Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  He came to that realization when he was out with his older daughter, Bunny, one day. She saw a toy she wanted and was insisting that her father buy it for her. Robert had just opened his practice and was watching every nickel. Bunny had been raised like a princess back in Atlanta, and Robert thought she had more than enough toys and dolls as it was.

  “Why, you don’t need that,” Robert told her.

  “Well, if you don’t give it to me, Granddaddy will.”

  Robert discovered that his whole family was really the Clements’ and not his, and he had to figure out how to reclaim his status in the household. He and Alice began fighting over her cooking, which had become a symbol of their class differences and the variation in southern culture, depending upon which state you happened to be from.

  Robert wanted oxtails and turnip greens and red-peppered gumbo like he grew up with in Louisiana. Alice had never really cooked for him before. And what she cooked was what any well-born 1950s homemaker would prepare for her family—the soufflés and casseroles of the upper classes of the day. She went to a great deal of trouble to make these Betty Crocker–era meals. But Robert didn’t like them, and he took her style of cooking as a repudiation of his tastes.

  “It needs some more seasoning in it,” he said.

  “The children don’t like it that way,” Alice told him.

  “Children eat what their mama give ’em,” Robert said. “And you give ’em the food the way I like it to be cooked.”

  But it was already too late. The children had become set in their expectations, the family system already established. Robert and Alice fought and fought over it. They were paying a price for the sacrifices they had made to get established outside the South. Every day, they were confronted with a difference they hadn’t noticed before, something so basic as a meal suddenly becoming a metaphor of the different worlds they came from. The dinner table became a testing of wills over which culture would prevail, the high-toned world of black elites in Atlanta or the hardscrabble but no less proud black middle class of small-town Louisiana, and, more important, who was going to run the family—the Clements from afar or Robert, who was working long hours to take care of them now.

  It exposed a chasm between the two of them that would never be fully resolved but that both would have to live with. “That was a big hurdle,” Robert said.

  As it was, they were living in a cramped apartment with temporary furniture and tacked-down rugs and trying to make the best of it.

  “We were not defined by where we lived,” Robert said. “We felt we’d make it in time. And we lived that way.”

  So long as they were in a walk-up apartment, Alice put off her socialite yearnings. She wanted to wait to make her presence known to the colored elite in Los Angeles. She wanted to wait until they could secure a house more befitting her station. She took a position teaching third grade in the Los Angeles public school system to help them save up for the house they would need before she could announce herself to L.A. society.

  Robert didn’t see the point of waiting. She was the same person now as she would be when they got a house. But Alice knew the value of a proper entrance when one was coming in as an outsider, as any southerner new to California would be. Robert kept asking anyway. It would be good for business to start making connections, and she was all but assured of acceptance to those patrician circles by birth alone.

  “Well, when you gonna join?” he’d ask her.

  “It’s too expensive for us out here now,” she’d say. “The time’s not right.”

  From Atlanta, her mother had signed her up with the Links, perhaps the most elite of the invitation-only, class- and color-conscious colored women’s societies of the era.

  But Alice wouldn’t activate her membership until they got a house. “We’re not ready, Robert,” she said. “No, we’re not ready.”

  It was a reminder to Robert that he had not yet lived up to her and her family’s expectations. The shadow of Rufus Clement loomed over him from across the continent. The family he was just now getting to know was used to living on an estate with formal gardens and servants, and here they were, cramped together with him in a walk-up apartment like waitstaff.

  Robert was not in a position to duplicate what they had back in Atlanta. So he set out to prove himself in other ways. If Alice wasn’t ready to go Hollywood, Robert was. His practice was just beginning to take off, and he had an idea of what he needed to cap off the image he was trying to create. He went to Dr. Beck for advice.

  “Doctor, I wanna buy a Cadillac,” Robert said, announcing his desire for the most coveted car on the market in those days. “Do you think I’d hurt myself if I bought a Cadillac?”

  “Can you meet the notes, boy?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Go buy it, then.”

  Alice was against it and said so. “How’d you like a Cadillac parked in front of an upstairs apartment? Don’t you think you’re a little premature?”

  “Yes, but I want one.”

  “You don’t wanna buy a Cadillac, and you live in a walk-up apartment,” Alice said. “You don’t have a garage to put it in.”

  But Robert had made up his mind. He thought he could attract more patients with it. Patients half expected their doctor to be driving a Cadillac. It would make them respect him more, give them something to brag about. And if they were bragging about him, more patients might come his way. Besides, there was something deep inside him that had to prove to the world and to himself that he had made it.

  So he went downtown to Thomas Cadillac to buy himself one. But the salesclerk took him past the showroom of new Cadillacs to the dealership’s used car lot.

  “I told him I wanted a new car, and he kept showing me used cars,” Robert said, exasperated but by now picking up on the subtleties of his interactions in the New World.

  “I thanked him and went home,” Robert said.

