“I told my kids, I’m doing pretty good to be seventy-seven years old,” Saint says.
Ida Mae looks at him and smiles.
“That ain’t old,” she tells him.
On a late winter afternoon, Ida Mae is going through some old funeral programs like other people go through family photo albums. She starts to thinking about all the funerals she has been to, and one stands out in her mind. It was of a nephew of her husband. The nephew had been gay, and his companion, who was white, was distraught beyond words.
As she is recounting the story, Betty, the tenant from upstairs, happens to be there for a visit. Ida Mae describes how the companion was so torn up about her nephew’s death that he nearly climbed into the casket.
“It was a white fella he was living with,” she says. “And when they closed the casket, that white boy fell out. He said, ‘Don’t close the casket!’ He took care of him to the end. Wouldn’t let him go.
“I guess he musta really loved him,” she says.
“That’s not love,” Betty breaks in. “God didn’t mean for no man to be with no other man. They can’t love. They don’t know what love is.”
“You don’t think they can love each other?” Ida Mae asks her.
“Can’t no man love another man. Only men and women can love each other.”
Ida Mae just looks straight ahead toward the couch. She knows what she saw. There are husbands who don’t show out like that for their wives and wives looking relieved and near-gleeful at their husbands’ funerals.
Ida Mae shakes her head. “Well, I don’t know what it is,” she says. “But it sure is something there.”
Ida Mae is the last of her sisters and brothers still alive. The last one to go was Irene, the sister who urged her to come up north in the first place and whom she and her family stayed with in Milwaukee for a time.
Irene died in 1996, and it fell to Ida Mae to manage her affairs. It meant periodic trips to Milwaukee that Ida Mae took on without a great show of sentiment as just part of her duty as a sister.
It is the middle of October 1997. We are driving north toward Milwaukee on Lake Shore Drive along the curves of Lake Michigan. It is a blue glass sea with white waves like the ocean.
It has been a year since Irene’s death, and still Ida Mae has business she must attend to. I had offered to drive Ida Mae and Eleanor to Milwaukee, and we are on our way on a steel gray morning. A storm gathers as we head north on the Edens Expressway. The rain beats down in sheets. Cars are having to slow to a crawl, and you can barely see ahead of you. The trip is going to take much longer than expected. This will cut into the time she will have to take care of things.
“It’s really coming down,” I say. “Of all days. I hope it won’t be like this all day long.”
This sets off an automatic response in Ida Mae, and she reframes the moment for everyone.
“Now, we ain’t got nothing to do with God’s business,” she says, sitting back in her seat.
She adjusts herself and straightens her scarf, contenting herself with whatever the day has in store.
NEW YORK, 1997
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
THERE IS A STIRRING among the original migrants and their children. The question is whether they should go back south again. Some haven’t been back since they left and see no reason to go back now. Some go back and forth all the time and have already picked out a plot of land. George is somewhere in the middle.
He has diabetes now, and his knees are failing him. People in his circle from back in Florida are dying off or moving away. He’s now under some pressure to move back to Florida from people who see the reconstituted South as the next refuge. People who left decades before, and even more likely their children, can’t help but consider the prospects of a changed South, whether they act on it or not.
“Two more years, and I’ll be able to retire and I’m gone,” some of the people who came north have been saying. They say they are weary of the confined spaces, the cost of living, the crime, just the stress of living among so many millions of people.
“I don’t know why you staying up here,” some of them have been telling George. “Better get out from here while you can.”
It reminds George of how people talked during the Migration. “People saying the same thing they said before, just in the reverse,” he says.
But there are fundamental differences, as he sees it, between those who went north and those who stayed in the South, the people and the place he would be returning to if he chose to do so, and he doesn’t see that changing. “Those who didn’t leave learned to accept it,” he says.
He never did.
“I think about leaving the North,” he says. “But I would be a stranger down there. I’ve lived in New York for fifty-two years. I’ve spent more time here than there. I’m a New Yorker now. Almost all the ones I grew up with are in nursing homes. If I went back, what would I do?”
There is an unspoken fear among some migrants to the North that, no matter how much better you could live in the South on those northern pensions, going home is somehow moving backward, a retreat, an admission of failure or at worst something that, like retirement itself, could signal the end of the full part of life and perhaps the end of life itself.
It was making George think back to what had happened to his old friend Babe Blye.
Babe was George’s best friend and upstairs tenant who had worked with him in the orange groves when they were young men. Babe had come to New York in 1932 with his brother Reuben, well before George, and had gone back and forth between New York and Florida until George came up. For years, the two of them had lived in George’s brownstone together with their wives, like the Ricardos and the Mertzes on I Love Lucy.
Babe so loved New York that he didn’t go back to Florida “unless somebody was sick or died,” Reuben said.
