War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (9 page)

“You’re right, Bill,” he said after a minute.
“This is going to be an adventure.”

I wouldn’t have used that word, but it seemed oddly appropriate.
Adventure.

I only hoped it would turn out well.

* * *

We were up early the next morning.
We found a pancake house nearby, and I treated us to a large breakfast, along with the morning paper.
I read it back to front, trying to get a sense of this city from a short night’s sleep and a few hours’ drive.

The paper made me wonder why I hadn’t heard much about Cleveland in Chicago.
Mayor Carl Stokes, up for reelection, was having trouble in his own community for something called
t
he Glenville
s
hootout, a three-day riot that began when the police tried to bring down a black militant group the previous summer.

And Stokes wasn’t as effective with the white political establishment as people wanted.
Apparently, the black community had expected miracles from him, and
w
as
disappointed when he managed only to do a good job.

Or so it seemed.
I was making a lot of judgments from a few column inches and some editorials.
Other articles caught my attention:
A
group of blacks were calling for a boycott of McDonald’s because a black man had applied for the franchise store in the Hough District and had been turned down.
And in nearby Akron, a minister who let the SDS meet in his church had been fired.
Local ministers and lay people weighed in on whether something like that could happen in Cleveland.

Midway through breakfast, Malcolm slid a section of the paper toward me, folded to show a picture and an article.
The picture was of a white man, standing on top of a stone structure.
He was young and thin, wearing glasses, his head turned down.
In his right hand, he held a gun, pointed away from his body.

I grabbed the section and read the article. In Pittsburgh, this
twenty-two
-year-old man, who had just come out of the Air Force, climbed a bridge and shot at people below.
The paper listed the shooter’s service record and time in Vietnam.

Malcolm had his hand wrapped around the diner’s white coffee cup.
“We going to Pittsburgh?”

I had thought of it.
I had toyed with taking the long way through Pennsylvania, getting a meal in Pittsburgh and spending the night in Philadelphia before heading north to Connecticut.

“Why?” I asked.

“Just doesn’t look like the kinda place we want to stop,” he said.

I shoved the paper back at him.
Jimmy reached away from his pancakes and grabbed the section before I could stop him.

“Don’t worry,” I said.
“We’re going through Pennsylvania today, but I promise we won’t stop in Pittsburgh.”

Malcolm gave me a relieved smile and went back to his paper.
Jimmy looked at me from the other section, nodded toward the article
,
and frowned.
He didn’t get Malcolm’s objection. But Jimmy had seen a lot more than Malcolm.
Jimmy’d faced white men with guns, and survived.
He’d also traveled a lot more, moved to a new community, and started a new life.

He knew how to deal with differences.

Malcolm didn’t.

I found that troublesome.
I had brought Malcolm along so that he could help me
.  I didn’t want to
take care of him.

* * *

Despite Malcolm’s worry, the drive across Pennsylvania was relatively uneventful.
True to my promise, I didn’t go south to Pittsburgh.
Instead, we drove on Interstate 80 across the middle of Pennsylvania.
I got a bit turned around after we left the Ohio Turnpike. The interstate wasn’t finished through Youngstown, and the maze of roads and the lack of signs
were
very confusing.

But once we hit Pennsylvania, I was all right, taking the driving one hour at a time.
There was a lot of traffic, most of it elderly people on Sunday drives or families enjoying a day off.
There were also a lot of small towns just off the interstate, which made me leery.

Up north, the small towns were generally white, generally suspicious of anyone who didn’t belong — and it was pretty obvious, right from the first glance that I didn’t belong — and unwilling to accommodate newcomers, particularly
black
newcomers.

I had known from the start that this part of my trip would be difficult.
I made sure our gas tank was full before we started into Pennsylvania, and as I drove, I kept an eye not just on the landscape, but also on the other drivers around me.

In some ways, the panel van gave us protection.
We rode higher than most cars, and because of that, our skin color wasn’t immediately obvious.
Judging by the reactions I got at gas stations and at one of the restaurants in Cleveland, no one expected three black males to get out of a van.
I guess the
stereotype
had us in finned Cadillacs or the kind of dilapidated car my Impala had been.

We stopped twice at waysides.
On both occasions, I picked stops that had few cars, instead of the ones that were packed.
Jimmy, who had a small bladder, complained once when I passed a stop, but when I mentioned that there were three trucks in the parking area, he said he could hold it.

Malcolm looked at both of us as if we were speaking a strange language, and maybe we were.
But Jimmy and I had had a couple of bad experiences with truck drivers after we had fled Memphis, and neither of us wanted to repeat that.

We had dinner in Scranton at a roadside diner that I saw a black couple enter just as we were driving past.
The meal was adequate, and the prices reasonable.

The last part of the trip, from Scranton into New York and then on
to Connecticut, proved more difficult than I expected.
My Sinclair map, which I had gotten because Jimmy loved the dinosaur on the cover, showed Interstate 84 as completed.
But my map was optimistic. The road was supposed to be completed by 1969, and in the way of all good road construction, it was behind schedule.

