Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(4)
We pushed down the plastic knobs at the tops of our doors, listening for that reassuring click of safety, and sat silently for the remainder of the drive to the brewery, as if being quiet might attract less attention to our father’s silver Chrysler.
“We’re only as safe as the locks on our doors,” my father always said.
We knew why—because all the people on the street were black. Men and women walked into liquor stores that had the word LOTTO spray-painted on their awnings, cradling brown paper bags when they came out. Cadillacs crawled along side streets where the houses had been burned in the riots and left to disintegrate. Women wore short skirts in November, their legs muscular and lean above high heels. Men circled in the middle of the road, back and forth, back and forth—angry, wild-eyed, shouting at each other.
I wasn’t as afraid as my father. Sometimes, when my parents traveled with their friends to Bermuda or the Bahamas, I stayed in a black neighborhood in Detroit with our housekeeper, Ollie. I climbed trees with Tony and Dana, Ollie’s grandchildren, and sang gospel at her church. I ate Ollie’s Southern cooking and watched her husband, Raymond, blow cigarette smoke out of his tracheotomy hole. Raymond was dying of lung cancer. I could hear Ollie crying at night through the paper-thin wall and Raymond comforting her by humming old songs, and I wondered why, when it was perfectly safe to stay at Ollie’s, we had to lock our doors to keep the black people on the street out.
“Damn riots,” my father said. “Changed everything. We could hear the gunshots and smell the smoke all the way up in Grosse Pointe.”
They had come the year after I was born, the riots, in 1967. My father said the blacks had changed after that, but of course he wasn’t talking about Ollie. The whites fled Detroit for the suburbs, and the Grosse Pointe police force doubled in size.
“Any nonresident black found within the city limits will be escorted back to Detroit,” I’d once heard a police officer say to a woman who’d complained about black kids swimming at the Farms Pier pool. She’d been dressed in a monogrammed pink-and-green sweater, and her husband’s khakis were cuffed at the ankle, like my father’s. They looked like everyone else in Grosse Pointe, the kind of people who drank cocktails from glasses etched with the motto “You can’t be too rich or too thin,” and whose black cooks and maids were treated entirely differently from the blacks on the streets or at the parks.
“Whites aren’t safe down here anymore,” my father said, switching lanes to avoid hitting a man who carried a boom box on his shoulder. “Coleman Young’s made sure enough of that.”
Coleman Young was the mayor of Detroit. My uncles, who ran the family company, were always having meetings with “Mr. Young,” making “deals” with him. Uncle Peter and Great Uncle John ran the brewery, Uncle Gari the ice cream division. As children, we understood Coleman Young to be the king of Detroit, someone our family had to please at all costs, because we were white.
I could see the Stroh’s Beer sign just ahead, hovering above the brewery in red block letters that lit up the sky. It always startled me, seeing our name like that, and I looked away as we turned into the parking lot, focusing instead on the rows and rows of blood-red beer trucks, Stroh’s Beer inscribed in gold across their sides.
My father swung open the door to the Brewhaus, allowing Bobby and Charlie through. My father smiled down at me as I passed through in my red winter coat, one of my mittens trailing on the floor from the string connecting them through my sleeves.
All through the cavernous space was the pungent scent of hops and wheat. Enormous copper cauldrons of brew, one after another, emitted their noxious steam as we walked a catwalk running along the perimeter of the space. We looked down at the blue-uniformed men adding ingredients to the brew through sliding hatches on the sides of the cauldrons, their rosy copper gleaming under the fluorescent lighting.
“Can you smell that beer?” my father shouted over the din of machinery. “It’s cooked with real fire.” He pointed to a row of six copper cauldrons that had been tiled around their sides, like bathtubs. “The fire’s inside.”
I was just learning to read. I remembered seeing the words Fire-Brewed on a beer bottle in our refrigerator.
“Only fire-brewed beer in the U.S.,” my father told us as he stamped out his cigarette on the catwalk. “We do it the old-fashioned way.”
My father worked in the marketing department. Sometimes he flew to Hollywood to oversee the production of Stroh’s Beer commercials. Later, he’d show me the ads on TV while we sat eating pizza in the library at home. My favorite was an ad in which a pretzel climbed up a bottle of beer to take a sip.
My father led us around the perimeter of the Brewhaus. He tapped his cigarette pack on his open palm to knock one out. He wore a dark-gray pinstriped suit with a white shirt and a burgundy tie dotted with tiny tennis racquets. He had on businessman shoes—lace-up black barges with pointy toes and tiny eyelets in the hard leather, shoes that weighed as much as a small dog when I picked them up in his closet, especially with the shoe horns still in them.
“Dad, wear these,” I would say as he dressed for work, holding up the leaden shoes. He had at least ten pairs to choose from.
He always walked over in his black socks, held up by suspenders just below his knees, and took the shoes. “Thanks, Minuscule.”
My father leaned into the railing of the catwalk. He looked at Bobby and Charlie, as he drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “You two will work here someday. This is your company.”