For years he worked at a car-painting factory in New York, caught possum in the Connecticut woods for their barbecues, and ran poker parties with George that almost got them killed. When Babe got sick, he went to George and told him he was going home. He asked George, whom he always called Son, a favor before he left.
“Son,” Babe said. “I ain’t gon’ live long, Son. I’m going back. But I want you to sing ‘Peace in the Valley’ at my funeral.”
“Babe, I ain’t got no guarantee I’m a outlive you.”
“Oh, yeah, you gon’ outlive me.”
“Well, close as we’ve been, I don’t know if I can sing that.”
“Goddammit, I want you to sing ‘Peace in the Valley’ now,” Babe said. “Goddammit, I want you to promise me ’fore I go. You gon’ sing ‘Peace in the Valley’?”
“Okay. Yeah, Babe, I’m a sing ‘Peace in the Valley.’ ”
In his heart he knew he couldn’t. They were too close, like brothers, Babe and his wife, Hallie Q., upstairs from George and Inez all those years.
Babe left New York and went back to Eustis to live out his final years. He didn’t live terribly long after that, a couple of years, as George and Reuben recalled.
He knew he was sick when he left. “He didn’t tell me everything,” George said. “But he knew something was wrong. And all of a sudden, he got it on his mind he wanted to go back home.”
Babe died in 1976. The funeral was at the St. James Methodist Church, where George and Sam and Mud had eaten all those oranges back when they were little boys.
George went back for the funeral but didn’t think he could get through a song about his friend and onetime crew foreman who had protected him in the orange groves. He figured he wouldn’t have to, what with Babe being gone and no one there to make him do it.
Apparently Babe had told his wife, Hallie Q. She went up to George at the funeral.
“George, you supposed to sing ‘Peace in the Valley,’ ” she said.
“Q., I can’t do it.”
“You promised Babe.”
Somehow George got through the song Babe loved so much. George had to take his
handkerchief and wipe his eyes at the end of it. The original Migration people were falling away.
LOS ANGELES, AUTUMN 1996
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
ROBERT’S FRIENDS and former classmates are getting up in years and facing one ailment or another, which puts Robert in almost as much demand as he was when he had a full-time practice. A friend called to complain about a cough and thought he might need to go to the hospital. Robert calmed him down and told him to give the antibiotics a chance to work.
Today he has gotten word that an old classmate from Morehouse is in the hospital, and Robert wants to go by and see him. We drive to a hospital in South Central. As we walk out of the elevator to get to the man’s room, someone runs toward us.
“Dr. Foster, Dr. Foster!” the man is exclaiming.
It’s an orderly who recognizes Robert from years ago and comes over to him out of breath.
“Don’t you remember me from that appendectomy over on Hoover?”
“Why, of course, I do,” Robert says, not remembering the man exactly but not letting on.
The orderly gets Robert caught up on what he has been doing the past few years, excitedly trying to impress him, and Robert wishes him well.
“You take care, Dr. Foster.”
“And you as well.”
Back at the house, he boils water for tea. He seems calm and at peace, distant now from the multiple recountings of the hard trek he made to get to California. He has thought things through and seems to have figured out his thinking now.
“I wanted to prove to them that I was worthy of a room,” he says of his rejection along his journey. “I was not sure that I was good enough to be admitted. What good had it done me to get all this education and work as a surgeon in the army?”
“Have you ever been back through that stretch?” I ask him.
“Never,” he shoots back. “I drove back south, but I went through Oklahoma.”
He pauses and considers the effect his migration had on how he lived out the rest of his life and how he raised his daughters. He had demanded more of them than might have been necessary. He became obsessed with appearances and spent a fortune on their clothes and breeding so that there would be no reason for them to be rejected as he had been.
“I gave my daughters ballet so they could know how to walk,” he said, “and create the picture I wanted. I wanted them to have an excellent education. I didn’t want them to suffer the pains of racism. I didn’t want them to have to sit in the back of the bus, suffer the unwelcome attention of low-class whites. I didn’t want them to be open to being molested.”
Unlike other parents raised in the South, he had never drilled into his children the hardships he had endured or dwelled on the limits of what they could or could not do based on the color of their skin. It was a strategy that worked beautifully in producing young women of grace and refinement but left them knowing little about the rituals and folk wisdom and history of the South or, in the end, that part of their father.
He remade himself in California and still does not fully know what to make of the place.
“It seemed like a fairyland the way they painted the picture,” he says, “and I bought it.”
“What do you think now?” I ask him.
“It’s not the oasis that I thought it was,” he says, “but I’ve got over that, too.”
He pauses and considers the options of a stifled life under the deadly combination of Jim Crow and “little-townism,” as he calls it, if he had stayed in Monroe or even Atlanta.
“I don’t think I could have done any better,” he finally says.
