Our town was any town, but Motown was heaven.

The True Story of Jesse James is still playing downtown; up on Market at the Manor, The Guns of Navarone. It's funny how every town has a Market Street corner full of tomato-red headrags tied back fresh

around the colored faces of summertime women, young and old, shelling beans for 50 cents a bushel, singing gospel music, talking about "Child did ya hear?" and "Girl let me tell ya," laughing a paper sack full between corn-shucking smiles of missing front teeth.

Any morning was every Saturday morning in a catfish box loaded onto the backs of men dragging the catch of the work day up and down concrete floors years and years longer than the oldest one of the bunch

remembers the smell of old pants piled up across tables full of old white ladies selling dead husbands' Sunday suits and shirts still heavily starched for the price of a movie matinee in the balcony, a pack of 19 cent cigarettes

and a Coca-Cola in one of them small baby-green bottles full of Texas Pete hot sauce poured over fresh hog meat that didn't smell like death at all. It smelled like sausage and grits and a bacon grease fire

contained all over the breakfast floor at Whitey's Restaurant, all the way in the black room behind the kitchen sink where we all had to eat back then before LBJ came to town wearing that big-ass cowboy hat

and those black rattlesnake-killing cowboy boots that were at least 2 feet long and a foot wide up and down the side of a stretched-out white Fleetwood wrapped around one of them Texas longhorns.

Everything changed that year. The price of meat went up. A quart of milk was double the price of a loaf of Wonder bread and neckbones were 29 cents a pound. Everything except cigarettes. They stayed the same

in North Carolina, so we smoked Marlboros and Camels and Kools 'til we were drunk as my daddy still scaling fish at that seafood store, wrapping his life in old newspapers like Virginia Mullets fileted fresh outa the dirty blue waters that ran up and down the Market Street of my youth.

Running like a little black boy trying to make it to the Greyhound station before the bus from New York pulled into any one-stop town where I didn't think anyone ever bought a round-trip ticket outa this place that held my father's hand soft as a pretty brown woman.

Daddy was still young then, as handsome as could be, riding out his last cowboy years tall as John Wayne on a drugstore pony. Put a dime in and I robbed 5 and 10 cent stores and rode with the James Gang

for what seemed like the whole Negro section of the movie house. And for another 25 cents, I was the Lone Ranger, black mask, silver bullet, white horse and all

the lights would come on all over the popcorn floor. Daylight would still be waiting outside dancing just above the skyline and pretty boy Elvis was on every, radio station shaking his butt, so we shook our butts 'til the sun went down because he was the king and everything

was all right 'til 'round about midnight in Motown, Detroit when we took off those blue suede shoes and slipped all the way down deep into some of those Rhythm and Blues.

1400 on your AM dial, Ernie's Record Mart spinning records outa Nashville, Tennessee: Smokey and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, The Temps and The 4 Tops, Mary Wells, The Marvellettes and Little Stevie "The Harmonica Boy" Wonder.

And I wonder why every night I prayed Thy will be done and finished before the last song closed my eyes and covered them in corn silk soul. And I admit Diana was the Supreme Angel, but God he was Marvin Gaye.