As the train gained speed as it headed out of the station, George was helping an elderly white lady with her two bags. He had gotten one bag into the rack overhead and was heaving the second bag over the edge of the compartment.
“And just as I went up with the next bag and set it up in the rack,” George said, “something hit me from behind like a truck. Boom!”
The conductor, a sturdy and heavyset man, had knocked into George as George tried to steady himself on the moving train while holding the bag overhead. George’s knees were bad from all the basketball he had played in high school, and, standing on the train rocking as it was, he was off balance and had nothing to hold on to.
“He come up from behind me like a football player blocking the line,” George said.
The conductor shoved George into the seat where the passenger was. George managed to drop the bag onto the rack and not onto the elderly white passenger. But the force of the conductor’s weight knocked George over onto the lady, a precarious situation for a colored man in the South.
The train rumbled from side to side as George stood and tried to straighten himself. He suspected he knew what had happened but looked around anyway and saw the conductor in the aisle grinning. This feud was escalating to a point that was getting dangerous for George. If the passenger were hurt or frightened by a colored man sprawled over her as he was, George would be the one to take the fall for it, and the conductor knew it. If the passenger grew hysterical and accused George of attacking her, there would be nothing George could do, and far worse could happen to him.
But it was a fortunate thing for George that the white woman saw that he had been pushed and did not let it rattle her.
“Well, what’s wrong with him?” she asked George.
“Miss, you know what he was trying to do?”
She shook her head no.
“He was trying to make me drop that bag on your head. He’s just that mean, and he just don’t like nobody. He did that to try to make me drop that bag on your head.”
“What is wrong with him?”
George started telling his story about how the conductor had been harassing him all this time, and now the conductor had pushed him and didn’t even seem to care about the passengers’ safety, and she listened because she had seen it for herself.
“Well, something needs to be done about that.”
“Yes, ma’am. But they just don’t pay me no attention if I try to do anything about it.”
He paused. “But you could do something about it.”
“Well, who do I write?”
“You just write it, and I’ll send it,” he said, not wanting to risk her forgetting about it or just not getting around to it. “You write it, and give it to me.”
And so the woman wrote up her complaint and gave the letter to George. He, in turn, attached a letter of his own and sent it to the superintendent in Jacksonville, Florida, who was over that route at that time.
George never heard from the superintendent’s office about the harassment he had endured.
“But when they saw her letter, they immediately went into action,” he said.
The office called the conductor in to question him about the white woman’s complaint and suspended him for sixty days. It wasn’t long before the conductor found out that it was George who had had a hand in the suspension, and, of course, that did not sit well with him.
George only heard the outcome from other attendants and never got a response himself. Still, it could be said that he had emerged victorious. And that only created more trouble for him. He had expected as much and had prepared for it. When he dropped off the woman’s letter, he decided to do it on the way north, so that by the time it got into the superintendent’s hands, George would be well out of Florida and out of the conductor’s orbit.
Back in New York, he went straight to the railroad office to get a route change.
“Look, I’m not going back to the west coast anymore,” George told the dispatcher. “I had an incident down there with a conductor. I know it’s gonna be rough. And I’m not going back down there.”
George proposed switching with another attendant who had always wanted the coveted all-reserve train to Tampa–St. Petersburg but didn’t have George’s seniority. George was willing to take a less desirable route to avoid any more trouble.
“No, you can’t do that,” the dispatcher told him.
“Look, I just told you I had an incident down there. I’m not going back down there ’cause I know what they’re contemplating. I’m not going back.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t change.”
George decided to call the other attendant himself.
“Look, you been raving you wanna run to St. Petersburg. I tell you what, when we come out Saturday, you set up in my car in the west coast and I’ll set up in your car going to Miami. We’ll just switch. You can go to St. Pete, and I’ll take your run to Miami.”
The attendant took George’s old route, was happy to take it, and, when George’s stand-in got to Tampa, a group of white men met him at the train.
“Yeah, which one of you boys is that nigger boy called Starling? You George Starling?”
“No, sir, I ain’t no George Starling.”
“Why, by God, where is he?”
“Well, he’s not on here.”
“Well, by God, we gonna find him. He done got Captain Wills put in the street for sixty days, and we gonna teach him a lesson.”
When the car attendant who traded routes with George got back from that first run to Tampa, he went to George and told him what had happened.
“Boy,” he said, “I don’t know what you did down there, but they mad with you down there. Don’t you go back down there.”
“Why you think I switched with you?” George asked. “You tell them, don’t worry, I’m not coming back down there no time soon.”
George didn’t go back to Tampa for five years. New conductors and managers came in, and it was only then that George felt it safe to go back.
