Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  LOS ANGELES, JUNE 1953

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  ROBERT HAD BEEN IN CALIFORNIA for a couple of months now, taking whatever work Dr. Beck threw his way and doing physicals for Golden State Insurance. He had set aside some of what he had been making and was starting to feel he could pull a practice together, what with all the people he was meeting through Golden State.

  He decided it was time he got an office of his own. He could never get ahead on those ten-dollar physicals, and he wouldn’t be able to make the most of Dr. Beck’s referrals or treat any patients without an office they could come to. Besides, Alice and the girls were wanting to know when they could come out to California, and the Clements, just waiting for him to fall short, wanted to know what was taking him so long since he had raved so much about the place before he had seen it.

  Robert didn’t want an office in the predictable places where colored businesses went. He didn’t want to be in Compton or Watts or South Central. He wanted to be as far north as he could afford, which wouldn’t be but so far north given his resources and wouldn’t be practical anyway, given where his current roster of potential patients was living. He wanted a location with some prestige so he could live out the California dream he had in his head and justify the fees he thought he deserved, not knowing that a shot of penicillin generally went for five dollars no matter where you were.

  He went driving around the west side looking for the right kind of place for himself. He found an office to let at 959 West Jefferson, well west of Central Avenue, right across the street from the University of Southern California campus. He could always say he was near Southern Cal, and he liked the sound of that.

  It was a ground-floor suite at the front of an office building with a dentist upstairs and a doctor and an Asian import-export company on the ground floor with him. The office directly behind his was occupied by an internist from Los Angeles who was neither willing to nor interested in extending himself to this newcomer just in from the South, as seemed to be the distancing and disdainful attitude of many of the people who happened to have gotten to the North or West first or had the advantages of having grown up outside the walls of Jim Crow.

  The internist had come from a completely different world, an integrated world that Robert both distrusted and envied, a world he could only hope his young daughters could grow to master and benefit from but not completely lose themselves in one day.

  The building was just a few blocks south of the apartment on Ellendale he had secured for himself and his family until they could afford the house everyone expected of him. Everything finally seemed to be coming together.

  That office was where he would start his new life. “And it was a beautiful building,” Robert said. “It had a nice marquee in front of it. My office was at the front of the building, and my name was on the window, beautifully etched.”

  He put a deposit on an X-ray machine and the draperies for the office, a desk in the waiting room, chairs for the patients he hoped to attract. Now that he was nearly established, the people from Monroe turned out. Limuary Jordan and his wife, Adeline, came and helped him set up the office.

  “We built his operating table in a room over there,” Limuary would remember.

  Howard Beckwith, a friend from back home, built furniture and opened his line of credit for Robert to use to get on his feet. Limuary loaned him money, too. They all made sure he ate.

  “Come on, Doc, you can’t practice on your empty stomach,” they said. “You gotta eat.”

  Mrs. Beck and her daughter, Vivian, planned an open house for that July. They supplied the linens, the lace tablecloths, the crystal punch bowls. They made the punch and refreshments and served as hostesses in their cinched-waist dresses and pumps.

  “I spent my last dime buying whiskey at Mick’s for the open house,” Robert said. “We had two fifths of whiskey.”

  He invited twenty people. The friends from Morehouse and Spelman and Atlanta University all came out, and Robert was in business.

  He called Alice to say it was time. He was ready for them to join him in Los Angeles. They had been waiting in Atlanta for him to give them the word. The girls were growing up fast, and he had missed most of it. Bunny was nine already, and Robin was seven. He was all packed and ready to receive them. He would move out of the Becks’ and into an apartment a few blocks north of his new office.

  But when it came time to actually move in, the manager told him she was sorry but it was already rented to somebody else.

  “That was my introduction to the deception of California,” he said.

  Alice and the girls had come all this distance, and he didn’t have a place for them. He had to scramble to find something else before word got back to the Clements. He heard about a Dr. Anderson he knew from back in Louisiana, who happened to be moving out of his apartment. It was on St. Andrews Place, near the Becks’. It had two bedrooms. It was a far cry from Hickory Hill, the president’s mansion back at Atlanta University, where Alice and the girls had been living. But the family would be together for the first time since Austria.

  “And he rented it to me for my family,” Robert said.

  Alice set about making the apartment a home, while Robert began building a practice. He discovered he was having trouble attracting his most obvious patient base. For some reason, even with the new office on the fashionable side of town, the people from back home—from Monroe and from his days at Morehouse and Alice’s days at Spelman—weren’t coming. They had shown up for the hors d’oeuvres and whiskey at the open house, but they weren’t coming in for appointments.

  “Some were going to white doctors,” he would say years later. “But not all of them went to white doctors. I really don’t know who they were going to. I wasn’t really interested in who they were going to. I wanted them to come to me.”

  He figured he was a hometown patient’s dream. He was board-certified in surgery but was doing family practice, knew their family histories, could talk their language, and, as he had done all his life, would do just about anything to please them.

