Isabel Wilkerson
Page 44
Besides, the people back home would be disappointed if they didn’t put on a show, and so they did. So she would have to find a car wash before she could get so close to town that some neighbor might see her in a dusty old automobile and conclude that things weren’t nearly as swell up north as they had been claiming. If she did not find a car wash, it would be all over North Rome before she turned onto Gibbon Street to greet her mother and nieces, who, at that very moment, were praying she was running late because they weren’t finished waxing the floors and shining the windows with old pages of the Rome News Tribune, hadn’t smoothed out the chenille blankets with the cotton-ball fringe in the guest bedroom, the corn bread hadn’t risen yet, the African violets needed watering, and what if she pulled up just now?
My mother delayed her arrival and the moment she would see her own beloved mother to stop in Cartersville to get the Pontiac washed and polished. That was the most important thing, after all. She had driven to Rome before, but it was in a Chevrolet, a used one at that. She had not long before started a new job teaching school, bought herself a row house in an all-white block in Northwest Washington, and now had this new car. But it wouldn’t mean as much unless the people back home could see the manifestation of all this for themselves.
“We wanted to arrive in the daytime so people would come out looking at us,” my mother remembered of the trip she made with her sister. “We tooted the horn, and Mother came out. I don’t know why we went to Rome. To show off the car, I guess.”
The car, with its precious Washington, D.C., license plates, would cause a commotion, like a UFO from another planet, which is just what she wanted, and all the little children would look at that shiny, chrome-plated car and inspect the tags and ask, “What is a ‘District of Columbia’?”
At holidays and in summer, the migrants came home. They would leave a trail of Cadillac dust on Highway 61 in the Delta or along Route 1 through the Carolinas and Georgia. They had prepared all year for this moment of glory, and there were times when in some church parking lots in Grenada or Greenville, there were more Illinois license plates than those from Mississippi.
They had gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.
The homesick migrants loaded up their sleepy children in the dark hours of the morning for the long drive to the mother country when there was a death in the family or a loved one needing tending or just to show off how well they were making out up north. When they saw the cold airs of the New World seeping into their northern-bred children, they sent them south for the summer so the children would know where they came from. The migrants warned their children to be on their best behavior, especially when it came to the white people they might encounter.
But the children did not have the internalized deference of their southern cousins. They got into scrapes with the other children and couldn’t remember all the rules. One migrant’s son, Emmett Till, on a visit from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955, was killed for breaking protocol in some way that will probably never be known for sure, except that everyone agreed it involved something he had said to a white woman, which only served to remind those who left of the rightness of their decision and those who stayed how foolhardy it could be to forget for a moment where you were when you crossed into the very different country of the South.
Ida Mae did not go back often, not because she was afraid but because she had a family to tend to in Chicago. She went back for illnesses and funerals—when her mother, Miss Theenie, took ill and died, and years later, when her baby sister, Talma, got sick and died. Her husband, George, went back only once—for the funeral of the brother who had raised him, Willie. And even then he did not stay the night; he left for Chicago right away.
Robert Foster did not go back often either. His goal was to get as many of his loved ones from Monroe to move out to California, and he went back only when he had to. Alice had no interest in going, and he did not insist on Alice or the girls visiting Monroe. They would grow up knowing little of their father’s small-town Louisiana roots. When he returned home, he put on a show, as would have been expected of him, and made sure it was clear that he was now more California than Louisiana.
It would be a long time before George Starling would feel safe returning to Eustis, Florida, seeing how he had left. Southern sheriffs and planters were known to have long memories and even to go after migrants who had fled north. Some white southerners tried to convince the workers who had fled that conditions had improved. Some extradited people for whatever reason they saw fit.
“Even in the North, refugees were not always safe,” wrote Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy in the 1945 book Anyplace but Here. “One hard-working migrant was astonished when a detective from Atlanta approached him and informed him that he was wanted back home for ‘spitting on the sidewalk.’ ”
So George was not inclined to linger in the vicinity of Eustis, Florida. His job on the railroad took him south, but on a line that usually veered west toward Birmingham. The times he worked a train that happened to take him through Florida, he did not leave the station or request permission to go home. The few relatives he trusted drove thirty or forty miles from Eustis or Alachua to meet him at the Wildwood station, bearing gossip, good wishes, and hams. George, in his porter’s cap and uniform, leaned out of the coach door to see them and left weighed down with homemade cakes or fresh fish they had caught for him to take back up north.
“Where they stop the train and fuel up, they had to stop there a good little while,” George’s Uncle Andrew “Jack” Johnson said. “We’d go there and meet him. And most of the time we carry him something. Give him his handout, such as we had.”
It was a measure of their pride and devotion that the uncle and his wife drove close to two hours in thunderstorms and waited for however long it took the train to get there for the few minutes they’d get to see him. “He’d have time enough to speak and pass a few words,” the uncle remembered, “while the train was fueling up.”
