Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  “Thank you very much,” Robert said, “but they’re already taken care of.”

  In truth, he had not begun looking. But he was grateful for the reminder and would track down an engraver immediately. “It had to be the best person in the city,” he would say years later. “And I knew the best couldn’t be a patient of mine.”

  He dispatched his mother-in-law to get on it right away. Her southern socialite airs would come in handy about now. It would give her something to occupy her mind and less time to scrutinize him. She spent an entire month choosing between white and ecru and the proper weight for the card stock. They found the invitations at the old Bullock’s Wilshire in Beverly Hills, off Rodeo Drive. They had them engraved on Crane’s paper, white with red lettering and a red border along the edge. “Etiquettely,” he said, “it was perfect.”

  The invitations read:

  Doctor and Mrs. Robert P. Foster

  At Home

  Friday, the twenty-fifth of December

  At nine o’clock in the evening

  1680 Victoria Avenue

  Regrets Only Cocktails—Dancing

  Two hundred invitations went out, and as Robert was at the peak of his practice and popularity, 194 accepted. “We counted all but six R.S.V.P.’s,” he said, “and the six that declined were all out of town.”

  That raised the stakes for everything else, beginning with the costumes for the principals. He was the star and would have to look it. He went to the Beverly Hills couturiers, the tailors to Sammy Davis, Jr., who, from across a blackjack table some people said he favored, and found a suit to his liking. Crushed velvet had just hit the scene, very Fifth Dimension, Age of Aquarius, and all that. So that’s what he would wear. Black crushed velvet suit. Black crushed velvet bow tie. Black velvet Bally slippers with a gold medallion above the instep. The suit had a red lining to match the red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, and the shirt cuff fell precisely one inch below the jacket sleeve, just as it should.

  Finding something for Alice would take more time. He was the show-off, just waiting for somebody to say, Bob Foster, you too much. They went all over Beverly Hills, to the back rooms of the designer floors of the finest department stores, Robert watching, advising, critiquing, and, for one reason or another, dismissing and rejecting as Alice tried on hanger after hanger of dresses.

  One night after work, rather than heading straight home or to the track, Robert drove north and west from his medical office toward Beverly Hills. He went directly to the French Room at Bullock’s Wilshire, which he had been known to keep open in search of the right attire. They had been there already, but he wanted to check again.

  This time, he saw an organza gown loaded with beadwork. It was gaudy like New Orleans, and the skirt looked as if somebody had thrown rubies on the sidewalk. Robert told the salesclerk to wrap it up immediately. He carried it home and ran up the steps to show Alice. It was late, and he woke her up.

  “Try it on, baby,” he said.

  She got up, and he positioned himself three feet to the right and rear in a corner of the yellow-trimmed bedroom to watch her move in it.

  Walk.

  Turn.

  Come to me.

  “It became alive when she walked,” he said.

  In Ann Arbor, his nephew, Madison, awaited word on the big party between sociology colloquia and trying to take over the administration building at the University of Michigan. He was a three-piece-suited militant who knew how to use a fish fork. Robert had given him a year’s notice about the party. All year long, if the phone rang and it was Robert, he knew what it was about. I’m having Mrs. Williams roast the nuts for the party. Hampton Hawes has agreed to do the jazz set. I’m flying the Smithfield hams in from Virginia.

  From the moment they accepted, he and the 194 other people on the guest list (and the guests they were bringing with them) were on a low-grade state of alert whether they liked it or not. Anyone deemed close enough to be invited also knew that Robert would expect them to look and act the part he assigned them. He wanted them to have a good time, of course, but he would also be sure to make note of the cut of their jackets and where a dress hem fell in relation to the ankle or knee. He would be judging them all. It was just how he was, and he couldn’t help it.

  Madison felt the heat as much as anyone. He was the only child of Robert’s deceased oldest brother. Theirs was the closest that either had to a father-son relationship. They were the only Foster men left after all the deaths in the family. Big Madison, when he was alive, had made a point of not leaving the South, not running away and chasing a dream as Robert and millions of others had done, but staying and making the most of the angst and subtle shifts in sentiment of southern whites watching their meal ticket disappear on north- and westbound trains. Little Madison had thus been raised in the South, with the pride and insecurities that came with it, and, despite his father’s decision to stay, looked up to his Uncle Robert, who had made good out west.

  A visit from Robert was a cause of great anxiety. Robert once visited Michigan in the midsixties. Madison did his best to impress him. He took him to the fanciest place he could afford. It took some time for the guests to figure out what they wanted from the menu. But they ordered and had a fine time. On the ride back, Robert gave his assessment of the evening.

  “That was B+,” he said.

  Madison sank into his seat and waited to hear what he had missed.

  “You shouldn’t have let your guests struggle with the menu,” Robert told him.

  Madison never really got over it. Almost forty years later, and he was still second-guessing the evening. “I didn’t preorder the food,” he would say long afterward. “It was a painful lesson. I learned it.”

