George Starling knew better. He had been to New York before, just not on the train. He remained in his seat until he arrived at the real New York, where the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor, to help raise him and his cousins were waiting for him at their Harlem doorsteps.
SAN DIEGO COUNTY, APRIL 1953
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
TT WAS EARLY IN SAN DIEGO. Robert Foster could see the concrete skyline and the headlights of a city waking up. He drew closer to the heart of town. Trolley cars clanked past the palm trees on C Street. The Pacific Ocean was up ahead. He was finally on the other side of the desert. He was hours from Los Angeles but well into California, the end of the line when it came to the Migration. It was more a relief now than a wonder.
His eyes scanned the pedestrians for pigment. He stopped at the curb and flagged down the first colored person he saw. He had not talked to a soul during his night in the desert. This would be the first encounter in this new adopted land. His heart sank as he uttered the words that seemed an admission of failure.
“Pardon me,” he said, edgily, to the man. “Where can you find a colored hotel?”
“What do you mean, a colored hotel?” the man said with the casual annoyance of an urbanite interrupted by a tourist. “I can tell you where a hotel is. There’s a hotel right there.”
“No, I don’t want that,” Robert said. “Just tell me where most of the colored folks stay.”
Robert was too tired to argue. Three states without sleep. He had a stubble of beard on his face that he would otherwise never be seen in public with. He could not bear rejection again.
“I could not,” he began, still searching for the right words decades later, “the thought—it was overwhelming—of me being turned down again. I couldn’t do that.”
Robert repeated himself to the man. The man assured him he didn’t have to stay in a place like that in San Diego but gave him the name of a small, featureless hotel anyway, a place for colored people, since he was so insistent on that.
Robert found the place. He slept and showered and shaved for the first time since New Mexico. When he opened his eyes hours later, there he was in a segregated hotel. A week on the road, and he was in the exact same place, it seemed, that he left.
Later in the day, he headed north past the Joshua trees. Los Angeles was another 121 miles from San Diego. He didn’t know which city would be the right one for him—Los Angeles or Oakland—or where he would work or how he would set up a practice wherever he ended up. He had just come out of the desert, in every sense of the word, and the details of his future were too much to think about right now.
He drove north toward whatever awaited him. Billboards popped up on both sides of the highway. They whizzed past him as he drove. They had women in rouge and lipstick and men with stingy-brim hats with the cord above the brim selling lager beer and cigarettes. The people in the billboards were smiling and happy. They looked out onto the highway and straight into the cars.
They kept him company, and, although they weren’t talking to him, he told himself they were. “I played a game that it was for me,” he later said.
Soon one billboard stood out from the others. IT’S LUCKY WHEN YOU’RE IN CALIFORNIA, it said cheerfully. It was hawking Lucky lager beer to every car that passed. Robert repeated those words in his mind.
“It’s gonna be lucky for me in California. It’s gonna be good.”
It had to be. He said it over and over to himself until he actually started to believe it.
THE SOUTH, 1915–1975
FROM THE MOMENT the first migrants stepped off the earliest trains, the observers of the Great Migration debated what made millions of rural and small-town people turn their backs on all they knew, leave the land where their fathers were buried, and jump off a cliff into the unknown.
Planters blamed northern recruiters, who were getting paid a dollar a head to deliver colored labor to the foundries and slaughterhouses of the North. But that only held for the earliest recruits, usually young men, field hands, with nothing to lose. Others said the Chicago Defender seduced them. But they could only be seduced if there was some passion already deep within them.
Economists said it was the boll weevil that tore through the cotton fields and left them without work and in even greater misery, which likely gave hard-bitten sharecroppers just one more reason to go. Still, many of them picked cotton not by choice but because it was the only work allowed them in the cotton-growing states. In South Carolina, colored people had to apply for a permit to do any work other than agriculture after Reconstruction.11 It would not likely have been their choice had there been an alternative. And besides, many of the migrants, people like George Starling and Robert Foster and many thousands more came from southern towns where they did not pick cotton or from states less dependent on it and thus would have made their decisions with no thought of the boll weevil or the pressure on cotton prices.
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, an investigative body created after the World War I wave of migration, decided to ask migrants why they had left. A few of their responses were these:
SOME OF MY PEOPLE WERE HERE.12
PERSUADED BY FRIENDS.
FOR BETTER WAGES.
TO BETTER MY CONDITIONS.
BETTER CONDITIONS.
BETTER LIVING.
MORE WORK; CAME ON VISIT AND STAYED.
WIFE PERSUADED ME.
TIRED OF THE SOUTH.
TO GET AWAY FROM THE SOUTH.
