Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Joe Lee did not work for Mr. Edd—his father had a piece of land he farmed on his own. But it didn’t matter because any boss man in the ruling class could claim jurisdiction when he pleased. A colored man, a few miles west of here, was whipped when he asked a storekeeper for a receipt. If what Addie B. said was true, Joe Lee had committed a serious crime against Mr. Edd, and it didn’t matter who he worked for.

  So they took him out to the woods.

  They laid him across a log by the schoolhouse. They beat him with the chains that Willie Jim had raised up to Ida Mae. And when he said he didn’t know anything about any turkeys, they paid it no mind. They beat him until his coveralls turned red with blood and stuck to the surface of his skin as if with adhesive. Then they took him to the Chickasaw County jail and left him bleeding alone in the cell.

  The next morning, Addie B.’s turkeys wandered back on their own to her cabin across the field. They had been roosting in the countryside and came cawing and clucking before George and Ida Mae knew why Joe Lee was captured in the first place or what had become of him. There were no apologies. Sometimes they just got the wrong man. Joe Lee was known for taking what wasn’t his, but this was one time when he hadn’t.

  George went to Mr. Edd first thing in the morning to find out what happened and where his cousin was and to register his discontent. Ida Mae didn’t want him going in the state of mind he was in and told him to mind his words. He had to walk a thin line between being a man and acting a slave. Step too far on one side, and he couldn’t live with himself. Step too far on the other, and he might not live at all.

  He got there and asked Mr. Edd what happened.

  “Where is Joe Lee?” George asked.

  “We tried to wait till you got there,” Mr. Edd said.

  George thought it best not to press the matter of what happened to Joe Lee. All these years he had been loyal to Mr. Edd, and Mr. Edd had been fair with him. So he spoke only as a husband and father, which he felt was within his right.

  “Very idea you upsettin’ my family,” he said, looking down as he prepared to leave and not quite knowing what else to do.

  Joe Lee survived the night. The boss man told George to go get him at the jail. George, Willie, Saint, and the other colored men on the plantation took grease to peel the overalls off him, just as their slave forefathers had done after whippings generations before. They carried Joe Lee back to his father’s farm in the fresh clothes they put on him, and the people went back to picking cotton. The lash wounds on Joe Lee’s back healed in time. But Joe Lee was never right again, people said. And, in a way, neither was George.

  On the drive back home, George searched himself, hard and deep. This wasn’t the first beating, and it wouldn’t be the last. Joe Lee had lived, but he just as easily could have died. And there was not a thing anybody could do about it. As it was, Ida Mae felt George was in danger for asking Mr. Edd about it at all. Next time, it could be him. George had a brother in Chicago. Ida Mae’s big sister, Irene, was in Milwaukee and had been agitating for them to come north.

  He made up his mind on the way back. He drove into the yard and went into the cabin to break the news to Ida Mae.

  “This the last crop we making,” he said.

  EUSTIS, FLORIDA, 1944

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  WORD SPREAD THROUGH THE CITRUS GROVES that a cell of pickers had taken to demanding twenty-two cents a box and refusing to pick if they didn’t get it. It was a miracle wage, and soon other pickers were trying to join Lil George’s roving union. But some got scared at the way George talked to the white people like he was equal and never went picking with him again.

  The foremen who assembled the crews and oversaw the citrus harvest knew they were in for a long day when they saw George, Mud, and Sam awaiting pickup with other hungry workers at the corner of Bates and Palmetto. Most foremen had little sympathy for the pickers. Their job was to get the fruit out of the trees as fast as they could, and this back-and-forth over pay was wasting time. Even worse, these boys had no business telling white men what to do. Most foremen told the pickers to take whatever the packinghouses were offering.

