The Warmth of Other Suns

by Isabel Wilkerson

  Each day, the danger was drawing closer, and there was now even more pressure on George’s pickers to work no matter how much George managed to win for them. McCall stepped up his arrests. In February, he showed up at the home of a picker from a crew in Leesburg, fifteen miles west of Eustis.106 The picker, Mack Fryar, had already worked that week, but, to the sheriff’s way of thinking, the picker had no business being at home on a Saturday instead of out in the groves. McCall ordered Fryar to come with him. When he asked why, McCall replied, “None of your damn jaw, just come on with me.” McCall struck the picker in the head with a blackjack for such impudence, knocking him unconscious in front of the picker’s wife and fourteen-year-old son.107 He then hauled the picker to the Lake County jail.

  The FBI began an investigation, and an agent was seen visiting the picker’s wife, Annie. Local whites got wind of it and began plotting mob action because they saw her as “stirring up trouble for the sheriff and the county” by talking to the FBI. Neighbors warned the wife, and upon the picker’s release, the Fryars fled to Harlem, “leaving all their possessions, except some money from the sale of her chickens.”108

  George, now an unintended union organizer, somehow managed to stay under the radar screen for months, or so it appeared, in the eleven hundred square miles of citrus land being policed by Sheriff McCall. But that could not go on forever. The orange groves had become a battlefield over more than just fruit but over the rights of the people lowest down in the citrus world and the caste system itself, and the only thing that couldn’t be known was how far George, Mud, and Sam could push it.

  For several days late in the picking season, no rain fell from the sky. The limbs of the tangerine trees shrank in response. The stems became a tough rubber, harder to cut.

  Lil George and his crew landed in a tangerine grove out in Sanford in the middle of this unpleasant development. They hated picking tangerines. The fruit was small, and it took more of them to fill a box. The very properties that made them easy to peel made them harder to pick. The rind broke and bruised almost at the touch, meaning it was harder to get a box of perfect tangerines. They had to be clipped flush without scraping the fruit, all while the picker was reaching between the branches and trying to steady himself on a limb. Then they had to be packed just so in the crate so the stem of each tangerine wouldn’t injure the rest.

  However difficult they were to pick, tangerines were big sellers at market. Growers in Lake County were known for holding down their production costs, and thus netting “returns to the grower considerably above the state average,” according to a newspaper report.109

  To do that, the grove owners were holding the pickers to nickels on a box. But, with the war on, tangerines were selling an average of four dollars and forty cents a box at auction in 1944, nearly twice the going rate before the United States entered World War II.110 Across the state, tens of thousands of tangerines were being shipped out every week, a good portion of them coming out of Lake County. There were 2.6 million citrus trees in Lake County, the third most in the state next to Polk and Orange counties.111

  George’s crew arrived at the tangerine grove out in Sanford that morning. The foreman said the packinghouse would pay ten cents a box. George said that wasn’t enough what with all they had to do and how hard it was to pick fragile tangerines in the best of conditions, which, after the lack of rain, these weren’t.

  The price was always in flux depending on the circumstances anyway. This was one time where the pickers saw more work for themselves and thought the price should reflect that. So, no, they needed twenty cents. The foreman held his ground. Lil George started to round up the pickers to head back home, to see if twenty cents sounded better to the foreman than no tangerines at all. George told his crew to get back on the truck, we’re going back to town.

  “Well, we done come all this far now,” they said. “We may as well work today, and then we won’t come back tomorrow.”

  This was always the hard part. The pickers liked the miracle money on the days when the foreman gave in. But when the foreman turned them down, they were scared to leave with ill will in the air. What was the point of antagonizing the boss man? Let’s go on and work while we’re out here.

  But George knew that walking out was the only leverage they had.

  “No, we not gonna work today,” George told the pickers. “We are not going to work today. Now, you made enough money yesterday. You already made more in one day than you make in a week doing day’s work. You ain’t never made over six dollars a week. Yesterday, you made seven, eight, nine dollars. So you not losing anything. You gaining. So you can afford to go home and sit down today. Now, we not picking.”

  The pickers didn’t move.

  “What are you worried about?” George asked them. “Just take it easy.”

  “Well, we done warmed our pail.”

  “So now you don’t have to cook. Just take that on back home and eat.”

  Word got back to the owner of the grove that there was trouble in the tangerine stands, and he came out to the field himself. He demanded to know why they were standing there not picking.

  “We not gonna pick tangerines for less than twenty cents a box,” George told him.

  The man cursed and called them names. He had a gun on him like many a man, colored and white, in those parts at that time and told them he would use it if he had to. George, Mud, and Sam knew from hunting squirrel and possum how to handle a gun, too, and told him as much. The pickers, too frightened to speak, watched the standoff between George and the grove owner, not knowing how far either of them would take this thing or how all of them would manage to get out of this.

