The Warmth of Other Suns

by Isabel Wilkerson

  LOS ANGELES, 1953

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  ROBERT WAS HEADING BACK to Los Angeles sometime in the late spring of 1953 with the relief and uncertainty of a discriminating man having finally made the decision of his life. He would no longer be a visitor here. For better or for worse, it was home now, and yet he knew little of it. It was as if he had married a perfect stranger and was now confronting the enormity of getting to know her after the deed was done. He had to convince himself that he had made the right choice, that, after all, there really had been no choice for an educated and ambitious colored man like him at the time.

  He had driven clear across the country and more than halfway up the California coast and back, with an unsatisfying flirtation with Oakland in between. But his task had just begun.

  What little he had when he set out from Louisiana had now dwindled to almost nothing. He pulled into Los Angeles with all of a dollar and a half in his pocket. Now it somehow had to be converted into enough money to buy equality, meaning, to him, enough to go anywhere, do anything, buy the best of whatever he might want. He could not erase half a lifetime of sirring and stepping off the sidewalk, but he would have a good time trying.

  He did not have enough to put a security deposit on an apartment, so he had to return to Dr. Beck, who put him up in the guest room of his house and made good on his promise to throw some surgery his way.

  Dr. Beck called Robert into his office early on.

  “I want you to examine this lady,” Dr. Beck told him, starting to describe the patient. “This is Mrs. Brown. I think she has a tumor. Check her out. Tell me what she needs.”

  Dr. Beck had already examined the patient and knew precisely what she needed, but it was his way of easing Robert into this part of his practice. “That would feed you,” Robert said years later. “It wouldn’t give me quail, but it would feed me.”

  He needed to find a place so he could send for Alice and the girls. He was itching to be on his own and make a name for himself. He couldn’t do that sitting in somebody else’s office waiting for a patient to need surgery.

  He heard that the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest colored insurance company in the West (founded by William Nickerson, Jr.,35 a migrant from Texas; George Allen Beavers, a migrant from Georgia; and Norman Oliver Houston, a native Californian, in 1925), was hiring doctors to go house to house to collect urine samples and do routine examinations of customers seeking coverage. Years later, this kind of work would be performed by people with a fraction of his education, and it would be unthinkable for a doctor to show up at a patient’s house for any reason, much less to collect urine samples.

  It was beneath him, and it was exactly the kind of thing he was running from in Louisiana. He never wanted to be a country doctor going out to people’s shotgun houses with a satchel in his hand. Now he would be a city doctor going out to people’s bungalows with a satchel in his hand, and not to deliver babies or patch wounds but to take people’s blood pressure, of all things. There was no way he could let the people back in Monroe, and, Heaven forbid, his in-laws, the Clements, know how humble his existence was and how desperate he had become.

  But he needed the money and had no choice. He was better off than most other new arrivals from the South, who didn’t have his credentials. So he made himself grateful for the $7.50 he got for each exam and for the extra $2.50 for the cup of urine.

  It was as if he were a young boy again, going door-to-door as he had in Monroe, asking people if they wanted some figs to can for the coming winter. As he had before, he tried to make the best of the situation. He learned to ingratiate himself to the customers while making sure not to miss anything lest he not get paid. But he never knew what he was in for, because here, unlike in Monroe, he was a small person in a big place, a colored man who had memorized the rules of the South and was now in a place with no rules, none that he could see anyway, and where the Foster name could not help him.

  One day he showed up at the modest home of a colored couple in their fifties somewhere in South Central. The wife met him at the door and called her husband to the front room.

  “John, the doctor’s here,” the wife said before disappearing into the kitchen.

  Robert checked off the answers the husband gave about preexisting conditions, fractures, and surgeries. He gave the man a cup to collect the urine in and later began the physical.

  He put a blood pressure cuff on the man’s arm and began listening for the systolic pressure. Just then the wife walked in and turned the television on so loud that Robert couldn’t hear the beat.

  “Could you ask your wife to please cut the television off?” Robert asked. “I can’t do my examination.”

  The woman complied, and soon Robert was finished with the husband.

  “Now,” Robert said, “I also have a form to examine your wife.”

  “Alright,” the husband said. “Baby, come on. The doctor’s ready to do your physical.”

  The wife came out. She was a large woman in a housedress and apron. She had her hands on her hips. And Robert was unprepared for what she had to say.

  “I told you I wasn’t going to let no nigger doctor examine me.”

  Robert was beside himself. There were many things one could say about the South, but he had never experienced rejection by patients of his own kind and hadn’t anticipated such a thing in this new place. Colored doctors in the South were revered because there were so few of them and because they were the only ones who could be counted on to go into the country to tend to colored people. They were greeted like Union soldiers come to free the slaves. Because of the great chasm between blacks and whites, colored doctors also had a virtual monopoly on colored patients.

