“I told you that cow didn’t like me,” Pershing said.
His father couldn’t afford to lose a whole bucket of milk. Madison Foster was the principal of the colored high school—a misnomer because it included every grade from the first through the eleventh, but, in any case, paid him a fraction of what the state openly and unapologetically paid his white counterparts and left him and his family only slightly better off than the colored servants in town. He needed that milk to supplement his wages, and he didn’t have milk to waste.
“Let him go,” his father finally conceded to his wife, Ottie. “Unloose him. Unloose him.”
Pershing got his way. He was the last child Ottie would ever bear, and, to the degree that a colored child could be spoiled when so much of the world was cut off to him, he was.
There were three children above him. Madison was the oldest and away most of the time, off in medical school. He was going to be the first doctor in the family, as Ottie, who set her sights higher than the teacher that she was, liked to say of her firstborn. Leland, the second son, was a star pitcher at Morehouse College in Atlanta. His parents had big plans for Leland, naming him as they did after their alma mater, Leland College in New Orleans. People were saying Leland had a shot at the Negro Leagues. He had to fight the girls off him as it was. He had a sculpted mahogany face and waves in his hair. He had the best mind of all the four children but, to his mother’s great sorrow, was a regular at the pool hall and the juke joints, despite her best efforts. The women called him Woo, which is what they whispered when they saw him.
There was a sister named Emlyn. They called her Gold owing to the sunset cast to her skin and her place as the only surviving girl. Her twin, Evelyn, had died as an infant. Everybody fussed over Gold and told her how beautiful she was, which she was.
The table seemed set before Pershing was even born, and he couldn’t see how to stand out on his own or figure out how he fit in as the youngest. A few years before, when he was about ten, he hit upon something that he thought he could do. He was in fifth grade, and when the school bell rang, he ran to meet his mother in her seventh-grade classroom. He told her his discovery as they walked home together.
“Mama, I believe I can play the piano.”
“You think you can?”
“Yes, Mama, I know I can.”
“What makes you know?”
“Mama, all you got to do is do like this,” he said, banging his fingers on an invisible keyboard as he walked, “and hum the song, and it’ll come out.”
“You think so, baby?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Well, tomorrow after school, you go down, and you try it on the piano, and you let me know how you come out.”
The next day, he did as she said. Noise came out of the piano instead of the music in his head, and that was the end of his short career as a pianist. He never spoke of it again. And, seeing that he didn’t bring it up, neither did his mother.
The day the cow kicked over the bucket, they let Pershing have his way. He was a teenager now and off to the Paramount. It sat gaudy and beautiful on the other side of the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks from the colored section of town. He stepped out of the white frame bungalow with his pants creased to a knife edge, the crinkled waves in his hair pomaded and patted down, and proceeded down the dirt roads leading downtown. He went past the little plank houses that stood on cinder blocks due to the rains and floods and jumped over the dirt ditches that made grass islands of every yard around.
He picked up paper-shell pecans that fell in people’s yards like litter. Soon he came to the places where the white people lived. The streets were paved and smooth now. In New Town, the roads were earthen humps with a ditch on either side to catch the bayou when it ran out of places to go. Whenever it rained, the streets turned to mud, and Pershing and the other children jumped in the ditches and splashed around as if the ditches were a swimming pool. They didn’t know what a real pool was like because the only one in town didn’t allow children who looked like them.
Trucks rumbled down the road and flung dust on the porches and through the screens and into the front rooms of the houses on Pershing’s side of town. The mud and dust were an affront to Pershing, and he defied it the best he could. He made a game out of proving he could outwit his lower-caste world.
“It was my personal pride to wait till a rainy day and polish my black-and-white shoes,” he said, “and wear them when the rain had stopped and jump over puddles and not get a spot of anything on them.”
Those dirt roads were the reason he never learned to skate, and he could never forget that.
“We could buy skates,” Pershing would remember even as an old man. “But we couldn’t buy sidewalks.”
Downtown was called Five Points, the intersection of Eighteenth and Desiard, and when Pershing got there, he walked further down Desiard Street past Piccadilly’s restaurant, where the white people ate, and on to the Paramount straight ahead. He could see the double glass doors in front and a crowd forming outside. He knew to ignore the front entrance. It was off-limits to people like him.
He went to get his ticket. It was a more complicated affair than it had to be, owing to the whims and peculiarities of how Jim Crow played out in a particular town or establishment. For a time, there was a single ticket agent working both booths—the window for the colored and the one for the white. The agent swiveled between the two openings to sell the movie tickets, a roll to the white line and then a pivot to the colored. It created unnecessary confusion and waiting time for one line or the other, the waiting borne more likely by the colored moviegoers than the white, as waiting to be served after colored people would have been unacceptable to the white clientele. By the time Pershing was nearly grown, the swiveling ticket agent was dispensed with in favor of altogether separate windows and ticket sellers, which would cost a little more but would move the white and colored lines along more quickly and was more in keeping with the usual protocols of Jim Crow.
