Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  The turkeys grew big and plump as September approached, and the land was turning white with cotton.

  EUSTIS, FLORIDA, 1939

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  A FLATBED TRUCK creaked down a highway through rattlesnake scrub and okra growing wild in the field. George Starling should not have been on that truck. He should have been in a college classroom up in Tallahassee. But his father said he’d had enough schooling, and schools nearby did not allow colored students. So Lil George went and got himself a wife out of spite and love, too, and had to feed her now, and so was sitting on a flatbed truck en route to the groves instead of in the library stacks at a college in the state capital.

  The truck was on its way between the groves on a chill morning at picking season. It was hauling men to pick fruit for fresh juice and frozen concentrate, for gift boxes of temple oranges and ruby grapefruit, and the perfect balls of citrus stacked high on grocery shelves for people in New York to pick through.

  The owners of the groves rode their dogs in the covered front seats safe from the wind. The pickers rode on the flatbed truck with the frost cutting their faces. Twenty or thirty men hunched on the open barge, their legs dangling over the sides of it and a stack of ladders tied loose along the rim.

  George sat pinned between the regular pickers, who were missing teeth and taking liberties with the language and knew more about picking than he ever cared to know. They got a kick out of bouncing over potholes, grove to grove, next to the college boy. They looked to be the smart ones now, hadn’t had to squint over any textbooks or waste time in somebody’s high school. And here they were carrying a bushel sack in the same flatbed truck as Lil George. Back when he was still in school and picking only during semester break, they started calling him “Schoolboy.”

  “Schoolboy,” one of them said, “I don’t know whatchu goin’ to school fuh. You right out’chere with us. I ain’t went so far as the sixth grade, and I can pick more fruit in one hour than you pick all day. You ain’t had to go no twelfth grade to learn how to do this.”

  “Yeah, you right,” George said. “But the difference between you and me, is I can leave from out here, and you can’t. When the opportunity presents itself, I can leave.”

  That was easy to say when he was back and forth to Tallahassee, calling himself a freshman and then a sophomore and looking like he could do anything in the world. Now he was picking because he had to, no different from them.

  He told himself that this picking situation was a temporary setback and kept himself busy doing whatever came up. Some days, the high school had him substitute for a sick teacher. He had more education than most colored people in town anyway. He sold insurance on the side to the colored people out in the woods. But the groves were all there was most days, and he climbed the flatbed like every other colored citizen who could use the money, which was just about all of them at one time or another.

  Fruit was the currency of central Florida. The land was given over to citrus trees, groves of them spanning the low hills from Eustis up to Ocala and down to Orlando. Tourism hadn’t yet bloomed the way it would decades later in central Florida, and Eustis, Ocala, and even Orlando were just places to pass through on the way to Miami. Each year in the late thirties and early forties, some two million tons of oranges and grapefruit were coming out of the state, most of it from the region where George lived.

  The people who picked the fruit and the big owners of the groves were often at odds with each other, one side poor, one side landed, one needing more money than the other was willing to give. But they agreed on one thing: they wanted the trees heavy with oranges and the people of the North flush and hungry because then there would be work enough for everyone.

  So they pampered the trees like infants. When a hard freeze afflicted the groves, the people burned logs and rubber tires and lit the oil heaters to keep the orange trees warm. They prayed for a miracle like the one at a grove they called Ole Natural. A big freeze had settled in back in 1895, and most of the other groves looked as if they had been set on fire after it left. But Ole Natural survived the big freeze, and its orange trees came back on their own.

  Lake County held a high place in the Citrus Belt and once was the orange capital of the world. But Lil George never took it that seriously and never got but so good at picking. He could never claim to have picked the most bushels in the least amount of time. It was piecework, and the winners of the race were not necessarily the quickest minds but the fastest hands. George had a quick mind.

  In the late fall, a crowd gathered before the sun came up, when the fog hung close to the earth. The people stood watching at the corner of Bates and Palmetto and in front of the pool hall over in East town, near Egypt. They waited in the wet dark for the flatbed truck to roll up. The foreman climbed down and picked out the best pickers for his crew. The foremen were the middlemen between the packinghouses and the pickers, and both sides might have cause to distrust them now and then. They chose the pickers and oversaw the picking and each had their own way of supervising. It might be Oscar Lipscomb or Uncle John Fashaw or a man they called Mr. Pat choosing his pickers for the season.

  George hoped to get on the Blye brothers’ crew. They were ten years older than he was. They knew their way around the juke joints and the raccoon woods around Eustis. One of them was named Arnette, but they called him Whisper because he had got his throat cut and could speak no louder than that.

  The other brother, Reuben, towered over the tallest of men. He had a stone face, a long series of wives, and had seen just about everything. When he was a little boy, an uncle told him to come help him with an errand. The two of them rode out into the woods and came to a stop at a tree. A colored man was hanging dead from a limb. The uncle needed Reuben’s help cutting the rope and getting the limp, lynched body down. Reuben was ten years old. He would never forget that.

