Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  The dust coated the tweed and his skin and his hair, and Pershing found it unbearable, packed as he was like livestock.

  “I was dressed as good as I could be,” Pershing said years later. “And I felt very down that I had to submit to this.”

  He looked around him at the other colored passengers to his left and to his right, grown people, beaten down, hunched in their seats. They dropped their eyes, and he dropped his.

  “Some have endured, and that’s all they’ve known,” Pershing said. “They don’t expect anything better, and nobody’s demanding anything better. You wouldn’t have survived if you had done too much demanding anyway.”

  It was a long ride, there was no toilet on the bus, and the back seats took every bump on the road. Before Pershing could make it to St. Louis, he passed his urine and sat in his soaked tweed pants and felt lower than he had in his entire short life.

  St. Louis was a blur. Madison carted Pershing all over St. Louis, took him into Homer G. Phillips Hospital, where Madison was a resident and where the nurses fawned over the cute little brother with the thick eyelashes and waves in his hair. Madison reminded him it was time to get ready for college. For a while, when he was thirteen or fourteen, Pershing actually thought he didn’t have to go. He told his mother that one day.

  “Mama, I’m gonna stop school.”

  He didn’t realize how impossible that was, his father being principal and all.

  Ottie indulged him.

  “Baby, why are you gonna stop school?”

  “I want some of the things the other boys got.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like clothes.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  Pershing couldn’t think of much in particular that he didn’t already have.

  “I want a suit. I want a pair of shoes.”

  “Now, I tell you what you do,” his mother said. “You save your little money you get from the milk. Now, get you a little job after school or in the summer, and you work and save your money. And when you got half of whatever it cost, I’ll give you the other half.”

  Pershing listened.

  “And you don’t pay down on anything,” she told him. “You can keep your money as well as that white man can.”

  The nearest college was right in Monroe, across the railroad tracks from where they lived. Northeast Louisiana College had a brand-new campus with reasonable fees, built with taxpayer money, to which his parents’ meager salaries contributed. Students who looked like Pershing weren’t permitted there. So the family debated where Pershing would go.

  His mother wanted him at Morehouse, the most prestigious college in the country for colored men. It was in Atlanta, which might as well have been Paris, and she wanted the biggest she could get for her baby. All these years she had saved up her teaching money, kept it in a chifforobe with a key, which the children knew not to touch. It would be their future. The last time she opened the chifforobe, it was to send Leland to Morehouse. It was expensive, and he had not fared well. Professor Foster blamed the school, but anyone who knew Leland knew the trouble was with Leland, whom the women called Woo and who was brilliant, beloved, and weak to life’s temptations. They had wasted their precious, second-class, colored teacher’s wages on Leland at Morehouse. Now Ottie was trying to send Pershing there, and Pershing wanted to go.

  “No, you don’t go to Morehouse,” Professor Foster said.

  “You’ll go to Morehouse,” his mother said.

  So it was settled. He would go to Morehouse. But the family had to save up the extra money it would take. Pershing would have to spend two years at the lesser-known alma mater of his parents, Leland College, before living out his mother’s dream.

  The summer after his freshman year at Leland, he needed a job. He heard the furniture store downtown needed janitors. He dressed and went down and got in line with all the other colored boys wanting to work.

  The white foreman called him to the front when it was his turn for an interview.

  “Boy, do you go to school?” the foreman asked.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” he said. “I just completed my first year at Leland College.”

  “Boy, if you go to college, you don’t need a job as a janitor.”

  Few people, white or black, in Ouachita County had the chance to go to college. Resentments ran deep, especially when it came to a colored boy getting to go when some southerners were still debating whether colored people were worth educating at all. Too many educated colored people, and it would upset the whole balance of power in the caste system and give other colored people ideas.

  The man turned to some other boys in line, who weren’t in school and didn’t need tuition, and hired them. Pershing had a long memory, and he would nurse that wound for years. Here he was trying to make something of himself, and the invisible hand was punishing the ambitious, and rewarding the servile to keep colored people in their place.

  Later in the summer, he went looking for work at the sawmill.

  He saw a classmate there from high school and was told the work wasn’t too hard. It was stacking wood staves to make barrels. Pershing asked the foreman for a job. There was nothing available, he was told. He was getting desperate. He spotted his friend stacking staves.

  “Show me how to do this.”

  The friend showed him what to do, and Pershing worked beside him. He looked up and saw the foreman watching him. Pershing pretended not to see him, worked even harder. The foreman left, and, when he came back, Pershing was still at work. At the end of the day, the foreman hired him. Pershing finished out the summer stacking staves, not minding the hard work and not finding it demeaning.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to stoop to conquer.”

  Morehouse was a heavenly place. Colored boys racing straight-backed and self-important in their sweater vests, hair brushed back with a hint of a center part. Arriving at chapel to sit with their respective fraternities and daring not take the wrong row. There was a sister school, Spelman, the women sealed off in their cloistered dormitories and emerging in fitted dresses and gloves to be paired with Morehouse men, who were the only men worthy of them. There was the graduate school, Atlanta University, where the brightest of both schools were expected to go to take their master’s and doctorates. It was all too perfect for words.

