Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  They looked further west and found a house more in keeping with their vision of themselves. It was a four-bedroom peach stucco mansion set back from the road on St. Andrews between Pico and Country Club. The address was 1215 St. Andrews. It had a wide portico with balustrades like the bridges of Paris. It was surrounded by houses that were equally grand. And they wanted it.

  But the neighborhood was all white, and there was a covenant on the house that forbade the owners from selling to colored people. Still a real estate agent managed to secure the house for them in spite of the restriction. During the early testing of limits that presaged the white flight from northern and western cities in the 1960s, realtors found ways around the covenants by buying properties themselves and selling them at a higher price to colored people, by arranging third-party transfers that hid the identity of the true purchasers, or by matching defiant or desperate white sellers with equally anxious colored buyers, which together were just about the only way colored people could get into certain neighborhoods. In any case, Dr. and Mrs. Beck, bourgeois though they were, waited until after dark to move into 1215 St. Andrews Place. But someone must have seen them. That night, as they began unpacking, an orange light danced in front of the picture window. The palm tree on their manicured lawn was on fire. It was not unlike the crosses that burned in the South, except this was California.

  They were not new to this kind of hostility, and they decided not to run from it. They had survived the South during far uglier days. And they considered themselves upstanding people that anyone should be proud to live next to. They went to court to challenge the covenant and defend the means by which they had acquired the house; and, when it was over, they had won the right to stay. The white people emptied out of the block within months.

  On a spring afternoon six years later, Robert Pershing Foster drew near the vicinity of the peach stucco house that his mentor had to sue to live in, to begin his own life in California.

  Robert had arrived in one of the last receiving stations of the twentieth-century migration out of the South. For most of the state’s history, the distance between California and the old Confederacy had discouraged all but the most determined of black pioneers. The people were of so little means that they could scarcely take a chance on someplace so far away in the decades before the Great Migration. There was already an abundance of unskilled labor from China, Japan, and Mexico, which gave California industries little need to recruit cheap black labor from the South, had they been so inclined.

  Still, a small contingent of blacks had lived in California since the eighteenth century. There were two blacks among the forty-four settlers who founded Los Angeles on September 4, 1781. Some arrived over the ensuing decades, when slaveholders who moved west brought their slaves with them. Others worked as fur traders, scouts, cowboys, and miners. But even before the end of the Civil War, California, like other states outside the South, strongly discouraged the migration of freed slaves across its border. The state constitutional convention seriously considered prohibiting colored people from living in California. The measure did not pass but was a reflection of the fear and intolerance directed toward them.

  By 1900, there were only 2,131 black people in the city of Los Angeles out of a total population of 102,479, and only 11,045 in the entire state of California. The numbers rose slowly but steadily over the years but did not take off during the labor shortage of World War I as in the North. California had not been as dependent on European labor as had other parts of the country, and Los Angeles, the state’s largest city, did not then have an industrial base as did the cities of the North.

  But even in the low-status laborer and domestic positions that were the caste-ordered preserve of colored people in the South, colored migrants to California faced stiff competition from the many immigrants already there, the Mexicans and Filipinos working the loading docks, the Europeans in personal service to the glamorous and the wealthy.

  “Even the seeming inapproachable shoe-shining field was competed for by the Greeks,” observed a report by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s on the challenges facing black workers in Los Angeles. “Trained English servants succeeded them as valets and butlers.”

  The polyglot nature of Los Angeles made it harder for colored migrants to figure out this new terrain, where competition was coming from every direction and each minority was pitted against the others. “In certain plants, Mexicans and whites worked together,” the Works Progress Administration reported. “In some others, white workers accepted Negroes and objected to Mexicans. In others, white workers accepted Mexicans and objected to Japanese. White women worked with Mexican and Italian women, but refused to work with Negroes.… In the General Hospital, Negro nurses attended white patients, but were segregated from white nurses in dining halls: in a manufacturing plant white workers refused to work with Negroes, but worked under a Negro foreman.”

  Into this world arrived the migrants from the South, looking for a place for themselves far from home, not knowing what to expect in a city with a whimsical caste system and no rules that anyone could see.

  The Becks were expecting him. Word had reached them that he was heading to California, although Robert did not alert them himself or assume he could stay with them. Driving in the middle of a foreign city, it hit him that he had arrived in Los Angeles without any assurance of anything. It was not clear who would take him in or for how long. The nearest relative was two thousand miles away. And he suddenly started to feel alone and uncertain again. “I knew I could find a place to sleep in any hotel I knew would take me in,” he would say years later, “but I didn’t know what my future was.”

  He decided to look up Dr. Beck’s office and go by there first. He didn’t want to give the impression that he expected to live off the Becks. “These were not relatives I was going to see,” Robert said. “I didn’t know the Becks would take me in.”

  He found the address in the phone book. It was an office building on South Figueroa, number 4240. It turned out Dr. Beck was delighted to see him.

  “Come here, boy,” Dr. Beck said greeting him. “Of course you’ll be staying with us. We’ve got a big house, plenty of room.”

