“Foster, you’re the only colored officer with surgical training here,” the colonel said. “You don’t get this often, but I’m going to give you first choice.”
Pershing threw his shoulders back.
“Thank you, Colonel,” Pershing said. “Alright. Now what are my choices?”
World War II was over, and another, smaller one was brewing in Korea. He could go on to Korea, stay in the South at Fort Sam Houston, or go to Austria, a base of the European theater. The colonel encouraged him to go to Austria, and that’s what Pershing chose.
Thousands of colored soldiers had preceded him overseas during the two great wars—more than a million in World War II alone—and that service had been a defining experience for many of them. They were forced into segregated units and often given the most menial tasks or the most dangerous infantry tours. But they also experienced relief from Jim Crow in those European villages, were recognized as liberating Americans rather than lower-caste colored men, and felt pride in what their uniform represented.
They returned home to a Jim Crow South that expected them to go back to the servile position they left. Most resented it and wanted to be honored for risking their lives for their country rather than attacked for being uppity. Some survived the war only to lose their lives to Jim Crow.
In the spring of 1919, a colored soldier named Wilbur Little returned home to Blakely, Georgia, after a tour of duty in World War I.101 A band of white men saw him at the train station in his uniform. They ordered him to take it off and walk home in his underwear. He refused. Soon anonymous notes were warning him to leave town if he wanted to wear his uniform. Days later, a mob attacked him as he greeted friends congratulating him on his achievements. He was found beaten to death on the outskirts of town. He was wearing his uniform. He had survived the war only to be killed at home. Cases like that were cause enough for some men to go north.
Pershing put those things aside and chose to revel in the idea that he could actually be chief of surgery. Alice was elated. They had been married for eight years now and had never lived together more than a few weeks at a time. The two girls, Bunny and Robin, were just about school age now. Alice had been rearing them in Atlanta with her parents while Pershing did his medical training in different parts of the South. Now the four of them could be a family.
They arrived just outside Salzburg, and Pershing went straight to his new commanding officer. He wanted to make a good impression.
“Captain Foster has reported for duty, sir,” he said.
The new colonel was from Mississippi, and, in an instant, Pershing found himself hurled back to the South. The colonel had not expected his new surgeon to be colored, nor had he been told that this colored surgeon was supposed to be in charge—or, if he did know, he chose to ignore it. He told Pershing he had nothing for him to do.
“Why don’t you go out?” the colonel said. “Can’t you go somewhere? Come back in a week.”
“Well, I don’t have any money,” Pershing said. “I’ve come all the way from Fort Houston, and the next payday hasn’t come, Colonel.”
The southern colonel had no assignment for him, so Pershing had no choice but to wait until the following week. When he returned, he learned there would be no leadership position for him. A white officer would be chief of surgery, as it had always been. Pershing would have no title other than staff doctor. Jim Crow had followed him across the Atlantic, and it was hitting him that he would never get ahead as long as these apostles of Jim Crow were over him.
Still, he dutifully made his rounds when it was his turn, tending to the basic needs of the soldiers, itching to do something more in keeping with his credentials. It turned out that many of the patients were soldiers’ wives with gynecological and obstetrical complications that called for interventions that by now he was well equipped to handle. But for one reason or another, a superior officer always seemed to intervene and never let him treat the white ones.
One day a patient was in labor on his watch. The nurse thought it might be time. Pershing said it was still too soon.
“She’s not quite ready yet,” he told the nurse. “Watch her close, now.”
Other doctors tended to deliver when it was most convenient, pump general anesthesia into the patient and get it over with, he recalled years later. Cesarean sections were all the rage. But Pershing had learned from the woman in the cabin back in Louisiana that everything had its own time. He liked to let a baby come when it was ready. Others said he let the labor go on too long. But he thought it was a more welcoming way for one to enter the world if one were not rushed into it. So, while other doctors relied on general anesthesia, he preferred local for the sake of the mother and the baby.
