Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  George was growing taller and bigger and was in high school now. He grew to over six feet and started playing basketball at Curtright. He was walking taller and straighter. One day he went up to Ocala to see his grandmother the root doctor. He liked to surprise her, so he didn’t let her know that he was coming. But she knew anyway. “You think you slipped up on me,” she said once. “I knew you was coming ’cause my nose was itching. I just told somebody, ‘Somebody’s coming to see me.’ ”

  She saw the change in him, how he was wearing grown folks’ clothes, walking taller, straighter, suddenly aware of how he looked in a mirror. It always happened that the young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth. “I see George got you in long pants now,” she said. “You must be smelling yourself.”

  It’s true that George got into his share of devilment, but, fortunately for him, it turned out that he had a thing for numbers and words. He could remember just about anything that was set in front of him, and school came easy to him. He devoured books even though they were the white schools’ leftovers and had pages missing. He started to think about how he could escape this place, maybe even go to college.

  The kids noticed and looked to George to help them with their lesson. But they seemed to wish they didn’t have to ask. They would turn around and tease him for doing what they should have been doing.

  “So what you doing tonight, George?”

  “Getting my lesson.”

  “Yeah, you go on and get your lesson, and we’ll get the girls.”

  George couldn’t abide the teasing and didn’t believe they were doing all they said they were anyway. He would finish his homework and tip over to the house of whatever girl they said they were having their fun with. He would sweet-talk the girl, and since he was tall and not, as they say, hard on the eyes, he managed to do quite well, in his estimation.

  The next day in school, the boasting would commence.

  “They brag about how they were with this girl last night,” George said years later. “I say to myself, ‘I know you lying.’ But I couldn’t tell them. I used to walk the back roads. Nobody would see me.”

  George was always observing the developments around him, and here was a lesson in the underhanded nature of some human relations. “I know they would be telling lies on the girls,” he said years later, “ ’cause I be setting up there with that same girl in her house. That’s how I found out how the boys lie on girls.”

  He didn’t want them knowing his business. He indulged them instead.

  “What’d you do last night, Lil George?”

  “Man, I had so much work. I was getting my lesson.”

  By the time they got old enough to work, most of the kids had dropped out of school altogether. By graduation day, there were only six seniors in the Class of 1936 at Curtright Vocational Training School, and George Swanson Starling was valedictorian. He got accepted to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical State College in Tallahassee. His father did not really understand why he would want to go when he could be making a little money picking in the groves. But he sent him anyway.

  George came home with better than decent grades. But a year passed and then another whole six months with other people working and George just reading books. His father didn’t see the point of it. In the middle of George’s sophomore year, his father told him he had gotten enough schooling and it was time for him to work. Maybe he could pick it up later.

  Big George didn’t see where it made much difference anyway, hardly anybody they knew went to college. The father had only gone to fifth grade, and he was doing alright, running the store and packing fruit at the Eichelberger Packing Company.

  “With two years of college, you should be able to be president of the United States,” his father figured.

  “But I’m taking a four-year course number, and you dropping me in the middle of the stream. I’m not prepared to do anything because I’m only halfway there.”

  George had made valedictorian at Curtwright and, just as significant to him, was the only one from his high school to finish the first year of college without failing any subject. He thought he deserved better.

  But his father had made up his mind. Lil George was his namesake, but he wasn’t his only concern. Big George had remarried since coming to Eustis. He had a wife now and two stepsons to think about. He had that little store to keep up and dreams of a little orange grove of his own for his old age. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had to send George back to school to study Socrates and polynomials. It was an outrageous indulgence when everybody else was working the groves every day.

  A few days later, George was looking for some papers. Rummaging through a dresser drawer, he found some postal receipts for deposits his father had made in a savings account at the post office.

  “He had a drawer full of them where he was saving in the post office,” George said years later. “But he was telling me he didn’t have any money. And that made me angry, and I couldn’t sense it into him that I needed to go on and get the other two years. So I just got angry and evil, and I decided I would do something to hurt him.”

  George had gotten around with the girls, but he always seemed to come back to one in particular. Inez Cunningham was a girl from the backwoods with full cheeks and a narrow waist who had endured an even more unsettled childhood than he had. Her parents had died young and left her in the care of a Pentecostal aunt who trotted her to late-night church meetings with holy rollers talking in tongues. She spent so much of her girlhood in the quaking pews of the Pentecostal church that she swore she would never join a church again if she got free. She kept her word and never did.

  She wore plaits and plain dresses and didn’t have the pomaded hair some other girls had or the stockings and jewelry that made certain girls look more refined. But she had a way of smiling and tilting her head to the side and some kind of simpatico, outsider way of looking at the world that appealed to a young man like George who felt life had never cut him a fair deal.

  She had graduated from high school and was doing the common and necessary job of cleaning white people’s homes. But with George up in Tallahassee around those well-turned-out coeds training to be teachers, she fixated on her deficiencies. She imagined her competition in high heels and straight hair, their dignified talk turning George’s head. She convinced herself he would choose one of them over her and told him as much.