  He realized he had entered a more complicated universe than he had imagined. Colored people in California didn’t have to go to colored doctors if they didn’t want to. They had choices colored people in the South couldn’t dream of. To make matters worse for a colored doctor new in town, the very system that instilled privilege and superiority in southern whites also instilled a sense of inferiority in their colored workers, and when the latter got the chance to get all that had been denied them, some sought out whatever they were convinced was superior—and thus white.

  In that one exchange, Robert experienced a by-product of integration that would affect nearly every black business and institution when the doors of segregation flung open—rejection by a black customer base for the wide-open new world. It didn’t take Robert long to realize that he would have to work doubly hard to win over his own people and get any patients at all. But at the moment, he was so hurt and rattled by the woman’s rejection that he couldn’t think straight.

  “It frightened me so,” Robert said years later, “I threw all my things in my bag and dashed out of the house to leave.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor,” the husband was saying.

  “That’s alright, that’s alright,” Robert said, the door closing behind him.

  Robert got into his car and only then realized that, in his haste, he had forgotten something.

  “Oh, my gosh, I’ve undergone this embarrassment,” he thought to himself, “and I don’t have the urine specimen. I’ll only get $7.50.”

  He needed every nickel, so he had no choice. “I cut the motor off,” he said, “swallowed my pride, and went back and got the urine specimen.”

  The woman never let him examine her, and it was just as well. The experience had begun to shape his vision of this new world. “To think that I had come all the way from the Deep South,” he would say many years later, “out here to this Land of Milk and Honey and Opportunity and Intelligence, to find that one of my own color was disrespecting me.”

  He endured such slights for years, and drove all over South Central Los Angeles doing perfunctory examinations and collecting urine as if he were a traveling salesman and not a surgeon with military awards, and he did it because he had to. “That’s the cut that you took t
o get your foot in the door,” he would say years later.

  The ready-made clientele of old Louisianans he had imagined in his more cocksure moments in Monroe did not materialize. The people were there, alright. He saw them spilling onto Jefferson after Mass on Sunday mornings and packing into the clubs and cafés on Central Avenue and shopping on Crenshaw. But he had no easy way to get to them. Some were going to white doctors over in Leimert Park. Some were going to colored doctors they already knew. Specialists like him often built a practice through referrals, but few doctors knew him well enough to refer patients to him, and they seemed content with the surgeons already on their roster. Los Angeles was turning out to be bigger than he thought, and it was harder to make inroads.

  Even the people he knew from back in Monroe were slow to seek him out for treatment. Some people acted different when they got out to the New World. Some changed their names, no longer wanted to be called Boo but by their given name, Henry or William, as Robert himself had done. Some were anxious to leave the South and the past behind and preferred doctors from California, because people from California were seen as better educated, more sophisticated, untainted by the South, and just “better.” Some people disappeared completely—the palest Creoles passed into white society, never to be seen again in the colored world. But mostly, the same cliques and assumptions people had had back home had migrated with them to the New World. Some people had resented Robert and the Fosters back in Monroe and brought the feelings with them. And some just couldn’t bear the idea of little Pershing from back home examining them.

  “All that crowd over there, and then some,” Robert said. “They didn’t come. My father taught half of ’em. There’s enough people in this town to give me the biggest practice in the world that I went to grade school with.”

  He learned he would have to make do without them. He was feeling anxious and slightly desperate and could not bear the thought of failure. Big Madison was back in Monroe, looking to hear how his little brother was handling all those patients he bragged about. Alice and the girls were awaiting word as to when they would join him in what everyone expected would be a fabulous new home. And his father-in-law was surely expecting a progress report on how his practice was faring in Los Angeles, a city the father-in-law had argued against in the first place.

  As it was, the Clements were beside themselves with excitement over developments back in Atlanta. President Clement had decided to make a historic bid to become the first colored member of the Atlanta Board of Education. Colored people could not vote in most of the South and could lose their lives for even trying to register, and here was Clement running for public office in the biggest city in the South. It was such a long shot that Robert was too weary to pay it much attention.

  Somehow Robert had to find a way out of this new desert he was in. So he wasted no time seeking out prospects wherever he could. Rather than bemoan his lowered position as a traveling hack for an insurance company, he started viewing every insurance customer needing a physical as a potential patient. He dug deep into himself and resurrected the earnest little boy selling figs and buttermilk back in Monroe. He put on his most charming self and tried to win over whoever was placed before him, no matter how surly or resistant or lowly the patient was.

  “If people saw you and liked you,” he began, “it’s your job to charm ’em, show how efficient you were.”

  He spent many lonely hours crisscrossing neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles, far from the Becks’ and the manicured places he wanted to be, conducting those insurance examinations.

  Then, in May, a month after he had arrived in Los Angeles, he got word from Atlanta: President Clement had beaten the longest of odds and been elected to the Board of Education. He had defeated an incumbent, 22,259 votes to 13,936 votes, in an election in which Red-baiting detractors tried to get him disqualified in the eleventh hour and his opponent, who had been on the board since 1927, had been so confident that he didn’t even campaign.

