Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  It would appear from the precision of the Arrington High escape that this was not the first time the people involved in its execution had carried out an operation such as this. To this day, many funeral directors refuse to discuss the matter, admit their involvement, or bring unwanted attention to it—in case, it would seem, it might need to be used again.

  “That underground is as effective today in the South,” Arrington High told the Chicago Defender after his arrival, “as it was during the days of slavery.”

  It was Dr. Howard who, with the help of more than a dozen others, arranged for his colleague’s escape and greeted him upon arrival. He knew what it meant to flee for your life. He did not have to imagine what Arrington High had been through during that dark, cramped ride to Chicago. He himself had to be spirited from Mississippi only a few years before.

  NEW YORK, 1957

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  GEORGE STARLING WAS RUNNING the rails up and down the East Coast, and, as he did, he was in a way running from Inez. George loved Inez. But Inez was not an easy woman to love. There was a storm inside her that nobody seemed able to calm.

  It had started long before, when she and her toddler sister were left orphaned right after Inez was born. They were raised by poor, put-upon, Bible-thumping Pentecostal aunts, who couldn’t afford two more mouths to feed, and by a Victorian grandmother, who thought the only way to break a girl as stubborn as Inez was to beat her the way the overseers beat their foreparents. They hauled Inez and her older sister to their Holiness church, where the aunts and the grandmother caught the spirit and talked in tongues. Inez’s sister did not let it get to her. Inez rebelled from the start.

  George had taken a liking to Inez back in Eustis, maybe because she was as headstrong as he was and knew what it was like to feel tossed about as a child by the people charged with caring for her. He hadn’t given much thought to the consequences of marrying her, hadn’t given much thought to marriage at all. But now he found himself bound to her, with a young son she adored, and as principled and stubborn as he was, he wasn’t going to admit defeat no matter how blue and ornery she could be.

  There were happy times, when the folks from back home paraded up from Florida. George could regale them with stories from the railroad, and Inez could show off how well they had made out in New York, how much better things were there than down south, how the little country orphan girl was living in a brownstone in the biggest, brightest city in maybe the whole world.

  In the summer, it seemed as if there was someone from Eustis coming up every weekend. If George wasn’t on the rails, he would throw some ribs on the grill. Babe Blye, who lived upstairs from George and Inez in the second-floor apartment, would drive out to the woods, out to Westchester or Connecticut, and bring back some possum or run to the corner store and get the whiskey and chitlins. Inez and Babe’s wife, Hallie Q., would cook up the possum and the chitlins and stir up some collard greens, make the potato salad, and there would be a Florida reunion in the middle of Harlem. Everybody who came up to New York from Eustis knew to stop by George and Inez’s place.

  Soon, after so many years with just the three of them, their household expanded further. They had a little girl in 1954. She looked just like George and had his temperament. They named her Sonya. Now they had two little ones to raise.

  Then, one day in 1957, word arrived about a death in the family that would bring more changes to the household. Inez’s sister had taken ill and died back in Florida. She left behind a teenage daughter named Pat, who was bright but distraught and who everyone feared was headed for trouble.

  Like many people who had come up from the South, George and Inez sent for the girl to come live with them. Inez wasn’t especially happy about her niece coming. Life was hard enough in New York. Inez had put Eustis behind her and was working hard to take care of her own children. She and George had to leave the children alone more than they wanted to as it was in order to meet the house note and the property taxes, the utilities, and everything else that seemed to be high just because this was New York.

  But George saw something in the girl, a quick mind and a good heart, and thought they could help her. Besides, he knew that most migrant families that moved up north took in a relative or two at some point or other. It was how a lot of newcomers got situated in the New World, and was the right and southern thing to do.

  There were people in Eustis who never left and never wanted to leave and couldn’t see why anybody would go up north with all the crime and drugs and devilment. They felt sorry for the sheltered teenager whose mother had taken ill and died in her arms and who now was being shipped up north to live with an aunt and uncle she barely knew in a city she had never seen.

  “All the people in my little town saw doom for me,” Pat said years later. “Uncle George took me in.”

  George knew firsthand how the folks in Eustis could be. He told Pat she needed to make the most of the mind God had given her and warned her that there would be people pitying her and expecting her to fail.

  “You must not fail,” George told Pat, “because they’re expecting you to.”

  But when Pat arrived, George was hardly ever around, working the rails as he was. Inez couldn’t hide her resentment, and it was just the two of them, aunt and niece, in the first floor of their brownstone sometimes. Inez told her she would give her a week, and then Pat would have to start paying rent.

  Pat protested that her mother had just died, that she didn’t have a job yet, she didn’t know the city well enough. Inez didn’t need to be told how rough life could be. She had never had the chance even to know her mother. She had little sympathy and didn’t want her around.

  Inez got worried about the money it was costing to have Pat there and would lock the kitchen to control who could get in. Pat would have to sneak in there when the kitchen was open.

