Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Johnson and his friends made it onto the freight train and were headed out of Louisiana and into Texas. But what they hadn’t realized was that the freight trains had police, men who patrolled the freight cars and were on the lookout for stowaways like them. The patrolmen were called railroad bulls, and they were hired to do whatever it took to get stowaways off the train. They were known to beat or shoot anyone they caught or to send stowaways to a chain gang, where they might never be seen again. The bulls had names like “Denver Bob” and “Texas Slim.”

  Johnson and his friends were positioning themselves on a freight car and dreaming of California when a bull caught sight of them. It was harder to go undetected when there were four people rather than one. The bulls started hurling rocks and the boys had no choice. They jumped sixteen or seventeen feet from a moving freight train, not knowing where they were or when the next freight was coming or if whatever came through was going to California.

  Now they were lost somewhere in Texas. They had to wait for hours before another train rumbled through. They hopped on it, not knowing where it was headed. Suddenly it stopped on a trestle bridge suspended two stories above a ravine. The bulls liked to stop on high bridges to force stowaways off the train. It left the boys with nowhere to hide. They could stay and face a beating from the bulls or risk injuring themselves in yet another jump.

  They jumped. They tumbled downhill in the darkness. They were still in Texas, crawling through weeds, the bulls’ flashlights searching the scrub brush.

  In all the commotion, Johnson got separated from the other three as they rolled down the ravine. He was alone in the brush as he heard the train rattle away from him. He crawled in the brambles, hungry, lost, and jarred by the escape. He crawled toward the light of a settlement in search of food.

  He came to a fire where real hoboes, men who rode trains for the thrill of it, were gathered near the tracks of the freight train. The hoboes were sitting around a pot over a fire, one man with a potato, another with a skinned rabbit over the flame. The men were covered in soot. This was what they called the hobo jungle, where they slept and cooked their food, which was whatever the group of them had managed to rustle up, before taking to the trains again.

  “What’d you bring to put in the pot?” they asked the boy.

  He didn’t have anything. He was not of their world.

  “You better go and look for something,” they told him.

  The boy walked further toward the light of the settlement in search of food to bring back to the strangers by the fire.

  He approached a house. A white woman answered. She didn’t seem surprised. The people in the settlement had seen a lot of boys and men hopping trains like him.

  “Madame,” he said, “I’m hoboing.” He asked if she had food she could spare. “Anything you have.”

  She gave him bread and chicken. With that, he returned to the hobo jungle, handed over what he had gotten, and was finally able to eat. At daybreak, he hopped the first train that came through. He rode not knowing where he was headed and not, of course, able to ask.

  The train was not going west to California. It was going north toward Chicago. There, the next morning, he hopped a train going west with the sun. The boy would make it to California and become an extra in the movies, an officeholder in the Lake Charles, Louisiana, Club, and a respectable accountant in South Central Los Angeles.

  George had heard about these boys and men hoboing out of the South but had never seen one for himself until that day on the northbound train. He was as startled as the disheveled, soot-covered man in front of him.

  “I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” George thought to himself. “I can’t believe I’m seeing what I see.”

  The man must have sneaked onto the train as it sat boarding passengers or run alongside it and jumped up as the train either slowed to a stop or pulled out of a station.

  And now he was clinging to the sides of the railcar as it rocked at top speed, the wind rushing between the cars as they rumbled and turned.

  George never knew what became of the man or the others he saw hoboing on the trains. They never spoke. He himself had stared death in the face in Florida and felt sadness and awe at whatever drove them to steal onto a train this way.

  “They were standing there like statues,” George said. “Like they were part of the equipment. I couldn’t tell whether they were living or dead there for a while.”

  Sometimes he would see the same few coming back and forth, as if that were the only way they could manage to go north or south. It was nerve-jangling to George to see them because he was supposed to turn them in. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “I would never give them up,” he said. “I’d pretend I didn’t see them. One or two occasions, I’d sneak a sandwich or something out of the diner.”

  And after he did that, they would always disappear.

  LOS ANGELES, SUMMER 1955

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  AFTER TWO YEARS OF HARD WORK, Robert managed to attract enough patients needing some sort of surgery that he was finally able to secure admitting privileges at a hospital in Los Angeles. It was nowhere near Cedars Sinai or UCLA Medical Center but was a little place called Metropolitan Hospital over at Twenty-first and Hoover Street, near his office. It had a mostly colored patient load and a mostly white staff of doctors. There were only a few colored doctors, and Robert was one of them.

  They did most of their surgeries in the morning, and around noon they broke for lunch. They sat in the lounge to eat or read the newspapers and waited for their next cases to come up.

  But Mondays were different. Monday was the day when the white doctors came back from the weekend, regaling one another with their exploits at the casinos and their triumphs on the golf courses in Palm Springs or Las Vegas. Robert dreaded Mondays.

  One Monday, they turned and looked at him.

  “Bob, have you been to Caesars?”

  “No, I haven’t seen it,” Robert said, looking down. “I’ve never been there.”

  Robert hated to admit that. He wanted more than anything to be able to go to Vegas. He was born for Vegas. By now he had the money to go. That was what he came out here for—to be a full citizen, do whatever people of his station did, regardless of what color they were.

