“It was beautiful,” Ida Mae said years later. “Trees everywhere, all up and down the block.”
Weeks passed. Ida Mae went to work one morning and came back that evening on the streetcar over on Exchange. She walked down Colfax in the neighborhood of brick apartment buildings, barbershop storefronts, and frame bungalows along a route that she was just beginning to learn.
It was then that she noticed something missing across the street from her three-flat. A house had vanished. The people across from her had moved it, or so it appeared. There was now a small crater in the earth where, just that morning, a house used to be.
It was a wonderment to Ida Mae and to James and Eleanor and the grandkids. Why would their nice white neighbors move their house clear off the street? Where did they go? What did this mean?
They would never see them again to get the answers. They would never fully know for sure what had happened or why. It would become part of their family lore, one of the things they would tell over and over again, shaking their heads and hunching their shoulders as they looked out their second-floor window at the sociology unfolding beneath them.
As it was, too much was happening anyway. Within weeks of the disappearing house, moving vans clogged Colfax Street. More people were vanishing, but those people left their houses behind. They took their sofas and upright pianos and were gone.
“Lord, they move quick,” Ida Mae said years later. “And then blacks started moving in. Oh, Lord.”
The whites left so fast Ida Mae didn’t get a chance to know any of them or their kids or what they did for a living or if they liked watching The Ed Sullivan Show like she did Sunday nights. They didn’t stick around long enough to explain. But some of the whites who left the South Side in a panic would talk about it years later and, to tell the truth, never got over the loss of their old neighborhoods.
“It happened slowly, and then all of a sudden, boom,” said a white homemaker who fled Ida Mae’s neighborhood around that time and was quoted by the writer Louis Rosen, who had been a teenager when his parents fled South Shore, in the book South Side.195 “Everyone was gone. Everything changed. Before you know it, this one, that one. And then you heard, ‘So-and-so’s moving.’ People didn’t want to be the last.”
A white father told Rosen, “I fought the good fight.196 I couldn’t stay there with my three kids—my oldest was only fourteen at the time. I made a judgment. I did the best I could.”
“It was like sitting around with a big group,” said a white husband.197 “ ‘Okay, guys, in the next year, we’re all going.’ ”
“It was who found a house first,” the wife chimed in.
“Exactly. And we all went,” the husband said.
To the colored people left behind, none of it made any sense. “It was like having a tooth pulled for no reason,” said a black resident who moved his family in, only to watch the white neighbors empty out.198
By the end of the year, the 7500 block of Colfax and much of the rest of South Shore went from all white to nearly totally black, which in itself might have been a neutral development, except that many houses changed hands so rapidly it was unclear whether the new people could afford the mortgages, and the rest were abandoned to renters with no investment or incentive to keep the places up. The turnover was sudden and complete and so destabilizing that it even extended to the stores on Seventy-fifth Street, to the neighborhood schools and to the street-sweeping and police patrols that could have kept up the quality of life. It was as if the city lost interest when the white people left.
The ice cream parlor closed. The five-and-dime shut down. The Walgreens on the corner became a liquor store. Karen and Kevin enrolled in Bradwell Elementary School and remember being, along with two other kids, the only black children in the entire school in 1968. By the time they graduated four years later, the racial composition had completely reversed: only four white children were left. South Shore would become as solidly black as the North Shore was solidly white. Ida Mae’s neighborhood never had a chance to catch up with all the upheaval and was never the same again.
South Shore was one of the last white strongholds on the South Side, the completion of a cycle that had begun when the migrants first arrived and started looking for a way out of the tenements. There were fifty-eight bombings of houses that blacks moved into or were about to move into between 1917 and 1921 alone, bombings having become one of the preferred methods of intimidation in the North. In neighborhood after neighborhood, with the arrival of black residents the response during the Migration years was swift and predictable.
It happened to ordinary people like Ida Mae and to celebrities like Mahalia Jackson, the leading gospel singer of her day.199 When she began looking for a house in a well-to-do section of the South Side, people held meetings up and down the block. A Catholic priest rallied his parishioners and told them not to sell to her.
“You’d have thought the atomic bomb was coming instead of me,” the singer said.
She got calls in the middle of the night, warning her, “You move into that house, and we’ll blow it up with dynamite. You’re going to need more than your gospel songs and prayers to save you.”
She bought the house. It was a sprawling red brick ranch and the house of her dreams, coming as she had from the back country of Louisiana. A doctor had broken ranks and sold it to her. As soon as she moved in, the neighbors shot rifle bullets through her windows. The police were posted outside her house for close to a year.
“One by one,” she said, “they sold their houses and moved away. As fast as a house came on the market a colored family would buy it.”
Even Hyde Park, an island of sophistication just north of Ida Mae’s working-class neighborhood of South Shore, succumbed to the same fears and raw emotion that overtook the rest of the city’s South Side.