We sat through single lanes and long traffic lines, driving past construction workers who looked uncomfortable in their work uniforms, sweat pouring down their faces.

I felt at a distinct disadvantage not knowing the area.
When Jimmy and I had driven north from Memphis, I had deliberately followed the Old Gospel Trail, knowing I would find friendly motels and a lot of black faces.
It had been the black migration route when the jobs left the south and moved north.

But I knew so little about Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that I had mostly guessed.
T
he
back section
of
Chicago Negro Almanac
listed black population centers in the country by state.
There seemed to be a pattern: Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, which had been my original route.

But when I changed my mind, and decided to push directly to New Haven, I forced us into uncharted territory.
And my little Sinclair map, which was about as trustworthy as a
page
of imaginary lines, said the largest town between Scranton and New Haven was either Middletown, Newburgh, or Danbury
,
which were nothing but names to me.

The road construction continued most of the way through New York.
The workers had left by the time we reached Maybrook.
The new interstate, with its half-opened lanes, became a ghost road a few miles later — dug into the earth, but not yet paved, and we found ourselves directed to 17K leading into Newburgh.
I nearly stopped
for the night
then, but I didn’t see an obviously friendly neighborhood.

It was growing dark as we crossed the Hudson River into Beacon.
I wished we hadn’t taken this route after all.
The interstate had been planned to bypass the main highways, so we found ourselves on back roads that led to places I’d never been with names like Fishkill and Poughquag.

The back roads weren’t direct, either, like the
i
nterstate was supposed to be, so we went at least fifty miles out of our way north to catch Highway 22, which took us south to
US
6 which finally took us into Connecticut.

I’d never been a fan of Connecticut.
The state was too white and too rural for me.
I’d been in and out of it a few times as I’d traveled to New York from Boston.
But I was relieved to see the white and black Connecticut road signs appear in my headlights.
Danbury wasn’t far, and if New Haven hadn’t been less than an hour from there, I probably would have stayed in Danbury despite my misgivings.

I was getting tired, my eyes hurt, and I had been on the road too long.
As it was, we had to stop just outside of Danbury to let Jimmy pee on the side of the road.
He got a little thrill from doing something forbidden in the dark because I wasn’t going to let any cop catch a glimpse of our skin color from our headlights.

We took
US
6 to
Connecticut
34, going through sleepy small town after sleepy small town, filled with expensive homes and barns and silent streets.
Malcolm kept looking at me nervously
,
and I kept ignoring him.
I didn’t want him to see how uncomfortable I was.

Route 34
was supposed to dump us in New Haven, and I wouldn’t have realized that we had gotten there if it
hadn’t been
for Jimmy, yelling and pointing at the tiny
NEW HAVEN
,
POPULATION
136,000
sign that was pushed up near a tree on the side of the road.

Like the rest of Connecticut, the buildings were dark here.
But the area was dilapidated.
Warehouses and storefronts, many made of brick, had boarded windows and barred doors.
Streetlights were either burned out or knocked out.

Ours was the only car on the road.

“You know where we’re staying?” Malcolm asked.

I shook my head.
I felt at a loss. I
hadn’t called ahead, because I hadn’t known New Haven, and wasn’t sure what part of town we would stay in.
But I had expected to arrive in daylight.

Another sign told us we were headed toward the Yale Bowl, and I continued on the same route.
I figured if we got close to the university, we had a chance of finding a motel that might take us.

Since the university was integrated, black parents had to stay somewhere.
So I doubted any of the nearby motels would throw us out, especially if I assured them we’d only stay one night.
My bigger concern was prices.
Yale was an expensive and prestigious university, so I expected the hotel prices
in New Haven
to reflect that.

“Hey, Smoke!” Jimmy scooted forward in his seat.
“There’s a place.”

He was pointing at the right side of the road. There, not a block ahead of us, was a motel, built into the shape of a U.
The center had trees and a carport.
Someone had placed lights at decent intervals, revealing a small group of cars parked at one end.

I turned into the parking lot.
The place didn’t look full.
A neon
V
ACANCY
sign had a burned out V, and no one had turned on the Y
ES
or N
O
below it.

It was nearly midnight, but I decided to take my chances.

I parked beneath the carport. A wrought-iron fence framed the north and south sides of the carport, and the front door of the office had the same wrought
-
iron design.

That door was closed and obviously locked.
But someone had taped a handwritten sign to one side of the door.

I got out and walked to the door.
The sign, above the doorbell, read:

F
OR
AFTER
-
HOURS SERVICE, PLEASE RING BELL
.

AND BE PREPARED TO WAIT
!!!!!

I pushed the button.
A paint
chip fell off into my hand.
From inside, I heard a loud buzzer, obviously designed to wake someone from a sound sleep.

Then I took a step back from the door, just in case I startled the hotel manager.
I had no idea what the ethnic makeup of New Haven was, nor did I know what this neighborhood was like, even though it looked transitional at best.