Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  They were received like visiting dignitaries. They had once been just like the people who stayed. Now they were doing important-sounding work for the government in Washington, in the hotels on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, in the garment district in New York or in the apartments of the rich people on Riverside Drive. They wore the protective coating of the North. They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.

  At night when the junebugs came out, the children sat at the knees of the people from the North and heard stories of doing unimaginable things like sitting in the front of a trolley car and saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, sir” to a white person and living to tell it.

  In Grenada, Mississippi, two little boys couldn’t wait for their big sister Francie to come visit from Ohio. Gilbert and Percy Elie would crouch at her feet and listen to her.

  “We would sit on the porch in the moonlight,” Gilbert remembered, “and she would tell us about the North.”

  Then she went back to Ohio. And life returned to the way it was for Gilbert and Percy, living as they were in the altogether different country of the Mississippi Delta.

  They and Ida Mae and George and Pershing and children all over the South were growing up, trying to comprehend the caste they were born into, adjusting or resisting, lying in bed at night and imagining a world that was different and free, and knowing it was out there because they had seen it in the casual airs, the haughtiness even, and the clothes and the stories of the people from the North. Now nothing around them made sense, and everything that happened to them imprinted itself into their psyches and loomed larger because they had glimpsed what was possible outside the bars of their own existence.

  Yet they were too young to escape. So they had to endure their peculiar station in the feudal world they were consigned to and the madness that could intrude at any given moment.

  Like the night back in the 1940s, “a moon-shining night, bright, like it’s almost day,” when little Gibert and Percy were sitting on the front porch steps of their family’s cabin.

  The boys could hear voices coming from the woods. The voices echoed through the trees in the night. The boys got quiet and still and tried to make out what was happening. They could hear the crackle of a whip and a hollow wailing coming from the woods. A colored man was being lashed in the pine scrub beyond their cabin.

  The boys heard the man cry out with each blow.

  “Alright, we gonna take a break,” some voices finally said.

  There was silence. Then the men took up the task again.

  “We gonna kill you,” the voices said from the woods.

  “Please, please, don’t,” the colored voice said. “Before y’all do, will you let me pray?”

  The man began to pray. “The man prayed a prayer like a Baptist preacher,” Gilbert remembered decades later. “I ain’t never heard a man pray like that man.”

  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they doing,” Gilbert remembered the man praying. “I lived a good life for you, if you never done nothing for me, Lord, please …”

  “Alright, that’s enough,” the other voices said.

  The man continued to pray. The beating and wailing commenced again. Then the wailing stopped.

  “The sonabitch dead,” came a voice from the woods.

  Gilbert could never get the man’s cries out of his head. “We don’t know who he was,” Gilbert said some fifty years later, “or what he was supposed to have done.”

  The seeds of Gilbert’s departure from Mississippi were sown that night. More seeds were planted another day, when he and his father and brother were walking home from the movie theater in town.

  The street was little more than an alley, barely wide enough for two people to walk astride. Gilbert was about twelve. He was reading a comic book and not paying attention. Three white boys not much older than Gilbert came in their direction. Gilbert’s father and brother instinctively jumped out of the way. Gilbert was looking at his comic book and bumped into one of the boys.

  The boy grabbed Gilbert by the collar.

  “Who do you think you are?” Gilbert remembered the boy asking him.

  The boy spat at him, and Gilbert hit the boy back. Gilbert’s father was shaking with fear. He begged forgiveness from the boy who spat on his son. Then he turned to his son and upbraided him.

  “Boy, what’s the matter with you?” his father said. “Are you crazy?”

  The father fumed at him. “All the way home, he didn’t talk to me,” Gilbert remembered decades later. “I got home, he didn’t say a word.”

  That night, Gilbert could hear his father confiding to his mother through the cardboard-thin walls of their cabin. “Sugar, that one son we got, Gilbert, I’m afraid for him,” the father whispered. “That boy’ll never live if he stays in Grenada.”

  Gilbert knew that. He shared his dreams with Percy when they worked in the field hoeing and plowing and weighing up the cotton.

  “We would plow side to side,” Gilbert remembered. “He’d have a row, and I’d have a row. We would talk. We would talk about school or what I’m gonna do when I get to be grown, when I leave here.”

  His big sister’s stories of life up north had seeped into him, and one day when he got big enough, he told himself, he was going to follow her to Ohio. And he did.

  Hundreds of miles away, out in the country near Jackson, North Carolina, a family named DeBreaux was in a tizzy whenever cousin Beulah was expected in from New York. The mother cooked all day. The daughters, Virginia and Lee, cleaned and swept and tried to imagine how she would look. It was as if the queen of England were coming.

  Beulah blew into town in the latest silk dresses, her high heels click-clacking on the pavement. Her hair was pressed and shiny and swung when she turned her head. The girls touched it to see how it felt.

  “If we could just look like that,” Virginia told her sister.

  Virginia started dreaming then and there. Someday, I’m going to New York.

  She sat and planned the whole thing out with her little brother. She wouldn’t have to pick cotton anymore or feel the spike of frost on the wet grass going barefoot to the outhouse in the morning.