LOS ANGELES, 1961
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
IT WAS WELL INTO THE NIGHT of March 20, 1961, when the telephone rang at the Foster house on Victoria, and Robert took the call. A nearly hysterical voice was coming at him, and Robert tried to make out the facts tumbling out from the other end of the line. It was the wife of a man who had somehow stumbled and sliced his left hand on the edge of a glass table, severing an artery. The man was hemorrhaging and losing consciousness. The man would need to be seen right away.
Robert would drop everything for any of his patients and had done so countless times, to the detriment of his own family. But this injury got his attention more than most. It was a disoriented Ray Charles, who was facing the loss of the use of his left hand, a disaster for the piano-playing singer, or, with all the bleeding he sustained, the loss of more than that.
The circumstances of the fall were unclear and only made the situation more delicate. For several days, Ray had been under pressure to write a playbook of songs for a big tour coming up.145 He had put in long hours, dictating the music in his head to a collaborator writing the songs down on paper. He had been up most of the previous night, had worked all day and into a second night. He was finding it hard to stay alert, and he was running out of time. He had turned to drugs before and so now summoned his heroin dealer to help him get through the night, according to his biographer Michael Lydon.
After the dealer’s last visit to Ray’s house near Baldwin Hills, Ray went thrashing about alone in his den, knocking into walls and furniture, out of his mind.146 Ray would later say the episode had less to do with drugs than fatigue, although he was candid about his drug use. “I didn’t see how the dope was hurting,” he said in his 1978 autobiography, Brother Ray. “I don’t mean I wasn’t sick now and then in those years, ’cause I was. I’d hit a dry period and go through the same convulsions as any other junkie.”
As for the events leading up to
that night, he said, “I’m sure that sometime during that day—like all days—I had my little fix and maybe it was stronger than usual.”
That night, as he remembered it, he collapsed from exhaustion and “somehow, in my state of unconsciousness, I slammed my hand against a glass table top and sliced it to ribbons.” His hand went numb. He was so high, exhausted, or just out of it, the injury didn’t register with him. And he just lay there, “bleeding like a hog.”
It was around that time that his son, Ray, Jr., ventured into the den.147 Little Ray was six years old and wanted to say good night to his father. The boy opened the door to his father’s den and found him with his shirt covered in blood and blood on the walls.
Ray’s writing partner and his drummer rushed in to help him. They wrapped his hand in beach towels, soaking up two quarts’ worth of blood, and tried to get him walking to keep him from losing consciousness.
They chose not to call an ambulance under the circumstances.148 His wife, Della Bea, then eight months pregnant, instead called Robert, who told them to meet him at his clinic at once. Ray arrived at Robert’s office on West Jefferson Avenue bleeding so heavily that he went into convulsions Robert quickly sewed the wound and admitted Ray into the hospital, where Ray required a transfusion of four pints of blood.
There Robert examined Ray more closely and discovered that Ray had not only sliced an artery but severed a tendon as well. Robert would have to perform emergency surgery to reconnect the tendon if Ray was to regain use of his hand. After the surgery, Robert told Ray he was not to use the hand for six weeks.
“Naturally, I refused,” Ray said years later.149 His big tour was starting the next week, so he told Robert he would just play with one hand. A publicist had already devised an explanation for the public. They would say he had slipped in the bathtub.
Robert could not have been pleased with Ray’s insistence but knew him well enough not to be surprised. With Ray determined to go on tour against doctor’s orders, Robert insisted on going along with him to attend to the wound should anything happen to it, which, naturally, it did.
Robert put a cast on the hand to protect it, but that only seemed to attract attention and endanger it more. “Everyone I met couldn’t resist touching it or shaking it,” Ray recalled.150 “The hand did get infected, but Bob was there to keep me straight.”
The tour was a dream of Ray’s from back when he had gotten his start in those Jim Crow towns in Florida, where he could just see himself leading a big band like Duke Ellington’s—with trombones, trumpets, saxophones, guitars, him on piano, of course, and the Raelettes, his doo-wopping backup singers in their form-fitting sequins and stilettos.151
Robert traveled with them to St. Louis, checking on his most famous patient’s most precious instrument and loving his front-row seat to smoke-filled celebrity. The tour continued on to Detroit, where Ray struck up his orchestra and somebody decided to bring a blind teenager onto the stage. It was said that the teenager had been signed up by a new outfit called Motown and could sing and play the harmonica. It was Stevie Wonder, “Little Stevie,” as he was known back then, who, not surprisingly, idolized Ray Charles and got the chance to play a few songs with him that spring night in Detroit.
Ray’s hard-driving life of drugs and women was beginning to catch up with him—he would end up arrested for drug possession in Boston and would end up fathering a total of twelve children, only three of them by his wife, Della Bea, who divorced him in 1977.
But it occurred to him as he was writing his biography that he did not want to leave the wrong impression about his physician, a man he described as “one of the dearest people I’ve ever known.”152
He said: “I must say something about Bob, though, before anyone gets the wrong idea. Although he was my personal friend, and although he traveled with me for about ten days during the time my hand was in the cast, I never let him do anything illegal for me. I liked him too well for that. If you really love a person, you won’t get him involved in something which might hurt him.”