  When Reuben got big, he fled to New York, worked at a tombstone factory in Brooklyn, on the 9W highway through Kingston up into Albany. He worked crushing tomatoes at a ketchup factory and had seen so many of the unmentionable things that got mangled into the ketchup that he never ate ketchup again. Now he was back in Eustis working as a foreman in the groves. He looked straight at you and through you and had a way of making women forget their husbands when they saw him.

  It was a buyer’s market in the picking world. There were always plenty more people who wanted to pick than there was room or need for in the groves. The lucky ones loaded onto the truck, their legs dangling from the rim of the flatbed.

  At the grove, they each picked a number out of a hat and went to the row with that number. They got paid by how many boxes of fruit they picked by sunset and had to keep up with little tickets to prove what they had picked. If the row was thick with fruit, it would be a good day. They could stand at the underskirt and fill a two-bushel box. If it was sparse, they had to climb into two or three trees to get that much.

  It tempted good people to try to outtrick one another. You looked for a way out. You learned to watch everybody and the rows coming up. The rule was that when you finished yours, you moved in order to the next row available. If it was a dud row like the one you were working, you did your best to avoid it.

  “If that next row is a bad row,” George said, “and you on a bad row, and here’s somebody else by you on a bad row, you lag back, you keep watching them. You let them get through first, ahead of you, so they can get that bad row. Then you hurry up and get through.”

  If the next one up was thick with fruit and “you on a bad row, you run through it,” George said. “But you be sure they done moved over before you leave your row. You get cagey. It’s little tricks in all this.”

  Some men could pick a hundred boxes a day. They called them high rollers. George never managed more than sixty-five or seventy. He never cared enough about it to get proficient.

  They set the ladders in the tree, ladders sixteen and twenty feet high, sometimes spliced like extension cords and leaning forty
feet up, a full four stories, along the spine of the tree. They had to set them so the ladder wouldn’t kick when they reached the top and wouldn’t split the tree in two, which was liable to happen with a ladder set in the fork of a young bud. They learned to plant their ladders deep in the soil.

  The trees were wet from the rain, and George and the pickers had to balance themselves on the slick limbs of the old seedlings. They disappeared into the branches with a bushel sack on their shoulders and a clipper in their hand and only came down when the sack was full and their shoulders ached and they were sick from the sight of fruit. Tangerines, tangelos, temple oranges, navel oranges, Valencia oranges, seeded grapefruit, seedless grapefruit, red navels, ruby reds, lemons, and kumquats. If he had to pick, which he did, George would rather pick grapefruit because they filled a box quicker. But the packinghouses knew that, too. So they paid less for grapefruit than just about anything else.

  Up and down the ladders they went, working top to bottom, snipping fruit and filling boxes. Sometimes they heard a voice cry out way down the grove; a picker had come across a wasp nest and pulled at it instead of an orange. Every now and then, they heard a thud and then a cry. A limb had snapped. Somebody fell out of a tree, broke an arm or leg or neck.

  George climbed the high limbs of four or five grown seedlings one morning and was climbing deep into the next. The foreman that day was an old colored man named Deacon John Fashaw. They called him Uncle John. George knew him from Gethsemane Baptist Church. The deacon oversaw the harvest of some of the groves at the Eichelberger Packing Company. He called George out of the tree in the middle of the grove.

  “Number fourteen!” he yelled.

  Deacon Fashaw presided over his pickers with a suckle from an orange tree. It looked like a switch a mother whipped her children with. He called George over to him with the suckle in his hand.

  “Now, number fourteen,” the deacon said, looking up into the limbs at George.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come down here. Bring ya ladder.”

  “Dog, what Uncle John want?” George said under his breath and then, out loud, “I’ll be there, Uncle John.”

  If he didn’t move fast, next thing he’d know, Deacon Fashaw would be there shaking his ladder from under the tree.

  “Come down, young man. Come down.”

  George climbed down, and Deacon Fashaw swooshed the switch at him. Anybody else, and George would have had him on the ground. But it was Deacon Fashaw, and the men respected his position too much to fight him.

  “Now, you bring your ladder back here. I told you to bring your ladder back here.”

  George ran back to get the ladder and followed Deacon Fashaw back to the first tree he had picked.

  “Now, you see that orange up there in the top of the tree?”

  “Yeah, Uncle John.”

  “Well, you know they want that orange in New York, and you done left it up there in that tree. And I don’t like it. And Mr. Eichelberger don’t like it. Mr. Eichelberger don’t like it, and I ain’t gon’ have it. Now, you put that ladder back in that tree, and you go right on up there and pick that orange right now.”

  Deacon Fashaw stood and watched George position his ladder and climb into the tree for that one orange as the other pickers peered through the branches. It was all part of Uncle John’s plan. “He let you get four or five trees away so you have to drag that back,” George said. “You probably done lost five or six boxes while you doing that. You do that two or three times, you soon get the message that ‘I’m gonna be sure I clean my tree before I leave it.’ I mean clean it.”

  They moved from grove to grove in a single day. The flatbed truck rumbled down a highway past the bean fields and the turpentine stills. Midday, they finished one grove and were moving to the next. The truck reached an intersection and swung a hard left. The ladders broke from their lashes and shifted under the men. The loose ladders pushed the men off the open bed of the truck and onto the rough surface of the highway as if they had been shot from a gun.