A white doctor of his same rank caught wind of the delay. He stepped in over Pershing’s head and delivered the baby as Pershing watched, too hurt to speak and not daring to.
Never was there a rule written down somewhere, but that was how it played out. “You make the rounds,” Pershing said years later, “and you’re standing behind other doctors, and they’re talking about your patient.”
He was noticing it more and more, like how, whenever a white woman needed surgery, they never let him in the operating room. They sent him over to operate on the men. It was Jim Crow all over again, and he thought again about his short- and long-term prospects. It was reminding him that he had a decision to make. When he got out of the army, he would get as far away from Jim Crow’s disciples as he could.
For now he had no choice. He was under these people and had to make the best of it. He pushed the hurt and anger inside himself and decided that if all they would let him do was take somebody’s pulse, he would take it better than any doctor there. And so he doted on the few patients he got.
“I treated every white boy like he was the king of Siam,” he said, “and didn’t lose dignity. It’s a fine art.”
It all changed one day when a woman in labor suddenly stopped contracting. It was another doctor’s patient, the one who had intervened when he thought Pershing had let a labor go on too long. The doctor was getting second opinions and let Pershing come in this time. Pershing saw the woman on the operating table in preparation for a C-section.
He looked the patient over and gave his diagnosis.
“She’s in uterine inertia,” Pershing said. “The uterus is tired. It’s stopped pushing. You need to start a glucose drip of Pitocin to make the uterus start contracting.”102
The doctor decided to try it. The nurses later went to Pershing and gave him the news.
“The baby’s crawling,” they said. “The baby came.”
One evening soon afterward, he and Alice were at dinner in the officers’ club. The waiter asked what they were drinking and soon reappeared with another round.
“Compliments of the lieutenant over there,” the waiter said.
Pershing reached for Alice’s hand. They danced their way over to the table where the lieutenant, a white man from Kentucky, was sitting with his wife.
“You wouldn’t remember me,” the wife said. “But I’m the patient whose baby you just delivered. I must give you a kiss for saving me from a C-section.”
She gave him a kiss in front of everyone.
“You were the talk of the commissary,” she said.
People were taking notice. He was young, charming, and brilliant. People saw him in line and tittered about him.
“I hear we got a new doctor, and he’s colored,” people were saying.
“Would you have a colored doctor deliver your baby?” somebody else would throw in.
CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, FALL 1937
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
THE MEN WHO pounded on Ida Mae’s door that black night, who raised a chain up to her, frightening her and the children and her sister-in-law Indiana, who slept by the door, went and hunted down her husband’s cousin Joe Lee over the turkeys that had disappeared.
They tied Joe Lee’s hands behind him with hog wire and too
k him to the woods out by Houston, a few miles away.
They tied him up for stealing Addie B.’s turkeys, which belonged to Mr. Edd.
Joe Lee did not work for Mr. Edd—his father had a piece of land he farmed on his own. But it didn’t matter because any boss man in the ruling class could claim jurisdiction when he pleased. A colored man, a few miles west of here, was whipped when he asked a storekeeper for a receipt. If what Addie B. said was true, Joe Lee had committed a serious crime against Mr. Edd, and it didn’t matter who he worked for.
So they took him out to the woods.
They laid him across a log by the schoolhouse. They beat him with the chains that Willie Jim had raised up to Ida Mae. And when he said he didn’t know anything about any turkeys, they paid it no mind. They beat him until his coveralls turned red with blood and stuck to the surface of his skin as if with adhesive. Then they took him to the Chickasaw County jail and left him bleeding alone in the cell.
The next morning, Addie B.’s turkeys wandered back on their own to her cabin across the field. They had been roosting in the countryside and came cawing and clucking before George and Ida Mae knew why Joe Lee was captured in the first place or what had become of him. There were no apologies. Sometimes they just got the wrong man. Joe Lee was known for taking what wasn’t his, but this was one time when he hadn’t.