The earliest departures were merely the first step in a divorce that would take more than half a century to complete.13 At the time it was misunderstood as a temporary consequence of war and declared over when the war ended. But the people who before had been cut off from the North now had the names of neighbors and relatives actually living there. Instead of the weakening stream that observers predicted, the Great Migration actually gathered steam after World War I.14
It continued into the twenties with the departure of some 903,000 black southerners, nearly double the World War I wave. It did not stop in the thirties, when, despite the Depression, 480,000 managed to leave. Among them was Ida Mae Gladney. World War II brought the fastest flow of black people out of the South in history—nearly 1.6 million left during the 1940s, more than in any decade before. George Starling was one of them. Another 1.4 million followed in the 1950s, when Robert Pershing Foster drove out of Louisiana for good. And another million in the 1960s, when, because of the more barefaced violence during the South’s desperate last stand against civil rights, it was actually more treacherous to leave certain isolated precincts of the rural South than perhaps at any time since slavery.
The numbers put forward by the census are believed by some historians to be an underestimate. Unknown numbers of migrants who could pass for white melted into the white population once they left and would not have been counted in the Migration. Colored men fearful of being extradited back to the South over purported debts or disputes would have been wary of census takers. And overcrowded tenements with four or five families packed into kitchenettes or day workers rotating their use of a bed would have been hard to accurately account for in the best of circumstances. “A large error in enumerating southern blacks who went North,” wrote the historian Florette Henri, “was not only probable but inescapable.”15
The journey north was a defining moment for the people embarking upon it. Many years later, most everyone would remember how they chose where they went, the name of the train they took, and whom they went to stay with. Some would remember the exact day they departed and the places the train stopped on the way to wherever they were going. A man named Robert Fields, who as a teenager hid in the freight cars to flee Yazoo City, Mississippi, remembered arriving in Chicago on the day Rudolph Valentino died, which would make it August 23, 1926, because the news of Valentino’s death was on the front page of every newspaper and was all anyone was talking about that day.16
Robert Pershing F
oster would remember leaving right after Easter, which, unbeknownst to him, was a popular time to leave. Given a choice, southerners preferred not to go north facing winter, and leaving at Easter gave them plenty of time to adjust to the North before the cold set in. George Starling would remember that he left Florida on April 14, 1945, as if it were his birthday, which in a way it was.
Decades after she left, Ida Mae Gladney would remember that they got the cotton clean out of the field before they left, which would make it mid- to late October, and that she was pregnant with her youngest child but not yet showing, which would make it 1937.
Well after Ida Mae, George, and Robert made their way out of the South, a man by the name of Eddie Earvin would always remember how he left because he went to such great lengths to escape the Mississippi Delta.17 It was the spring of 1963.
Many of the observers and participants of the first wave of the Migration had passed away, having concluded that the phenomenon was long over. They would not have imagined that someone like Earvin might have a harder time leaving than many before him.
But in the early 1960s, secluded regions of the rural South—Alabama and Mississippi in particular—had become war zones in the final confrontation between segregationists and the civil rights movement. Spies and traitors were everywhere, the violence raw and without apology, the segregationists standing more boldfaced, clamping down harder as outsiders tried to force integration on them. No one was exempt—not well-to-do white northerners like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, not upstanding family men like Medgar Evers, or even four little middle-class girls in church on a Sunday morning in Birmingham in 1963.
Earvin’s story is evidence of just how long the Great Migration stretched across a hard century, how universal were the impulses of those who left, and how treacherous it could be to try to leave certain remote and Victorian pockets of the American South throughout the sixty-odd years the Great Migration lasted.
Eddie Earvin was twenty in the spring of 1963. He was a day picker at a plantation in Scotts, Mississippi, walking with pieces of cardboard tied to his one pair of shoes to cover the bottoms of his feet. “We were still in slavery, like,” he would say years later.
He started picking when he was five and chopping weeds off the cotton at six. And when he was seven or eight, a boy named Charles Parker was skinned alive for opening a door for a white woman and speaking to her in a way she didn’t like, as the grown folks told it. Eddie would never forget that.
He picked because he had to and crawled on his knees to cut spinach because spinach is low to the ground. He got ten cents for a fifty-pound basket of spinach. He could pick only two or three baskets a day because spinach is light.
One day when he was out cutting spinach, he sliced into his finger but was afraid to leave the field. It was six miles to the doctor in town. He worked two more days and on the third day decided to walk to town to see the doctor. The boss man passed him on his way back to the field and jumped out of his truck.
“Don’t you know you don’t go nowhere unlessen I tell you to?” the boss man said.
He pulled a Winchester rifle out of the truck. “Maybe I ought to kill you right now,” he said.
The man put the rifle to Eddie’s head.