  The men came to no agreement. The owner stormed back to his truck and sped away in a cloud of dust down an alley of his unpicked tangerine trees. George tried to step onto the flatbed truck to head back to town with his pickers. The foreman pushed him off.

  “No, boy,” he said. “Y’all can’t work, you ain’t gon’ ride. These others can go back on here, but you ain’t going back on there.”

  The pickers were scared to get on the truck and scared not to.

  “Y’all go ’head,” George said. “Don’t worry about me. Go on and get in the truck. You ride. I’ll get back to town. Don’t worry about me. Just get on the truck.”

  He hitched a ride back to town and wondered how long his little union would hold.

  Fear spread among Lil George’s band of pickers after that losing day in the tangerine groves. The owner had come out and seen them not picking. All these walkouts, and there might come a time when the packinghouse wouldn’t let them work at all. The boss men might blame them for the fruit hanging unpicked in the trees. A picker would end up hanging from a tree himself before long, if this kept up.

  They talked among themselves when George, Mud, and Sam weren’t around. They didn’t like how George, in particular, had a way of being what they considered impudent with white people in a way that made everyone nervous.

  Things had gone too far, as the other pickers saw it. These boys had been up north and were going to get all of them killed. That night, after the defeat over the tangerines, they went in secret to the owners of the grove.

  “Us come by to tell y’all how come us didn’t work today,” they said. “Them boys, Sam and Mud and Lil George. You know them is bad. Them boys is bad. We know y’all is always done a good part by us colored folks, and we wanted to work. But them boys told us if we put a ladder in that tree, they gonna snatch the ladder up and stomp us when we hit the ground. So we scared. We know y’all is good white folks and has always done a good part by us. And it wasn’t none a us.”

  Sometime later, a young man was tending the grove owner’s yard. He was clearing debris around the garage when he heard voices inside. They were the voices of grove owners talking among themselves about people on the colored side of town, something about the trouble some men were causing in the groves.

  The yard man recognized the name of Lil Geo
rge Starling. Schoolboy had helped him fill out ration papers for sugar and gasoline. It was wartime, and he wouldn’t have gotten any if he didn’t have papers, and he wouldn’t have had papers if George hadn’t filled them out for him.

  That night after work, the yard man went to Lil George.

  “Lil George, I come to tell you what I heard them saying about you boys today in the garage up there,” he said.

  George looked at him and listened.

  “I heard them plottin’ that they gon’ take you boys out,” he said. “Say if they get rid a you three, that the rest of them they could handle. Say ’cause y’all got a big influence over them others. And so they scared a y’all. So they planning to get rid a y’all.”

  The yard man said he heard mention of a cypress swamp eighteen miles out from town.

  “They talking ’bout taking y’all out to Blackwater Creek,” he said. “They talking ’bout giving y’all a necktie party. They gon’ take y’all out there and hang y’all in one of them cypress trees.”

  Something in George half expected as much. The man went on.

  “I thought I would tell you ’cause you always were nice to me,” he said. “When I had papers to fill out, I would bring my papers to you. You would always do it for me. You never charged me anything. And I wanted you to know. I came out here to tell you y’all better watch yourself.”

  “I appreciate that,” George told him, not wanting to betray the churning in his stomach. “Man, I ain’t studyin’ ’bout them people.”

  Inside was a different story. “I couldn’t rest comfortable,” he said.

  Leaving was his only option. He went to tell his father. Big George was trying to set out a little grove of his own at a place called Grand Island five or six miles out from town. He had just put his orange trees in the ground and had to haul water out to them to soak them so they could catch root.

  Lil George helped him haul lake water in barrels. Together, they poured the pails of water at the roots of the trees every evening.

  Out in the grove that night, Lil George told him his plans.

  “After today, I’m not gonna be able to help you haul no water,” he said. “I’ll help you water these trees. Then I’m gonna get my clothes together, and I’m gonna take on off. Because I’m not gonna change.”

  He told his father what his father already knew. Men had been hanged for far less than what George was orchestrating. And there would be no protecting him if he stayed. In Florida and in the rest of the Deep South, “the killing of a Negro by a white man ceased in practice even to call for legal inquiry,” a white southerner observed in the early 1940s.112

  George and his father lived with that reality every day of their lives, and now it was right before them.

  “So the best thing for me to do,” George told his father, “is to get on out from around here.”

  FORT POLK, LOUISIANA, EARLY 1953

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  BY THE TIME his tour of duty in Austria was over, Pershing had worked his way to a position of esteem if not authority and won awards for his medical skills. He had worked long hours, odd hours, building up his reputation, but it had left him no further ahead. Most southern hospitals wouldn’t allow him inside an operating room no matter how gifted he was or what he’d done in the army. There was simply no place for a high-minded colored surgeon who thought he was as good as, or, to hear him tell it, better than most anybody else. He was now discharged to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and, with no job prospects and a family to support, was plotting his escape from the world he had known. But where? And to what?