  Then he wrote a letter to General Motors, Cadillac division, in Detroit: “I’m a young black physician, just getting started,” he wrote. “All my life I dreamed Cadillac, and when I had enough money to go down and get one, the man insults me by showing me used cars.”

  Soon after he wrote the letter, he got a call from the dealership. “We have instructions,” Robert remembered the man saying, “to deliver to you a Cadillac to your liking. What day would you like to come down and select it?”

  It was 1955, so he headed right over to pick out a 1955 model. “A white Cadillac,” he said years later, a smile forming on his face, “with blue interior and whitewall tires. Yes, indeedy. See what you can get when you step on the right feet?”

  Some of the people from Monroe thought the car pretentious and over the top. They were still having a hard time even picturing him a doctor. But just putting the key in the ignition made him feel like he had moved up in the world.

  “And I learned that lesson from Dr. Beck’s advice,” Robert said years later. “To hell with what people think of me. Go on and do what you wanna do. They gonna do what they wanna do anyhow, say what they wanna say anyway.”

  He mulled over his words. “That’s right,” he said. “And you get more if they feel you ain’t suffering.”

  He was already plotting new ways to prove himself to the naysayers, black and white, in Louisiana and in L.A. “My lifestyle’ll blow ’em outta the water,” Robert would say. “Just blow ’em outta the water, ’cause I’ll go on and do what I wanna do.”

  THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN

  We cannot escape our origins,

  however hard we might try,

  those origins contain the key

  —could we but find it—

  to all that we later become.

  —JAMES BALDWIN,

  Notes of a Native Son

  CHICAGO, NOVEMBER 1940

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THE CROWDS GATHERED early at the fire station at Thirty-sixth and State on the morning of November 5, 1940. It was election day. President Franklin D. Roo
sevelt was in a tighter-than-expected race against a maverick businessman, Wendell Willkie. Europe was at war, the United States was in Depression despite the gains of the New Deal, and Roosevelt was now the first president in history to seek a third term, which his Republican opponent was using against him.

  For weeks, precinct captains and ward volunteers had canvassed the tenements and three-flats on the South Side of Chicago. They had passed out palm cards and campaign flyers to the domestics and factory workers and to untutored potential voters like Ida Mae.

  Illinois was considered crucial to Roosevelt this election, so much so that the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago that year. He had been elected twice before by landslides against Herbert Hoover and Alf Landon, and he now needed the Midwest and Chicago, in particular, to turn out for him if he were to stay in the White House.

  Ida Mae didn’t know what was at stake, but suddenly everyone around her was talking about something she’d never heard of back in Mississippi. The precinct captain for her area, a Mr. Tibbs, had been out in the neighborhood rousing the people to register for the upcoming election. She had seen him and gotten the slip his workers handed out and was curious about all the commotion.

  Back home, no one dared talk about such things. She couldn’t vote in Mississippi. She never knew where the polls were in Chickasaw County. And even if she had had the nerve to go, she would have been turned away for failing to pay a poll tax or not being able to answer a question on a literacy test for which there was no answer, such as how many grains of sand there were on the beach or how to interpret an obscure article of the Mississippi constitution to the election registrar’s satisfaction. She and most every other colored person in the South knew better than even to try.

  So she never thought about her senator or congressman or state representative or about Theodore Bilbo, an admitted Klansman and a famous Mississippi governor. Bilbo had been one of the most incendiary segregationists of the era, yet she didn’t pay him much mind because she had nothing to do with his getting into office and couldn’t have voted against him even if she knew when and how to do it.

  Bilbo made it to the governor’s mansion without citizens like Ida Mae or Miss Theenie having any say as to his getting into or remaining in office. He later ascended without them to the U.S. Senate, where, in 1938, the year Ida Mae finally migrated to Chicago, he helped lead one of the longest filibusters in the history of the Senate, the one to thwart a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime.

  At one point in the filibuster, he rose to speak on behalf of his constituents—not the entire state of Mississippi but the white voters there—and in opposition to the interests of half the state. He spoke in defense of the right to kill black citizens as white southerners saw fit.

  “If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Bilbo told his Senate colleagues, “you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousand fold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.”

  Ida Mae hadn’t bothered to know what politicians like Bilbo were doing because it wouldn’t have done her any good. Nobody she knew had even tried to vote. Nobody made note of election day whenever it came. It was as if there were an invisible world of voting and elections going on about its business without her.

  Now it was 1940, and she was in Chicago. All around her were new arrivals like herself who had never voted before and were just getting the hang of elections after a lifetime of being excluded. Suddenly, the very party and the very apparatus that was ready to kill them if they tried to vote in the South was searching them out and all but carrying them to the polls. To the Democrats in the North, each new arrival from the South was a potential new vote in their column. It was in the Democrats’ best interest to mobilize these people, who, now given the chance to vote, might go Republican. The Republicans, after all, had been the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction. The Republicans had opposed the segregationists who had held the migrants down in the South. But now the migration trains were delivering brand-new voters to the hands of whoever got to them first.