  Whatever future there was for colored America, they believed themselves to be it, and they carried themselves accordingly. Then there was Atlanta. Too many colored doctors and lawyers and businessmen to count, living in brick houses set back from the road and with staircases inside, driving fancy cars and not apologizing for it.

  “I saw blacks living like people ought to live,” Pershing would say years later.

  Atlanta was big enough to get lost in. Enough colored people to be anonymous. The colored people drew a fence around themselves and manufactured a world so grand they told themselves they didn’t want whatever Jim Crow was keeping from them.

  Pershing was at peace. It was the fall of 1937.

  After the first homecoming game, Pershing and a science classmate by the name of Morris Williams took two girls out dancing. They both chipped in the money they needed and bought sloe gin for the four of them and whiled away the night.

  They took the girls home and were walking back to the dormitory. As they crossed the intersection of Fair and Ashby, Pershing slowed down to a stop in the middle of the street. He was wobbling from the gin. He stood and looked around. He was in Atlanta in the middle of the night, far from the stooping and yessums of Monroe. He was surrounded by a whole campus of somebodies like him and doing whatever he pleased.

  He stood in the street, half drunk and half dreaming. Cars slowed and honked, and he paid them no mind.

  “Boy, come on,” his friend said. “Get out the street. That car’s gon’ hit you, you drunk fool.”

  “Yes, I’m drunk,” Pershing said. “I ain’t in Monroe, don’t nobody know me, and I don’t give a damn.

  “I’m
free,” he said.

  Pershing did not know precisely where he would end up or how. But he knew at that moment that he would never live in another country Jim Crow town again. He would do whatever it took to get as far away as he could.

  “That bug got in me,” Pershing would later say. “I wanted, I wanted to get out.”

  Shadows still hung over him. His big brother Leland was rarely in class but was a four-letter man at Morehouse and a star pitcher on the baseball team. The Spelman women called out his name on the yard. And then there was Madison, his oldest brother. Madison still hung over him from afar. Madison was a doctor. Madison sang. Madison dressed. The women loved Madison.

  “So you hit school,” Pershing would remember years later, “and ‘That’s Foster’s brother. That’s Foster’s brother.’ It’s hard to be the little one. You fightin’ for identity. And everybody discussing everything you did. And when it was bad, they blew it up.”

  Pershing threw himself into the one thing that brought him the most attention. He had a voice as rich as an organ, so he joined the school choir. He started singing solo at the Christmas concert at Sisters Chapel at Spelman and made a name for himself. In time, people didn’t ask about Leland and baseball as much anymore or about his brother the doctor.

  In his senior year, sometime in 1939, Pershing arrived for choir practice one day when the head of the music department, a man by the name of Harold Stotford, called him over. They stood in the rehearsal room as students gathered to practice.

  “Foster, wait here a minute,” Professor Stotford said. “I want you to meet this young lady.”

  A young woman of modest dress and perfect manners stepped forward. She was a gifted pianist and a newer member of the choir. She was the color of the buttermilk he used to make with his mother and had brown hair brushing her shoulder. She looked out from wire-rimmed glasses that were an accurate barometer of how studious she was.

  Pershing recognized her instantly. She could have been a celebrity on campus had she not had the breeding and sweet nature not to make a fuss of her position. She was the beloved only daughter of the president of Atlanta University, the campus’s graduate school, and was well known to anyone with the least awareness of social standing.

  Her name was Alice Clement.

  She was a sophomore at Spelman. Her family lived in a mansion high on a hill on university grounds. It was redbrick with black shutters. The estate was called Hickory Hill and looked like Mount Vernon. Her father, President Rufus Clement, had a car and driver. Her cotillions and bridge parties were chronicled in the society pages of the Atlanta Daily World, the colored newspaper in town. She was bookish and would not likely have been made Miss Spelman had she even cared to run, but she would know how to throw a dinner party for twelve. She was the embodiment of most everything an ambitious colored man of the day was trained to want.

  “This is the daughter of President Clement,” Professor Stotford said, “who happens to be that gentleman there. President of Atlanta University. I want you to meet Alice Clement.”

  “How do you do?” Pershing said. He made a mental note to himself to make the most of his good fortune.

  At the next choir rehearsal, he made it his business to start a conversation with her in the hope that something might come of it. She finally asked him to take her to a party. He was all too happy to oblige.

  He put on his wittiest, most charming self, and soon the boy from Monroe, Louisiana, was courting the quiet and self-contained daughter of a university president. Pershing escorted her to parties, took her to dances with a foursome. He was spending more time up at Hickory Hill and gaining automatic admission to the world of the most influential colored people in all of Atlanta.

  Pershing Foster was not what Rufus Early Clement would have had in mind for his only daughter. Clement had risen from a bellhop and delivery boy in Kentucky to become the head of one of the most elite colored universities in the country and its longest-serving president. He was a square-jawed, politically astute academic who rarely smiled and wore a look of professorial detachment at both the lectern and the many social engagements that demanded his attendance. He met regularly with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson in his capacity not only as a university president but as a leading figure among the colored bourgeoisie in the South.

