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By Root 373 0

in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks’ paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world, and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked—because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?

But, dear reader, before you start playing Stephen Foster and “The Star Spangled Banner,” I need to remind you what you may already know: This idyllic existence (so aptly documented on shows like Donna Reed and Father Knows Best) had its dark side. Beyond the fact that women were still years away from a liberation movement, and beyond the fact that had a single black person moved into this neighborhood the FOR SALE signs would have grown like poisonous weeds, there was the insurmountable fact that you simply could not love who you loved if who you loved possessed the same genitalia as you. You didn’t even exist to begin with, so therefore you became either very quiet or a very angry actor performing each day on the heterosexual stage.

Mr. and Mrs. Good had three children: Sammy, Alice, and Jerry. If you wanted to pack up a family and send them around the world so people in other lands could see what a nice American family looked like, the Goods were it. Mr. Good was the manager of the local department store. Sammy was the oldest child, about four years ahead of me in school. He had been adopted when the Goods did not know if the stork would come with any of their own. But then they had Alice, who was my age, and Jerry, who was three years younger.

The Goods lived in a spritely brick ranch house with a large, screened-in back porch and a backyard that stretched a decent 150 feet. Mr. Good’s comfortable income, just slightly better (though not by much) than the rest of the street, allowed him to have a maid who came to the house once a week to do laundry, iron clothes, and clean. She was black and took the bus in from the north end of Flint. Her presence did not cause any “discomfort” in the neighborhood other than making most of the women wish that they had one of them, too.

The Goods were not flashy people, and if there was any other sign that they had some extra income it was that each winter Mr. Good had men come and flood his backyard to create a free neighborhood ice rink for all to enjoy, any time, day or night. He had large floodlights that lit the rink, and if you were to ask the neighbors for one of their fondest Hill/Lapeer Street memories, it would be that of a man who turned over his backyard so that anyone could go skating there for hours on end.

Mr. Good always drove a new-model car, usually a Buick. He was friendly but reserved, a bit shorter than the other dads on the street. He was different in two other ways: he had a black mustache on a street devoid of facial hair, and he was a Jew.

Sometime around the summer of 1964 a sound started coming out of the normally staid Good house. It was a thumping noise, a low, vibrating thump that occurred in a repetitive rhythm, sorta like the beat to a song, but no song any of us were familiar with. BOOM-boom-boom, BOOM-boom-boom, BOOM-boom-boom, BOOM-boom-boom.

It could have been Mr. Good working on something with his new Craftsman tools. It could have been a new kitchen they were putting in. Maybe Hamaad, the local exterminator, had been called in to root out some pesky termites or a possum that got under the crawl space.

But no, it was none of that. It was black people’s music. Specifically, the Supremes, a group none of us had heard of. The song was “Where Did Our