  “I would go in there and snatch everything I could outta there,” Pat said.

  One day, soon after she arrived, George and Inez left for work, and Gerard, now twelve, and little Sonya, who was about six, were left alone in the house with Pat, who was still getting used to all the lights and the noise and the perils of the big city.

  About ten boys showed up at the front door. Gerard let them in, and they all headed straight for the kitchen.

  “They had this white stuff, and they were doing something with it,” Pat remembered. She had never seen this in Eustis before. The boys were doing drugs, she later learned.

  It was summer, and, each day, after George and Inez left, the boys would show up and head for the kitchen.

  “They would come there to roll that stuff and then hit the door,” Pat remembered.

  The temptations of the city had seeped into George and Inez’s house when they weren’t looking, when they were out trying to make a living to stay in the city that was swallowing up their son. Pat eventually got the nerve to confront Gerard.

  “I’m gonna tell Inez,” she warned him.

  Gerard knew how much his mother adored him and dared Pat to say anything.

  Pat got up the courage to tell Inez. She told her that when she went off to work, Gerard was letting in a bunch of boys, and they were doing dope in the kitchen.

  Inez grew enraged.

  “How dare you say that about Gerard!” she told Pat.

  George wasn’t around. He was on the train. And Inez told Pat she wanted her out of the house.

  “I don’t appreciate you talking about my son taking drugs,” she said.

  Pat was between jobs, was just a teenager, and had no money. But she was too proud to argue with her aunt.

  “Well, if that’s what you want me to do,” she said.

  She gathered what few things she had and started walking, not knowing where she was going. She got to a shoe-shine stand and asked the man if he knew of anyone with rooms for rent.

  He took her to the apartment of a sweet old couple. The wife sang with a gospel group, and Pat stayed there until she got on her fee
t.

  George got back from the rails, not knowing what had happened to Pat or where she was. He didn’t intercede because Pat was Inez’s blood relative, not his. It was only some time later that she saw George and told him what had happened.

  “Pat, I had no idea,” George said. “I didn’t know where you were. She told me you had just left. I had no idea that she had done that.”

  Inez was her aunt, but it was George she would always be closer to, like a second daughter to him.

  “The man cared more about me than she did,” Pat said. “Had he been there that day, I would have waited and told him. My pride wouldn’t let me.”

  Pat’s warnings turned out to be prophetic. Gerard would only sink deeper into drugs and watch his friends die from overdoses of heroin. One of them they found dead in an elevator. Gerard would go on to steal televisions and radios and cash from his parents, anything of value that they hadn’t locked up or hidden away or could be easily carried out the door. He would bring sadness and heartbreak to Inez and especially to George, who could rarely even bring himself to talk about his son. He had come all this way from Florida, and here was something that had turned out worse in ways he couldn’t have thought possible.

  Gerard would get himself together for a time but would never truly get on his feet. And during those moments of victory, his father preached at him.

  “You owe God,” he’d tell Gerard. “You owe it to him to go around and tell your generation the evil of dealing in drugs and how he rescued you.”

  Inez, who had adored and indulged Gerard, retreated into herself and seemed to take the sorrows out on those around her. She had a coat that Pat used to beg her to let her wear.

  “A little coat that I loved,” Pat said.

  Pat had come up from the country with few clothes of her own, and when it got cold she wanted to wear one of Inez’s coats, that one in particular. Pat was always talking about that coat.

  “Uncle George knew I liked it,” Pat said. “Everybody knew I liked it.”

  One day, after she had moved out, she saw her Uncle George.

  “Pat, I got some bad news for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your aunt threw that coat you so loved in the garbage can today,” he said. “I begged her not to, but she did it anyway.”

  Pat went to their house and looked in the trash can for it.

  “By the time I went there, it was gone,” Pat said.

  It all came back to Pat, the things the family used to say about Inez, that they could never make sense of “how when she was a little baby, how stubborn she was and how their grandmother would whip them and she refused to bow.”

  Pat would eventually make peace with her aunt. She would grow up, get married, have a family of her own, and join a church, which was what all of them had been raised to do. Inez never joined a church in New York. It reminded her too much of the hard life she’d had in Eustis and of a little girl’s imaginings of how different life might have been if her mother had lived, the mother who died bringing Inez into the world.

  Pat managed to convince Inez to go with her on occasion.

  And every time, Pat remembered, “she would break down crying, and she’d have to leave the church.”

  LOS ANGELES, MAY 1962

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  THE SONG HIT the Billboard charts in May 1962. It stayed there for seven weeks and peaked at Number 20.

  The song was by a famous migrant from Albany, Georgia, Robert’s most high-maintenance patient, Ray Charles. It was about Robert or, rather, an idealized version of him in a smoke- and drug-filled world of airless recording studios, martini nightclubs, cross-country road tours, and shimmying, wig- and rouge-wearing backup-singer love triangles that was the life of Ray Charles in the sixties and which Robert entered unavoidably and not unhappily as his personal physician during the peak of both men’s careers. The song was called “Hide Nor Hair,” and the chorus went like this:

  Well, I called my Dr. Foster and when the girl answered the phone,

  I got a funny feeling, the way she said Dr. Foster had gone.