“You don’t go nowhere unlessen I tell you to go,” he told him.
Eddie was seventeen. He decided that, somehow or other, he would find a way out. When he was twenty, he made his plans. A bus ticket to Chicago was twenty-one dollars, as he remembered it. It took him six or seven months to save up for it. But that was the easy part. Now he had to find out how to use it without calling attention to himself in that little town where everybody knew everybody and it seemed everyone was watching.
There was a bus that stopped near him, but he couldn’t catch that bus or inquire about it. “Everybody knew what you’d be trying to do if you caught that bus,” he said. And you had to walk six miles to get to it.
There was another little bus stop in a town nearby. It did not post the bus schedule, and he was not in a position to ask. “They didn’t tell you the schedule,” he would say years later. “A lot of things you’d want to know, you couldn’t ask.”
So he went to the station at different times of the day. Each time, he sat and waited for the bus to leave, and when it belched out of the depot, he looked at the station clock and made a note of it. Sometimes the bus left early, he found. Sometimes it left late. He tried to get an average time so he would not miss it on the day he wanted to go. That was how he learned the bus schedule.
“We had been checking for months,” he said.
He decided to leave in May 1963 and take his sister and her two children with him. He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” he said. “You had to sneak away.”
That day, he acted as if it were any other day. He went up to a man named Eason and casually asked him if he could give them a ride.
“We going to Greenville today,” he told Eason. “Could you take us?”
He didn’t tell Eason he was leaving Mississippi for good or that he needed to catch a bus pulling out at a certain time or that this was the moment of truth after planning this in his mind for most of his short adult life. The man might not have taken them if he knew. So Eddie kept it to himself.
The four of them got in the car with nothing but a few clothes in a paper bag. When they got to Greenville, they paid the man three or four dollars. Eason figured out what they were up to when he saw where they wanted to be dropped off.
“What do you call yourself doing?” he asked them.
“We getting out of town,” Eddie said. The man got scared himself after that.
Eddie and his sister and her two kids got on the bus, and before anybody knew it, they were out of the county with everything they had in a shopping bag wrapped in a rope of sea grass.
They sat in the back and kept their mouths shut. “The white folks could talk,” he would say years later. “You sit and be quiet. Where we came from, we didn’t move from the back. We just sat there. We weren’t the type to move around. We wasn’t sure we could move. So we didn’t move. That fear.”
He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, “What kind of god they got up inside that church?”
He was getting away from all that now. He looked out at the lights and the billboards. The driver announced that they were passing out of Mississippi and into Tennessee. He was out for sure now and on his way to Illinois, and at that moment he could feel the sacks of cotton dropping from his back. Years later, he would still tremble at the memory and put into words the sentiments of generations who went in search of a kinder mistress.
“It was like getting unstuck from a magnet,” he said.
PART FOUR
THE KINDER MISTRESS
The lazy, laughing South
With blood on its mouth.…1
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic—
That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her
But she spits in my face.…
So now I seek the North—
The cold-faced North,
For she, they say,
is a kinder mistress.
—LANGSTON HUGHES, “THE SOUTH”
CHICAGO
Timidly, we get off the train.2
We hug our suitcases,
fearful of pickpockets.…
We are very reserved,
for we have been warned not to act green.…
We board our first Yankee street car
to go to a cousin’s home.…
We have been told
that we can sit where we please,
but we are still scared.
We cannot shake off three hundred years of
fear
in three hours.
—RICHARD WRIGHT, 12 Million Black Voices
CHICAGO, TWELFTH STREET STATION, OCTOBER 1937
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
THE LEAVES WERE THE COLOR of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets. They had begun to fall from the branches and settle in piles at the roots of the elm trees. The leaves had begun to fall when Ida Mae and George walked into the cold light of morning for the very first time in the North.
Ida Mae and her family had ridden all through the night on the Illinois Central and had arrived, stiff and disheveled, in a cold, hurrying place of concrete and steel. People clipped past them in their wool finery and distracted urgency, not pausing to speak—people everywhere, more people than they had maybe seen in one single place in their entire lives, coming as they were from the spread-out, isolated back country of plantations and lean-tos. They would somehow have to make it across town to yet another station to catch the train to Milwaukee and cart their worldly belongings to yet another platform for the last leg of their journey out of the South.
Above them hung black billboards as tall as a barn with the names of connecting cities and towns and their respective platforms and departure times—Sioux Falls, Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, Omaha, Madison, Dubuque—footfalls, redcaps, four-faced clocks, and neon arrows pointing to arrivals and track numbers. The trains were not trains but Zephyrs and Hiawathas, the station itself feeling bigger and busier than all of Okolona or Egypt or any little town back home or anything they could possibly have ever seen before.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 26