  Chicago was a Democratic town, and the Democrats had the means to make the most of this gift to the party. They were counting on the goodwill Roosevelt had engendered among colored people with his New Deal initiatives. Still, the precinct captains took no chances. They went door-to-door to talk up the New Deal and to register the people. They asked them about their kids and jobs and convinced them that the Democrats in the North were different from those in the South. They printed up party slates and passed out palm cards—political crib notes that would fit in the palm of the hand—so the people would know whom to vote for when they got inside the booth.

  On election day, Ida Mae walked up to the fire station around the corner from her flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash to vote for the first time in her life. The sidewalks were teeming with volunteers to usher neophytes into the station and to the correct sign-in tables. Inside, election judges, clerks, a policeman or two monitored the proceedings.

  Ida Mae was not certain what to do. She had never touched an election ballot. She walked in, and a lady came over and directed her to where she should go. Ida Mae stepped inside a polling booth for the first time in her life and drew the curtain behind her. She unfolded the palm card she had been given and tried to remember what the lady had told her about how to punch in her choices for president of the United States and other political offices. It was the first time she would ever have a say in such things.

  “She showed me how to do it,” Ida Mae said.

  What was unthinkable in Mississippi would eventually become so much a part of life in Chicago that Mr. Tibbs would ask Ida Mae to volunteer at the polls the next time. She had a pleasant disposition, and Mr. Tibbs put her to work helping other people learn how to vote. She would stand outside the firehouse, directing newcomers who were clutching their palm cards and looking as puzzled as she had been her first time at the polls.

  She did not see herself as taking any kind of political stand. But in that simple gesture, she was defying the very heart of the southern caste system, and doing something she could not have dreamed of doing—in fact, had not allowed herself even to contemplate—all those years in Mississippi.

  But she had seen for herself the difference it could make the first time she had stepped inside a voting booth. Ida Mae’s first vote and George’s first vote and those of tens of thousands of other colored migrants new to the North were among the 2,149,934 votes cast for President Roosevelt in Illinois that day in 1940. Ida Mae’s new home was a deeply divided swing state that year, and this was among the tightest of races. It turned out for Roosevelt that it was a good thing the migrants had come. The ballots cast by Ida Mae and other colored migrants up from the South were enough to help give Roosevelt the two percent margin of victory he needed to carry the state of Illinois and, by extension, the United States—to return him to the White House.

  ON THE SILVER COMET, MID- TO LATE 1940s

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  THE TRAIN HAD ROLLED OUT OF BIRMINGHAM and was wending its way toward New York. It would stop in Wattsville, Ragland, Ohatchee in Alabama, in Cedartown, Rockmart, Atlanta, Athens, Elberton in Georgia, on its way to the Carolinas and up the East Coast. George was working the train as a railcar attendant and was settling into a twenty-three-hour workday of hauling bags, sweeping and dusting, tending and picking up after the fifty-two passengers in his car.

  Somewhere along the route, he looked out of the vestibule door by the draft gears between the railcars. The train leaned into a sharp bend in the track. The railcars spread apart to take the full curve. And suddenly, George could see the figure of a man standing between the railcars, clinging to the edge by the
door. The man stood as still as a piece of furniture. With the railcars spread open as they were, the man could no longer hide. He looked into George’s face and did not speak. His eyes begged George not to turn him in.

  It is not known how many migrants made it out of the South by hopping a freight or passenger train as this man did. They called what this man was doing “hoboing.” It was one of the ways some men and boys, often the most desperate, the poorest, the most adventurous, or those who got on the wrong side of a planter or a sheriff, got out.

  Years before, in 1931, a boy by the name of Johnson plotted his way out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, with three of his friends. They were hoping to make it to Los Angeles. All over the South, there were colored boys like him dreaming of hopping a train. They practiced how to jump on and off the freight cars when the trains passed through Yazoo City, Mississippi, or Bessemer, Alabama, or any number of small towns. They would ride a couple hundred feet and jump off until they got the hang of it.

  Johnson and his friends talked about escaping Lake Charles, Louisiana, for months. They planned the day of departure, only to put it off because one boy’s mother got sick or another lost his nerve. Finally they set a date and met at the rail yard one night in 1931. They had nothing but the clothes they were wearing and a couple dollars in their pockets. The four of them grabbed the side of a car and hopped aboard as the train wound along the tracks.

  The passenger trains would have been a surer way to get out. The freights were not marked and did not announce their destinations like the passenger trains did. Anyone riding them couldn’t be certain where he was headed. But scheduled trains were riskier because the passengers, the conductors, the porters, and attendants like George might see them and turn them in. So most stowaways hopped a freight train, lonely with its grain and cotton bins. If they found a car open, they hid inside. Sometimes they had no choice but to ride on top of the car, holding tight against the wind kicked up by a train going seventy miles an hour.