  But among the gumbo recipes and family Bibles they brought to California were the petty rivalries from back in Louisiana. People had long memories, and if Professor Foster had taken a switch to them without cause or Robert’s mother had been too hard on them in the seventh grade or if one of the Fosters had happened not to speak to them at Zion Baptist Church one Sunday back in 1932, they remembered it and carried it with them across the desert to California.

  And that wasn’t all. Some of the middle-class people from back in Monroe—the insurance agents and teachers and salesclerks—seemed to resent even the early signs of success and the fact that he was wanting people to call him Robert instead of Pershing after all these years.

  They seemed to be second-guessing him more than his other patients did. They questioned the motives of his every instruction and stood up to him like they did when they were back in the third grade, especially when it came to surgery.

  “See, they got lots of time before they get on the table,” Robert remembered. “They can think a whole lot. They can get another consultation. They’d be quick to say, ‘I’ll get another consultation.’ Or somebody would say, ‘What you tryin’ to do? Buy a mink coat for Alice?’ Now, that slaps you. People can be little.”

  The rejection hurt him and gnawed at him. It stayed with him for decades. He set out to prove he could make it without them. He would be the very best doctor he knew how. He would focus not on the grudging people from Monroe but on the people who wanted him as their doctor. He would put on a show so they wouldn’t forget him. He would pull in more of the cooks and laborers from Texas and the Mardi Gras–celebrating people from New Orleans and Baton Rouge, who would appreciate his loud suits and stingy-brim hats and folksy, one-of-the-people bedside manner.

  The people from Monroe would learn how wrong they had been.

  TO BEND IN STRANGE WINDS

  I was a Southerner,

 
; and I had the map of Dixie on my tongue.

  — ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Dust Tracks on a Road

  CHICAGO, LATE 1938

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THERE WAS A KNOCK on the door at Ida Mae’s tiny flat one afternoon when she was at home alone taking care of the children. It was a neighbor lady who had taken notice of the new family just up from Mississippi, seen that the young mother was by herself with the little ones much of the time, the husband likely off to work somewhere, and the neighbor lady was saying she had come to introduce herself.

  Ida Mae thought it was awfully nice of the lady to drop by. She hadn’t been in Chicago long, as the woman likely knew. George had secured the apartment while Ida Mae was in Mississippi giving birth to Eleanor.

  On days when there was no work to be had, Ida Mae was cooped up in the kitchenette apartment, far from home, in a big, loud city she didn’t yet know. She was used to wide-open spaces, trees everywhere, being able to see the sun set and rise and the sky stretched out over the field. She was used to killing a chicken if she needed one, not lining up at a butcher and paying for it in pieces with money she didn’t have. As much as she hated picking cotton, she missed her sisters-in-law and the other families on the plantation and her mother and younger sister. She didn’t know too many people in Chicago yet and was isolated with only little James and Eleanor with her during the day, as Velma was off in grade school.

  So Ida Mae welcomed the neighbor lady and invited her in to sit a while. The lady had brought something with her. It was a bottle of homemade wine. Ida Mae had never had wine before. George didn’t believe in it, and Ida Mae never had occasion to try it.

  The woman opened the bottle and poured some for the two of them to drink while they talked. Ida Mae took a few sips and started feeling woozy as the woman asked her how she’d gotten there. The woman learned all about how Ida Mae’s family first tried Milwaukee and how Ida Mae went back to Mississippi to have the baby when George told her he was going to try Chicago. The woman poured more wine, and Ida Mae got giddy and light-headed. She had never felt this way before.

  The woman was from Mississippi but had been in Chicago for some time, had gotten to know the city’s virtues and vices and how a city resident, which Ida Mae now was, should comport oneself. She told Ida Mae that now that she was in the North, she shouldn’t wear her head scarf out in public—that was for back when she was in the field; that she shouldn’t hang her wet laundry out the front window, even though there was no place else to let the linens dry out in the open sun like back home; that she should make sure the kids had shoes on when they went out, even though the kids hated shoes and shoes cost money they didn’t have.

  Ida Mae told the lady she appreciated that advice, but soon she wasn’t comprehending much of anything the neighbor lady was saying. When the bottle of wine was finished, the lady said she’d better be heading back home.

  George came home soon after the neighbor lady left. He found Ida Mae giggling and slurring her words, talking gibberish, and the children needing to eat and get their diapers changed. She told him that a nice neighbor lady had stopped by and that she had tried some of the wine the lady brought.

  George was furious. The devilment of the city had come right into his home, as hard as he tried to protect his family from it. Ida Mae was too sweet-natured to recognize when someone might be taking advantage and wasn’t wise to the machinations of the people who had preceded them to Chicago. She wouldn’t have noticed if they made fun of them, looked down on them, or took pleasure in seeing the simple country people fall under the city’s spell. He had to make it clear to Ida Mae that she was not to just let anybody in—this was Chicago, after all. He told her he didn’t want that lady coming around anymore and that Ida Mae wasn’t to drink any more wine, which was a sin in his estimation anyway.