One time, George was hauling luggage at the train stop at Wildwood, when up stepped the most feared man in all of Lake County and one of the most notorious sheriffs in the South, Willis V. McCall. The sheriff was just one more reason that George went no closer to his hometown of Eustis than the depot at Wildwood.
McCall was the lawman who had shot two handcuffed prisoners, killing one, as he transported them from one jail to another for an upcoming trial in the Groveland rape case back in 1949. The trial and the subsequent shootings attracted nationwide attention partly because one of the men McCall thought he had killed had actually survived to tell what happened to him. The NAACP field secretary Harry T. Moore and his wife had died from a bomb placed under Moore’s bed after Moore had accused McCall of police brutality in the case.
Over the years, McCall would be accused, implicated, or indicted in dozens of cases of prisoners dying under suspicious circumstances while in his custody. He patrolled the colored section in his ten-gallon hat, interrogating and pistol-whipping colored men for any suspicion and putting colored fruit pickers in jail if he caught them not working on a Saturday.
The colored people of Eustis and the rest of Lake County lived in fear of his patrol car crawling through their gravel streets.
“Here come the Big Hat Man,” the people would say when they saw him approaching.
People scurried from the street. They cleared the benches on McDonald Avenue and fled behind the storefronts when they saw him coming.
“That bench would be cleared in two seconds,” George said.
The sheriff had free rein and used to come into Big George’s corner store and drink his sodas without paying.
“Well, see you, George,” McCall would tell Big George, slurping on a soda to which he had helped himself.
“Hey, don’t I know you?”
“I guess you do.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is George Starling, Jr.”
“Oh, you George’s boy, heh?”
“I’m George’s son.”
That was the only time in all the years that Willis McCall was sheriff that George actually spoke with him. George felt safe because he was about to jump up on the train, and so he spoke his mind as he never would have in Eustis.
“I was biggity then,” George said. “And he got a little red in the face, and he kind of grinned a little bit.”
McCall regained his composure.
“Well, when you coming home?”
“I ain’t,” George told him. “I live in New York. I ain’t coming back to Eustis.”
George turned away and hopped up on the train. “I ain’t, not long as you still living,” he said under his breath.
Emmett Till was perhaps the most memorialized black northerner ever to go south, if only because he never made it back alive and because of the brutal reasons that he didn’t. His mother had sent her only child south for the summer in 1955 to spend time with his great-uncle in Mississippi. She never saw him alive again. He was bludgeoned and shot to death a month after his fourteenth birthday. Three days later, two fishermen found his body in the Tallahatchie River. Against the advice of those around her, his mother, Mamie Till, decided to hold the funeral with an open casket, so people could see what Mississippi had done to him.
Mourners and the curious clogged Fortieth and State Streets to line up and see his swollen, disfigured body inside the old barrel-vaulted Roberts Temple Church of God. Many of the people paying their respects had come from Mississippi like Emmett Till’s family, had lived and escaped the violence, and here it was being brought back to Chicago in the form of a fourteen-year-old boy. It could just as easily have been one of their children lying there lifeless. How many of them had sent their children south to be with their cousins and grandparents, giving them the same warnings Mamie Till had given her son—that they mind themselves around white people?
Ida Mae went to Roberts Temple Church of God that day in early September and stood in line with the thousands of others waiting to see him. She felt she had to. It took hours to reach the casket. She was unprepared for what confronted her when she leaned over the glass-covered coffin. The undertakers had done what they could, but an eye was out of its socket and the face so disfigured that it did not resemble a human being’s. She had to look away.
George said he didn’t want to go, and he didn’t. He had lived it and seen enough.
DISILLUSIONMENT
Let’s not fool ourselves,
we are far from the Promised Land,
both north and south.
— DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
It was a hoax if you ask me.…
They’re packed tight
into the buildings,
and can’t do anything,
not even dream of going North,
the way I do
when it gets rough.
— A COLORED MAN WHO NEVER LEFT ALABAMA, QUOTED IN The New York Times IN 1967
CHICAGO, 1951
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
BY MIDCENTURY, the receiving cities of the Great Migration strained under the weight of millions of black southerners trying to situate themselves as tens of thousands more alighted from Pontiacs and railroad platforms each week. In the spring of 1951, a colored bus driver and former army captain named Harvey Clark, and his wife, Johnetta, faced an impossible living situation.
It was a dilemma confronting Ida Mae and her family and just about every colored household up from the South. There was not enough housing to contain them, and the white neighborhoods bordering the black belt were barricading themselves further, not flinching at the use of violence to keep the walls in place.