George went to Mr. Edd first thing in the morning to find out what happened and where his cousin was and to register his discontent. Ida Mae didn’t want him going in the state of mind he was in and told him to mind his words. He had to walk a thin line between being a man and acting a slave. Step too far on one side, and he couldn’t live with himself. Step too far on the other, and he might not live at all.
He got there and asked Mr. Edd what happened.
“Where is Joe Lee?” George asked.
“We tried to wait till you got there,” Mr. Edd said.
George thought it best not to press the matter of what happened to Joe Lee. All these years he had been loyal to Mr. Edd, and Mr. Edd had been fair with him. So he spoke only as a husband and father, which he felt was within his right.
“Very idea you upsettin’ my family,” he said, looking down as he prepared to leave and not quite knowing what else to do.
Joe Lee survived the night. The boss man told George to go get him at the jail. George, Willie, Saint, and the other colored men on the plantation took grease to peel the overalls off him, just as their slave forefathers had done after whippings generations before. They carried Joe Lee back to his father’s farm in the fresh clothes they put on him, and the people went back to picking cotton. The lash wounds on Joe Lee’s back healed in time. But Joe Lee was never right again, people said. And, in a way, neither was George.
On the drive back home, George searched himself, hard and deep. This wasn’t the first beating, and it wouldn’t be the last. Joe Lee had lived, but he just as easily could have died. And there was not a thing anybody could do about it. As it was, Ida Mae felt George was in danger for asking Mr. Edd about it at all. Next time, it could be him. George had a brother in Chicago. Ida Mae’s big sister, Irene, was in Milwaukee and had been agitating for them to come north.
He made up his mind on the way back. He drove into the yard and went into the cabin to break the news to Ida Mae.
“This the last crop we making,” he said.
EUSTIS, FLORIDA, 1944
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
WORD SPREAD THROUGH THE CITRUS GROVES that a cell of pickers had taken to demanding twenty-two cents a box and refusing to pick if they didn’t get it. It was a miracle wage, and soon other pickers were trying to join Lil George’s roving union. But some got scared at the way George talked to the white people like he was equal and never went picking with him again.
The foremen who assembled the crews and oversaw the citrus harvest knew they were in for a long day when they saw George, Mud, and Sam awaiting pickup with other hungry workers at the corner of Bates and Palmetto. Most foremen had little sympathy for the pickers. Their job was to get the fruit out of the trees as fast as they could, and this back-and-forth over pay was wasting time. Even worse, these boys had no business telling white men what to do. Most foremen told the pickers to take whatever the packinghouses were offering.
The Blye brothers were different. They were among the few colored foremen around and had grown up with most of the pickers. Reuben, who towered over most men and had a way of making women forget their husbands; Babe, who liked to gamble and hunt possum; and Whisper, who could speak no louder than that because he had got his throat cut, had been pickers themselves and knew the packinghouses could pay more if they wanted to. Florida growers were grossing fifty million dollars a year from that fruit back in the forties, and the brothers felt the pickers deserved better.103
After assessing a grove, George and the Blye brothers conferred on the price the pickers should ask for. Then the brothers went and told the packinghouse it looked like the pickers flat-out wouldn’t work if they didn’t get their price, and they didn’t know what had got into them. The Blye brothers hoped to convince the packinghouses that, with the war on, there weren’t enough good pickers to choose from and they were stuck with whoever was left, crazy though these pickers may be, that the packinghouses needed to think about paying more if they wanted the fruit out of the trees, at least for now. Of course, the Blye brothers, being colored and walking a fine line themselves, didn’t put it like that. They just said the pickers were refusing and they didn’t know what in the world had got into them.
Back in the groves, the brothers confided to George, Mud, and Sam that they were within their rights to ask and that there was room to maneuver. The packinghouses were wringing the most they could out of all of them, including the Blye brothers, who had reason to believe they themselves weren’t getting paid what the white foremen were, this being the South in the 1940s.
