on pizza like there’s no fucking tomorrow.” To his customers he said, “A bunch of know-nothing baby thugs aren’t going to shut down this Dago.” In private, Angelo danced the watusi through the kitchen, faked Alley Oop passes with the pepperoni and prayed the riot would last until football season.

  Marguerite Soulier, Maggie to her friends, had worked part-time for Angelo almost five years, earning enough scratch to get through her undergrad and first year of an MA at Wayne State. Covering absences, Maggie waited tables, delivered pizza, cooked, cleaned and washed dishes. She thought people were so freaked out by the riots that the simple act of ordering pizza was a way to escape the madness and mayhem. Her killer tips seemed like acts of contrition to avoid the heavy hand of god, juju sticks to keep death and destruction away from the few square blocks of their neighborhood.

  Exhausted, Maggie planned to hang loose on her day off—read, write and cop some zees. But that wasn’t going to happen. On the radio that morning the disc jockey said police had nothing to drink because all city water had been diverted to fight fires. With Detroit on the brink of civil war, Maggie decided she couldn’t take a nap knowing cops with guns were tired, hot and thirsty. She slipped on a pair of cutoffs, a white eyelet sleeveless blouse and her white beaded moccasins from Mackinaw Island.

  Her wheels were parked in the backyard behind a cyclone fence at her Aunt Jo’s house. When Maggie started college, Aunt Jo rented her a dormer bedroom in the converted attic of her bungalow a few blocks from Angelo’s. The car was a college g
raduation gift from her umpteen French-Canadian relatives who started a fund in the 1940’s to boost their tribe’s interest in higher education. Maggie, her sister Isabel and their cousins had years to plan and pick the perfect car. For Maggie, there was no contest. It was love at first sight. Although she openly harangued her adopted countrymen for conspicuous consumption, Maggie decided a red Triumph convertible, the TR4, would be the one deliberate, ostentatious, materialistic and pretentious possession she’d own.

  In addition to Maggie’s car, the backyard hosted a rusted swing-less swing set, two overgrown crabapple trees, a cracked concrete pad for the garage-that-never-was and an untamed crop of rhubarb. Up close it was a mess. From a distance, the crabapples filled the yard with pink in the spring, promised shade in the summer and architectural interest in the winter. On the ground, fermenting apples seemed to stunt the germination of most grasses and weeds, but not rhubarb. During the third weekend each May, neighborhood rhubarb lovers showed up in rubber boots for the annual harvest then returned pints and quarts of canned rhubarb to Aunt Jo’s pantry. Aunt Jo called it the perfect economic model.

  Top down, Maggie drove to the nearest Kroger store. Stock was low, but she snagged four cases of Coke and four cheap church keys. A security guard, whose uniform still held the folds from its original package, offered to help load the pop in the cubby-sized back seat.

  “Party?” he asked.

  “No party. I’m delivering this to the police station. They’re out of water.”

  “Be careful,” he warned. “It’s a bad scene out there, snipers all over. Wouldn’t want a pretty little girl like you gettin’ shot at.” He jiggled a large set of keys attached to his belt. Maggie noticed a wedding band.

  “No sweat. Once I drop this off, I’ll be heading home. I’m cool.”

  “I’d say you’re hot” he laughed, licked his lips and started to rub his crotch. Maggie ignored him, gunned her engine and thought dickhead.

  The streets were as quiet as a Super Bowl Sunday, intermittent cars and bikes, a few random pedestrians. Anyone who could find a way out of Detroit had.

  For the rank and file, this wasn’t an option. Maggie had one more year at Wayne State to finish her MA. She was a working stiff who lived from paycheck to paycheck.

  The heat would have been oppressive on its own, but with the heat from the fires, it was an inferno. Hell had erupted on the north side of the Detroit River. On the south side, Canadians picnicked along a grassy shore and watched dark smoke dominate the horizon, turning Detroit’s skyline from Kodachrome to black and white. The wailing sirens and erratic gunfire reminded Maggie of World War II films she’d seen in grade school. It was surreal. Music, she thought, and flipped on the radio to Simon and Garfunkel singing The Sound of Silence. Maggie sang along, “Hello darkness my old friend.” She didn’t miss the irony.

  Like an apparition rising through the haze, Maggie saw a cop standing in front of the Fort and Green Street police station. As she pulled into the parking lot, the young cop raised his gun and pointed it at her car. He looked about sixteen with a crew cut and pants two inches too short, like he’d just gone through a growth spurt.

  “Whoa girlie. Where do you think you’re going?” His voice was deeper and more commanding than she expected.

  “On the radio they said you were out of water and had nothing to drink, so I decided to drop off some pop.”

  Lowering his gun, he bent down and squinted against the light. “You brought pop?”

  “Yes, four cases of Coke.”

  “Unbelievable. You just made my day! I can’t take four cases because I’m the only one on duty, but I’ll take a can. The guys at the barricades along Fort Street, in the middle of nowhere, are frying on the pavement. Head downtown. You’ll see them.”

  Maggie picked up a rubber band from the ashtray, pulled her hair in a ponytail and headed toward the turbulence downtown. In her rearview mirror, the boy cop was tipping up his can of Coke as debris skittered across the concrete.

  Ahead was a scene from some post-apocalyptic movie. The highway was littered with wind-blown paper—banks, stores and gas stations abandoned. A lone man with a Detroit Tiger’s cap was sitting on a bench at a deserted bus stop, his feet tapping and head shaking to some James Brown kind of beat. Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag?