  He stayed awake at night weighing the options. All this education and no place to practice and live out his life as he imagined it to be. The only assurance of a job was back home in Monroe. Madison would be overjoyed to have his little brother join his small-town practice. But Louisiana was out of the question. In the time Pershing had been away, the Fosters had lost their place as the leading and often resented colored family in Monroe. His mother, Ottie, had passed away. His father, Professor Foster, had been edged out of his position as principal of Monroe Colored High School, to which he had devoted most of his adult life and identity. He had been forced into retirement and had to watch as a younger rival from his own faculty, Henry Carroll, not only ascended to the principal’s desk but also, through carefully tended connections to a former governor of Louisiana, James A. Noe, managed to get a new colored high school built and named after himself.

  Robert watched the school go up and grieved for his heartbroken father. Just being a Foster in Monroe was like being in exile now. Besides, Alice had no interest in that small town. She wouldn’t stand for it, and Pershing couldn’t bear it.

  He could return to Alice’s home in Atlanta. The Clements would be beside themselves. And that was the problem. Dr. Clement could surely set him up in practice, and Alice and Pershing could join colored society as the daughter and son-in-law of a distinguished university president. They would have a place card calligraphied for them whenever dignitaries came to visit—Eleanor Roosevelt, the Rockefellers, and so forth. They would have everything they aspired to. But at what price? He imagined he couldn’t so much as choose the seasoning on the roast with Dr. Clement down the street.

  As it was, Dr. Clement was growing in prominence in Atlanta, looming larger than ever before, running for the Board of Education, seeking to become the first colored holder of a major office since Reconstruction.

  Back in medical school, Pershing had begun suspecting he had lost his place as the man in his family. While he was away learning to be a doctor, the family grew accustomed to Pershing’s absence, had settled into routines and ways of being that could not be turned off overnight.

  Alice and the girls were living in President Clement’s brick Georgian mansion with its circular driveway and Doric-columned veranda, its groundskeepers and servants, its chintz draperies and damask upholstery in grand parlors and receiving rooms. There, dignitaries gathered for tea and, in the evenings, Dr. Clement read to his beloved granddaughters in a club chair by the fireplace, pictures of the girls on the mantel next to the porcelain figurines. The Clements and Alice would gather the girls around the baby grand to sing along as Alice played.

  Bunny and Robin had become adorable little girls in pigtails and ribbons and patent-leather shoes, but Pershing didn’t truly know them. He had missed the milestones in their lives, their first steps, their first words, their first day of school. It was the Clements who dried their tears when they fell and went over their homework with them.

  Pershing could not blame anyone for what had become of his role in the family. He had agreed to the arrangement. Now he decided he needed to get as far from the Clements as he could to take possession of the family that was slipping from his influence. Atlanta was in the South, anyway. Atlanta was off the list.

  He sat down and tried to figure out—where else did he know anybody? There must be someplace outside the South he could go. In the years since World War I, a large colony of colored people from Monroe had established themselves in Detroit. Faroker Johnson was one hometown man he knew. He was a dentist who had preceded him at Meharry and was practicing up in River Rouge. Then there was his boyhood friend Nimrod Sherman. He was a psychiatrist up in Detroit and doing alright for himself. But Detroit didn’t have the sophistication Pershing was looking for, and he didn’t consider it for very long. Same for St. Louis, where he had done his residency, and even Chicago, which was cold besides.

  What he wanted was New York, where they never turned the lights out and had the best of anything you could think of. But he didn’t know anybody there. That wasn’t the natural route people from Louisiana took to get out of the South. They went where the railroad took them, straight north to Chicago and Detroit. Or west to California, where the climate was more to their liking.

  So Pershing would have to think West, which was not a difficult thing to do. He had been hearing about California all his life, played pretend
with Clara Poe and always said he was going to California before he even knew what it was. Seemed like everybody who left Monroe was talking California. There was a contingent up in Oakland, a branch down in Los Angeles, spreading out to Fresno and over to San Bernardino. He had names, lots of names. More than enough to make a practice out of. Not only was it out of the South, it was about as far as you could get from the South and the Clements, too.

  He began to get excited at the very thought. No more stepping to the side door to get your meal like a hog at a trough. No more operations in somebody’s kitchen and lynchings in the next county. He could dress like he wanted, act like he wanted, be who he wanted and how he wanted to be it. He would not have to try to protect his daughters from some planter with snuff in his mouth and know he couldn’t. In California, he could stand up straight and not apologize for it. He would know what white people’s water tasted like and drink it whenever he wanted. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything. He was going to be a citizen of the United States, like the passport said.

  He told Alice his decision. They could start out fresh in California, the four of them. He would go first and see it for himself. She and the girls would stay in Atlanta for now, and she could start packing their belongings. He would send for them after he got settled. All he had to do now was save a little money. And figure how best to get out.