  Big George didn’t want Inez around his son either. She was from the backwoods and, in the pecking order that emerged even on the lowest rung—people with house notes versus people who paid rent, factory workers versus servants—Big George saw Inez as lower than the Starlings.

  During spring break of his sophomore year, the subject of school came up again. George asked his father if he would send him back, and again the answer was no. George was incensed and decided to do something about it. It was April 19, 1939. He took his father’s car and drove up to the house where Inez lived.

  “Come on, let’s take a ride,” he said.

  “What you doing?”

  “Come on, let’s ride.”

  “Well, where you going?”

  “Oh, just a ride.”

  She hopped in, and he drove south for five miles to Tavares, the county seat. He drove around to the back of the courthouse, where the jail was, and slowed to a stop.

  “Where you going?” Inez asked, alarmed now.

  He grabbed her hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  He led her upstairs and into the magistrate’s office.

  “Well, what can I do for ya, boy?” the magistrate said.

  “We come to get married,” George said.

  Inez nearly fainted. She looked to George to explain himself.

  “Well, you been pressuring me about gettin’ married. You’re telling me that I’m gonna end up marrying one of those college girls that’s getting a schoolteacher’s education. And you’re not gonna be good enough for
me. And I keep telling you that that wouldn’t make any difference. But you can’t seem to believe that, and you don’t want to wait. I wanted to show you that you the only one that I wanted. So we just gonna get married now.”

  Inez stood there with her mouth open. “I—I didn’t know” was all she could manage.

  She was wearing whatever dress she happened to put on that morning, and he had on whatever he’d thrown on, too.

  “Now, you know that’ll cost you a dollar fifty, boy,” the county judge, A. S. Herlong, said. “A dollar for the license. Fifty cent for a witness.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The judge went through the vows and declared them man and wife. She was twenty-one. He was twenty and not legally old enough to marry.

  “I told the man I was twenty-one,” George later said. “They didn’t care. If you black, they don’t care nothin’ about Negroes. They didn’t check it out. I would be twenty-one in a couple of months. But anyway, we got married.”

  As they drove back to Eustis, George told Inez his plan.

  “You gon’ have to continue to stay with your people. We got to keep this secret until I find out whether I’m going back to school or not.”

  George left out a crucial bit of information in what he told Inez, although it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. “I didn’t tell her my ulterior motive,” he said years later. Now, in all fairness, he said, “I was in love with her. But I didn’t have no intention of getting married, not at that stage, until I got mad with my daddy. He didn’t even want me to be courting this girl, much less talking about marrying her.

  “So I figured that would fix him up good ’cause he won’t send me back to school,” he said. “I got in all that trouble for a dollar fifty cents.”

  George hadn’t really thought his revenge scheme through to completion. He held out hope that his father would change his mind. George would spring the news about Inez on him only if his father didn’t come around. The two of them kept their secret through the spring and into the summer, when George went to New York like a lot of college students from the South to make spending money for school.

  He worked at a dry cleaner’s in Flatbush and lived with the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor in Ocala. Toward the end of the summer, he wrote his father: I have my money for my books and everything. I bought what clothing I’ll need. Are you going to be able to pay my tuition?

  Lil George didn’t know it, but the people back home had been grumbling in Big George’s ear. The father had already done more than he had to. Nobody else was spending all that money for school. None of them had gone off to college, and they had made out alright. Their kids were working in the groves and bringing in good money. What was Lil George doing? His father wrote him back: No, I just won’t be able to do it. You’ll have to work this year, and we’ll see how things are next year.

  The summer was almost over. The semester would be starting soon. George had run out of time. He realized his dream was over. He wrote his father again. He wanted to get back at him now: Well, that’s alright, don’t worry about it ’cause I’m married anyhow. I’m married to Inez.

  George waited for the fireworks. But they never came. He caught the bus back home, and the old people who hadn’t seen him in months recognized him as he walked from the bus station. They called out to him from their front porches.

  “Hey, ain’t that Lil George Starling?”

  “Yes, ma’am, this is me.”

  “Come here, boy. Lord have mercy, what is wrong with you? You done gone plumb fool. They tell me you done jumped up and married that Cunningham girl. And your daddy said, he was here gettin’ ready to send you back to school.”

  George couldn’t speak. The old people went on.

  “ ’Cause your daddy said he was gettin’ ready to send you back to school, and, before he know anything, you come writing him about you done got married.”

  The word had spread all across Egypt town, and everybody knew about the ingrate son who had ruined his chance at college, marrying some girl from the wrong side of town.

  Dog, the ole man done tricked me, George thought to himself. He knew how they talked. And in the old people’s sweet scolding, he could hear how the story got repackaged in the telling, people in town with nothing better to do, who never had the chance at college themselves, maybe never tried or even wanted to go, delighting in the confusion and goading Big George over it.