  Clement gained a reputation as a cautious and incurious steward whom history will record as the man who ousted W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual of his time, from a professorship at Atlanta University after years of clashing egos and temperaments.

  W. E. B. Du Bois arrived at Atlanta University, already in his seventies and with plans for an ambitious study on race relations, at around the same time that Clement was confronted with this new boy interested in his only daughter. Clement would be at odds with Du Bois almost from the start, perhaps threatened by the long shadow of his celebrity or put off by the elder man’s impertinent disregard for Clement, who was thirty years younger than Du Bois. But it was just as likely a contest between the accommodating pragmatism of the southern-born Clement and the impatient radicalism of the northern-bred Du Bois. The two men were the very embodiment of the North-South divide among black intellectuals.

  In any case, Clement blocked Du Bois’s every move, even standing in the way of a thousand-dollar grant Du Bois was pursuing, according to Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis. Du Bois suspected Clement of sabotaging him and said he “regretted the necessity of having to work with a president who seemed incapable of appreciating the great opportunity facing the university.” For his part, Clement complained that Du Bois “had become extremely difficult” and that he believed Du Bois’s age was impairing him. In 1943, Clement found a way to get rid of Du Bois altogether by invoking, with the support of the board of trustees he had lobbied, an arbitrary loophole requiring compulsory retirement at sixty-five. He informed Du Bois that he would be retired when his contract ended at the close of the school year.

  “The result of this action was disastrous,” Du Bois wrote in his autobiography. “Not only was a great plan of scientific work killed at birth, but my own life was thrown into confusion.” Du Bois “fought back in despair” against his termination, Lewis wrote. Students from Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and Atlanta University rose up in support of Du Bois in a scornful letter to President Clement: “Our regret,” they wrote, “is that we did not have more courses under him, and the students who follow us will not have the opportunity which we have had in absorbing his rich experience and inspiration.”

  Du Bois was beside himself. “There was no earthly reason why this wish of mine should not have been granted and applauded,” he said.

  His northern friends thought they knew what the trouble was. “He’s buried himself in the South too long,” Arthur Spingarn, the NAACP president, concluded, “protecting ideas nobody but he understands, and raising hope for change which may be comprehended in a hundred years.”

  Du Bois returned north, to New York, where he took a position as director of special research at the NAACP, the organization he had co-founded thirty-four years before, and moved into an apartment on Sugar Hill in Harlem.

  For his part, Rufus Clement had proven that, even if out of his own insecurities and desire for control, he could be a cunning and formidable adversary. He had prevailed in the short run, regardless of the consequences or of which side of history he would ultimately fall on.

  As for this new young man at his doorstep wanting to court his only daughter, Clement was still sizing him up. Pershing was respectful and well mannered, as Dr. Clement would have expected of any Morehouse man. He was a math major—smart, clearly. But on the face of it, Pershing was just another student who had worked waiting tables at the cafeteria and who was just now making a name for himself as a soloist in the choir. He had come from some country town out in Louisiana. Someone said his parents taught school or something. Dr. Clement had never heard of the Fosters, nor had he any reason to recognize Monroe.

/>   No young man with the courage to come courting his daughter would have had an easy time of it. Worse still, this was not looking like a move up in Dr. Clement’s estimation, so he looked judgingly through his spectacles.

  But Pershing told of the great plans he had for himself. He talked about pursuing his doctorate in biology at Atlanta University. Or maybe going to a graduate school up north, like the University of Michigan or the University of Chicago. Pershing figured that southern elites always loved those northern status symbols even if they didn’t care to live there themselves. Maybe he would get a scholarship to go. Then he would apply for a fellowship in New York, maybe. His brother was a doctor, internal medicine, and he was considering that, too, by the way.

  Pershing was talking the president’s language, the vocabulary of upward mobility. He had potential. He was ambitious, if nothing else. And Alice—quiet, demure Alice—had taken to him. He had a street wit about him that made her laugh. He was the life of the party she never was, and she seemed content to bask in his light.

  Pershing graduated Morehouse with a major in math and a minor in biology in the spring of 1939 and sang solo at commencement. He took up graduate studies at Atlanta University while Alice completed her time at Spelman. He was moving into a world where great things were expected of him. Dr. Clement looked for him to make good on his promise to become someone worthy of his daughter. Madison wanted his baby brother to follow in his footsteps. His mother, too, wanted a second doctor in the family and knew her youngest had it in him. So he applied to Meharry Medical College in Nashville and was accepted. His mother sent him the registration fee.

  “I sat awake all night,” he said. “Do I want to go? Or don’t I want to go?”

  If he could have done anything in the world at that moment, he would have dropped it all and gone up north to New York or out west to California. He’d always had a thing for California. He would go into show business, maybe, and sing and perform onstage. The audiences would love him, and he would be who and where he was meant to be. But he kept his dreams to himself and did what was expected of him. He sent in the registration fee and would start medical school in the South, in the state of Tennessee, a place far from his dreams, in the fall.