  He began avoiding the other doctors on Mondays. He made himself busy, buried himself in his newspaper, and avoided eye contact so they wouldn’t engage him in conversation during their animated recaps. But he couldn’t escape hearing their tales from the casinos.

  He sat there having to listen to them talk about Vegas for months, seething and saying nothing. They seemed to have caught on that he didn’t want to join in and left him alone as they compared notes among themselves.

  “Then, every now and then,” Robert remembered, “somebody would make a mistake and ask to confirm or give your feeling about a club or gambling in Las Vegas.”

  One day, he spoke up.

  “Listen, I’m tired of you guys asking me about Las Vegas,” he said. “You know colored people can’t go to the hotels there or the casinos. It’s a thorn in my side, so don’t ask me about that.”

  The doctors fell silent. “That embarrassed all those who heard it,” Robert remembered years later. “They had a guilt feeling that they were a part of that. This is the way I perceived it anyway. Maybe they didn’t give a nickel. I don’t know.”

  The doctors stopped asking him about Vegas, but that didn’t mean he stopped thinking about it, wishing for it.

  Over time, Robert began hearing rumors about blacks protesting their exclusion from Las Vegas and that the city might be opening up. He went to two doctor friends of his, one a brother of his classmate Dr. Beale back in Houston, and another, Dr. Jackson, who had both gotten into hospital management and seemed always to know the latest.

  He asked them what they’d heard about Vegas.

  “Is it true that blacks can go there now?”

  “I ain�
�t heard that, Bob,” Dr. Jackson said.

  They had, however, heard that there was a colored man in Vegas who people said was helping get colored people into a few of the hotels and casinos.

  “I tell you what you do,” Dr. Jackson said. “Why don’t you call Jimmy Gay?”

  “Who’s Jimmy Gay?”

  James Arthur Gay was perhaps the most influential colored man in the still-segregated world of Las Vegas. He had migrated there from Fordyce, Arkansas, after World War II and found himself locked out of both the mortuary trade, for which he had been trained, and the resort industry, to which he aspired. College degree in hand, he worked his way up from a cook at a drive-in to become one of the first colored executives at a casino, the Sands, at a time when stars like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., were not permitted to stay in hotels on the Strip. Knowing how hard it had been for him to cross the color line in Vegas, he took it upon himself to help spirit other colored people in wherever he could, risking his own tenuous standing to do so.

  Over time, he became the contact person, a secret agent of sorts, the one connection in an almost underground network in Las Vegas, where a colored visitor could not otherwise be assured of getting a room at a mainline hotel. Jimmy knew who to talk to in order to secure rooms for colored people at the Vegas hotels and knew how to do it discreetly, and he was in a position to screen, through word of mouth in that insular circle of colored people for whom he would perform such a service.

  So Robert called him.

  “This is Bob Foster, Jimmy,” Robert said. “Jackson and Beale told me to call you and find out if this was true. Have they opened Las Vegas up?”

  “You planning to come up?”

  “If we can go. Can we go? Could we come?”

  “Well, how many in your party? When are you planning to come? Get your party together and call me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Robert couldn’t wait to tell his friends about it. It took them some time to get it together. A total of thirteen people signed up to go in what would be an early foray past the color line in Vegas: doctors, doctors’ wives, a school principal. They started planning right away. They made their plane and train reservations. They read up on the casinos and the shows they wanted to see. The women shopped for what seemed like weeks.

  “They had three different outfits for every day,” Robert said. “Three completely different outfits.”

  Jimmy had arranged for them to stay at the Riviera Hotel. Robert couldn’t wait. It was the first high-rise in Vegas. It had cost ten million dollars to build and had just opened that spring to worries that it was so big that the desert sand might sink under its weight. It was right on the Strip, its name in big letters on a V-shaped marquee above the sign for the Starlight Lounge. Dean Martin was part owner. Liberace played there. It would become the set for Ocean’s Eleven. It was so very Rat Pack, and Robert could just picture himself at a dinner show in the Clover Room. All summer, a jingle was running on the radio stations in Los Angeles about “The Riv,” as it came to be called, like it was the hottest thing going in Vegas. There’s a new high in the Las Vegas sky, the Riviera Hotel. Robert used to sing along with the jingle and only got more excited.

  “You heard it a million times a day,” Robert said. “And, oh, I’d just be thinking about the trip we were going to have.”

  The people who flew in piled into several taxicabs at the Vegas airport and pulled up to the canopied driveway of the Riviera with enough luggage for a celebrity road tour. They walked into the marble lobby, chatting and giddy.

  “Now, we all dressed to the fingertips,” Robert said, “sharp as sharp could be. Everybody.”

  Robert saw bellmen all around but noticed that no one stepped forward to get the luggage. Someone in the group asked for help. At last a bellman came and brought their luggage in, loads of it, to the front desk.

  In the lobby, Robert’s group met up with the couple who had caught the train and had arrived ahead of them. The wife was named Thurma Adams. She jumped up and ran toward Robert and the others and began acting out of sorts. She was humming under her breath as if to warn them of something, but it was in a childlike code that Robert had trouble deciphering.

