Hastings Street Blues: The Detroit Series #2

Detroit, 1943. Hastings Street, music city in Black Detroit. Barbecue to make your mouth water. Blues to make you jump. Anger hot enough to set the city aflame…

That’s where Azulee Smith, star singer at Calvary Baptist, wants to be—not in the church choir, but in the blues bars and clubs on Hastings Street. It’s a dream, but it’s not a living. To feed her family, she decides to go to work in a defense plant, where the money comes with a high emotional price. When she breaks the color line at Detroit Aluminum, she finds herself praying for the Lord to help her make a way on a factory floor that’s as dangerous as Hastings Street.

Viola Allen didn’t decide to integrate a defense plant for the money. She’s come to fight a war—not just the army’s war against Hitler in Europe, but a Black woman’s war against hatred, in the South she fled as much as in Detroit. In the factory, an all-too-familiar hatred is waiting for her… and so is a surprise. When she and Azulee walk into the plant, every white woman walks out—except for one.

Bess Horowitz, the only Jew on the factory floor, knows all about hatred. But she welcomes the new hires into the plant and endures the same treatment they do—slurs and threats. Isolated and lonely, she leans on her best friend in the plant, Theodore Duncan. He’s sympathetic and political—and he’s not Jewish. As they fall in love, Bess discovers that interfaith love is as difficult and elusive as interracial harmony.

Despite their differences, Azulee, Viola and Bess develop a fragile bond. In the summer of 1943, when racial violence sets Hastings Street on fire and tears Detroit apart, can their friendship survive?