Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  He knew he couldn’t be seen openly advising black passengers to defy the conductor’s orders. So from the moment he boarded the train in New York and began waiting on the black passengers in his charge, he paid close attention to them, scrutinized them to see which ones might be more receptive.

  Then, as the train rumbled toward Union Station in Washington, and when he had made certain that the conductor wasn’t around, he began approaching colored passengers, one by one. He leaned over the seat and began speaking in whispers.

  “Look,” he told them, “what I want to say to you is confidential, between you and me. If you don’t think you can keep it confidential, let me know now, and I won’t say any more. But it’s to your benefit.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Then he would explain the situation.

  “Well, now, going below Washington,” he would tell them, “they want us to move y’all up front in the Jim Crow car. But you have paid for a seat to wherever you’re going. You paid an extra fee to reserve this seat, and you’re entitled to keep this seat to your point of destination. But they not gonna tell you that. They gonna tell you, you got to move up front.”

  He waited for their response, checked for a show of interest and curiosity instead of fear and distrust. Then he would know whether to proceed. If he felt safe, he would go on.

  “What you do,” he continued, “is tell them that you don’t care to move. Just tell them that.”

  Then he told them what to expect and gave them a little script. “They’re gonna give you an argument,” he said. “But just tell ’em, ‘Look, I have a reserved seat here from New York to Jacksonville. Washington isn’t my destination, and I’m not moving anywhere. Now, if you want me to move, you get the cops and come and move me. I’m not voluntarily moving anywhere.’ ”

  He reassured them that they were within their rights. “They’re not gon’ bother you,” he told them. “Because they know if you got nerve enough to tell ’em that you’re not gonna move and if they force you to move, that they have a suit on their hands.”

  But it occurred to him that he needed to protect himself. He couldn’t give any appearance of undermining the conductor’s orders or inspiring the black passengers to do something that would otherwise never occur to them. So he admonished them further. “And don’t go telling them, ‘Well, the attendant told me I didn’t have to move,’ ” George said. “Or you’ll get me killed. Just tell ’em you’re not gonna move. They not gonna move you.”

  Some of them got scared at that kind of talk. So George gave them an out. “If you feel more comfortable, and you think you should go up to that Jim Crow car when you have paid to ride like everybody else, then you go,” he said. “I’ll move you.”

  He forewarned them that if they decided to take the chance, they should know that he would have to feign indifference, pretend to have no knowledge of the matter if the conductor got involved. “He’s gonna be telling me to take you up front, and you gonna be tellin’ him that you’re not going, and I’m gonna just be standing there. I’m gonna be saying, ‘Naw, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.’ ”

  By the time the train got halfway to Washington, he had a good idea of who he had in the railcar with him and which of them might be safe to approach.

  “You could tell just by who brings them to the station,” he said, “how they depart, the conversations.”

  But sometimes he would misjudge a passenger and come close to getting caught. Some passengers would loud-talk him.

  “What? What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?” they’d ask, not comprehending his plan.

  George would speak in an even quieter whisper to get their voices down, which only meant they couldn’t hear him and made them ask more questions, even louder than before.

  “What? I don’t have to move? How come I don’t have to move?”

  George would just shake his head and step away. “You know to leave them alone,” he said.

  What gave George the greatest sense of defeat were the people who went up to the Jim Crow car anyway. “They move anyway to avoid trouble,” he said. “Quite a few would move up because the other attendants—they wouldn’t tell the people. They wouldn’t go to ’em like I would. Some of them would even support the conductor in telling them, ‘You better move. You gotta move.’ ”

  George didn’t see it that way, and after all he had been through in the South, and even in the North, he felt it his duty to let the people know. It was the same George who tried to rouse the fruit pickers some twenty years before, to get them to stand up for what was due them.

  In this case, on the train, George was fortunate. “None of them ever exposed me,” he said.

  And what’s more, of the cases he saw, the people who resisted got to stay in their rightful seats. “Every incident that came up,” George said, “they left them alone.”

  CHICAGO, SPRING 1967

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IT HAD BEEN CLOSE TO THIRTY YEARS since Ida Mae and her family had come up north. The children were grown now. And by the late 1950s, the first generation born in the North had arrived. Eleanor, who had come north in Ida Mae’s belly, had gotten married right out of high school and had two kids. James and his wife, Mary Ann, soon followed with four kids of their own. Ida Mae held the babies close and prayed for the first members of the family born free in the Promised Land.

  There were different branches now, and they were getting by, but still renting and not settled in a place of their own. From flat to flat, in and around the straining borders of the South Side, Ida Mae and her family had moved more in Chicago than they had when they were sharecroppers in Mississippi, as they had never moved in Mississippi like some of the people they knew because they had always stayed with their one planter, Mr. Edd.

  They had lived at Twenty-first and State, Thirty-third and State, Forty-fifth and St. Lawrence, and were now in the 700 block of West Sixty-sixth Place. They had been all over the South Side.