  In the early 1940s, she did, in fact, join the multitudes. The day she left, her mother made fried chicken and broke down crying. Her father was too hurt to speak. He stayed in the house as they left. “He did not bid us good-bye,” she said. She ended up in Brooklyn, where the elevated train shook the apartment and looked as if it were coming straight into the window, and where she would get her hair pressed and wear high heels click-clacking on the pavement like Beulah.

  Sometimes, the young people had little choice but to leave, sooner than they had imagined. Such was the case with my mother’s older brother. He was a teenager in Rome, Georgia, working as a driver and office boy for an upstanding white man in town during the Depression. He would drive the man from Georgia to Miami for the man’s business trips, alone with him in the car for hours at a time. He liked the man because he let him keep the big new shiny car after dropping the man off at the white hotel. It was one of the few company jobs accorded colored teenagers in the South at that time and was thought to be a good one.

  One day, he was straightening the man’s office when he opened a drawer and saw something white folded inside. He pulled it out and unfurled the fabric.

  It was a white robe and hood.

  Trembling, he put it back in the drawer, and had to reconsider everything he thought he knew about the man he had trusted and the world in which he lived. That night, he went home and told his parents and little sisters that he was leaving Georgia for Detroit, one of the receiving stations for people from that part of the South. He had made his decision, was shocked into it, really. He would get a job at Chrysler like a cousin of theirs. He was joining the Great Migration for the most personal and profound of reasons, and, without knowing it, planting a seed in my
mother’s imagination, knowing as she did why her big brother had fled.

  Several seeds were planted, too, in Ida Mae, Lil George, and Pershing. Ida Mae heard about this one or that one going north to freedom after a lynching or a raw deal at settlement. Her big brothers, Sam and Cleve, had fled to Toledo, her big sister Irene was talking about going to Milwaukee, and, as Ida Mae came of age, she saw the cloche hats and unobtainable finery of city living in the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue out of Chicago.

  Lil George watched the Blye brothers, Babe and Reuben, older boys who’d gone north to New York, come back to Eustis in their zoot suits and fedoras. They talked about all the money they were making building the 9W highway up in Jersey, about the skyscrapers and streetlights, the dance halls in Harlem, the parties in Corona, and the boulevards paved where the colored people lived.

  “We used to sit up all night,” George remembered, “and listen to Babe and M.B. and Reuben and Freeman and all them talkin’ about New York. And I said, ‘Boy, that sounds just like heaven. I wanna see some of that. New York. I’m sure going to New York soon as I get big enough.’ ”

  And in Monroe, Louisiana, if Mantan Moreland passed through town, there was a stir in the pews and talk in the pool hall. Everyone wanted to sit down with the native son who had made it to Hollywood, even if it was only as a shuffling sidekick in the movies.

  Pershing saw the parade of people from the North and the movie scenes at the Paramount of life beyond Louisiana and began dreaming of escape, too. When he was still small enough to fit in the crawl spaces of the houses on cinder-block stilts, he played pretend with a girl down the street named Clara Poe. They peeked out from under the floor joists and waited for a car to rumble down Louise-Anne Avenue and fought over whose it was. It’s my car. No, it’s my car. Then they pretended they were in the car leaving.

  Clara always said she was going to Chicago, where her uncles were. But no matter how many times Clara said Chicago, Pershing said he was going to California. He didn’t have any family there. All he knew was that, one day, somehow, whenever he got big and whatever it took, he was going.

  A BURDENSOME LABOR

  But the Egyptians

  mistreated

  and oppressed us,

  assigning us a

  burdensome labor.

  — DEUTERONOMY 26:6

  CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, 1929

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IDA MAE’S NEW HUSBAND took her to live in a little wood cabin on Edd Pearson’s plantation on a clearing past the Natchez Trace. Ida Mae was sixteen. In the morning, the sun poked at them through the gaps in the roof. At night, they could see the stars through the ceiling cracks over their bed. It just about rained inside as much as out.

  They set about working cotton for Mr. Edd. All around them, the land was in a state of being cotton or becoming cotton, brown and rutted for planting, green shoots willed into rows of coddled bushes until the land was white out to the tree line. Every so often, a wood cabin broke the clearing, raw and thrown-together, built uneasily on a footprint of land that was a fraction of what was devoted to the field.

  The people who lived in the cabins gave the best hours of their days to cotton, working until the sun went behind the trees and they couldn’t see their hands anymore.

  Early morning, the mist rose over the fields and made a halo on the surface of the earth. Ida Mae’s new husband and the sharecroppers working other sections of Pearson’s land tried to pick as much as they could before the sun got high.

  Edd Monroe Pearson was a decent boss man, as decent as could be expected from a planter in Mississippi in the 1920s. He presided over the lives of some dozen families who grew his crops, as Ida Mae would recall, and he took half of whatever they produced, whether it was cotton or turkeys or hogs. At the end of the season, he deducted the debts he said they owed—cottonseed, fertilizer, implements, ginning fees, cornmeal, salt pork—the “furnish,” as it was called, of their half of the harvest. Money rarely changed hands between planter and sharecropper, as the entire system was built on credit. The sharecroppers owed the planters, the planters owed the merchants, the merchants owed the banks, and the banks were often beholden to some business concern in the North, where most of the real money was in the first place.

