NEW YORK, 1970
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
THIS IS WHAT GEORGE STARLING’S LIFE had become at its midpoint.
He had made it up north, alright, as he had dreamed so long ago. But he had an unhappy wife who could not be made happy and two teenage children who were good at heart but had been swallowed up by the worst aspects of the North and South while he and his wife were out working long hours to give the kids a life they themselves had never had. He had a two-year-old by another woman that he had to support and a decent-paying but dead-end job as essentially a servant to railroad passengers needing help with their luggage, directions to their seats, another pillow, their shoes shined.
He turned fifty-two in 1970. He had been in the North for a quarter of a century. He would never be the chemist or accountant he had seen for himself in his mind, would never work a white-collar job or any kind of job that would make use of his intellect. And, by an accident of birth, he had managed to suffer the terror and injustice of Jim Crow but just missed the revolution that opened up the best in education and unheard-of career opportunities for black people with the passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960s. The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close to fifty when its effects were truly felt.
He did not begrudge the younger generation their opportunities. He only wished that more of them, his own children, in particular, recognized their good fortune, the price that had been paid for it, and made the most of it. He was proud to have lived to see the change take place.
He wasn’t judging anyone and accepted the fact that history had come too late for him to make much use of all the things that were now opening up. But he couldn’t understand why some of the young people couldn’t see it. Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people.
He did not dwell on this long or let it get him down. He stood as straight-backed now as he had when the South told him he didn’t have a right to. He started going to church and found solace in that. He started singing in the choir. He had a way of sitting back and shaking his head at absurdities—whether segregationists training their terriers to mock black people in the South or black people with no hope or home training shooting each other over a nickel bag in the North.
The young people were letting their hair grow out and wearing Afros that his generation would never have been seen out in public with. They were living together—shacking up, they called it—in a flouting kind of way that even now, tortured as his marriage was, he couldn’t bring himself to do. They were taking things farther than he ever would have had the nerve to contemplate, preaching black power, calling the white man a devil, walking arm in arm down the street with white women, all of those things that would have gotten him killed when he was their age.
The young people picked up on something strong and unnameable in him. They never bothered him as he climbed the stairs out of his basement apartment with his creaky and now-arthritic knees, heading to work at Pennsylvania Station or returning late at night from a forty-eight-hour run.
He knew more than most people of his generation precisely what he had missed out on, and what his life could have been. He had had a taste of college, knew he could do the work, and was convinced he could have succeeded.
How complicated had the ending of his college career been. Looking back on it, the course of his life had turned on that moment. He would not have been working in the citrus groves or had the standoff with the grove owners that had forced him to flee to the North if he had stayed in school. That moment would gnaw at him for as long as he lived. What if his father hadn’t gotten it into his head that George had had enough schooling, if his father had helped out with the tuition George needed, if his father hadn’t had a new family to support and chosen that obligation over college for his son? Then there was segregation. What if colored students had been allowed to attend the state schools near Eustis in George’s day, as they could after the civil rights movement, where it would have been easier for George to make a go of it, work and go part-time if he had to?
Then there was George himself. At midlife, George had to search his soul and live with the regrets of his own missteps. If only he hadn’t rushed to get back at his father by marrying a woman from the other side of the tracks, giving his father further reason to withhold his support and leaving George with a wife to take care of besides, perhaps he would have gotten the education that would have allowed him to fulfill his potential. As it was, he had only to look at Inez to be reminded of what could have been.
“It was spite,” George would say of the decisions he made at that moment in his life.
He took every chance he got to warn young people not to make his mistakes, not knowing if they heard him but feeling he had to get it out.
“That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite,” he said. “Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it.”
LOS ANGELES, 1970
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1970, Robert P. Foster turned fifty-two years old. He had been in Los Angeles for seventeen years. But, for some reason, he was unable to fill up on what he had acquired any more than he could carry fog in his satchel.
He had a practice that minted money. With all those migrants from Texas and Louisiana, he had patients spilling out of his office and into the hall, sitting like refugees on the floor all day, waiting for him to check their blood pressure.
By then he found it hard to walk down a hospital ward without orderlies and scrub nurses hailing him from closing elevator doors, “Hey, Doc! Remember me?” from some long-ago operation, and his feigning recollection so as not to disappoint them.
He was comfortably situated. There was the well-born wife, the three beautiful daughters, and the 3,600-square-foot house west of Crenshaw—if only by a block—with the white Cadillac in the driveway. He was famous even. Ray Charles’s song about him, “Hide Nor Hair,” spent seven weeks on the Billboard charts back in 1962. But he woke up that morning with the feeling that nothing mattered but the events that were about to unfold that day.