  When Ida Mae came to her senses, she was shamefaced about what had happened. She was waking up to the ways and the people of the North. She soon learned that the colored people who had gotten there before her and had assimilated to the city didn’t look too kindly upon her innocent country ways.

  In the receiving cities of the North and West, the newcomers like Ida Mae had to worry about acceptance or rejection not only from whites they encountered but from the colored people who arrived ahead of them, who could at times be the most sneeringly judgmental of all.

  The northern-born colored people and the long-standing migrants, who were still trying to keep their footing in the New World, often resented the arrival of the unwashed masses pouring in from the very places some of the old-timers had left. As often happens with immigrant groups, some of the old-timers would have preferred to shut the door after they got there to protect their own uncertain standing.

  The small colony of colored people already in the New World had made a place for themselves as an almost invisible minority by the time the Migration began. Many were the descendants of slaves the North had kept before Abolition or of slaves who fled the South on the Underground Railroad or were among the trickle of pioneers who had migrated from the South in the decades after the Civil War.

  A good portion were in the servant class—waiters, janitors, elevator operators, maids, and butlers to the wealthiest white families in the city. But some had managed to create a solid though tenuous middle class of Pullman porters, postal workers, ministers, and businessmen who were anxious to keep the status and gains they had won. The color line restricted them to the oldest housing in the least desirable section of town no matter what their class, but they had tried to make the best of it and had created a world within a world for themselves.

  From this group came the letters and newspaper stories about the freedoms of the North that helped inspire blacks to leave the South in the first place. The Great Migration brought in many a northerner’s sweetheart, aunts, uncles, siblings, nieces, nephews, parents, and children. It also delivered hundreds of thousands of new customers, voters, readers, patients, and parishioners to the black institutions that stood to profit and be forever changed by the influx.

  “They have been our best patrons,” a colored physician in Chicago told researchers studying the Migration in the 1930s. “We have increased from five to two hundred and fifty doctors. We are living in better homes, and have more teachers in the schools; and nearly every colored church has benefitted.”

  Businessmen jumped at the opportunity. They opened restaurants serving hog maws and turnip greens. A man named Robert Horton opened Hattiesburg Shaving Parlor in a five-block stretch along Rhodes Avenue where some 150 families from that Gulf Coast town were huddled together. A few blocks away, there sat the Mississippi Coal and Wood Company, the Florida East Coast Shine Parlor to pull in the Floridians, and the Carolina Sea Island Candy Store for those who’d made it from there.

  The Migration made giddy landlords of some of the old-timers. It gave them the chance to get extra money and bragging rights, too, by renting their spare rooms and garages to the new people. In Los Angeles and Oakland, it became a status symbol to have the wherewithal to take in roomers.

  “I got a sharecropper,” a woman in Los Angeles was heard boasting.

  “Honey, I got me three sharecroppers!” another one said.

  The churches stood to gain the most, and did. They ran notices in the Defender proclaiming, “Strangers welcome.” Walters African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago tripled in membership. The city’s Olivet Baptist Church got five thousand new members in the first three years of the Migration, making it one of the largest Baptist churches and one of the first megachurches in the country. A migrant from Alabama said she couldn’t get in the first time she went. “We’d have to stand up,” she said. “I don’t care how early we’d go, you wouldn’t get in.”

  But soon the cultural and class divisions between the newcomers and the old-timers began to surface. Many of the migrants, seeking the status and security they could not get back home, filled the stained-glass sanctuaries of the mainline churches. Others we
re overwhelmed by the size of the congregations and the austerity of their services. One migrant said she “couldn’t understand the pastor and the words he used” at Olivet and couldn’t get used to the singing. “The songs was proud-like,” she said.

  A migrant from Louisiana felt out of place at Pilgrim Baptist, another big, old-line church. “Nobody said nothing,” the migrant said. “But there were whispers all over the place.”

  The migrants did as much moving around from church to church as they did from flat to flat. They tended to favor smaller storefront churches opened up by ministers fresh from the South, where they could sing the spirituals, catch the spirit, and fan themselves like they were used to. The reason one woman left a mainline church was because it was “too large—it don’t see the small people.”

  The migrants brought new life to the old receiving stations. But by their sheer numbers, they pressed down upon the colored people already there. Slumlords made the most of it by subdividing what housing there was into smaller and smaller units and investing as little as possible in the way of upkeep to cash in on the bonanza. It left well-suited lawyers and teachers living next to sharecroppers in head scarves just off the Illinois Central. The middle-class and professional people searched for a way out.

  “They tried to insulate themselves by moving further south along the narrow strip that defined the gradually expanding South Side Black Belt,” wrote the historian James R. Grossman. “But the migrants inevitably followed.”