Free Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore

empty-handed.
    “He’s not back there,” we heard Dad tell Mom. “No telling where he is. But he ain’t back there.”
    The cops delivered the bad news to Mrs. Good and she broke down again. Her husband put his arm around her to comfort her, and they walked slowly back to their house, as did everyone else to theirs.
    The next day Sammy Good was found near Pontiac, Michigan. He had either hitchhiked or taken the bus. He was wandering the streets and he was hungry and he didn’t want to go back home. He was tired of the insults and the bullies and the beatings and the inability to enjoy his dance party in peace. He had made it more than halfway to Hitsville, U.S.A., and it was said later, after he had run away again, that he had wanted to meet the Supremes and help them with their “styling.” I’m sure he could have made a significant contribution, and I’m certain that a more open and diverse place like Detroit might have suited him better.
    We never saw Sammy again. He went to live with an aunt, and that was the last anyone wanted to discuss the subject. One month before his high school graduation, Sammy made his way to New York City, perhaps a more accepting and forgiving place, and it was where he went for a stroll one night, down West 13th Street to pier 54, and threw himself into the Hudson River.

 

The Canoe

    W HEN I WAS YOUNG , my grandmother (my mom’s mother), sat me down to tell me the family history. She had an old, musty book of notes and clippings, and stacks of albums with faded photographs. As I was the oldest of the three kids, she wanted me to have this information so that it would be passed down to future generations. But for her, it was not just about handing over the printed material that had been handed to her. It was also about the Irish tradition of sitting the wee ones down and letting them see your face and look into your eyes as you told them “the stories of your people.” My grandmother explained that these stories were the closest thing we had to family jewels. They were who we were, where we came from, how our lives and values and beliefs came to be. In the generations that came before us, they understood that their good fortune (or tragedy) was not just a series of random happenings. They were the result of how one behaved, what integrity one had, and how carefully each of them made the decisions they made.
    These family stories were told and retold without the benefit of computers and other digital devices. One’s history was stored in one’s brain. Now memory is kept on a Sony stick. But as technology changes each year (see: Profit), we lose family photos in the numerous transfers along the way. The floppy disk from fifteen years ago, the one you have the family history stored on, is hard to retrieve now, and if you ask a kid to help you, you will be met with a confused look or a quiet snicker. If you “stored it” in 1995, it’s already ancient history, its ones and zeroes wiped clean.
    Yet, many of the stories told to me by my parents and grandparents are now lost, not because of a misplaced file, but because I wasn’t always listening. The TV was on, I wanted a Clark Bar, I wanted to go out and play, what did this have to do with the Tigers’ pennant chances? All that mattered was right here, right now, me.
    Thus, many stories were, in a single generation, erased through a lack of attention and no sense of duty or responsibility. I long to hear those stories now, and I regret that I did not in my youth respect them for the power and energy and beauty they had. I have tried to piece many of them back together with what my sisters and cousins remember, but I can see they will never truly be made whole again.
    But there was one story that stayed with me long after my grandmother passed. It was the story of her grandfather and how he came to be one of the early settlers in the Flint area (Lapeer County, to be exact). It was an area, at the time, inhabited by the native