  George felt himself thrown to the gravel. His heels nearly hit his back, and he tried to break the fall with his elbow and knee. Half the workers were on the ground. Some had fallen onto their heads and were lying unconscious. A man named Nathan Bailey was never able to work again. He got two hundred dollars for his injuries after the men petitioned the packing company for help. George got twelve dollars and forty-eight cents for his swollen knee and elbow, which he would remember for as long as he lived; they sent him two payments of six dollars and twenty-four cents each.

  Most of the men took it and were grateful. George wasn’t. The work was hard, and now it was dangerous. “You not getting anything to begin with, you know, at the best,” he said.

  George had some schooling, and the old men who teased him for it put their pride in their sack when they thought the packinghouse was cheating them.

  “Schoolboy, look a here,” a man said. “Tell me how much I got for my work. Here my envelope.”

  George took it and looked at it and turned to the man. “How many boxes of oranges did you pick?” George asked. “How many boxes of tangerines did you pick? How many boxes of grapefruit?”

  The man told him what he thought he had picked, and George did the math.

  “No, you three dollars short. They done cheated you out of three dollars somewhere ’cause if you picked the number of boxes you say you picked, you didn’t get paid for all of it.”

  Two or three days’ pay had disappeared. It was hard to keep up. Each kind of fruit paid a different rate—four cents a box for grapefruit one day, ten cents a box for tangerines the next, six cents a box for oranges. If they didn’t know how much they picked of each kind of fruit or lost the little ticket that said what they had picked or if the foreman added the numbers on the ticket wrong, whether on purpose or by accident, the pickers didn’t get what little they were due.

  “Sometimes they would tell you that they paying one thing and when you get your pay, you got less,” George said. “And if you couldn’t figure, you didn’t know the difference. They were very good at that. They promise you four cents for a box of grapefruit, and you get two cents.”

  The pickers took whatever they got. Some asked about the difference but didn’t dare press it. Some wrote it off, blamed themselves, said they must have been the ones who’d lost their ticket. There was no point in protesting. There wasn’t enough work as it was. It was the Depression. And for every man waiting at the corner of Bates and Palmetto in the black wet morning at picking time, hoping to board a truck to the groves, there were ten more out there hoping he would miss it.

  MONROE, LOUISIANA, 1935

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  PERSHING WAS SIXTEEN and making his first trip out of Monroe on his own on a bus ticket his brother Madison had given him for graduation. Pershing had just finished the eleventh grade, which was as far as you could go if you were colored in Louisiana, and he was beside himself with anticipation.

  The sign on the front of the bus said ST. LOUIS and Pershing climbed on board with his suitcase in his hand and his back propped straight as if he were stepping onto the Queen Mary and going to France. He dusted the folds of his tweed suit and headed down the central aisle of the bus in search of a seat. The bus was not going to take him to the Big North of southern dreams but to a modest city in a border state where his brother was serving out his medical residency, and well enough out of the South.

  He scanned the aisle to find a place for himself. His eye caught the wooden shingle with the metal prongs on the bottom, the shingle that said COLORED on one side and WHITE on the other. It was set into holes at the top of a seat back toward the latter half of the bus. He didn’t like seeing it, but he knew to expect it. He took a seat behind the wooden shingle and looked out the window at the view.

  Those white and colored shingles were as much a part of the southern landscape as cotton growing in the field. Each state and city had a different requirement or cu
stom to signal how the races were to be separated and to what extent the races were to be divided. In North Carolina, white and colored passengers could not occupy “contiguous seats on the same bench.” Virginia prohibited the two races from sitting side by side on the same bench unless all other seats were filled. Several states required that the placard saying WHITE or COLORED be “in plain letters, not less than two inches high.” In Houston, the race to which the seat belonged was posted on the back of the seat. In Georgia, the penalty for willfully riding in the wrong seat was a fine of a thousand dollars or six months in prison. Colored passengers were assigned to the front of the railcar on the train but to the rear of other conveyances to, in the words of the mayor of Birmingham, do “away with the disagreeable odors that would necessarily follow the breezes.”

  The bus headed north along the Mississippi River into Arkansas, picking up more people at stops along the way. The seats began to fill. More white passengers than colored seemed to be boarding. They had taken up some of the seats in the very front and were spreading further back. Now, each time new white people got on, they picked up the wooden shingle and inserted it in the seat back where Pershing was sitting. It seemed only the white people could touch the shingle and set the musical chairs in motion.

  “Go ’head, boy. Move on back,” the driver told him.

  Pershing rustled himself up from the seat he was in. Gathered his things. Looked for an empty space behind him. Moved back a row. Sometimes the new passenger took up a whole row by himself, forcing Pershing back just so the newcomer wouldn’t have to sit next to anyone else.

  At every stop, they had to move again until the colored passengers were now crowded into a few seats in the back and Pershing found himself in the very last row.

  It was early summer, and road dust flew into the windows and rushed to the back seat, where Pershing in his brand-new tweed suit was pressed among the other colored passengers.