  The Blye brothers were different. They were among the few colored foremen around and had grown up with most of the pickers. Reuben, who towered over most men and had a way of making women forget their husbands; Babe, who liked to gamble and hunt possum; and Whisper, who could speak no louder than that because he had got his throat cut, had been pickers themselves and knew the packinghouses could pay more if they wanted to. Florida growers were grossing fifty million dollars a year from that fruit back in the forties, and the brothers felt the pickers deserved better.

  After assessing a grove, George and the Blye brothers conferred on the price the pickers should ask for. Then the brothers went and told the packinghouse it looked like the pickers flat-out wouldn’t work if they didn’t get their price, and they didn’t know what had got into them. The Blye brothers hoped to convince the packinghouses that, with the war on, there weren’t enough good pickers to choose from and they were stuck with whoever was left, crazy though these pickers may be, that the packinghouses needed to think about paying more if they wanted the fruit out of the trees, at least for now. Of course, the Blye brothers, being colored and walking a fine line themselves, didn’t put it like that. They just said the pickers were refusing and they didn’t know what in the world had got into them.

  Back in the groves, the brothers confided to George, Mud, and Sam that they were within their rights to ask and that there was room to maneuver. The packinghouses were wringing the most they could out of all of them, including the Blye brothers, who had reason to believe they themselves weren’t getting paid what the white foremen were, this being the South in the 1940s.

  The grove owners and their packinghouses had a near monopoly on the growing and selling of citrus. They were among the richest men in central Florida; their European vacations and their daughters’ cotillions and the visits of their children from the best boarding schools in the South were all chronicled in the local papers that everyone, including workers like the Blye brothers and George, could read. It was a multimillion-dollar industry fed by the demands of wealthy and middle-class families from Chicago to Long Island who expected orange juice with their toast and coffee every morning.

  The brothers urged the three men and their frightened, thrown-together crew of pickers to stand their ground.

  “Man, sock it to ’em, sock it to ’em,” Reuben told George, knowing how much the grove owners were making off the fruit and that they were likely cheating them all.

  “Don’t pick it no less,” Whisper said. “Don’t pick it no less than twenty-two cents. Goddammit, I’m a tell the man y’all ain’t gon’ do it.”

  Most times George, Mud, and Sam got their price right there on the spot. But sometimes they didn’t. They couldn’t depend on getting the Blye brothers as their foremen every time. And when they didn’t, some foremen just said no without telling the packinghouse at all. Some went to the packinghouse but accepted whatever the packinghouse told them. Others went ahead and sent the truck back to the packinghouse empty of fruit and waited to see what the owners said. Sometimes the packinghouses relented. But sometimes the driver would come back from the packinghouse saying, “Well, they say they not gon’ pay that.”

  The pickers dragged back to the truck when that happened for the empty-handed ride back to town. George started to climb up with them. But most foremen weren’t like the Blye brothers and wouldn’t let him on the truck if he told the crew not to pick.

  “You big with your big-mouth self,” one foreman said. “You get back to town best way you can.”

  And so George had to thumb a ride for thirty or forty miles after facing down a foreman while his followers rumbled past him on the flatbed of the truck.

  He was developing a reputation for stirring up trouble in the groves. These walkouts were beginning to look something like a union. The grove owners didn’t like
unions, didn’t allow unions, and weren’t going to stand for it, especially from a band of colored pickers trying to take advantage of the war. Inez was scared for her husband but too disgusted to let it show. Didn’t he realize that he was colored in the South? Why couldn’t he be satisfied like everybody else?

  Big George had been working with them when Lil George stood up to a foreman in Orlando.

  The next day, Big George begged off. “I ain’t going with you,” he said. “Y’all too crazy.”

  He knew, and everyone else knew, that every time George went out to the groves standing up to packinghouses, he was pushing the limits of what a colored man in Florida in the 1940s was allowed to get away with.