  Robert regaled the Becks with the story of his journey. And he told them that it was not yet over, that he was going up to Oakland to see about the prospects there.

  “Now, when you get through looking it over,” Dr. Beck said, “come on back here, and I’ll give you all the surgery out of my practice.”

  Robert was relieved and knew that Dr. Beck had the best of intentions. But he also knew he couldn’t make a living on one man’s referrals alone. So he made plans to drive up to Oakland and to see if it better suited him. In the meantime, he would take in L.A.

  Johnny Warmsley, an old schoolmate from Morehouse, took him around, brought in another guy they knew from Atlanta, Wilbur Pew Beulow, who owned a gas station now, and showed him Hollywood and Vine, which actually meant something in those days, and Beverly Hills, the hills in general, the colored nightclubs on Central Avenue, the department stores on Wilshire, the palm trees, the billboards, the people dressed like Dean Martin and Doris Day, the broad silver sidewalks, and the mansions the color of cotton candy.

  They rode and rode, and Robert drank it in. He saw what he had driven all this way for and had had in his mind for as long as he could remember, and there it was laid out before him better than a dream.

  “I loved it,” Robert said. “I loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it.”

  You could drive for hours and still not see the end of it. He could get lost in a town like this, be whoever he wanted to be. It was a blank canvas waiting for him to start painting on it. “Big, open, hustle and bustle,” he said. “It was big, big, big. It was the cleanest city I’d ever seen. It was clean enough to eat breakfast off the sidewalk. Beautiful. I loved it.”

  Johnny Warmsley gave him the verbal map of the city.

  “Now, Los Angeles is divided into East and West by Main S
treet,” Johnny told him. “All the boulevards go this way, and the streets go that way. The colored neighborhoods are mostly east. There are very few of us west of Crenshaw.” That meant most of the places you heard about in the movies: Bel-Air, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Malibu. They were off-limits to colored people, Johnny Warmsley told him.

  Robert would have expected as much after his ordeal in Arizona and was too excited to muster much disappointment. After all, the Becks were living west of Crenshaw, the lawsuit notwithstanding, and that gave him hope that Los Angeles was making as much progress as most any city he might choose.

  Johnny and Wilbur were happy to take him to where the movie stars lived and maybe make a sighting. But Robert said he didn’t care about that. He had already seen Barbara Stanwyck once. It was when he was based in Austria for the army and the colonel from Mississippi, rather than giving Robert an assignment, ordered him to make himself scarce. The Clements gave him and Alice the money for a trip. They went all over Europe and when they were in Venice, they were standing in St. Mark’s Square when they saw Barbara Stanwyck and whoever her husband was at the time.

  “And she whispered to him, ‘Look at the blacks over there,’ ” Robert remembered. “I read her lips. She didn’t say it in a demeaning manner, but I saw him look over to where we were. And they were giving false grins for all the populants of the city. If you see a celebrity, sure, I want to see the celebrity. But I’d seen enough not to go gaga over it.”

  He woke up from the city’s spell. The glamour was all well and good, but he had other things on his mind.

  “I was thinking of more urgent things,” he said. “What will I do? What will I do? I had to think about surviving.”

  And so something compelled him several hundred more miles through the mountains, a fear that he was on his own now, far from home, that failure was a distinct but unbearable possibility and that everyone was watching and ready to comment on how things turned out. There was a dread deep within him that he might not make it in L.A., however besotted he was. And so he prepared to drive to Oakland in order to settle on a city for good.

  He was weighing every nuance and eventuality, and the stars seemed to have preordained Oakland. It had more people from Monroe than any other place on the coast. He would have a ready-made clientele. He would be looking up his old friend John Dunlap, who had been in the mortuary business in Monroe, knew everybody from back home, and had assured him of plenty of patients. It was as if Oakland were sitting there waiting for him. He could not rest until he had seen it.

  He rode at God’s knee between the two great cities of California and saw the clouds search out folds in the mountains. He made his way across the San Francisco Bay and into Oakland, which by the early 1950s had become a satellite of colored Louisiana. The shipyards and the loading docks and the railroad jobs had called out to the southerners running from Jim Crow and had given them haven and jobs paying more than a dollar an hour. They settled in the foothills of west Oakland and Richmond, far from the wealthy white cliff-side mansions and nearer to the shipyards. They planted their collards and turnip greens, and let chickens forage out back.

  Robert drove into west Oakland, past the fussy Victorian row houses and the worker cottages, turreted and marching in lockstep, barely a foot between them, roosters and pole beans growing in some of the postage stamp yards. It was looking familiar. It was looking like Monroe, which was perhaps one reason why people from Monroe had gravitated there in the first place and made a colony for themselves. It was precisely what Robert was looking to get away from. It was not living up to his glamour vision of California. It felt as if he had driven all this way for the same place he had left.

  He was searching for Forty-second and Lusk, where John Dunlap lived. Dunlap, as Robert called him, had moved to Oakland at the height of the war, in 1943, not knowing a soul. The climate agreed with him. He got a room and sent for his wife. From then on, he saw southerners like Robert show up in Oakland looking for something they couldn’t name. “They started coming every week,” Dunlap said decades later. “They were coming in carloads.”

