Michigan State and we reconnected. I had always been attracted to his good looks and intelligence, and now that I was a little older, he was equally drawn to me. We talked for hours, in person and on the phone, and he spent every evening during the holidays with me in my parents’ living room. Like me, Hubert planned to “be somebody,” and everyone in town expected that he would. My family liked him; in many ways he was a lot like my two brothers: smart, cool enough, but basically a good boy. Like everyone else, he gravitated to my darling baby. At last, I had a traveling companion on the trip to “somewhere.”
Having a boyfriend who was in college did wonders for my self-esteem. I refocused on school and even managed to participate in some extracurricular activities. People were complimentary of my performance as emcee of the school talent show, and my poem “Middle-Class High” was published in the school poetry journal. I made my first white friend: blond, pint-sized, funny Diane, who had transferred to Central from a Catholic school. Nicknamed “Squeak,” she and I shared artistic aspirations and a dislike of physical education class. A few years later Squeak would pass me the first marijuana joint I ever accepted; I trusted her implicitly and she became a lifelong friend. My deepening long-distance romance with Hubert made it easier to stay at home when my friends were out. For the first time since Hat Man, I was in a relationship with someone who valued me. I wasn’t looking at anyone else.
As the end of the spring semester approached, my classmates and I focused on writing our first term papers. The black consciousness movement that was inflaming the nation’s youth inspired most of our topics. We former Negroes began to refer to ourselves as Afro-Americans. We embraced the descriptor “black,” which up to then had been a derogatory term to be hurled at each other when we wanted to be hurtful. Huey P. Newton and the fearless Black Panthers, who had taken to patrolling the streets with their berets and rifles, were a source of pride and wonder. My paper entitled “The Negative Effects of the Ghetto on the Black Child” was a chronicle of the disadvantages of growing up on the Mud Lake side of America. It was an easy A.
I could hardly believe senior year was ending. Hubert was home from Michigan State and escorted me to the senior prom. I wore a fashionable blue gown that was a gift from my proud Aunt Dean. Except for needing a sitter, the night of my prom was just as I had always imagined it would be. I was on the arm of my handsome, educated boyfriend who cared about me as much as I did him. Like almost all of the black students, we swung by the corny official prom only long enough to check out the decorations and have our prom portraits taken. Then it was off to Detroit, over the brightly lit Ambassador Bridge to Canada for dinner and a glitzy show. Even though I was not a fan of the comedy of Totie Fields, catching her bawdy act over a steak dinner at the Top Hat Supper Club made prom night even more ritzy and special. I drifted into my parents’ house at dawn, ending a night that couldn’t have gone better.
Now, graduation, the first hurdle between me and the life I wanted, was only a week away. It was customary for graduating seniors to wear mortarboards and gowns for the entire week. I never left the house without at least my cap. Unwed motherhood had not vanquished my dreams, and I wanted the world to know.
I had been so intent on graduating that the ambivalence of commencement took me by surprise. The slightly untethered feeling of no longer being a student was an unforeseen consequence of the end of high school. Even more than having a child, graduation launched me into the world of adulthood at a time when society was changing at warp speed. My generation—the Baby Boomers—was beginning to assert itself in movements that would grow to reflect the size of our cohort. With so many questioning young men in line to be drafted to Vietnam, antiwar unrest was picking up steam. Murmurings of female discontent were evolving into bra-burning demonstrations and a full-throated call for women’s liberation. The feel-good exuberance of the Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was being nudged leftward by the shaggy discontent of the Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction.” As young white Americans surged through the portal of adulthood feeling that satisfaction was their due, my newly minted Afro-American peers were taking their demanding cue.
Dashing young rebels like Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, and Huey P. Newton captured our attention as the vanguard of a black movement that dared to challenge the status quo, the Establishment, and the Man. The world I had been so eager to confront was calling my bluff, and a wisp of floating anxiety accompanied my liberation from secondary school. Without the protective, quasi-adult laboratory of college, would I be up to the challenge of everyday life in times that were growing more tumultuous by the day?
“Turn on the TV. The niggers are tearing up Detroit,” was how Hubert conveyed the news that the city was going up in flames. His choice of words telegraphed a world of information about which people in our community had set off the rioting in the streets. This was not the organized confrontation of our idolized Black Panthers, militant college professors, or radicalized prisoners. Detroit police had raided an after-hours club on Saturday night, rousted the hustling and hanging-out folk, and set in motion violence that would leave the big city of my youth nearly unrecognizable for two generations.
The whole concept of a race riot was an anachronism to my generation. Just as the killing of John F. Kennedy had raised the phenomenon of presidential assassination from the pages of our history texts, the riot in Detroit brought to life something that had once existed only in two dimensions. Mama, Daddy, and our adult relatives talked about the disruption with unequivocal disapproval, though Daddy was quick to return a Black Power salute thrown his way by a carload of tough-looking brothers.
My own brothers and their friends seemed to sympathize with the anarchistic fervor of their Detroit counterparts, but sat out the riots without taking to the streets. Like my parents, I didn’t see the sense of black people running around throwing firebombs in our own neighborhoods. The indignant little girl who had blasted our people at the NAACP meeting was revived within me as I sat glued to the television set. I was half fascinated by the rebellious spectacle, half frightened that the chaos and its clearly dark-skinned origins could place all of us black people in danger. Mostly, I struggled to understand what good the young men skittering past the TV cameras throwing bottles and rocks thought would come of their actions.
The transformative civil rights struggle of my childhood and the March on Washington had been grounded in the nonviolent leadership of Dr. King. Even the black consciousness movement that was taking hold of my peers and me was rooted in the concept of inner growth; we nurtured our connection to the African motherland in an effort to cast off the lingering self-hatred of slavery. My girlfriend’s father, incandescent Pontiac attorney Milton Henry, was a local hero who led our young adult revolution by example. Milton was a handsome, charming black man who had explored the traditional American route to success by serving his country during World War II, graduating from Yale Law School, and becoming a catalyst for change in our city government. His military unit was the Tuskegee Airmen—a black fighter pilot group that distinguished itself by never losing a single plane. Home from the war, he had experienced disrespect from a Southern bus driver after fighting for America’s freedom, and had been scorned by the Pennsylvania Bar Association after passing its test with a stellar score. He was told that his “black ass” would never practice law in that state, and Pontiac’s voting districts were later gerrymandered in a way that made it hard for him to retain his incendiary intellectual presence on the city council.
Milton’s discontent with the status quo led him to become a major activist, a confidant and adviser of Malcolm X, and a litigator of black grievances in and outside the courtroom. No cause was too small; when an interracial couple was refused entry to the Pontiac Central High School prom, Milton Henry led protests in the streets. No power structure was too intimidating; in the courts, he challenged the system by objecting to all-white juries in cases with black defendants as not meeting the standard of “trial by peers.” In the late sixties, after numerous visits to the African continent, he redefined himself by adopting an African name, becoming a vocal proponent of black nationalism, and wearing the dashiki that would soon be sported by everyone from the brother on the corner to George Jefferson on TV. Ultimately, Milton cofounded the Republic of New Afrika, a truly revolutionary group that urged the creation of a new country made up of five Southern states with majority-black populations. Almost miraculously, he promoted his causes without resorting to violence. Ultimately, he split from his compatriots, including