  She was skipping as she sang, “La de, da, de, da, la de da, de da!”

  “Thurma, Thurma, Thurma,” Robert said. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Just go on over to that desk,” she told him. “You’ll see.”

  Robert understood instantly. “And chills went through me,” he remembered. “A wave of nausea.”

  Phoenix again.

  “Oh hell, we ain’t gonna get this room,” he thought to himself. “The same story, ‘There’s no room in here.’ ”

  Here they were, thirteen travelers just arrived in a place they thought had opened up to people like them. They couldn’t have been sure of it but wanted so much to believe that they had taken the chance anyway, and now they were being told there were no accommodations for them, and they’re standing there in the gilded lobby like refugees, homeless in their tailored suits and sequins and with enough luggage for a European holiday.

  Robert tried to calm himself and salvage the situation. He went over to the front desk just as he had in Phoenix, but more assured this time because he had been through this before and besides, he was a Californian now.

  “This is Dr. Robert Foster,” he began. “We have a party of thirteen people from Los Angeles. We are supposed to have room reservations.”

  “Who made them?” the clerk asked.

  “Mr. Jimmy Gay made them,” Robert answered.

  “Who’s Jimmy Gay?”

  “Jimmy Gay knows somebody here. I didn’t get the name of the person who made them for me.”

  The front-desk clerk called the reservations supervisor, and he came out.

  “And they looked, and they looked and they looked and they looked,” Robert remembered.

  “They looked for what they knew wasn’t there. And I know that one, too.”

  The front desk said it could find no reservation for any of them, made no offer to accommodate them, and made no suggestions nor showed any interest in where else they might possibly go.

  “So I’m standing there fuming,” Robert said many years later. “How do I get out of this? How we gonna get out this hotel with all this luggage? Humiliation galore. I felt everybody in the place looking at us. I felt as if the shower door had fallen, and I looked up and saw I had an audience of fifty people. I just felt that they could see clear through me that we had been rejected. And that was what I felt at that desk.”

  He decided to call Jimmy Gay from a phone booth in the hotel. Maybe that would clear things up. Fortunately, Jimmy was home.

  Jimmy told him that he would check on it and that Robert should stay by the phone booth.

  “Don’t let anybody use the phone you on,” Jimmy said. “Block it. Leave the line open. I want to make a phone call, and I’ll call you right back. Stay by the phone.”

  Jimmy couldn’t locate the reservations clerk he had talked to at the Riviera, late as it was. So he came up with an alternative.

  “Go to the Sands Hotel,” he instructed. He told them who to ask for when they got there. “He’ll take care of you and the party.”

  So Robert and the twelve others once again loaded into several cabs and went to the Sands Hotel. Because Jimmy had made reservations at the Riviera and not the Sands, the Sands didn’t have enough rooms for the entire party that night. The Sands made arrangements for them to stay at yet another hotel, the Flamingo Capri, further down on the Strip.

  “We’ll come and get you tomorrow,” the front-desk clerk said. The Sands kept its word, and the next morning they were, at last, all unpacking their things at the Sands.

  “I got a warm spot with Sands for what they did for us,” Robert would say years later.

  Jimmy Gay and his wife, Hazel, puddle-hopped them from nightclub to nightclub where Jimmy knew they would be accepted. They heard Pearl Bailey in the
lounge. They made three shows a night. And Robert got to go inside the casinos he had heard his fellow physicians brag and goad him about for months and that he dreaded hearing mention of. But now he didn’t have to dread it anymore.

  “We lived the part,” Robert said.

  He remembered one night in particular. He was wearing a black mohair suit he ordered specifically for the occasion from the tailor who dressed Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra. He wore a black tie with a burgundy stripe, a white tab-collar shirt, gold cuff links, black shoes, black silk socks, and a white handkerchief with his initials, RPF, embroidered in silver.

  All the humiliation melted away, the white doctors’ idle chatter, the rejection at the Riviera.

  He was finally in the world he belonged in, living out a dream like an honorary member of the Rat Pack. Jim Crow, the South, Louisiana, Monroe, Phoenix, the downside of L.A.—all gone for now. He was in a casino out of a movie. Dean Martin could have walked in any minute, or so it seemed, and here was Robert, right in the middle of it, acting as if he’d been born to it.

  “And I am playing the roulette. And I’m enjoying myself, and I’m having a good time, and I’m standing up betting over some other people there, and I hit my number, and I eased the buttons loose on the coat, and I hit number eleven, and I reached over like this to pick up my chips and open my coat and show my blood red silk lining.

  “People said, ‘Oh, look at that!’ A white woman said that. She had never seen a red lining in a suit. That was very avant-garde. All this conservative stuff outside. And this red satin lining inside.”

  For once he would not be dreading lunchtime at the hospital that Monday.

  CHICAGO, EARLY 1939

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  GEORGE AND IDA MAE had been in the North for close to two years. They had three little ones to feed and were still having trouble finding work. They had arrived in the depths of the Great Depression with the fewest skills any migrant could have but with the most modest of expectations and the strongest of backs. They had taken their chances and found even the most menial jobs hard to come by.