Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  One time, George’s brother Winston, whom everyone called Win, came up from the plantation just for a visit and wasn’t ashamed to look up at the tall buildings reaching for the sky.

  George took him around the first day, and at the end of it they settled in for the night. Win got ready for bed and then started calling for his brother.

  “Come help me,” Win said. “I can’t blow this light out.”

  George found him standing by the bulb. Win had been blowing on the bulb until he was almost out of breath.

  “Win, you can’t blow it out, you got to turn it off,” George told him, reaching for the light switch and shaking his head. It hadn’t been that long ago that he, too, had been callow to the New World.

  “George showed him how to cut it off,” Ida Mae said, “and we never had no more trouble with him.”

  They were becoming Chicagoans now. They would talk about Win and that lightbulb for years.

  It was only a matter of time before just about every colored family in the North, unsettled though they might have been, got visitors as George and Ida Mae did. There was a back-and-forth of people, anxious, giddy, wanting to come north and see what all the fuss was about. And whenever a colored guest paid a visit while the Migration was on, and even decades later, he or she could be assured of finding the same southern peasant food, the same turnip greens, ham hocks, corn bread in Chicago as in Mississippi.

  But the visitors were a curiosity to the children of the North. The uncles and cousins from the South often had a slow-talking, sweetly alien, wide-openness about them that could both enchant and startle some of the more reserved nieces and nephews who barely knew them, as was the case with a character from Mississippi visiting relatives in Pittsburgh in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson in the following exchange:

  BOY WILLIE: How you doing, sugar?

  MARETHA: Fine.

  BOY WILLIE: You was just a little old thing last time I seen you. You remember me, don’t you? This your Uncle Boy Willie from down South. That there’s Lymon. He my friend. We come up here to sell watermelons. You like watermelons?

  (MARETHA nods.)

  We got a whole truckload out front. You can have as many as you want. What you been doing?

  MARETHA: Nothing.

  BOY WILLIE: Don’t be shy now. Look at you getting all big. How old is you?

  MARETHA: Eleven. I’m gonna be twelve soon.

  BOY WILLIE: You like it up here? You like the North?

  MARETHA: It’s alright.

  BOY WILLIE: That there’s Lymon. Did you say hi to Lymon?

  MARETHA: Hi.

  LYMON: How you doing? You look just like your mama. I remember you when you was wearing diapers.

  BOY WILLIE: You gonna come down South and see me? Uncle boy Willie gonna get him a farm. Gonna get a great big old farm. Come down there and I’ll teach you how to ride a mule. Teach you how to kill a chicken, too.

  NEW YORK, 1950s

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  GEORGE WAS JUST BACK ONE EVENING from a forty-eight-hour turnaround from New York to Florida and to New York again and had gotten his check and cashed it. Rather than head straight home to Inez, he thought he’d stop and get a drink at a bar near Penn Station.

  He was with another colored railroad attendant, chugging his beer as the bar filled up. He and his co-worker barely noticed that everyone else at the bar happened to be white as they regaled each other with stories from riding the rails. When it was time to go, they paid their tab and put their glasses down.

  The bartender had said very little to them the whole time they were there. Now the bartender calmly picked up their glasses, and instead of loading them into a tray to be washed, he took them and smashed them under the counter. The sound of glass breaking on concrete startled George and his co-worker, even though this wasn’t the first time this had happened to them, just not at this bar, and it attracted the attention of other patrons.

  “They do it right in front of us,” George said. “That’s the way they let us know they didn’t want us in there. As fast as you drink out of a glass and set it down, they break it.”

  There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be. It was just the prerogative of whoever happened to be in a position to keep you from getting what the law said you had a right to, because nobody was going to enforce it anyway.

  And so the glass he drank from went crashing under a counter in Manhattan.

  It was hitting George in all directions. At sudden and unexpected times like these in New York, in crude and predictable ways when he went back south for his job, and now on the train itself. He was a stickler for rules and regulations and businesslike comportment even if it was only for lifting and loading bags. He was in uniform and was representing not just the railroad but himself and colored people, and he took the job of attending to his passengers seriously.

  His formal bearing did not sit well with some of the southern conductors he worked for, who considered him acting above his station, which to his mind he was. He still saw himself as the college boy, someone who read the newspapers, kept up with world affairs, and knew as much as most anyone he was serving. The white southerners he worked with didn’t like it any more than the grove foremen did.

  “They kept me at a hardship,” George said.

  Somehow, without trying, he managed to get on the bad side of a southern conductor out of Tampa.

  The conductor liked to tease and joke with the colored attendants, one in particular. The conductor would nudge and kick the colored attendant, and the colored attendant, knowing his place, would jump and laugh and, to George’s mind, put on a show for the conductor.

  “Hah, hah, don’t do that, Cap!” the colored attendant would josh the conductor in mock protest.

  George stood stone-faced and made no attempt to hide his disdain.