Robert has a taste for collard greens and corn bread, and we go to his favorite soul food restaurant in Inglewood, over by Crenshaw and Manchester, run by some people from Mississippi. He orders up yams and collards and smothered chicken and remembers that it was here that he sat when the riots over the Rodney King verdict broke out in May 1992. He remembers telling the waitress to wrap everything up.
“Let me get out of here,” he told her. He turned north on Crenshaw and raced to get back home.
On this day four years later, the streets of his beloved adopted city are quiet, and Robert is momentarily back in the South with the comfort food of his youth. When it’s time to leave, I prepare to take him home, but he tells me he’d rather be dropped off somewhere else. He wants to go to Hollywood Park racetrack, which all too conveniently happens to be right around the corner from the restaurant. He assures me he will have a way to get home. On the short ride to the track, he talks about how it feels, just going into a casino, which, for him, is more than a casino, but freedom itself.
“I walk into a casino,” he says, “and I act like I own it.”
Walking in like that attracts just the kind of attention he craves.
“What kind of surgeon are you?” a man asked him once, having heard he was a doctor.
“A damn good one,” Robert told the man with a smile.
We arrive at the track, and Robert gets out of the car in his windbreaker and pensioner’s slacks. He looks up at the exterior of the track, which looms high above him like a coliseum. He is a regal man, small-boned and slight in stature, and he looks out of place given his bearing and pedigree. But he quickens his step the closer he gets to the entrance. I watch him to make sure he gets in alright until he disappears into the crowd. He does not look back but straight ahead, as if he owns the place.
THE WINTER OF THEIR LIVES
That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.20
—DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, The Negro Family
NEW YORK, 1997
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
THE HARLEM THAT GEORGE STARLING FLED to in 1945 no longer exists. The Savoy Ballroom closed its doors in 1958. Small’s Paradise closed in 1986, its patrons now frail and the children of the Migration not dressing up and dancing the Lindy Hop late into the night. The Sunday stroll died off with the top hat. The black elites—the surgeons and celebrities who would have made their homes on Sugar Hill in previous generations—can now move wherever they want. Many of them live in Westchester or Connecticut now.
The magnificent brownstones are aging and subdivided. Urban pioneers have only recently begun to turn them around. The streets have been given over to teenagers with boom boxes, to crack dealers and crack addicts, prostitutes and soapbox preachers, wig shops and liquor stores, corner stores selling single cigarettes for a nickel apiece and homeless people pushing their worldly possessions in shopping carts down what is no longer Lenox Avenue but Malcolm X Boulevard.
George Starling has lived in Harlem for half a century and knows and loves it in spite of itself. Many of the people who came up from the South have passed away. There are fewer and fewer old-timers left. Still he makes his way around with a sense of ownership and belonging. He has lived there for longer than most of the people around him have been alive.
It has gotten to the point that his mind is still sharp but he can’t drive anymore on account of his eyesight, and his knees fairly creak as he negotiates the steps to the basement apartment of his brownstone on 132nd Street.
When he returns home in the evening from church or the grocery store, and if someone happens to stop to talk to him, someone who, say, maybe has not been seen on the block before, a voice might holler out from across the street in the dark. It is a neighbor watching out for him.
“You alright, Mr. G.? Everything alright, Mr. George?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.”
“Okay. We just want to be sure.”
Back in 1950, on the occasion of Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary as a black community, the New York Age asked residents why they had moved to Harlem and why they stayed.
An ice vendor was one of the people who responded. “I know everybody in my block,” he said, “and I don’t think I want to go anywhere else to live, until I go to heaven.”21
George Starl
ing knows how the ice vendor felt. As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, he has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.
A neighbor passes and yells, “Hey, Mr. George!” He smiles and nods and lifts his hand in the neighbor’s direction.
Despite all the changes, it is still a neighborhood with its own sense of order and kinship.
“The people around here know more what’s going on over here than I do,” he says of his brownstone.
Anyone coming up to his door might face an inquiry.
“He know you?” somebody might ask on George’s behalf.
When he was still driving, the crack addicts and prostitutes—or, more precisely, the addicts who were prostituting themselves to get more cocaine—would approach him as he pulled up to the curb.
“You need some company tonight?”
“No, darling, I don’t need no company tonight.”
Sometimes they come to him with good news, knowing how upright he carries himself.
“I’m going to school now, Mr. G.,” they’ll say. “Can you give me two dollars for some cigarettes?”
He looks them over and sees that they are only telling him what they think he wants to hear. “They come up, and they look like they just came out a garbage can,” he says, shaking his head.
School is something he takes seriously because he hadn’t been able to complete his own education. He calls them on it.
“Yeah? How long you been in school?”
They might not have an answer, but he gives them a couple dollars anyway.
“I give it to you Tuesday,” they assure him.
“You don’t owe me,” George tells them. “ ’Cause I don’t want to get mad with you when you don’t pay me back.”
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 57