  In the months that George had been rousing up the pickers, their world had grown even more dangerous due to the state’s desperate wartime need for labor. From the panhandle to the Everglades, Florida authorities were now arresting colored men off the street and in their homes if they were caught not working. Charged with vagrancy, the men were assessed fines of several weeks’ pay and made to pick fruit or cut sugarcane to work off the debt if they did not have the money, which few of them did and as the authorities fully anticipated. Those captured were hauled to remote plantations or turpentine camps, held by force, and beaten or shot if they tried to escape.

  It was an illegal form of contemporary slavery called debt peonage, which persisted in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South well into the 1940s. Federal investigations into neoslavery in Florida uncovered numerous abuses of kidnapping and enslavement and led to a 1942 indictment and trial of a sugar plantation company in the Everglades.

  Lake County, too, needed as many workers as could be rounded up and in 1944 elected a new sheriff to see to it. He was Willis Virgil McCall, the six-foot-tall son of a dirt farmer who policed the county with a ten-gallon hat, size thirteen boots, and a Winchester rifle he did not hesitate to cock. He was openly linked to white supremacists and would be implicated in the deaths and abuse of dozens of blacks in what would become a twenty-eight-year reign. As soon as he took office, he set to work. He arrested forty pickers for vagrancy, including a man from Deacon Fashaw’s crew, in late January and early February 1945. They were arrested for not working on a Saturday, at a time when George, Sam, and Mud were leading actual strikes in the groves.

  Each day, the danger was drawing closer, and there was now even more pressure on George’s pickers to work no matter how much George managed to win for them. McCall stepped up his arrests. In February, he showed up at the home of a picker from a crew in Leesburg, fifteen miles west of Eustis. The picker, Mack Fryar, had already worked that week, but, to the sheriff’s way of thinking, the picker had no business being at home on a Saturday instead of out in the groves. McCall ordered Fryar to come with him. When he asked why, McCall replied, “None of your damn jaw, just come on with me.” McCall struck the picker in the head with a blackjack for such impudence, knocking him unconscious in front of the picker’s wife and fourteen-year-old son. He then hauled the picker to the Lake County jail.

  The FBI began an investigation, and an agent was seen visiting the picker’s wife, Annie. Local whites got wind of it and began plotting mob action because they saw her as “stirring up trouble for the sheriff and the county” by talking to the FBI. Neighbors warned the wife, and upon the picker’s release, the Fryars fled to Harlem, “leaving all their possessions, except some money from the sale of her chickens.”

  George, now an unintended union organizer, somehow managed to stay under the radar screen for months, or so it appeared, in the eleven hundred square miles of citrus land being policed by Sheriff McCall. But that could not go on forever. The orange groves had become a battlefield over more than just fruit but over the rights of the people lowest down in the citrus world and the caste system itself, and the only thing that couldn’t be known was how far George, Mud, and Sam could push it.

  For several days late in the picking season, no rain fell from the sky. The limbs of the tangerine trees shrank in response. The stems became a tough rubber, harder to cut.

  Lil George and his crew landed in a tangerine grove out in Sanford in the middle of this unpleasant development. They hated picking tangerines. The fruit was small, and it took more of them to fill a box. The very properties that made them easy to peel made them harder to pick. The rind broke and bruised almost at the touch, meaning it was harder to get a box of perfect tangerines. They had to be clipped flush without scraping the fruit, all while the picker was reaching between the branches and trying to steady himself on a limb. Then they had to be packed just so in the crate so the stem of each tangerine wouldn’t injure the rest.

  However difficult they were to pick, tangerines were big sellers at market. Growers in Lake County were known for holding down their production costs, and thus netting “returns to the grower considerably above the state average,” according to a newspaper report.

  To do that, the grove owners were holding the pickers to nickels on a box. But, with the war on, tangerines were selling an average of four dollars and forty cents a box at auction in 1944, nearly twice the going rate before the United States entered World War II. Across the state, tens of thousands of tangerines were being shipped out every week, a good portion of them coming out of Lake County. There were 2.6 million citrus trees in Lake County, the third most in the state next to Polk and Orange counties.