  They felt they had been in Chicago long enough without owning something. George had been at Campbell Soup for years. Ida Mae was working as a nurse’s aide at Walther Memorial Hospital. Velma was teaching, James was driving a bus for the Chicago Transit Authority. Eleanor was a ticket agent for the elevated train. So together, they had enough to put something down on some property.

  Not unlike many immigrant families, they wanted to stay together and wanted a place big enough for all of them. Their search led them to a beige brick three-flat in a long-contested but, they believed, newly opened-up neighborhood called South Shore on the southern tip of the black belt. It was a few blocks west of Lake Michigan. The street was lined with oak trees along the sidewalk and brick bungalows and multiflats with little patches of yard in front.

  They went to see the place at night.

  An Italian car salesman and his family lived there. It had room enough for James and his family on the first floor, Ida Mae and her husband on the second, Eleanor and her kids on the third, or if necessary, a tenant to help with the house payments. Ida Mae and her family didn’t have enough furniture to fill the flat. They wanted the place and everything in it: the plastic-covered upholstery, the marble-topped coffee table, the lamps, the dining room table, the breakfront and buffet, and the baby blue draperies over the front windows.

  The Italian car salesman said he liked them and wanted them to have it. The family paid thirty thousand dollars and moved in without incident. There was the little matter of a bullet hole in one of the windows in the front room, but Ida Mae didn’t let it bother her as it appeared the shot had been fired sometime before they moved in. Thirty years after they arrived in the New World with little more than their kids and the clothes on their backs, Ida Mae and her husband were finally homeowners in Chicago.

  “It was beautiful,” Ida Mae said years later. “Trees everywhere, all up and down the block.”

  Weeks passed. Ida Mae went to work one morning and came back that evening on the streetcar over on Exchange. Sh
e walked down Colfax in the neighborhood of brick apartment buildings, barbershop storefronts, and frame bungalows along a route that she was just beginning to learn.

  It was then that she noticed something missing across the street from her three-flat. A house had vanished. The people across from her had moved it, or so it appeared. There was now a small crater in the earth where, just that morning, a house used to be.

  It was a wonderment to Ida Mae and to James and Eleanor and the grandkids. Why would their nice white neighbors move their house clear off the street? Where did they go? What did this mean?

  They would never see them again to get the answers. They would never fully know for sure what had happened or why. It would become part of their family lore, one of the things they would tell over and over again, shaking their heads and hunching their shoulders as they looked out their second-floor window at the sociology unfolding beneath them.

  As it was, too much was happening anyway. Within weeks of the disappearing house, moving vans clogged Colfax Street. More people were vanishing, but those people left their houses behind. They took their sofas and upright pianos and were gone.

  “Lord, they move quick,” Ida Mae said years later. “And then blacks started moving in. Oh, Lord.”

  The whites left so fast Ida Mae didn’t get a chance to know any of them or their kids or what they did for a living or if they liked watching The Ed Sullivan Show like she did Sunday nights. They didn’t stick around long enough to explain. But some of the whites who left the South Side in a panic would talk about it years later and, to tell the truth, never got over the loss of their old neighborhoods.

  “It happened slowly, and then all of a sudden, boom,” said a white homemaker who fled Ida Mae’s neighborhood around that time and was quoted by the writer Louis Rosen, who had been a teenager when his parents fled South Shore, in the book South Side. “Everyone was gone. Everything changed. Before you know it, this one, that one. And then you heard, ‘So-and-so’s moving.’ People didn’t want to be the last.”

  A white father told Rosen, “I fought the good fight. I couldn’t stay there with my three kids—my oldest was only fourteen at the time. I made a judgment. I did the best I could.”

  “It was like sitting around with a big group,” said a white husband. “ ‘Okay, guys, in the next year, we’re all going.’ ”

  “It was who found a house first,” the wife chimed in.

  “Exactly. And we all went,” the husband said.

  To the colored people left behind, none of it made any sense. “It was like having a tooth pulled for no reason,” said a black resident who moved his family in, only to watch the white neighbors empty out.

  By the end of the year, the 7500 block of Colfax and much of the rest of South Shore went from all white to nearly totally black, which in itself might have been a neutral development, except that many houses changed hands so rapidly it was unclear whether the new people could afford the mortgages, and the rest were abandoned to renters with no investment or incentive to keep the places up. The turnover was sudden and complete and so destabilizing that it even extended to the stores on Seventy-fifth Street, to the neighborhood schools and to the street-sweeping and police patrols that could have kept up the quality of life. It was as if the city lost interest when the white people left.

  The ice cream parlor closed. The five-and-dime shut down. The Walgreens on the corner became a liquor store. Karen and Kevin enrolled in Bradwell Elementary School and remember being, along with two other kids, the only black children in the entire school in 1968. By the time they graduated four years later, the racial composition had completely reversed: only four white children were left. South Shore would become as solidly black as the North Shore was solidly white. Ida Mae’s neighborhood never had a chance to catch up with all the upheaval and was never the same again.