  “Jesus, fucking Christ lady, what the hell are you doing here?” shouted the cop at the first barricade. His uniform was wrinkled and soaked with perspiration, his thinning hair plastered to his head. Maggie wondered if she’d ever seen anyone who looked so spent.

  “Heard you were out of water and needed something to drink. I brought pop.”

  “Did you say pop?”

  “Yes, four cases of Coke.”

  “Lady, you gotta be kidding me. Hey guys, we’ve got someone delivering Coke. Can you give us four cans?”

  “I can leave four cases!”

  “No, the guys at the next barricade need something to drink. Take the rest to them. They can get it to headquarters.”

  Maggie handed the weary cop four cans of Coke and said, “Stay safe.”

  He said, “lady, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve got two kids and a wife. I have to stay safe.”

  This time, Maggie turned the radio off, fought back tears and didn’t look in the rearview mirror.

  Up the almost desolate road, Maggie saw an old two-tone pink and brown Edsel make a slow turn onto Fort Street. Curious, she sped up and saw a middle-aged white woman in a nurse’s uniform with a starched white cap buoyed by ratted hair. The woman’s left hand was on the steering wheel. In her right hand a small black revolver swept back and forth as if looking for a threat or a target. Maggie whispered, “holy crap,” as she gunned the engine and put as much distance as she could between her and Annie Oakley.

  Three miles closer to the next barricade, three miles closer to the fires, the air was heavier and Maggie felt the heat and acrid taste of smoke in her throat. Sirens no longer wailed, they shrieked. What was left of the blue sky had turned gunmetal gray, a grim artificial dusk. When Maggie stopped at the makeshift barricade, another disheveled guy in a uniform approached her with his gun drawn. He said, “turn off the car and don’t move a single bone in your body. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now tell me why you’re driving around in a red convertible in a war zone? Are you freaking crazy?”

  “I’m delivering pop. The police at the last barricade asked me to bring you some Coke.”

  The cop’s laughter sounded maniacal. He dropped the gun to his side and doubled over in laughter. Maggie couldn’t help herself. She started to laugh. The sound of their shared laughter echoed in the smoky air, ricocheting against the shrieking sirens and darkening sky. Shaking, released from the tension of her absurd mission, Maggie wanted to hold onto this moment, turn it into a poem, an ode, a prayer.

  When the laughter ended, the cop looked at Maggie and said, “Unreal. I’m not sure what I needed more, the Coke or a wicked laugh. Both. Both remind me I’m here, in my body. We’ll take a few Cokes, but you need to head into town and drop the rest off at headquarters. They’re getting nailed.”

  Maggie looked into another pair of tired eyes, the color of an ocean filled with phosphorescent light. His badge read Sam Tervo. “Why don’t you take what’s left of the open case and I’ll bring the rest to headquarters. That way you’ll have some extras if you need them.”

  “Deal,” said Sam. “Do I by any chance know you from Wayne State?”

  “Maybe. I’m finishing up an MA program. You?”

  “MBA. I thought you looked familiar. I’ll look for you in September. Buy you a Coke?”

  “Deal,” laughed Maggie. As Sam pulled the open case out of the car, Maggie saw the stretch of muscles in his neck and a sweet hollow under the open collar of his shirt.

  “What’s your name?” Sam asked.

  “Maggie.”

  Tapping his badge, Sam grinned and said, “I’m Sam.”
>
  This time Maggie smiled when she looked in the rearview mirror and saw Sam smiling back. He was holding up a can of Coke, as if making a toast.

  Before Maggie made her turn off Fort Street into the downtown area, two military transport vehicles filled with khaki-uniformed troops passed her. The boys sitting at the back of the truck looked at her with blank stares, confusion, fear, disbelief, she couldn’t tell. But to her they were—boys, just boys—who had parked their ten-speed bikes in their parents’ garage to put on a uniform and load a rifle. This was not Vietnam, not a jungle in some god-forsaken outpost. This was Motown, home to the Lions, Tigers, Red Wings and the Big Three. An American city under siege. A civil conflict with faceless, nameless enemies. Maggie imagined the sweltering heat in the canvas-topped truck. Hands sweating around the barrels of guns as these boys thought about Detroiters—about men, women and children who looked like their neighbors.

  The area surrounding the downtown Police Headquarters, between Beaubien and Brush Streets, was dicey in the best of times. Nearby, St. Andrew’s Benevolent Society provided services to the indigent and unfortunate. Almost any time of day you’d find men on the steps drinking hooch from paper bags and entertaining one another by making lewd comments to women and girls of all ages, shapes and sizes. The game was all about getting a reaction, any reaction.

  Ten years ago, Maggie spent a week of her summer vacation with Aunt Jo who just started her career at J. L. Hudson’s. With twenty-five floors, Hudson’s was the tallest department store in the world. Maggie spent her days wandering up and down the elevators and escalators, trying on everything from bikinis to formals, and checking out her image in three-way mirrors. After work, Aunt Jo would meet her in one of Hudson’s five restaurants for a snack and they’d talk about their day. Maggie hit pay dirt on the last day of her vacation when Aunt Jo finally gave into her pleas to check out the city on her own. After three hours of hard sidewalks and no shade, Maggie headed away from Woodward Avenue. With temperatures topping ninety degrees, Maggie was relieved to find a street named Beaubien, where she thought she’d find shade and a park bench to finish reading The Ugly American. As Maggie passed St. Andrews, one of the porch-sitters yelled, “Look at them sweet little titties!” Unsure of herself, Maggie flipped him the bird. She could still feel the humiliating blush of that moment, smell the urine-soaked ground and hear the cackle of laughter.