Until this moment, he had lived his life with the perpetual sense of watching a reception through a keyhole, of arriving too late and without the proper documentation. There he would be at the front gate, all dressed and superior to the people inside but afraid of being denied admittance. He craved acceptance from those most determined to withhold it from him and met slights and rejections at nearly every turn. The small-minded people in that Jim Crow town. Rufus and Pearl Clement scrutinizing his every move since the day he married Alice. The colonel from Mississippi who wouldn’t let him operate on white women. The motel clerks in Phoenix who denied him a room. The colored people who happened to have gotten to L.A. first and wouldn’t lend a newcomer a hand. That hotel in Vegas.
After all this time, he still couldn’t shake these things. Rufus Clement had been dead for years. The run-in with the motel clerks in Phoenix—that was seventeen years ago. The colonel farther back than that. All the good and extraordinary things that had happened to him seemed never to make up for the rejection he had endured, and he set out to prove that he was better than what they took him for, even though the people who haunted him would never see it, no matter what he did.
Because of the fifty-one previous years of his life, he had a number of complexes. He had a Napoleon complex, a southern complex, a baby-of-the-family complex. He had both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex, and, because he was born on Christmas Day, a Christmas baby complex.
He had never had much of a birthday party, a fate known to just about anyone who enters the world on Christmas. His mother had tried to give him a birthday party once when he was a young boy in Monroe. She invited all the children in New Town. Only four came.
That would not
happen this time. He finally had all the pieces in place to celebrate his having arrived. In a few hours, he would give a gala in honor of himself. It would make up for all the parties he’d never had, all the slights he had ever suffered. It would prove to everyone that he had put Monroe and the South behind him and made it in L.A. He had worked it all out in his head.
He would have guests from back east and up the coast and from all over the country. Monroe, too, of course. The best hams and the finest heavy bond paper for the invitations. Anything that anyone had ever thought of for a party, he would have. It would cost in the thousands, like the major motion picture wrap parties over in Beverly Hills, and he wanted the guests to see every dime of it. He had rehearsed the whole thing in his mind.
That morning he woke up early, just like when he was a teenager back in Monroe racing to lose himself in the celluloid illusion of California sophisticates from the colored balcony of the Paramount. Now he was in California, finally a sophisticate himself, and the urine-scented steps of the Paramount were from another lifetime.
But as he rewound a tape that had yet to be recorded, a thunderstorm gathered in his stomach. He could hear the sounds of a party forming on the first floor. Footsteps on linoleum, the help skittering between the refrigerator and the sink and around the avocado green Formica island back to the refrigerator again. The low screech of high chairs being positioned at the bar, the setting down of serving pieces and highball glasses, the opening and closing of the heavy front door with the arrival of roses and ice. He had done all he could, and now it was up to the workers, who, sweet though they might be, could not possibly understand how crucial it was that there be only cashews and almonds and, for God’s sake, no peanuts in the nut bowls.
The sound of urgent disorder rose up the staircase and into his room. Rather than being pleased that all was going more or less according to plan, he was sickened at the prospect that, for all his preparation, things might be less than perfect.
He could hear the assembling of a party. The storm grew worse in his stomach.
For most of 1970, Robert had devoted himself to the second job of planning his own arrival party. He had told his wife, Alice, and daughter Joy and his mother-in-law, Pearl, as soon as the thought had occurred to him. He told Bunny and Robin in Chicago to be in Los Angeles that Christmas and sent them checks for their gowns with instructions to start shopping immediately. He told his nephew, Madison, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, that he expected him in from Ann Arbor. He told Madison’s mother, Harriet, that he wanted her in from Monroe.
He alerted the members of his wedding party, the former groomsmen in black tails and white kid gloves and the bridesmaids with tiaras planted over their Bette Davis curls, so they could mark Friday, December 25, 1970, on their calendars. Leo, the maître d’ at L’Escoffier, a French restaurant at the Beverly Hilton, would oversee the whole affair. The date fell within weeks of Alice’s fiftieth birthday, as well as Bunny’s and Gold’s birthdays. But the party would be essentially for him.
Robert began devising the guest list as if it were a state dinner. He began thinking menu and decor. A tent over the patio. Belgian lace for the tablecloths. Open bar with unpronounceable top-shelf spirits. He slept with the thought of it. He carried it in his head to work. During breaks in the day, he would think aloud to a nurse about this or that entrée or particular band, not necessarily because he wanted a second opinion—he would not have turned to them for that—but because he assumed everyone was as captivated as he was.
In fact, some were. At the office one day, a patient overheard him buzzing about the party. The patient joined in and offered to help. He said he did a little printing work and could make Doc Foster some nice invitations for the party. Robert was horrified at the notion and thought it should be obvious that no ordinary printer would do for a party of this caliber.
“Thank you very much,” Robert said, “but they’re already taken care of.”
In truth, he had not begun looking. But he was grateful for the reminder and would track down an engraver immediately. “It had to be the best person in the city,” he would say years later. “And I knew the best couldn’t be a patient of mine.”