“Shall we sacrifice our property for a third of its value and run like rats from a burning ship,” said a handbill circulated among white residents trying to keep blacks on the other side of State Street, “or shall we put up a united front to keep Hyde Park desirable for ourselves?”
Oddly enough, Hyde Park was one of the very few places where the alarmist rhetoric did not completely take.200 It was home to the venerable University of Chicago, which had its own interest in maintaining stability, and the neighborhood was blessed with some of the finest residential architecture in the city, giving many whites compelling and overriding reasons to stay. The neighborhood was one of the most expensive on the South Side, so blacks who moved there had to have the means just to get in. Thus Hyde Park actually became a rare island of integration despite the initial hostilities.
Still, it was surrounded by all-black neighborhoods in a deeply divided city. Entire communities like the suburb of Cicero remained completely off-limits to blacks, and whites would avoid so much as driving through whole sections of the south and west sides for the remainder of the century.
By the time the Migration reached its conclusion, sociologists would have a name for that kind of hard-core racial division. They would call it hypersegregation, a kind of separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work. The top ten cities that would earn that designation after the 1980 census (the last census after the close of the Great Migration, which statistically ended in the 1970s) were, in order of severity of racial isolation from most segregated to least: (1) Chicago, (2) Detroit, (3) Cleveland, (4) Milwaukee, (5) Newark, (6) Gary, Indiana, (7) Philadelphia, (8) Los Angeles, (9) Baltimore, and (10) St.201 Louis—all of them receiving stations of the Great Migration.
NEW YORK, LATE SUMMER 1967
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
THERE CAME A TIME in the lives of many migrants’ children when the parents sent them south for the summer to protect them from the uncaring streets of the Promised Land or to learn the culture of their family of origin or of the Old Country itself. It was a ritual practiced more or less by most families to ensure that their child
ren knew where they came from.
George and Inez Starling sent their daughter, Sonya, down to Eustis when she was thirteen. What happened there was the last thing they expected: she got pregnant.
“It almost killed my wife,” George said.
It was devastating after all they had been through and was the beginning of the most trying season of their lives. They had been married for twenty-eight years. Theirs had not been a happy union, but at least they had a family and had made out okay in New York, almost in spite of themselves, because they were hard workers and deep down good and decent people.
They had the highest hopes for their children, raised in a world free of the hardships they had endured in Florida. And now, it was as if the South and the backbiting country town they had left had reached back and punished them for having had the nerve to leave.
George had made a winless bargain. He had taken a job that kept him away from the very people he was working so hard to take care of, and he could not undo the damage already done. His absence only created a bigger gulf between him and Inez and left the children without a father most of the time and a mother with demons of her own to raise them practically by herself.
When they learned of Sonya’s pregnancy, George would not admit his pain. He reacted with resignation and had little sympathy for the despair Inez felt, just as, all those years before, she had had little sympathy for his earnestness in organizing the pickers in the citrus groves.
The wounds they both carried had hardened and calcified, and the crisis over Sonya—What would become of her? What kind of future would she have? How would they manage to raise the baby?—only widened the chasm. Each blamed the other and themselves.
When he finally spoke, George’s words cut deep. He said Sonya was no different from Inez. “It wasn’t on account of your purity,” he told her with the barbed edge that seemed to characterize more and more of their interactions, “that it didn’t happen to us. You can’t deny it ’cause you were doing it with me.”
Sonya gave birth to a baby boy she named Bryan. It was 1968. She was fourteen.
George, fatalistic now after all that they had been through, said all he could do was laugh. The sins of the father were visiting the children. He thought back to when he was in the tenth grade and a girl in his class turned up pregnant.
“She named me the father,” he said.
His first reaction was how did she know that he was the father, that just about anybody could have been the father. His second reaction was that there went his future. For the rest of his life, he would be picking fruit during the citrus season and digging up palmetto roots the rest of the time, pretty much the only work around.
“Let me finish the eleventh grade,” he remembered telling the grown folks. “I’d just like to finish out the eleventh grade. I don’t mind doing the right thing.”
The baby was born dead. “I was so relieved,” George said. “I never tried to find out if it was mine.”
Now his daughter had come to him with the same news the girl he dallied with in high school had broken to her family all those years ago.
“Now you know,” he thought to himself. “Now you know how that mother felt when her daughter said she was pregnant by you.”
And so when the crisis over Sonya came up, George could only laugh through his tears at how much of what he had sown he appeared to be reaping. “I never did tell my wife,” George said. “I didn’t try to tell my wife why I was laughing. It was retribution.”
It was retribution on several fronts. At around the same time that Sonya got pregnant, so did another woman. It was a woman George had been going out with behind Inez’s back. As their marriage strained under the weight of unspoken resentments, he gave in to temptation. It only made unpleasant matters even worse and life nearly unbearable for Inez, the discovery of two pregnancies she never would have imagined or wished for.