The Paramount fancied itself like one of the great opera houses of Europe with its crimson velvet curtains and pipe organ rising from the orchestra pit. A double-wide staircase ushered theatergoers to its box seats. But Pershing would not be permitted near them. He followed the colored crowd to the little door at the side entrance, while the white people passed through the heavy glass doors on Desiard. He saw Jimmy and Clarence and Nimrod and just about every other kid from New Town on his way in.
The side door opened onto a dark stairway. Pershing mounted the steps, anxious to get a seat before the lights went dim. He went up one flight, two flights, three, four, five flights of stairs. The scent of urine told him he was getting closer to the colored seats.
At the top of the stairs, there was Bennie Anderson, the colored ticket taker, ready to take his stub. The urine aroma was thick and heavy now. The toilet was stopped up most of the time, and the people did what they had to. Some relieved themselves on the way up. Pershing thought they did it on purpose—a protest maybe for the condition of the place, not registering that it was other colored people who had to suffer for it. He could understand it, but he didn’t much approve.
Pershing sat hard in the wooden seat and tried not to notice the stuffed upholstery on the main floor below. Sometimes the kids would rain popcorn and soda pop on the white people. At last, the place went dark, and Pershing left Monroe. He was on a bright veranda with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power out in California. It was a perfect world, and he could see himself in it.
The only way that someone as proud and particular as Pershing could survive in the time and place he was in was to put his mind somewhere else. He grew up watching his parents exercise exquisite control over the few things they were permitted to preside over in life. Their domain was the Monroe Colored High School, where Madison was principal and Ottie taught seventh grade. It was a small brick building with 1,139 pupils and a teacher for each grade, from kindergarten to eleventh, and run with the precision of a military institution.
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Madison James Foster was a short man partial to vested suits and Bible scripture. He had had a hard, orphan-like childhood which he kept to himself other than to say that he had been raised not by his parents but by white people in New Iberia, down by the Gulf. As a boy in the 1880s, he showed a gift for reciting verse, and his white guardians had him perform for their guests as parlor entertainment. There he stood in the middle of a Victorian front room, white guests gathered around him, and was told to recite scripture for their amusement. They saw that he had a facile mind and, when the time came, offered him some assistance to get a degree. He landed at an old colored school called Leland College in New Orleans, where he met a preacher’s daughter named Ottie. They graduated from Leland in 1905 and married the same year. They had big plans for themselves just as Jim Crow was closing doors on them.
They set out to teach far from New Orleans, in a moated land of cotton gins and oak trees dripping plant feathers between the Ouachita River and the bayou. An opportunity had arisen in Monroe, an old mill town near the upper brim of the Louisiana boot, not far from where the shoelaces would be. Monroe was three counties west of Mississippi, seventy-five miles from Vicksburg. It was closer to the cotton fields of the Delta than the bons-temps-rolling high life of New Orleans, where the two of them had met. To the north was the tenant-farming Ozark land of warm springs and hard living in Arkansas, where an attempt by sharecroppers to unionize in the town of Elaine would be crushed with bloody efficiency in 1919. To the west was Texas, the wide-open grazing and cotton land of vigilante justice and lynching spectacles that drew people by the thousands and made the newspapers all over the country.
In the midst of this violence, Monroe was a quietly hierarchal town with its two castes remaining in their places and separated by two sets of railroad tracks. The town had been founded by French traders in the nineteenth century and became a mill town serving the nearby cotton plantations and lumber concerns by the time the Fosters got there.
The town came into its own in the 1920s with the arrival of a crop-dusting outfit out of Macon, Georgia, the company having decided to move to the more strategically located town of Monroe, closer to the Mississippi Delta. In 1928, a businessman named C. E. Woolman purchased what was then known as Huff Daland Dusters. He switched from crop dusting and began running the first passenger flights between Mississippi and Texas, via Monroe and Shreveport, in 1929. The company would later come to be known as Delta Air Lines, named after the region it originally served. Delta’s presence in Monroe was little more than a distant point of pride to the colored people there, as they could not have become pilots, stewardesses, or gate agents for the airline and might glean only the ancillary benefits of cleaning the airport and serving the now wealthier and well-positioned white people working there. Delta would remain headquartered in Monroe until 1941, when it relocated to Atlanta with the United States’s entry into World War II.
It was in Monroe that Madison and Ottie Foster spent their honeymoon hoping to prosper despite the limits of their era, a time when Jim Crow was closing in on them and mutating all over the South. Madison took a position as principal and she as a teacher of the colored children who spilled out of the shotgun houses on the colored side of the Kansas City Southern and Union Pacific railroad tracks. They eventually bought a white frame bungalow on Louise Anne Avenue surrounded by icemen, barbers, sawmill workers, and domestics. The colored people took to calling the husband “Professor Foster” out of an overinflated respect for his bachelor’s degree and the position he held over them. It came out “ ’Fessor Foster,” though, by the time people got through saying it.