The hand began to heal, and after a week and a half on the road, Robert felt it safe to return to Los Angeles and to his practice. “He sewed up my hand so smoothly that you can barely detect the cuts today,” Ray said years later. “He’s the man who got me through the crisis with my hand, and for a piano player, that’s some serious business.”
It was time for Robert to leave the tour for another reason. Not only did he have a life and practice back in Los Angeles, he had another patient to attend to. Ray’s wife, Della Bea, was expecting her third child and wanted Robert to deliver her baby. She had had a difficult delivery with her first son before she had heard of Robert Foster and had now come to rely on him.
The baby was born in May of 1961. It was a boy. After all that had happened in the preceding month and the time spent tending them before that, the couple decided to name the new baby Robert.
THE NORTH, 1915–1975
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, scholars would debate the effects of the Migration, whether it was a success or a failure, whether the people who left had done better by leaving or would have been better off staying, whether the poorest among them merely imported the disorganized family systems inherited from slavery and carried into sharecropping or whether the anonymous, overpacked cities merely brought out the worst in the weaker souls. Usually these were macroeconomic, sociological questions as to the effect of the North or South on the people who left or stayed.
But back when the Migration first began, the venerable Chicago Commission on Race Relations, convened after World War I, chose to ask the migrants themselves about their perceptions of how they were faring in the North. These were a few of their responses:
DO YOU FEEL GREATER FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE IN CHICAGO? IN WHAT WAYS?153
Yes. Feel free to do anything I please. Not dictated to by white people.
Yes. Can vote; no lynching; no fear of mobs; can express my opinion and defend myself.
Yes. Feel more like a man. Same as slavery, in a way, at home. I don’t have to give up the sidewalk here for white people.
Sure. Feel more freedom. Was not counted in the South; colored people allowed no freedom at all in the South.
WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHICAGO?
When I got here and got on the street car and saw colored people sitting by white people all over the car I just held my breath, for I thought any minute they would start something. Then I saw nobody noticed it, and I just thought this was a real place for colored people.
Was completely lost, friend was to meet me but didn’t and I was afraid to ask anyone where to go; finally my friend came; was afraid to sleep first night—so much noise; thought the cars would finally stop running so I could rest.
Always liked Chicago, even the name before I came.
Didn’t like it; lonesome, until I went out.
Liked Chicago from the first visit made two years ago; was not satisfied until I was able to get back.
IN WHAT RESPECTS IS LIFE HARDER OR EASIER HERE THAN IN THE SOUTH?
Easier, you can make more money and it means more to you.
Find it easier to live because I have more to live on.
Earn more money; the strain is not so great wondering from day to day how to make a little money do.
Harder because of increased cost of living.
WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT THE NORTH?
Freedom and opportunity to acquire something.
Freedom allowed in every way.
Freedom of speech, right to live and work as others. Higher pay for labor.
Freedom; privileges; treatment of whites; ability to live in peace; not held down.
Freedom of speech and action. Can live without fear, no Jim Crow.
The schools for the children, the better wages, and the privileges for colored people.
The people, the freedom and liberty colored people enjoy here that they never before experienced.
WHAT DIFFICULTIES DO YOU THINK A PE
RSON FROM THE SOUTH MEETS IN COMING TO CHICAGO?
Getting accustomed to cold weather and flats.
Rooming and “closeness” of the houses.
Growing accustomed to being treated like people.
Getting used to the ways of the people; not speaking or being friendly; colder weather, hard on people from the South.
I know of no difficulties.
ARE YOU ADVISING FRIENDS TO COME TO CHICAGO?
Yes. People down there don’t really believe the things we write back; I didn’t believe myself until I got here.
No. I am not going to encourage them to come, for they might not make it, then I would be blamed.
Wish all the colored folks would come up here where you ain’t afraid to breathe.
THE RIVER KEEPS RUNNING
“Why do they come?” I asked a Negro minister in Philadelphia.154 “Well, they’re treated more like men up here in the North,” he said, “that’s the secret of it. There’s prejudice here, too, but the colour line isn’t drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South. It all gets back to a question of manhood.”
—RAY STANNARD BAKER, Following the Color Line
“Every train, every bus, they were coming.”155
—MANLEY THOMAS, a migrant from Tennessee to Milwaukee
WHITFIELD, MISSISSIPPI, FEBRUARY 7, 1958
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
IT WOULD BECOME LEGEND in Chicago among the migrants and their children, the lengths to which some colored people would go to get out of the South. The Great Migration was now into its fourth decade. People who were children when it began were well into middle age. And back in Mississippi, people were still trying to escape. Ida Mae would hear about these people and pray for them.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 41