He dispatched his mother-in-law to get on it right away. Her southern socialite airs would come in handy about now. It would give her something to occupy her mind and less time to scrutinize him. She spent an entire month choosing between white and ecru and the proper weight for the card stock. They found the invitations at the old Bullock’s Wilshire in Beverly Hills, off Rodeo Drive. They had them engraved on Crane’s paper, white with red lettering and a red border along the edge. “Etiquettely,” he said, “it was perfect.”
The invitations read:
Doctor and Mrs. Robert P. Foster
At Home
Friday, the twenty-fifth of December
At nine o’clock in the evening
1680 Victoria Avenue
Regrets Only Cocktails—Dancing
Two hundred invitations went out, and as Robert was at the peak of his practice and popularity, 194 accepted. “We counted all but six R.S.V.P.’s,” he said, “and the six that declined were all out of town.”
That raised the stakes for everything else, beginning with the costumes for the principals. He was the star and would have to look it. He went to the Beverly Hills couturiers, the tailors to Sammy Davis, Jr., who, from across a blackjack table some people said he favored, and found a suit to his liking. Crushed velvet had just hit the scene, very Fifth Dimension, Age of Aquarius, and all that. So that’s what he would wear. Black crushed velvet suit. Black crushed velvet bow tie. Black velvet Bally slippers with a gold medallion above the instep. The suit had a red lining to match the red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, and the shirt cuff fell precisely one inch below the jacket sleeve, just as it should.
Finding something for Alice would take more time. He was the show-off, just waiting for somebody to say, Bob Foster, you too much. They went all over Beverly Hills, to the back rooms of the designer floors of the finest department stores, Robert watching, advising, critiquing, and, for one reason or another, dismissing and rejecting as Alice tried on hanger after hanger of dresses.
One night after work, rather than heading straight home or to the track, Robert drove north and west from his medical office toward Beverly Hills. He went directly to the French Room at Bullock’s Wilshire, which he had been known to keep open in search of the right attire. They had been there already, but he wanted to check again.
This time, he saw an organza gown loaded with beadwork. It was gaudy like New Orleans, and the skirt looked as if somebody had thrown rubies on the sidewalk. Robert told the salesclerk to wrap it up immediately. He carried it home and ran up the steps to show Alice. It was late, and he woke her up.
“Try it on, baby,” he said.
She got up, and he positioned himself three feet to the right and rear in a corner of the yellow-trimmed bedroom to watch her move in it.
Walk.
Turn.
Come to me.
“It became alive when she walked,” he said.
In Ann Arbor, his nephew, Madison, awaited word on the big party between sociology colloquia and trying to take over the administration building at the University of Michigan. He was a three-piece-suited militant who knew how to use a fish fork. Robert had given him a year’s notice about the party. All year long, if the phone rang and it was Robert, he knew what it was about. I’m having Mrs. Williams roast the nuts for the party. Hampton Hawes has agreed to do the jazz set. I’m flying the Smithfield hams in from Virginia.
From the moment they accepted, he and the 194 other people on the guest list (and the guests they were bringing with them) were on a low-grade state of alert whether they liked it or not. Anyone deemed close enough to be invited also knew that Robert would expect them to look and act the part he assigned them. He wanted them to have a good time, of course, but he would also be sure to make note of the cut
of their jackets and where a dress hem fell in relation to the ankle or knee. He would be judging them all. It was just how he was, and he couldn’t help it.
Madison felt the heat as much as anyone. He was the only child of Robert’s deceased oldest brother. Theirs was the closest that either had to a father-son relationship. They were the only Foster men left after all the deaths in the family. Big Madison, when he was alive, had made a point of not leaving the South, not running away and chasing a dream as Robert and millions of others had done, but staying and making the most of the angst and subtle shifts in sentiment of southern whites watching their meal ticket disappear on north- and westbound trains. Little Madison had thus been raised in the South, with the pride and insecurities that came with it, and, despite his father’s decision to stay, looked up to his Uncle Robert, who had made good out west.
A visit from Robert was a cause of great anxiety. Robert once visited Michigan in the midsixties. Madison did his best to impress him. He took him to the fanciest place he could afford. It took some time for the guests to figure out what they wanted from the menu. But they ordered and had a fine time. On the ride back, Robert gave his assessment of the evening.
“That was B+,” he said.
Madison sank into his seat and waited to hear what he had missed.
“You shouldn’t have let your guests struggle with the menu,” Robert told him.
Madison never really got over it. Almost forty years later, and he was still second-guessing the evening. “I didn’t preorder the food,” he would say long afterward. “It was a painful lesson. I learned it.”
He was southern and did everything he could to prove himself. He tried to pull Robert’s daughters back to their Louisiana roots, but they looked upon him as their country cousin from back in Monroe, a place they cared little about, growing up as they did in California.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Page 50