He cut a tight-buttoned bearing in his Kuppenheimer suits and Arrow shirts with detachable white collars and cuff links, always gold cuff links. By the late twenties, he was in a position of some prestige among colored people in town, the president of the Louisiana Colored Teachers Association, and was regularly mentioned in the Louisiana News section of the Chicago Defender for attending or speaking at some important colored meeting or convention.
He rose early to open his school and greeted the people on their porches as he passed. He had authority of some sort over practically every child in New Town. Some Sundays, he preached at Zion Traveler Baptist Church. It was a world unto itself. The striving colored people in town, stooped and trodden the rest of the week, invested their very beings into the church and quarreled over how things should be run and who should be in charge of the one thing they had total control over.
In the summer of 1932, the church actually split into two rival factions as to who should be the pastor. One side was backing the Reverend W. W. Hill, an old-school preacher who had just been ousted; the other was supporting Professor Foster, a starched man with a standoffish wife and brilliant children whom some people saw as having enough influence as it was, seeing as how he already ran the school. The church grew so divided that people were no longer speaking. Enemy lines were drawn. The church had to shut down for two whole months. The authorities in Monroe took away the keys.
The church reopened the first Sunday in September 1932, along with the wounds and hostilities that were no closer to healing than the day the church was shuttered. That morning, Sunday school had barely begun when “there arose a contention between the two factions as to who was in charge of the church,” the Chicago Defender reported.
There was a question as to whether the apparent victor, Professor Foster, should speak, the Hill people saying it was perhaps best that he not, the anti-Hill faction urging him to go forward.
Professor Foster was accustomed to running things. He arose and stood stiff and pious and was reading Bible scripture, when four women walked up to the pulpit and demanded he stop preaching, as if to suggest he had no right to be taking over as he had.
It was an outrageous, unheard-of disruption, practically blasphemous, and the church broke into an uproar. Several men rushed the pulpit and began fighting. A deacon backed out of the door, hitting back at those who pursued him and falling down in the street. A parishioner named James Dugans, who was either a supporter of Professor Foster or merely enraged at the show of disrespect, picked up a chair, drew a pistol, and started shooting. A bullet struck a woman named Patsy Daniels in the stomach. Incensed, her father ran to a house next door and got a pistol of his own. The father came back to a fight that had now spilled out to the front of the church.
When the first gunman, Dugans, saw the woman’s now-armed father, he shot him in the chest. The bleeding father continued firing as he fell, killing Dugans and wounding three other parishioners. Patsy Daniels died from her wounds. In all, as many as seven people were left wounded, including the dead woman’s father. Professor Foster and his family managed to escape unharmed—physically, in any case. The Monroe police again had to take the keys of the church. Until the congregation could settle its dispute, “the doors of the church were securely nailed up,” the Atlanta Daily World reported.
Pershing was thirteen. He would now end up seeing the world as a beleaguered and underappreciated Foster, a member of a resented clan in a small, clannish subculture inside a segregated pressure cooker of a life. The incident was so unseemly and beneath him that he never spoke of it. But he carried the sense of betrayal and insecurity with him and in some ways would spend the rest of his life both running from those who rejected his family and craving their acceptance.
After the melee, neither Reverend Hill nor Professor Foster would ever muster the full support of the congregation or get to run Zion Traveler Baptist Church. In time, life somehow returned to some version of normalcy, and Professor Foster instead took comfort in his place as the leading black educator in town. On school mornings, he stood at the front steps of the school with a pocket watch in one hand and a paddle in the other. Sometimes the students came running across the school yard late and out of breath.
“The trains cut us off, ’Fessor Foster,” the children would tell him.
“I’m gon’ cut you off,” he’d say, r
aising his paddle. “Get up early. Get up early.”
He held chapel before class started, quoting the Old Testament in the auditorium for an hour every morning, and he believed in sparing neither the rod, paddle, or switch. He half waited for some child to get out of line so he could make an example out of him. But as anybody who grew up in that world could tell you, he was no better or no worse than any colored schoolmaster in the South when it came to such things.
His wife, Ottie Alberta Wright Foster, was a prim and ambitious woman, who made the society pages of the colored papers as president of the Golden Seal Embroidery Club and for hosting such things as a wedding breakfast for a bridal party in what the Defender called a “lovely home … prettily decorated for the occasion.” Ottie was raised in New Orleans, a magic circus of a place compared to Monroe, braided with openly mixed-race Creole people and their patois and jambalaya. She brought the food and ways with her and spent hours on the roux for her gumbo when things were good. To be reputed to be Creole was enough to make her exotic to some colored people, whether she was actually Creole or not—which no one ever established for sure but most assumed was true.
She was a small woman with skin the color of chestnuts and wavy black hair. It was said she would have been considered quite a beauty if it weren’t for the tight bun she wore low on her head with the severe center part at her forehead and the fact that she seemed rarely to smile at anyone other than her children.
All of the children were bright. But in the family hierarchy, there was not much Pershing could do to distinguish himself with one big brother off in medical school and another a star athlete. He played softball with the neighborhood kids, where they used broomsticks for bats and made their own rules because nobody had seen an official baseball game. But he wasn’t especially good at it.
Isabel Wilkerson Page 10