  Unlike some planters, Mr. Edd actually gave George and Ida Mae a few dollars when settling time came at the end of the harvest, although they never knew whether they would get anything or how much it might be or if it was actually what they were due, nor could they complain if it wasn’t. Edd Pearson was about the best boss man a colored sharecropper could hope for.

  But he was a ranking member of the dominant caste and felt it within his right to involve himself in the private affairs of his serfs.

  He came through the field on his horse one day and saw George bent over picking through the rows. George and Ida Mae had been out for hours and the sun had cooked their backs. Ida Mae had no gift for picking like her new husband did and had fallen farther and farther behind, stooping from the weight of the sack.

  George had called out to her, but she was too far back and too beat from the sun to catch up. After a few dozen pounds, her knees gave way. She saw a clear path up ahead and dropped onto her sack, collapsed in the dirt aisle between the cotton rows.

  Mr. Edd rode up to George and questioned him about it.

  “Your wife don’t do nothing, do she, but sit down,” Mr. Edd said to George.

  George would have liked to have said it was his business and not Mr. Edd’s, but colored men could not say such things to a white man in Mississippi and get away with it in 1929.

  When Mr. Edd was gone, George went back to Ida Mae.

  “See can’t you try and do a little bit better,” George said, caught between the two of them.

  She said she would try, but there was no use pretending. She was not going to be of much help in the field. She had never been able to pick a hundred pounds. One hundred was the magic number. It was the benchmark for payment when day pickers took to the field, fifty cents for a hundred pounds of cotton in the 1920s, the gold standard of cotton picking.

  It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust. It was “one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop labor ever known,” wrote the historian Donald Holley. It took some seventy bolls to make a single pound of cotton, which meant Ida Mae would have to pick seven thousand bolls to reach a hundred pounds. It meant reaching past the branches into the cotton flower and pulling a soft lock of cotton the size of a walnut out of its pod, doing this seven thousand times and turning around and doing the same thing the next day and the day after that.

  The hands got cramped from the repetitive motion of picking, the fingers fairly locked in place and callused from the pricks of the barbed, five-pointed cockleburs that cupped each precious boll. The work was not so much hazardous as it was mind-numbing and endless, requiring them to pick from the moment the sun peeked over the tree line to the moment it fell behind the horizon and they could no longer see. After ten or twelve hours, the pickers could barely stand up straight for all the stooping.

  Ida Mae had watched people do it all her life and knew how it was done. But when it came time to actually go out and pick it, she would look up and see everybody else far down the row. At weighing time, she would empty her sack on the scale and never get three digits.

  Above her was an entire economy she could not see but which ruled her days and determined the contours of her life. There were bankers, planters, merchants, warehouse clerks, fertilizer wholesalers, seed sellers, plow makers, mule dealers, gin owners. A good crop and a high price made not much improvement to the material discomforts of Ida Mae’s existence but meant a planter’s wife could “begin to dream of a new parlor carpet and a piano” and a salesman of farm implements could be “lavish with more expensive cigars than he smoked last year.” On Wall Street, there were futures and commodities traders wagering on what the cotton she had yet to pi
ck might go for next October. There were businessmen in Chicago needing oxford shirts, socialites in New York and Philadelphia wanting lace curtains and organdy evening gowns. Closer to home, closer than one dared to contemplate, there were Klansmen needing their white cotton robes and hoods.

  In the half light of morning, when the mist hung low and the dew was thick on the bolls, the pickers set out to the field as their slave foreparents had done year in and year out for two centuries. “The first horn was blown an hour before daylight as a summons for work hands to rise.” Each one looked out across the field to infinity. The quarry was spread over acres and rows far from the starting plant, and they could not see the end of what they were expected to pick.

  On large fields during the height of the season—which began in August in south Texas and moved eastward, reaching the Carolinas by early fall—the star pickers sped like fan blades through the cotton, a blur of fingers and bolls, arms and torsos switching from the left row to the right, picking on both sides of them and tossing the cotton like feathers into their sack. The sacks were strapped over their shoulders and dragged in the dirt behind them like an extra limb, the sacks weighing as much as a human adult by the end of the day and making them stoop all the more.

  They picked until they were hypnotized by the picking. By midday, the fast ones and the slow ones were far from the center, the stars way up ahead and not looking back, the slow ones trailing behind, the most watchful of everyone’s placement. The field was flat and unbroken by trees, and there was no escape from the hundred-degree heat. The sun bore down on them through the head rags and the Panama hats and made the cotton field shimmer like the ocean. Pickers thought they saw things, like people who had died and come back, and waved a handkerchief in the air to call the water boy from under a shade tree. He was usually a picker’s child, the one designated to fetch the bucket of well water when they needed it, half the water splashing out of the bucket and onto the ground as the water boy trudged down the rows.