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For a moment, Gray's enthusiasm quiets, and he shakes his head, almost in disbelief. "I've seen a lot of death around me," he says. "The fighting has to stop. It's time for the killing to stop." He cannot articulate his thoughts as eloquently as he wishes, but he is determined to change. He dreams of victories in the boxing ring and a sound home for his girlfriend and their two-year-old son. There have been moments when he was tempted to return to his old ways--"You know, when the bills pile up." But from here on, Gray says, he is determined to keep his fighting in the ring. "They call me the peacemaker now. And I'm proud to be a black man."
DAVID PUGH AUTO-ASSEMBLY WORKER, WAYNE, MICHIGAN
"MUSIC, THAT WAS MY DREAM," SAYS PUGH, "to be a musician." The past tense is both instructive and poignant. In the '60s Pugh was the trombone player of the Citronelle High School band in Alabama. Then, at one rehearsal, he forgot to bring his sheet music. It didn't faze him--he knew the tune by heart. But the band director and the drum major, both white, were certain he couldn't play without the score and humiliated Pugh, who stood alone, undefended, in front of the rest of the band. "The way they jumped on me, it was insulting," he says quietly. The band director, he adds, "made a mark of me so I just gave up music altogether. I just donated my horn to the music department, and I haven't blew a horn since."
In spite of the trials of being bused to the white high school in Citronelle, Pugh isn't willing to admit to having suffered from racism. "I didn't have any real bad experience with the opposite race," he says. "You had to deal with whites all the time in the South," recalls Pugh, now 43. He coped by learning from the poise of his father, a heavy-equipment operator, in such situations. "It was just students that had things instilled in them about what blacks were or what they weren't. You had those that were the die-hard racists. That was just a few. But most of us just got along." After graduating and moving to Michigan to find a job, he was drafted. "You find the same thing in the military. Some people are just die-hard racists, and some people are just people." After his Army service, Pugh went to work for Ford, where he'd had a brief stint before being drafted. He's been there for 24 years. "Almost 24 1/2 years," he points out proudly.
One of eight children, Pugh always wanted lots of kids of his own, but, he says, "God didn't mean for me to have them." He has been married twice. He left his first wife after 14 years together--for many reasons but one in particular. His stepson had become involved with a gang, and the boy's mother refused to acknowledge the problem. One night "gangstas" broke into Pugh's home, pistol-whipped his wife and shot him through both thighs. Soon after, the marriage dissolved. At the end of 1994, Pugh married his second wife Gwen, a training coordinator at Ford. They separated after four months. Marrying was a mistake, Gwen says. But they remain friends and often talk on the phone.