  “George, where is that boy? Is he going to school?”

  “No, you know what that devilish boy done? I’m here gettin’ ready to send him back to school, and here he come writing me the other day tellin’ me about he married.”

  “Well, I declare! You mean to tell! Now, I know that boy ain’t done nothin’ like that! And hard as you workin’ trying to send him to school!”

  And so it went. If the father had ever intended on sending him back, he now had a publicly acceptable excuse for not doing so, and he had come out the hero in the deal.

  As for Lil George, no colleges near Eustis nor any state universities in Florida, for that matter, admitted colored students. The closest colored colleges were hours away. He had a wife to support now. So he would have to do precisely what his father had intended all along. It looked as if he might never make it back to school.

  And he would have to live with vows made in anger for the rest of his life. It would not be happy because he knew and she knew how it had come to be. But they would both try to make the best of it now that the deed was done.

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  LOS ANGELES, 1996

  THE PANELED DOOR RISES a story high and would befit a museum or government office but is actually the front door of a Spanish Revival south of Wilshire. The door opens, and there stands a onetime bourbon-swilling army captain and deft-handed surgeon who, now in his later years, is a regular at the blackjack tables and the trifectas at Santa Anita. But he is, at the heart of it all and perhaps most important, a long-standing, still bitter, and somewhat obsessive expatriate from the twentieth-century South, the heartbreak Jim Crow land he chose to reject before it could reject him again.

  He is a Californian now, this Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. He is the color of strong coffee and has waves in his hair, which he lets grow as untamed as Einstein’s but then brushes back like the boys in the band. He’s wearing a white cotton island shirt, loose slacks, and sandals, the uniform of the well-to-do L.A. pensioner. He has the build and bearing of a Sammy Davis, Jr., and not a little of the showmanship and delightful superficiality that seem to grow on people in certain circles of L.A.

  He walks straight-backed and slew-footed into the foyer, past the curved, faux–Gone With the Wind staircase and the East Asian pottery. He gestures toward the living room, an imposing museum of a space that dwarfs him in its volume, fairly frozen in the sea foam carpet and hot pink tulip chairs out of a sherbety Doris Day movie from the fifties. The whole effect is as starched and formal as the tuxedos he used to wear to the parties he threw for himself back when his wife, Alice, was alive and the money was raining down like confetti. He seems accustomed to people fawning over the place and, with the prim air of leading men of his favorite movies from back in the forties, insists on serving his guests a slice of lemon pound cake and vanilla ice cream on Rosenthal china, whether they would like to have it or not.

  His heavy-lidded eyes look straight into those of his listener and have a distractingly thick fringe of lashes like those seen on babies and starlets.

  He is a physician—or was for most of his adult life and, by most accounts, a very good one—and is prone to pontificate like a man of his years and accomplishments. But he is just as likely to interrupt himself and check the time to see if he can still make the one o’clock at the Hollywood Park racetrack.

  His photo albums are filled with an unlikely assortment of bookies and blues singers and dentists and fraternity men and surgeons and society people whose approval he craved even though he kn
ew they were too pretentious to matter, really. He doesn’t say it because it would be gauche and hardly worth mentioning from his point of view, but there happen to be a lot of little Roberts around town, due to the fact that, over the years, he delivered a number of baby boys whose mothers were so grateful for his firm hand and calming reassurances at the precise moment of truth that they named their sons not after their husbands, but after the doctor who delivered their babies.

  Before he begins his story, he tells you it’s a long one and you can’t get it all. He’s lived too many lives, done too much, known too many people, ridden so high and so low that there’s no point in fooling yourself into thinking you can capture the whole of it.

  You could try, of course, and he agrees to give as much as he can.

  “I love to talk,” he says, a smile forming on his still-chiseled face as he sits upright in his tulip chair. “And I am my favorite subject.”

  MONROE, LOUISIANA, 1933

  IT WAS SATURDAY. Pershing Foster, the teenage son of ambitious but barely paid schoolteachers, began to stir in the thin light of morning. He lived across the railroad tracks from the rest of Monroe, in the worn colored section mockingly known as New Town despite its dirt roads and old shotgun houses on stilts. He pulled out his good pants with the three-inch waistband and the buttons on the side. A few hours from now, the Paramount Theater would go dark, and Jean Harlow or Errol Flynn or some other airbrushed and porcelain movie star would appear out of nowhere, big as a building.

  Pershing wanted to be there when the curtain went up and escape his segregated cell of a life, if only for ninety-four minutes. But his father reminded him he couldn’t leave just yet. The cows had to be brought in from the grazing pasture and milked before he could go.

  Morning after morning, his father had tried to teach him how to milk. Each time, Pershing bent down and pulled hard on the teats, but he could never get the hang of it, nor, truth be told, really wanted to. One time, the cow kicked over the bucket, and the milk spilled everywhere, which only proved to Pershing, who didn’t want to be there in the first place, that he wasn’t cut out for this line of work.