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of precedent with regard to race relations in Detroit and none of them boded well for the future.
    Many of the performances we did were for black audiences and in one instance I remember a very charming lady walking over to me and saying, “You sing so pretty and you’re so light.” The world was my oyster and everyday brought more knowledge. I learned how essential it was to value the moment, because it was futile to think long term. I learned if I was somebody’s “boy,” I was a short-term investment. I got good at spotting the unmarked police cars that held the “big four,” undercover policemen who were looking for a reason. But, more telling than anything were the unmistakable signposts that outlined the disparity of laws between black and white, and the resulting damage to a human condition forced by white society to singular survival. The uninvited rage that lives on in the flesh of impotence. It was my first opportunity to challenge my racist feelings that were deeply buried beneath the innocence of a young man who believed a class war was more appropriate to his surroundings than a race war.
    I needed to open my eyes a little wider. Of course we lived in a racist society. I could see it in the hesitation of my high school classmates when they refused acceptance of my invitations to watch me perform at the Village. I could see it when we drove through the suburbs and Joe Harris and Ronnie Abner from the Peps would sink down into their seats until their heads were no longer visible. I saw it in the anger of whitepolice who stopped us, who put them in jail and let me go. I knew that whatever I did I couldn’t change the color of my friends’ skin and, like the other members of the Peps, I felt powerless to change the beliefs of people who fostered the institution of racism.
    We weren’t politically motivated civil rights activists. We were teenagers, and every time we performed before white audiences and got applause we allowed ourselves to think we were beyond the reach of that terrible American hate. Joe, Ronnie, Tommy Stone (who was also one of the Peps), and I knew it wasn’t fair. We all wanted to be stars so we could somehow make up for that “something special” that was missing from our lives, and hopefully get the money we believed would insulate us from the injustice of our times.
    It was no different for Lee Rodgers, who had a local hit with a song called “Sad Affair,” or Leroy Belcher with his song “Superman,” or Little Bit and the Dreamers. I fell for Little Bit but she ended up calling me a dog because at that special moment of put up or shut up I chickened out. Nor was it different for any of the hundreds of young black Detroiters who over the years passed through the Village, sometimes launching a career from that building. The great performer Nathaniel Mayer with his “Village of Love” was one, as was Richard Street and the Distants.
    I don’t know what motivated Gabe and Leo Glantz to open that place, other than money, because they had no love for most of the entertainers. But, we all were thankful to have that stage available. In the end though, the Peps knew that no matter what happened, I could never really know about their lives because I had been born white. But for that God-sent moment in my life I might still be dressed in the cloth of ignorance. I soon became confident enough and good enough to go solo.

Chapter 4
     
    I T WAS, THANK G OD, ANOTHER GIG . I had every intention of adding it to the list of good ones I had privately come to distinguish from the sordid self-indulgence of the bad. The carefree youthful days of the Village were forty hard years behind me now. The blinding, swift complicity and love for the fame and fortune that followed was, by now, part of the historical record kept neatly in a trash bin somewhere. The rapacious, slow moving feast from that point to this was too large and tortuous to commit to film. Now I needed whatever work I could lay my