Ida Mae and her family moved from flat to flat within those walls. Once they lived in an apartment over a funeral home, where little Eleanor played among the caskets and rode with the undertaker to pick up bodies. As it was, Chicago was trying to discourage the migration of any more colored people from the South. In 1950, city aldermen and housing officials proposed restricting 13,000 new public housing units to people who had lived in Chicago for two years. The rule would presumably affect colored migrants and foreign immigrants alike. But it was the colored people who were having the most trouble finding housing and most likely to seek out such an alternative. And it was they who were seen as needing to be controlled, as they had only to catch a train rather than cross an ocean to get there. Nothing had worked before at keeping the migrants out once the Migration began, and this new plan wouldn’t either. But it was a sign of the hostility facing people like Harvey Clark and Ida Mae, as white home owners stepped up pressure on the city to protect their neighborhoods.
“They don’t want the Negro who has just moved out of rural Dixie as their neighbor,” a city official told the Chicago Defender in a story that described what it called a “2-Year City Ban on Migrants.”
With close to half a million colored people overflowing the black belt by 1950, racial walls that had been “successfully defended for a generation,” in the words of the historian Allan Spear, were facing imminent collapse, but not without a fight. Chicago found itself in the midst of “chronic urban guerilla warfare” that rivaled the city’s violent spasms at the start of the Migration, “when one racially motivated bombing or arson occurred every twenty days,” according to the historian Arnold Hirsch.
Harvey Clark was from Mississippi like Ida Mae and brought his family to Chicago in 1949 after serving in World War II. Now that they were in the big city, the couple and their two children were crammed into half of a two-room apartment. A family of five lived in the other half. Harvey Clark was paying fifty-six dollars a month for the privilege, up to fifty percent more than tenants in white neighborhoods paid for the same amount of space. One-room tenement life did not fit them at all. The husband and wife were college-educated, well-mannered, and looked like movie stars. The father had saved up for a piano for his eight-year-old daughter with the ringlets down her back but had no place to put it. He had high aspirations for their six-year-old son, who was bright and whose dimples could have landed him in cereal commercials.
The Clarks felt they had to get out. By May of 1951, they finally found the perfect apartment. It had five rooms, was clean and modern, was closer to the bus terminal, and cost only sixty dollars a month. That came to four dollars a month more for five times more space. It was just a block over the Chicago line, at 6139 West Nineteenth Street, in the working-class suburb of Cicero. The Clarks couldn’t believe their good fortune.
Cicero was an all-white town on the southwest border of Chicago. It was known as the place Al Capone went to elude Chicago authorities back during Prohibition. The town was filled with first- and second-generation immigrants—Czechs, Slavs, Poles, Italians. Some had fled fascism and Stalinism, not unlike blacks fleeing oppression in the South, and were still getting established in the New World. They lived in frame cottages and worked the factories and slaughterhouses. They were miles from the black belt, isolated from it, and bent on keeping their town as it was.
That the Clarks turned there at all was an indication of how closed the options were for colored families looking for clean, spacious housing they could afford. The Clarks set the move-in date for the third week of June. The moving truck arrived at 2:30 in the afternoon. White protesters met them as the couple tried to unload the truck.
“Get out of Cicero,” the protesters told them, “and don’t come back.”
As the Clarks started to enter the building, the police stopped them at the
door. The police took sides with the protesters and would not let the Clarks nor their furniture in.
“You should know better,” the chief of police told them. “Get going. Get out of here fast. There will be no moving in that building.”
The Clarks, along with their rental agent, Charles Edwards, fled the scene.
“Don’t come back in town,” the chief reportedly told Edwards, “or you’ll get a bullet through you.”
The Clarks did not let that deter them but sued and won the right to occupy the apartment. They tried to move in again on July 11, 1951. This time, a hundred Cicero housewives and grandmothers in swing coats and Mamie Eisenhower hats showed up to heckle them. The couple managed to get their furniture in, but as the day wore on, the crowds grew larger and more agitated. A man from a white supremacy group called the White Circle League handed out flyers that said, KEEP CICERO WHITE. The Clarks fled.
A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below. The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures. They overturned the refrigerator and tore the stove and plumbing fixtures out of the wall. They tore up the carpet. They shattered the mirrors. They bashed in the toilet bowl. They ripped out the radiators. They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter. And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.
In an hour, the mob “destroyed what had taken nine years to acquire,” wrote the historian Stephen Grant Meyer of what happened that night.
The next day, a full-out riot was under way. The mob grew to four thousand by early evening as teenagers got out of school, husbands returned home from work, and all of them joined the housewives who had kept a daylong vigil in protest of the Clarks’ arrival. They chanted, “Go, go, go, go.” They hurled rocks and bricks. They looted. Then they firebombed the whole building. The bombing gutted the twenty-unit building and forced even the white tenants out. The rioters overturned police cars and threw stones at the firefighters who were trying to put out the blaze.