  He was southern and did everything he could to prove himself. He tried to pull Robert’s daughters back to their Louisiana roots, but they looked upon him as their country cousin from back in Monroe, a place they cared little about, growing up as they did in California.

  Madison was a graduate student when Robert’s oldest daughter, Bunny, got her master’s at the University of Iowa. He didn’t have the money for a new suit. He flew in anyway. At the commencement, Robert pulled him aside.

  “Your suit pants are shiny,” Robert said. “You shouldn’t go out like that.”

  Madison would not let that happen again.

  He had a year’s notice on the party and made use of it. He went to a tailor and had two suits cut for the occasion, hoping that one of them might meet Robert’s exacting standards.

  December 25, 1970. A Friday. The florists draped pine leaf garlands down the railing of the front staircase. To the branches they fastened red plastic birds with glitter on the wing tips so that every four feet there was a little bird in flight.

  The caterers moved the dining room table in front of the gold draperies. They covered it with $250 worth of white Belgian lace and set sterling candelabras on each end, as the Clements would have done. The Smithfield hams arrived from Virginia. The shrimp gumbo was set out with instructions that it never hit empty.

  The barkeep lined the liquor bottles behind the highball glasses at the bar. “I told the bartender to give everybody two shots whether they wanted it or not,” Robert said.

  All day, the heavy front door opened and closed with the arrival of supplies, and the telephone rang on and off, people just landing at LAX, people needing directions. Dusk fell, and the time drew near. Robert began to feel sick. The thunderstorm grew worse in his stomach. He felt weak and exhausted. His knees gave way. He fell back, collapsed. He had to be helped upstairs, lie down, gather himself. He lay there staring at the yellow walls in the master bedroom, fretting and unable to face the possibility of imperfection.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to rest. Soon, outside his window, he could hear the rumble of car engines rounding St. Charles Place and turning up South Victoria. The screeching came to a stop. The creak of the passenger door of a Cadillac opening and the thud of its closing. The engine shut
ting down and the valet taking the keys. The first guests had arrived and were walking down the red-carpeted sidewalk he conceived of months ago.

  Round the corner and down the stairs, he could hear muffled conversation, a party being born. He reminded himself why he had spent the better part of a year and really all of his life planning for this moment. He got up, steadied himself. He checked himself in the mirror, practiced his smile, and straightened his crushed-velvet tie.

  “Let’s get on with it,” he said to himself, liking what he saw. “It’s on.”

  He is wearing mutton-chop sideburns, flecked gray, and an Afro shaped like a mushroom cap. Hip as you got in those days. He greets his guests with a cigarette between his fingers and his legs purposely slew-footed, as if he were posing for Esquire. It will make better pictures for the photographer he has hired to trail him and the guests all night.

  Soon the set piece begins to take shape. There’s Joe Luellen, who hit town back in the thirties and played in The Great White Hope. And three men standing together in velvet suits that forewarn the fashion crimes of the seventies.

  On a foot-high stand above the crowd, Sweets Edison is on trumpet under the green-striped tent over the patio. Hampton Hawes is playing piano with his head reared back. Everybody has a glass of something in one hand and a cigarette in the other like jewelry.

  There’s his mother-in-law near the hot pink tulip-upholstered love seat, in a four-hundred-dollar gown and a solid gold bracelet he bought her and which he complained she never gave him credit for. And she’s greeting and upstaging as if she paid for the whole shebang. (“I ignored it, I ignored it,” he would say years later, betraying that he most certainly had not.)

  There are two or three wet bars, help everywhere, dressed in maid’s uniforms and monkey suits, people checking coats, people parking cars, people pouring martinis, people picking up dishes before they have a chance to clink the top of an end table.

  There’s Bunny sticking her tongue out at the camera. And Ray Charles under the tent over the patio by the band. And Robert’s bookie. And a judge. A postmaster. And a dentist. Robert’s sister, Gold, in pink chiffon on a barstool, holding a pack of Marlboros. Keisha Brown, a gospel rock singer, sweating on stage in blood-red velvet. Madison, in a three-piece suit that thankfully met Robert’s approval, doing the funky chicken with a woman in white bell-bottoms. Alice in her cat-eye glasses, posing for pictures, calm and dignified in that heavy beaded dress by the staircase.

  The following Thursday, December 31, 1970, a breathless review ran on page C2 of the Los Angeles Sentinel, declaring it “certainly ‘The Party of the Year,’ without a doubt” (phrasing that unwittingly introduced the very doubt it sought to dispel). The column ran without pictures and began like this:

  One of the Angel City’s most fabulous parties to date was given by the Robert Fosters on Christmas Day, at their home on Victoria Avenue. The prominent physician and his wife, who is president of the L.A. Chapter of the Links, had their large back yard area tinted [sic] for the occasion, and the View Park decorators had a field day.…

  For her party, Alice wore a Malcolm Star original that fairly sparkled with jewels.… Mrs. Rufus E. Clement, formerly of Atlanta, and Louisville, Ky., now makes her home in L.A. with her daughter and son-in-law, and assisted in receiving the 400 guests.