  Now the conductor began making extra demands on them all. He liked to make the rail attendants wipe the railcar steps while the train was moving. He got a kick out of that.

  He wanted the attendants to drop the traps of the bottom step and wipe the steps down so he wouldn’t get dirt on him when he got off to direct passengers at the station. Usually, it was something the attendants did once the train had stopped. The conductor didn’t want that. He liked to see them bending over, dangling along the side, and struggling to wipe the bottom step while the train was running twenty-five, thirty miles an hour.

  George resisted wiping the steps until he thought it was safe. The other car attendant did as the conductor ordered. George stood to the side, his face pinched and frowning, as his co-worker tried to hold on and clean the step with the train rocking toward the station and the conductor chortling at the sight of it.

  One day the conductor confronted George.

  “What’s the matter with you, boy? You can’t laugh?”

  “Yes, sir, I have a good sense of humor,” George said. “But I don’t see anything funny about what y’all are doing.”

  The conductor began singling out George from that day on, blocking him in the aisles, jabbing him as he passed. There was little George could do about it and still keep his job. George had been through worse things in the South and figured it was just one more thing he would have to watch out for.

  But it got to the point that, when George saw him coming down the aisle to check tickets, he had to step between the seats to avoid a confrontation.

  “He got to the place when he get along about where I was,” George said, “and he would step out of the aisle in between the seats and step on my foot, like that. And then he’ll walk back and look at me.”

  George thought to himself, “I don’t know how I’m a deal with this ’cause he gonna do this one day and I’m a try to kill him.”

  “I was praying that I never had to rea
ch that point,” he said.

  One afternoon, they were pulling out of Clearwater on the Silver Star, a sleek, steel-encased all-reserve train that was the pride of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. It went up the west coast of Florida along the Gulf of Mexico en route to New York. It had only the finest and highest-class people on it, as George remembered, and he had worked his way up to that route.

  As the train gained speed as it headed out of the station, George was helping an elderly white lady with her two bags. He had gotten one bag into the rack overhead and was heaving the second bag over the edge of the compartment.

  “And just as I went up with the next bag and set it up in the rack,” George said, “something hit me from behind like a truck. Boom!”

  The conductor, a sturdy and heavyset man, had knocked into George as George tried to steady himself on the moving train while holding the bag overhead. George’s knees were bad from all the basketball he had played in high school, and, standing on the train rocking as it was, he was off balance and had nothing to hold on to.

  “He come up from behind me like a football player blocking the line,” George said.

  The conductor shoved George into the seat where the passenger was. George managed to drop the bag onto the rack and not onto the elderly white passenger. But the force of the conductor’s weight knocked George over onto the lady, a precarious situation for a colored man in the South.

  The train rumbled from side to side as George stood and tried to straighten himself. He suspected he knew what had happened but looked around anyway and saw the conductor in the aisle grinning. This feud was escalating to a point that was getting dangerous for George. If the passenger were hurt or frightened by a colored man sprawled over her as he was, George would be the one to take the fall for it, and the conductor knew it. If the passenger grew hysterical and accused George of attacking her, there would be nothing George could do, and far worse could happen to him.

  But it was a fortunate thing for George that the white woman saw that he had been pushed and did not let it rattle her.

  “Well, what’s wrong with him?” she asked George.

  “Miss, you know what he was trying to do?”

  She shook her head no.

  “He was trying to make me drop that bag on your head. He’s just that mean, and he just don’t like nobody. He did that to try to make me drop that bag on your head.”

  “What is wrong with him?”

  George started telling his story about how the conductor had been harassing him all this time, and now the conductor had pushed him and didn’t even seem to care about the passengers’ safety, and she listened because she had seen it for herself.

  “Well, something needs to be done about that.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But they just don’t pay me no attention if I try to do anything about it.”

  He paused. “But you could do something about it.”

  “Well, who do I write?”

  “You just write it, and I’ll send it,” he said, not wanting to risk her forgetting about it or just not getting around to it. “You write it, and give it to me.”

  And so the woman wrote up her complaint and gave the letter to George. He, in turn, attached a letter of his own and sent it to the superintendent in Jacksonville, Florida, who was over that route at that time.

  George never heard from the superintendent’s office about the harassment he had endured.

  “But when they saw her letter, they immediately went into action,” he said.

  The office called the conductor in to question him about the white woman’s complaint and suspended him for sixty days. It wasn’t long before the conductor found out that it was George who had had a hand in the suspension, and, of course, that did not sit well with him.

  George only heard the outcome from other attendants and never got a response himself. Still, it could be said that he had emerged victorious. And that only created more trouble for him. He had expected as much and had prepared for it. When he dropped off the woman’s letter, he decided to do it on the way north, so that by the time it got into the superintendent’s hands, George would be well out of Florida and out of the conductor’s orbit.

  Back in New York, he went straight to the railroad office to get a route change.

  “Look, I’m not going back to the west coast anymore,” George told the dispatcher. “I had an incident down there with a conductor. I know it’s gonna be rough. And I’m not going back down there.”