  She said, “He left with a lady patient, about 24 hours ago.”

  I added two and two, and here’s what I got: I got I’ll never see that girl no

  more.

  I ain’t seen hide nor hair of my baby, since she went away.

  If Dr. Foster has got her, then I know I’m through,

  Because he’s got medicine and money, too.

  I ain’t seen hide nor hair of my baby, since that day.

  Robert knew Ray was working on a song about him, or about a doctor at least. Ray asked Robert’s permission to use his name before recording it. Coming as it did just months after Robert had put his hand back together and delivered his son, it was Ray’s way of thanking a man he had come to depend on. Robert, always craving approval and enamored of show business, gave him the go-ahead.

  Robert wasn’t looking to be the subject of a song and really didn’t need it. Years later, he didn’t talk about it much and, the times he did, it was rather like a footnote. But when it first hit the airwaves back in 1962, his practice took off like never before. He could see the effects of the Migration in his waiting room—former sharecroppers from east Texas, schoolteachers from Baton Rouge, gamblers from Arkansas, Creoles from New Orleans. He ended up with more patients than he could handle, more than was really fair to him or to the patients, seeing as how he liked to spend so much time with each one, get to know them and their lives and desires, and seeing how much they took to that kind of attention. He had more business than he ever could have imagined back when he was dreaming of getting out of Louisiana, trying to convince himself as much as everybody else that he really could make it in California.

  It reached the point where the hallway outside his office began to look like some of the train stations during the Migration. Patients started lining up hours before he got there, a reunion of Texans and Louisianans and migrants from Arkansas, spilling out of the reception room and into the outer corridor, patients sitting cross-legged on the floor, heads tilted back against the wall, all waiting to hear their names called. They knew he might still be at the racetrack or just in from Vegas. He’d step over the dangling legs and watch out for their feet as he waded through the crowd to get to his office door.

  Some would end up waiting all day to see him, and somehow he made each one feel as if he or she were the only patient in the world. He would stay until ten or eleven at night or until he had seen the very last patient.

  It got so crowded, like a Saturday-night rent party, that some people just couldn’t take the waiting anymore, no matter how good he was. Reatha Gray Simon, his mentor Dr. Beck’s granddaughter, had a brief falling-out with him over the fact that she practically had to block out a whole day to see him.

  “I knew he was sometimes in surgery,” she said, “but sometimes he was at the track. The waiting room was like the neighborhood barbershop.”

  That was just how he wanted it. Gambling and medicine were basically his life. He could lose himself in both and had a hard time walling off his professional and personal lives. He doted on his patients and sometimes went gambling with them. He didn’t look down his speculum at the cooks and mailmen he treated and made sure to invite them to the parties he gave.

  “Some wouldn’t come for whatever reason,” he said. The house was practically a mansion, and Robert threw out the red carpet, literally. “Most of them probably didn’t feel comfortable. But I was gracious as I could be if they came. I’d bend over backwards to make them come.”

  THE PRODIGALS

  [My father], along with

  thousands of other Negroes,

  came North after 1919

  and I was part of that generation

  which had never seen the landscape

  of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.

  JAMES BALDWIN, Notes of a Native Son

  ’Sides, they can’t run us all ou
t.

  That land’s got more of our blood in it than theirs.

  Not all us s’posed to leave. Some of us got to stay,

  so y’all have a place to come back to.

  — A SHARECROPPER WHO STAYED IN

  NORTH CAROLINA, FROM MARITA

  GOLDEN, Long Distance Life

  SOMEWHERE NEAR CARTERSVILLE, GEORGIA, SUMMER 1956

  THE ROAD SIGNS were warning that the 1956 Pontiac with the shark-tooth grille and chrome racing stripes on the hood was drawing closer to the hill town of Rome, Georgia. My mother was driving, only it was clear from everything about her that she wouldn’t become my mother for a while. She would have been wearing a poodle skirt with a cinched waist, a scarf folded Marilyn Monroe–style atop her head and knotted breezily at the neck, pressed curls peeking out from the sides. Dark, movie star sunglasses dwarfed her face and shielded her eyes, the eyes scanning for the one thing she needed, could not put off, had to do before pulling into her old hometown of Rome.

  The car was brand-new, blue, the color of the flag, as my mother would remember it, with whitewall tires and white side panel trim. But it was dusty from the drive, its windshield spotted and speckled, and not looking anywhere close to the four thousand dollars she’d paid for it. Her sister Theresa, who had followed her up north, was with her, and they couldn’t roll into town like that. No migrant could, none would dare let on that their new life was anything less than perfect; they had to prove that their decision to go north was the superior and right thing to do, that they were living the dream and everything was out of a Technicolor movie set.