  “I didn’t think the people were ready for this,” his opponent, J.36 H. Landers, told The Atlanta Constitution.

  The win made Clement the first colored man to win a major office in Georgia since Reconstruction and was significant enough to merit a story in The New York Times and articles in Time and Newsweek. “For the first time since Reconstruction days,” the Times wrote, “a Negro won nomination to Atlanta’s Board of Education.”37

  The news filtered back as Robert was knocking on doors collecting urine samples and still boarding with the Becks. He was feeling even more isolated and alone and could not let on to anyone back home the truth of his situation. Just as he was needing to muster more faith than ever, the South chose a rare instance to let slip a colored victory—and to President Clement, no less, the man who had never thought Robert measured up, who had taken over his role as the head of his own family, and who second-guessed his every decision, even his choice to leave the South. Robert was struggling with that choice at that very moment and now could not escape his father-in-law’s triumph because it was national news.

  Robert was now feeling the accumulated weight of all the pressure he was under. With the Clements unwittingly gaining a greater hold on Alice and the girls as President Clement rose in stature, Robert fretted over his options. He had to get himself established, and soon. He devised a new plan to gain a foothold in Los Angeles: he now decided to canvass physicians door-to-door to try to build up referrals. He would market himself at the big middle-class churches in town. He would court potential patients wherever he could and dress in such a way that they wouldn’t forget him.

  So, in between insurance exams, he went from building to building, office to office, up and down Jefferson Avenue and off Vermont and Figueroa, tracking down physicians like a homeless man looking for change. He knocked on glass doors with a doctor’s name etched on them as he dreamed his, too, would be one day. He sucked in his pride and took in a deep breath and tried introducing himself to physicians who knew or thought little of him to get into their good graces. He showed them his surgery credentials and asked if they wouldn’t mind referring cases to him if they didn’t do surgery themselves.

  “That was met with poor success,” Robert said. Here he was, a perfect stranger from someplace down south—Louisiana, was it?—asking for a favor. The big-city doctors who happened to beat him to California or had grown up there didn’t take to it kindly. “So you took a lump in the jaw and kept on to the next office.”

  He made his pitch again and again and got the same response. “All the cordiality in the world,” Robert said. “They would say, ‘I’ve been using Dr. XYZ for all these years. Show me one good reason I should change to you.’ ”

  He didn’t have an answer then, but he was determined that one day he would. So he set about trying to make a name for himself the best he knew how. He started going to churches even though he was rarely seen in them otherwise. He decided to put on his loudest, most ostentatious suit and tie so the people would remember him. He made a show of dropping more than he really could afford when the collection plate came his way, enough for the church people to be sure to notice. He asked the ministers if they would introduce him to their congregations from the pulpit as they did politicians and visitors from back South.

  “I didn’t have any responses,” he said.

  But Golden State Insurance kept sending him out, and those after-hours insurance examinations were adding up. So he decided to turn his attention to the people themselves. He was doing more and more of those exams, and the anonymous working-class colored people of South Central L.A., many newly arrived from Texas or Arkansas or parts of Louisiana that Robert did not know, began to notice this smooth-talking physician, who looked more like a high roller than a doctor in his loud, tailored suits and stingy-brim hats and who made you feel as though you were the most important person in the world.

  He conducted enough of those examinations and collected enough of those critical vials of urine to move into an apartm
ent west of Crenshaw, near the Becks. He had been in Los Angeles a couple of months, getting himself set up, and could send for Alice and the girls now. His name was now forming on the lips of cleaning ladies and laborers, gamblers and seamstresses, postal workers and stevedores scattered all over South Central who wanted a doctor they could relate to, the humble and exuberant people who would eventually become the foundation of everything he would ever do in Los Angeles and among the most loyal people ever to enter his life.

  DIVISIONS

  I walked to the elevator and rode down with Shorty.38

  “You lucky bastard,” he said bitterly.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You saved your goddamn money and now you’re gone.”

  “My problems are just starting.”

  —RICHARD WRIGHT, Black Boy/American Hunger

  THE NORTH AND WEST, 1915 TO THE 1970S

  UNKNOWINGLY, the migrants were walking into a headwind of resentment and suspicion. They could not hide the rough-cast clothes ill suited for northern winters or the slow syrup accents some northerners could not decipher. They carried with them the scents of the South, of lye soap and earthen field. They had emerged from a cave of restrictions into wide-open, anonymous hives that viewed them with bemusement and contempt. They had been trained to walk humbly, look down when spoken to. It would take time to learn the ways of the North.

  What they could not have realized was the calcifying untruths they would have to overcome on top of everything else. As soon as the North took note of the flood of colored people from the South, sociologists and economists began studying the consequences of their arrival and drawing conclusions about who these people were and why they were coming.

  “With few exceptions,” wrote the economist Sadie Mossell of the migration to Philadelphia, “the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.”39