  George proposed switching with another attendant who had always wanted the coveted all-reserve train to Tampa–St. Petersburg but didn’t have George’s seniority. George was willing to take a less desirable route to avoid any more trouble.

  “No, you can’t do that,” the dispatcher told him.

  “Look, I just told you I had an incident down there. I’m not going back down there ’cause I know what they’re contemplating. I’m not going back.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t change.”

  George decided to call the other attendant himself.

  “Look, you been raving you wanna run to St. Petersburg. I tell you what, when we come out Saturday, you set up in my car in the west coast and I’ll set up in your car going to Miami. We’ll just switch. You can go to St. Pete, and I’ll take your run to Miami.”

  The attendant took George’s old route, was happy to take it, and, when George’s stand-in got to Tampa, a group of white men met him at the train.

  “Yeah, which one of you boys is that nigger boy called Starling? You George Starling?”

  “No, sir, I ain’t no George Starling.”

  “Why, by God, where is he?”

  “Well, he’s not on here.”

  “Well, by God, we gonna find him. He done got Captain Wills put in the street for sixty days, and we gonna teach him a lesson.”

  When the car attendant who traded routes with George got back from that first run to Tampa, he went to George and told him what had happened.

  “Boy,” he said, “I don’t know what you did down there, but they mad with you down there. Don’t you go back down there.”

  “Why you think I switched with you?” George asked. “You tell them, don’t worry, I’m not coming back down there no time soon.”

  George didn’t go back to Tampa for five years. New conductors and managers came in, and it was only then that George felt it safe to go back.

  LOS ANGELES, 1961

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  IT WAS WELL INTO THE NIGHT of March 20, 1961, when the telephone rang at the Foster house on Victoria, and Robert took the call. A nearly hysterical voice was coming at him, and Robert tried to make out the facts tumbling out from the other end of the line. It was the wife of a man who had somehow stumbled and sliced his left hand on the edge of a glass table, severing an artery. The man was hemorrhaging and losing consciousness. The man would need to be seen right away.

  Robert would drop everything for any of his patients and had done so countless times, to the detriment of his own family. But this injury got his attention more than most. It was a disoriented Ray Charles, who was facing the loss of the use of his left hand, a disaster for the piano-playing singer, or, with all the bleeding he sustained, the loss of more than that.

  The circumstances of the fall were unclear and only made the situation more delicate. For several days, Ray had been under pressure to write a playbook of songs for a big tour coming up. He had put in long hours, dictating the music in his head to a collaborator writing the songs down on paper. He had been up most of the previous night, had worked all day and into a second night. He was finding it hard to stay alert, and he was running out of time. He had turned to drugs before and so now summoned his heroin dealer to help him get through the night, according to his biographer Michael Lydon.

  After the dealer’s last visit to Ray’s house near Baldwin Hills, Ray went thrashing about alone in his den, knocking into walls and furniture, out of his mind. Ray would lat
er say the episode had less to do with drugs than fatigue, although he was candid about his drug use. “I didn’t see how the dope was hurting,” he said in his 1978 autobiography, Brother Ray. “I don’t mean I wasn’t sick now and then in those years, ’cause I was. I’d hit a dry period and go through the same convulsions as any other junkie.”

  As for the events leading up to that night, he said, “I’m sure that sometime during that day—like all days—I had my little fix and maybe it was stronger than usual.”

  That night, as he remembered it, he collapsed from exhaustion and “somehow, in my state of unconsciousness, I slammed my hand against a glass table top and sliced it to ribbons.” His hand went numb. He was so high, exhausted, or just out of it, the injury didn’t register with him. And he just lay there, “bleeding like a hog.”

  It was around that time that his son, Ray, Jr., ventured into the den. Little Ray was six years old and wanted to say good night to his father. The boy opened the door to his father’s den and found him with his shirt covered in blood and blood on the walls.

  Ray’s writing partner and his drummer rushed in to help him. They wrapped his hand in beach towels, soaking up two quarts’ worth of blood, and tried to get him walking to keep him from losing consciousness.

  They chose not to call an ambulance under the circumstances. His wife, Della Bea, then eight months pregnant, instead called Robert, who told them to meet him at his clinic at once. Ray arrived at Robert’s office on West Jefferson Avenue bleeding so heavily that he went into convulsions. Robert quickly sewed the wound and admitted Ray into the hospital, where Ray required a transfusion of four pints of blood.

  There Robert examined Ray more closely and discovered that Ray had not only sliced an artery but severed a tendon as well. Robert would have to perform emergency surgery to reconnect the tendon if Ray was to regain use of his hand. After the surgery, Robert told Ray he was not to use the hand for six weeks.

  “Naturally, I refused,” Ray said years later. His big tour was starting the next week, so he told Robert he would just play with one hand. A publicist had already devised an explanation for the public. They would say he had slipped in the bathtub.