Praise for the novel

"With unsparing candor, Susan Messer thrusts us into a time when racial tensions sundered friends and neighbors and turned families upside down. The confrontations in Grand River and Joy are complex, challenging, bitterly funny, and—painful though it is to acknowledge it—spot-on accurate."

Rosellen Brown
Author of Before and After and Half a Heart

"Grand River and Joy is a rare novel of insight and inspiration. It's impossible not to like a book this well-written and meaningful—not to mention as historically significant, humorous, and meditative."

Laura Kasischke
Author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Be Mine

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About the book

Halloween morning 1966, Harry Levine arrives at his wholesale shoe warehouse to find an ethnic slur soaped on the front window. As he scavenges around the sprawling warehouse basement, looking for the supplies he needs to clean the window, he makes more unsettling discoveries: a stash of Black Power literature; marijuana; a new phone line running off his own; and a makeshift living room, arranged by Alvin, the teenaged tenant who lives with his father, Curtis, above the warehouse. Accustomed to sloughing off fears about Detroit's troubled inner-city neighborhood, Harry dismisses the soaped window as a Halloween prank and gradually dismantles “Alvin's lounge” in a silent conversation with the teenaged tenant. Still, these events and discoveries draw him more deeply into the frustrations and fissures permeating his city in the months leading up to the Detroit riots.

Grand River and Joy, named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions during the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. Grand River and Joy is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history.

Excerpt

Because of the chores, the routine, on the way up the hall to the two front rooms, Harry didn’t see, or notice, the front window until the Halloween-morning sun glinted off it full on. And because he’d never seen anything like this before on his own front window, but because he had seen pictures, and because a deep ancestral memory of facing something like this was stored in a brain region that science had not yet identified, he now had a conjunction of shock and recognition, a sense that he’d always expected it, but that it didn’t hurt any less for the expecting.

And because Ilo always came up behind him, as if to say, let him be the first to face whatever happened during the night, let him be the scout, and because she had stopped in the ancient bathroom, where the door didn’t close all the way because of the warping and the layer upon ageless layer of paint, to check her lipstick—lipstick of all things, in a place like this. And because she was about to see the same front window he’d seen, he moved quickly in front of it and fooled with the old-fashioned shoes, thinking he might cover what he’d seen or simply distract her so she wouldn’t see, or simply to distract himself so that he himself wouldn’t see, wouldn’t fully see. Of course, the letters were backwards, when viewed from the inside, but it was surprising how many of them worked either way.

Readings and book signings

Wednesday September 30, 8:00 pm.
California Clipper, 1002 N. California Ave., Chicago
Sponsored by the Guild Complex, californiaclipper.com

For information about private events or book group visits, please contact me at Susan@SusanMesser.net.

Buy Grand River and Joy