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in the St. Clair River, where they often fished. Folks swore the currents came from Canada, which they could see when standing at the shore. Even when the sanctified preacher put on his white robe and walked through waves and over stones to baptize people, he wouldn't go out too far. Once he dropped his Bible in the water after dipping Melinda Pinkerton backward into salvation and a wave clipped his sleeve, sweeping his Bible away. He didn't try to go after it, either.
    There were three residential sections in Point Haven. Half of the black population lived in South Park by the railroad tracks or near the small factories on the outskirts of town. In South Park there were five churches, one bank, two grocery stores, one Laundromat, one bar, and four liquor stores. Coming from Detroit, you reached South Park first, and the first impression people got was that this place looked like a ghost town. It was. Full of black ghosts who crept quietly up and down the mostly unpaved streets, with no place to go besides the Shingle. If you were under twenty-one, there was roller-skating twice a week, uptown at the McKinley Auditorium, but this was only in the summer. Uptown consisted of only three main streets, which housed stores that sold all the same items, only at different prices. There was no building in the entire town more than four stories, except the YMCA and the telephone company. They were six stories. There was one movie house, three drive-ins, three beaches, a Softball field, and, in the fall, football games at the high school. In the winter there was outdoor ice skating but everybody's main source of entertainment was TV.
    Word was that all the rickety houses along Twenty-fourth Street were going to be torn down to make room for an industrial park. Supposedly it was already in the planning stages, but the colored people didn't believe this for a minute. They had lived here too long, some for as many as three generations. Surely the city wasn't going to tear down the houses that most of them had scrimped and scraped to buy. Where would they go, anyway? There was also supposed to be a plan to build a housing project smack dab in the middle of South Park, but this too they thought was all talk. After all, nothing had been built in this town since the library and state office building uptown, and that was where white people lived.
    Mid Town was where the so-called in-between black folks lived. These people weren't altogether poor because most of them had never received a welfare check, or if they had, they'd been working steadily enough to consider themselves middle class. Many of them were now buying instead of renting, and there were some white folks scattered in their neighborhood, but everybody called them white trash.
    As you continued north on Twenty-fourth Street, past Mid Town, you began to see aluminum siding and the houses were set back farther from the street. The front yards became longer and wider and this was a sure sign you were entering the all-white neighborhoods. There was no name for this area. Directly behind it was the highway, which veered off to the left and led to Strawberry Lane, where middle-class white folks who thought they were upper class lived. The only black folks you ever saw up there were the ones who cleaned house, raked leaves, or picked up trash. Black people called this redneck country. These white folks didn't actually hate colored people, they just didn't like being too close to them. People like the Leonards, who ran the NAACP chapter, the Colemans, whose family was full of schoolteachers, or the Halls, who both had Ph.D's in psychology, couldn't buy a house in this neighborhood without fearing for their lives.
    Even farther north was the North End. It was only ten minutes from Sarnia, Ontario. Here was a mixture of everybody: poor, not-so-poor, middle- and upper-middle-class black and white folks, all of whom considered themselves better than everybody else in town.
    Half the reading and