  Who was there? Well, we could easily say the Who’s Who of L.A. Society.… And believe it or not, at times there were as many as 200 beautiful people, milling, sipping, and just having a marvelous time on Christmas Day at the Robert Fosters.… This was certainly “The Party of the Year,” without a doubt.

  Robert had a photo album made of the night’s festivities. It was made of brown leather, and etched onto the front was “Robert’s Birthday” in gold italics. Over the succeeding decades, he would pull out the party album before he would his wedding pictures or his medical degree. The brown leather got worn in spots from the viewing. Usually, he would not bother to mention the Sentinel story nor the party itself so much as what went into it.

  “For some reason, it drops,” he told me years later when I asked him about the particulars. “It’s not any less valuable or delicious. But for some reason, it didn’t seem as important as when I was putting it together.”

  Some of the guests he never saw again. Some died. Some lost touch. It was a wrap, and everyone was marvelous.

  He took comfort in any sign of the night’s immortality. One day he passed the stationery department at Bullock’s. The invitations to his party were mounted and on display. “I went in once and told the lady, ‘That’s mine,’ ” he said. “She looked at me like I was a fool. I just smiled.”

  Talking about it kept the party going, and so it never really ended in his mind. He did not wait for reviews, he solicited them. He called Jimmy Marshall, one of his oldest friends from back in Monroe, right after the party.

  “Jimmy, did I wig ’em?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you hit it,” Jimmy said.

  What are they saying, what are they thinking? Robert asked Jimmy. Everyone was bowled over, of course. Jimmy didn’t want to say it, but the Monroe people thought he had gone too far. The black maid in the black-and-white dress and white bow in the foyer was over the top even for Robert.

  “We’ve been maids long enough,” Jimmy told Robert. “People didn’t go for that.”

  Robert didn’t take it too well. “Either he answered or cussed,” Jimmy said decades later, “which I didn’t care, in either case.”

  As long as the two had known each other, Robert’s fixations never made sense to Jimmy. “He always sought approval,” Jimmy said. “And I never understood it because he had it all.”

  PART FIVE

  AFTERMATH

  The migrants were gradually absorbed

  into the economic, social, and political life of the city.

  They have influenced and modified it.

  The city has, in turn, changed them.

  — ST. CLAIR DRAKE AND HORACE H. CAYTON, Black Metropolis

  IN THE PLACES THEY LEFT

  The only thing

  we are proud of

  in connection with

  the South

  is that we left it.

  — JEFFERSON L.

  EDMONDS,

  THE PUBLISHER

  OF The Liberator,

  ONE OF THE FIRST

  COLORED NEWSPAPERS

  IN LOS ANGELES

  CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, 1970

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THE RAW WOOD CABINS and gravel roads that broke the clearings in the bottomlands of Chickasaw County did not change much in the thirty years after Ida Mae and millions of other black people left the South in a migration that was now slowing down as Mississippi began fitfully opening up. Mr. Edd, whose land Ida Mae and her husband had sharecropped, died of a heart attack back in 1945, a few years after Ida Mae went north. Willie Jim, who came with Mr. Edd looking for Joe Lee that night all those years ago over the missing turkeys, was still alive. He ran a thousand-acre plantation with up to two hundred hoe hands and forty sharecropper families well into the 1960s.

  The land was still devoted to cotton, but big combines and mechanical harvesters now did most of the work. The people who had not gone north now worked in factories, textile mills, and hardware plants, factories that made poly foam and felt for the manufacture of furniture, and factories that made trailers, sewer pipes, corrugated boxes, shipping crates.

  The county and the rest of Mississippi and the old Confederacy had come out on the other side of a second civil war, the war over civil rights for the servant caste of the South. Chickasaw County had not been in the middle of it, had not been a focus of Martin Luther King or the freedom riders. It was too sparsely populated and too out of the way. But it was no less resistant to change, especially when it came to black people voting (where “intemperate individuals of both races created incidents best forgotten,” the Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society wrote d
ismissively of the era), and when it came to the integration of the schools, which had been segregated for longer than most anyone had been alive.

  It was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed.”

  Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester. One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate.

  The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own. They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.

  It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders.

  “This was passionately opposed,” wrote the Chickasaw Historical Society, “not only by most of the whites—but by some of the blacks as well.” That sentiment, if true, would have been explained away by the blacks who left as an indication that the blacks who stayed may have been more conciliatory than many of the people in the Great Migration.

  It wasn’t until the 1970–71 school year that integration finally came to Chickasaw County, and then only after a 1969 court order, Alexander v. Holmes, that gave county and municipal schools in Mississippi until February 1970 to desegregate. But even that deadline would be extended for years for particularly recalcitrant counties.