  George’s crew arrived at the tangerine grove out in Sanford that morning. The foreman said the packinghouse would pay ten cents a box. George said that wasn’t enough what with all they had to do and how hard it was to pick fragile tangerines in the best of conditions, which, after the lack of rain, these weren’t.

  The price was always in flux depending on the circumstances anyway. This was one time where the pickers saw more work for themselves and thought the price should reflect that. So, no, they needed twenty cents. The foreman held his ground. Lil George started to round up the pickers to head back home, to see if twenty cents sounded better to the foreman than no tangerines at all. George told his crew to get back on the truck, we’re going back to town.

  “Well, we done come all this far now,” they said. “We may as well work today, and then we won’t come back tomorrow.”

  This was always the hard part. The pickers liked the miracle money on the days when the foreman gave in. But when the foreman turned them down, they were scared to leave with ill will in the air. What was the point of antagonizing the boss man? Let’s go on and work while we’re out here.

  But George knew that walking out was the only leverage they had.

  “No, we not gonna work today,” George told the pickers. “We are not going to work today. Now, you made enough money yesterday. You already made more in one day than you make in a week doing day’s work. You ain’t never made over six dollars a week. Yesterday, you made seven, eight, nine dollars. So you not losing anything. You gaining. So you can afford to go home and sit down today. Now, we not picking.”

  The pickers didn’t move.

  “What are you worried about?” George asked them. “Just take it easy.”

  “Well, we done warmed our pail.”

  “So now you don’t have to cook. Just take that on back home and eat.”

  Word got back to the owner of the grove that there was trouble in the tangerine stands, and he came out to the field himself. He demanded to know why they were standing there not picking.

  “We not gonna pick tangerines for less than twenty cents a box,” George told him.

  The man cursed and called them names. He had a gun on him like many a man, colored and white, in those parts at that time and told them he would use it if he had to. George, Mud, and Sam knew from hunting squirrel and possum how to handle a gun, too, and told him as much. The pickers, too frightened to speak, watched the standoff between George and the grove owner, not knowing how far either of them would take this thing or how all of them would manage to get out of this.

 
; The men came to no agreement. The owner stormed back to his truck and sped away in a cloud of dust down an alley of his unpicked tangerine trees. George tried to step onto the flatbed truck to head back to town with his pickers. The foreman pushed him off.

  “No, boy,” he said. “Y’all can’t work, you ain’t gon’ ride. These others can go back on here, but you ain’t going back on there.”

  The pickers were scared to get on the truck and scared not to.

  “Y’all go ’head,” George said. “Don’t worry about me. Go on and get in the truck. You ride. I’ll get back to town. Don’t worry about me. Just get on the truck.”

  He hitched a ride back to town and wondered how long his little union would hold.

  Fear spread among Lil George’s band of pickers after that losing day in the tangerine groves. The owner had come out and seen them not picking. All these walkouts, and there might come a time when the packinghouse wouldn’t let them work at all. The boss men might blame them for the fruit hanging unpicked in the trees. A picker would end up hanging from a tree himself before long, if this kept up.

  They talked among themselves when George, Mud, and Sam weren’t around. They didn’t like how George, in particular, had a way of being what they considered impudent with white people in a way that made everyone nervous.

  Things had gone too far, as the other pickers saw it. These boys had been up north and were going to get all of them killed. That night, after the defeat over the tangerines, they went in secret to the owners of the grove.

  “Us come by to tell y’all how come us didn’t work today,” they said. “Them boys, Sam and Mud and Lil George. You know them is bad. Them boys is bad. We know y’all is always done a good part by us colored folks, and we wanted to work. But them boys told us if we put a ladder in that tree, they gonna snatch the ladder up and stomp us when we hit the ground. So we scared. We know y’all is good white folks and has always done a good part by us. And it wasn’t none a us.”