  South Shore was one of the last white strongholds on the South Side, the completion of a cycle that had begun when the migrants first arrived and started looking for a way out of the tenements. There were fifty-eight bombings of houses that blacks moved into or were about to move into between 1917 and 1921 alone, bombings having become one of the preferred methods of intimidation in the North. In neighborhood after neighborhood, with the arrival of black residents the response during the Migration years was swift and predictable.

  It happened to ordinary people like Ida Mae and to celebrities like Mahalia Jackson, the leading gospel singer of her day. When she began looking for a house in a well-to-do section of the South Side, people held meetings up and down the block. A Catholic priest rallied his parishioners and told them not to sell to her.

  “You’d have thought the atomic bomb was coming instead of me,” the singer said.

  She got calls in the middle of the night, warning her, “You move into that house, and we’ll blow it up with dynamite. You’re going to need more than your gospel songs and prayers to save you.”

  She bought the house. It was a sprawling red brick ranch and the house of her dreams, coming as she had from the back country of Louisiana. A doctor had broken ranks and sold it to her. As soon as she moved in, the neighbors shot rifle bullets through her windows. The police were posted outside her house for close to a year.

  “One by one,” she said, “they sold their houses and moved away. As fast as a house came on the market a colored family would buy it.”

  Even Hyde Park, an island of sophistication just north of Ida Mae’s working-class neighborhood of South Shore, succumbed to the same fears and raw emotion that overtook the rest of the city’s South Side.

  “Shall we sacrifice our property for a third of its value and run like rats from a burning ship,” said a handbill circulated among white residents trying to keep blacks on the other side of State Street, “or shall we put up a united front to keep Hyde Park desirable for ourselves?”

  Oddly enough, Hyde Park was one of the very few places where the alarmist rhetoric did not completely take. It was home to the venerable University of Chicago, which had its own interest in maintaining stability, and the neighborhood was blessed with some of the finest residential architecture in the city, giving many whites compelling and overriding reasons to stay. The neighborhood was one of the most expensive on the South Side, so blacks who moved there had to have the means just to get in. Thus Hyde Park actually became a rare island of integration despite the initial hostilities.

  Still, it was surrounded by all-black neighborhoods in a deeply divided city. Entire communities like the suburb of Cicero remained completely off-limits to blacks, and whites would avoid so much as driving through whole sections of the south and west sides for the remainder of the century.

  By the time the Migration reached its conclusion, sociologists would have a name for that kind of hard-core racial division. They would call it hypersegregation, a kind of separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work. The top ten cities that would earn that designation after the 1980 census (the last census after the close of the Great Migration, which statistically ended in the 1970s) were, in order of severity of racial isolation from most segregated to least: (1) Chicago, (2) Detroit, (3) Cleveland, (4) Milwaukee, (5) Newark, (6) Gary, Indiana, (7) Philadelphia, (8) Los Angeles, (9) Baltimore, and (10) St. Louis—all of them receiving stations of the Great Migration.

  NEW YORK, LATE SUMMER 1967

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  THERE CAME A TIME in the lives of many migrants’ children when the parents sent them south for the summer to protect them from the uncaring streets of the Promised Land or to learn the culture of their family of origin or of the Old Country itself. It was a ritual practiced more or less by most families to ensure that their children knew where they came from.

  George and Inez Starling sent their daughter, Sonya, down to Eustis when she was thirteen. What happened there was the last thing they expected: she got pregnant.

  “It almost killed my wife,” George s
aid.

  It was devastating after all they had been through and was the beginning of the most trying season of their lives. They had been married for twenty-eight years. Theirs had not been a happy union, but at least they had a family and had made out okay in New York, almost in spite of themselves, because they were hard workers and deep down good and decent people.

  They had the highest hopes for their children, raised in a world free of the hardships they had endured in Florida. And now, it was as if the South and the backbiting country town they had left had reached back and punished them for having had the nerve to leave.

  George had made a winless bargain. He had taken a job that kept him away from the very people he was working so hard to take care of, and he could not undo the damage already done. His absence only created a bigger gulf between him and Inez and left the children without a father most of the time and a mother with demons of her own to raise them practically by herself.

  When they learned of Sonya’s pregnancy, George would not admit his pain. He reacted with resignation and had little sympathy for the despair Inez felt, just as, all those years before, she had had little sympathy for his earnestness in organizing the pickers in the citrus groves.

  The wounds they both carried had hardened and calcified, and the crisis over Sonya—What would become of her? What kind of future would she have? How would they manage to raise the baby?—only widened the chasm. Each blamed the other and themselves.

  When he finally spoke, George’s words cut deep. He said Sonya was no different from Inez. “It wasn’t on account of your purity,” he told her with the barbed edge that seemed to characterize more and more of their interactions, “that it didn’t happen to us. You can’t deny it ’cause you were doing it with me.”