  Dunlap had married into a family of morticians and so had taken up the trade himself. Robert was counting on Dunlap to show him around and help him build a clientele. Morticians were always good people to know. Having seen the villas in Los Angeles, Robert was expecting a spread befitting someone with the guaranteed customer base a mortician enjoys. But he pulled up to Lusk and found the little white worker cottage belonging to Dunlap.

  Dunlap was glad to see him and showed Robert where he would be sleeping—on a makeshift bed in the front room. He apologized for not being able to take Robert around. But he was working hard to make ends meet in this new world and was too beat at the end of the day to be of much help. It turned out Dunlap hadn’t found work as a mortician in Oakland. He and other middle-class migrants from the South, it turns out, were not unlike the immigrant taxi drivers you hear about who had been doctors or engineers back in Pakistan. Dunlap had been somebody back home, but it didn’t translate at his destination. And so he had taken a job as a laborer at the shipyard.

  Dunlap pointed Robert in the direction of the hospitals he knew of and the people Robert might like to see from back home in Monroe. Robert set out in the morning for the hospitals and clinics he’d heard about. He went to Kaiser, the big industrialist-shipping conglomerate, to see what possibilities there might be for a medical position. He came back empty.

  “I’m not finding what I want,” he told Dunlap.

  Dunlap knew what that meant. Not only was Robert having no luck finding a place to practice, he wasn’t liking Oakland. As Dunlap saw it, Dr. Beck had gotten to Robert first. Los Angeles had seduced him. And Oakland did not stand a chance. Robert made up his mind and phoned Alice and the Clements about his decision. And as soon as he did, he drove back to Los Angeles to start living for the first time in his life.

  THE THINGS THEY LEFT BEHIND

  There were no Chinaberry trees. No pecan trees.…

  Never again would I pick dew berries

  or hear the familiar laughter from the field truck.

  This was my world now, this strange new family

  and their cramped quarters over the tiny grocery store

  they grandly called the “confectionery.”

  — CLIFTON TAULBERT, The Last Train North

  IN THE NORTH AND WEST, 1915–2000

  WHEN THEY FLED, there were things they left behind. There were people they might not see again. They would now find out through letters and telegrams that a baby had been born or that a parent had taken ill or passed away. There were things they might not ever taste or touch or share in again because they were hundreds of miles from all that they had known. From this moment forward, it would take great effort and resources merely to sit and chat over salt pork and grits with a beloved mother or sister who had chosen not to go. Perhaps the greatest single act of family disruption and heartbreak among black Americans in the twentieth century was the result of the hard choices made by those on either side of the Great Migration.

  The South was still deep within those who left, and the sight of some insignificant thing would take them back and remind them of what they once were. For my mother, a vase of Casablanca lilies far from home took her back to the memory of this:

  Once a year on a midsummer night that could not be foretold, a curious plant called the night-blooming cereus would decide to undrape its petals. It was said, among the colored people in the small-town South who followed such things and made a ritual of its arrival, that if you looked hard enough, you could see the face of the baby Jesus in the folds of the bloom.

  My mother’s mother, who sang to her camellias and made showpieces of the most recalcitrant and unlovable of plants—the African violets and Boston ferns that died when other people just looked at them—did not want to leave the land of her ancestors, the drawl of small-town convention, the hard soil she had willed into a cutting garden. There was chaos in t
he Jim Crow world outside her picket fence. But inside, there was peace and beauty, and she insulated herself in her perennial beds.

  She grew a night-blooming cereus on the front porch of her yellow bungalow. Its gangly branches coiled out of its pot and snaked along the porch planks. It was an unpleasant-looking orphan of a plant that was only worth growing for the one night in the year when its white, lily-like petals managed to open for a few hours when nobody would be up to see it.

  My mother’s mother tended its homely stalks all through the year. She watched it close and made note when the buds were plump and ready to unfurl. As soon as she was certain, she alerted the neighbors as they passed her front yard with its roses the size of saucers, which she sold after some cajoling for a dollar apiece, and its crape myrtles the color of cotton candy.

  “My night-blooming cereus is going to open tonight,” she told them.

  Amanda Poindexter, Miss Lilybell Nelson, who lived up the hill and sang like a bird, Mrs. Jacobs next door, and a few other neighbor ladies on Gibbon Street would arrive at my grandmother’s front porch at around midnight. They drank sweet tea and ate freshly churned vanilla ice cream. They rocked in the porch swing, which creaked as they rocked, and they waited. As a young girl, my mother sat watching on the porch steps, mystified by the grown people’s patience and devotion.

  The opening took hours. Sometime around three in the morning, the white petals spread open, and the women set down their sweet tea to crane their necks over the blossom. They inhaled its sugary scent and tried to find the baby Jesus in the cradle in the folds. Most exclaimed that they saw it; my mother said she never did. But she would remember the wait for the night-blooming cereus, the Georgia heat stifling and heavy, and take the memory with her when she left, though she would never share in the mystery of that Gibbon Street ritual again.