The grove owners and their packinghouses had a near monopoly on the growing and selling of citrus. They were among the richest men in central Florida; their European vacations and their daughters’ cotillions and the visits of their children from the best boarding schools in the South were all chronicled in the local papers that everyone, including workers like the Blye brothers and George, could read. It was a multimillion-dollar industry fed by the demands of wealthy and middle-class families from Chicago to Long Island who expected orange juice with their toast and coffee every morning.
The brothers urged the three men and their frightened, thrown-together crew of pickers to stand their ground.
“Man, sock it to ’em, sock it to ’em,” Reuben told George, knowing how much the grove owners were making off the fruit and that they were likely cheating them all.
“Don’t pick it no less,” Whisper said. “Don’t pick it no less than twenty-two cents. Goddammit, I’m a tell the man y’all ain’t gon’ do it.”
Most times George, Mud, and Sam got their price right there on the spot. But sometimes they didn’t. They couldn’t depend on getting the Blye brothers as their foremen every time. And when they didn’t, some foremen just said no without telling the packinghouse at all. Some went to the packinghouse but accepted whatever the packinghouse told them. Others went ahead and sent the truck back to the packinghouse empty of fruit and waited to see what the owners said. Sometimes the packinghouses relented. But sometimes the driver would come back from the packinghouse saying, “Well, they say they not gon’ pay that.”
The pickers dragged back to the truck when that happened for the empty-handed ride back to town. George started to climb up with them. But most foremen weren’t like the Blye brothers and wouldn’t let him on the truck if he told the crew not to pick.
“You big with your big-mouth self,” one foreman said. “You get back to town best way you can.”
And so George had to thumb a ride for thirty or forty miles after facing down a foreman while his followers rumbled past him on the flatbed of the truck.
He was dev
eloping a reputation for stirring up trouble in the groves. These walkouts were beginning to look something like a union. The grove owners didn’t like unions, didn’t allow unions, and weren’t going to stand for it, especially from a band of colored pickers trying to take advantage of the war. Inez was scared for her husband but too disgusted to let it show. Didn’t he realize that he was colored in the South? Why couldn’t he be satisfied like everybody else?
Big George had been working with them when Lil George stood up to a foreman in Orlando.
The next day, Big George begged off. “I ain’t going with you,” he said. “Y’all too crazy.”
He knew, and everyone else knew, that every time George went out to the groves standing up to packinghouses, he was pushing the limits of what a colored man in Florida in the 1940s was allowed to get away with.
In the months that George had been rousing up the pickers, their world had grown even more dangerous due to the state’s desperate wartime need for labor. From the panhandle to the Everglades, Florida authorities were now arresting colored men off the street and in their homes if they were caught not working. Charged with vagrancy, the men were assessed fines of several weeks’ pay and made to pick fruit or cut sugarcane to work off the debt if they did not have the money, which few of them did and as the authorities fully anticipated. Those captured were hauled to remote plantations or turpentine camps, held by force, and beaten or shot if they tried to escape.
It was an illegal form of contemporary slavery called debt peonage, which persisted in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South well into the 1940s.104 Federal investigations into neoslavery in Florida uncovered numerous abuses of kidnapping and enslavement and led to a 1942 indictment and trial of a sugar plantation company in the Everglades.
Lake County, too, needed as many workers as could be rounded up and in 1944 elected a new sheriff to see to it. He was Willis Virgil McCall, the six-foot-tall son of a dirt farmer who policed the county with a ten-gallon hat, size thirteen boots, and a Winchester rifle he did not hesitate to cock.105 He was openly linked to white supremacists and would be implicated in the deaths and abuse of dozens of blacks in what would become a twenty-eight-year reign. As soon as he took office, he set to work. He arrested forty pickers for vagrancy, including a man from Deacon Fashaw’s crew, in late January and early February 1945. They were arrested for not working on a Saturday, at a time when George, Sam, and Mud were leading actual strikes in the groves.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 18