The sadness and irony seemed to be turning in on itself, and it all seemed to point back to the rash and fateful day that George tried to get back at his father by marrying Inez in the first place. It appeared in the end he was only getting back at himself.
The other woman gave birth to a son. The boy was named Kenny. He was born a few months after Sonya’s baby was born.
Kenny would grow up as an outside son, knowing his father, George, from afar and valuing him more than perhaps anyone else on earth because he was in some ways more like his father than anyone else and loved what little he knew of him.
LOS ANGELES, 1967
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
RUFUS CLEMENT AND HIS SON-IN-LAW, Robert Foster, were at opposite ends of the Great Migration. They represented the two roads that stood before the majority of black people at the start of the century. One man had stayed in the South. One had left it behind. Both had worked long and hard and had all the material comforts most any American could dream of. Yet both men wanted to prove to the other and to everyone else that his was the wiser choice, his life the more meaningful one.
President Clement was the tight-buttoned scion of the southern black bourgeoisie. Robert was a brilliant but tortured free spirit who had run from the very strictures Clement stood for. Clement was a distinguished accommodationist in the Jim Crow South—a beneficiary of it, in fact. He was not unlike the colored university president in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose allegiance was, above all, to the institution he ran, which had become an extension of himself. He was a pragmatist who had learned the fine art of extracting whatever he needed from guilt-ridden northerners or poorly credentialed but powerful segregationists who wouldn’t want him living next to them but might grant him a concession or donate to his cause, the colored graduate school Atlanta University. He was so vigilant as to his place in the colored hierarchy that he kept a card file near his desk, Time magazine reported, on every black person in the United States that he considered “worthy of a high position in Government and education” in case he got a query from Washington.202
Without trying, Rufus Clement had become an unwitting rival of Robert, not only for the affections of Robert’s wife and children but in both men’s unspoken effort to prove that where each man had ended up was the better place for colored people.
Robert had made out well as a noted surgeon in Los Angeles. But it did not rate with his father-in-law, Rufus Clement, who had staked his claim in the South and prospered. President Clement had avoided the messy confrontations of the civil rights era, saying at one point that he had been disturbed, as any right-thinking southerner might be, by the sit-ins but recognized that “this is the way in which they have tried to dramatize the way in which the American Negro has to live in his own country.” He reassured white southerners that “we don’t want to sit beside you, we just want to sit when we eat, like other people sit. We don’t want to intermarry with your people. We simply want to get a drink of water where there is a drinking fountain available.”
His patient and deferential ambitions paid off in 1953, when, against the longest of odds, he was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education—a first for a colored person there, while Robert, by contrast, was doing physicals and collecting urine samples for Golden State Insurance in what then seemed an unpromising start in California.
The Clements hovered over Robert and pulled at his wife and daughters from afar. And as they did, Robert retreated further into the world of his patients, his bookies, and the B-list musicians he liked to hang around with. He was drinking more and coming in late. He had fallen hard for Vegas and now had discovered horse racing. He joined the club room at Santa Anita, since now he could well afford it, and liked to catch the trifectas at Hollywood Park racetrack down in Inglewood.
He would go to Vegas whenever the spirit hit him and could play long and well. “I don’t need to eat and rarely need to go to the bathroom,” Robert would say. “I can go thirty-six hours.” He liked the Sands Hotel and the Las Vegas Hilton. He went so often and bet so much that the hotels started comping him rooms and mea
ls. Some trips, he brought back tens of thousands of dollars. Some trips, he lost that much. But he was hooked.
While he was out betting heavy and looking for something that did not exist and that nobody could give him, Alice set about establishing herself as a proper surgeon’s wife. She joined the Links and the auxiliary of doctors’ wives and hosted teas and bridge parties for the same kind of social set she had grown accustomed to back in Atlanta. The girls took piano and voice lessons and came out at their cotillions in white princess gowns. They were living parallel lives, and Alice and the girls tried not to notice that Robert, whose long hours helped finance their ball gowns and socials, was trying to fill some hole that could not be filled and was hardly ever around.
At one point, Alice had had enough. She packed up the girls and moved back to Atlanta with the Clements, who surely had not approved of how their daughter and granddaughters were faring with Robert. Somehow Alice and Robert made up, and she came back to Los Angeles. But nothing really had changed. They had both come into their own and seemed less suited in some ways than before. Perhaps they had always been ill suited for each other but were just beginning to realize it, now that they had a life and a family and reputations to protect.
They reached a kind of understanding and came together on the shining occasions when their mutual love of hosting and socializing happened to intersect at the grand parties they threw and the costumes they wore.
It was a ritual, and they had an understanding. Robert dressed Alice. Robert bought the clothes. Robert chose the clothes. Dressing Alice was his personal project. He studied her as a surveyor would study an isthmus, knew her assets and liabilities as far as tailoring went, and accompanied her not so much as an advocate for her tastes but as a guardian of his own reputation.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 47