Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  “I am humiliated and ensnared in an evaluation process which is untenable,” Robert wrote.

  He had never wanted to make a federal case out of the times in his life he had been ill-treated because of the caste into which he had been born and the era in which he lived. But here he was making a plea to the government as he fought for his good name. The stress forced him to seek treatment from a cardiologist and from vascular and orthopedic surgeons and a psychiatrist. They told him he needed to quit to protect his health, but Robert did not want to go out that way, not after all he had been through, proving himself at every turn, starting with the decision to migrate in the first place.

  The only good thing about the situation was that Rufus Clement had not lived to see it. Surely he would have told him that this was proof of what Clement had believed all along, that Robert would have been better off casting his lot in the South. Better, too, that big Madison hadn’t lived to see it either. Surely, he would have shed a tear for his little brother who so loved medicine and worked so hard at pleasing everyone.

  The dispute dragged on for years as Robert sought relief through workers’ compensation for the toll the situation had taken on his health. One day in the middle of this episode in his life, he was walking down the red-carpeted aisle toward the club room at Santa Anita when it felt as if he were being stabbed in the chest. He was suffering a heart attack. He would require bypass surgery and would see his life slow down considerably.

  He would soon take his own physicians’ advice and retire from the VA hospital. It was not how he wanted to end his career. The memory of what he felt was a forced ouster in his adopted home would stay with him for the rest of his life. He had seen roadblocks to black progress even in his beloved California. “And it’s harder and heavier the higher the paycheck,” he said.

  As for Robert’s reputation, the one he fought so hard to maintain during his dispute with the hospital, it remained as it had always been. Patients from the VA hospital continued to see him, dropping by the house on Victoria to seek his advice. And many years later, the State Medical Board in Sacramento showed the record of Dr. Robert P. Foster to be free of any sanctions during the forty-four years he was licensed to practice medicine in the state of California.

  But he would never see California the same. He would have many moments of joy from the old patients who consulted him and brought their children for him to examine and allay their worries long after he had retired. But he would never get over what befell him.

  “He was dying on the inside,” his friend and patient Malissa Briley said.

  REDEMPTION

  For our light

  and momentary troubles

  are achieving for us

  an eternal glory

  that far outweighs them all.

  — 2 CORINTHIANS 4:17

  1

  CHICAGO, SUMMER 1996

  IDA MAE GLADNEY IS EIGHTY-THREE YEARS OLD when I first meet her. She is a churchgoing pensioner with time on her hands. She spends most of her days alone while everyone else is out working. She does word puzzles and crosswords, whole paperback books of them, to keep her mind sharp. She collects the funeral programs of the people she knew and loved in Mississippi and Chicago, who are, one by one, passing away, getting extras for other mourners the way young people collect business cards and email addresses. It is the currency of the old. In the meantime, she manages to keep up with the job pursuits and love lives of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  She has little interest in soap operas and doesn’t need to watch police dramas on television. She has one right outside her window. Hers is a bow-front window, curved like a movie screen. She can monitor the street day or night from her box seat, which is actually a baby blue, plastic-covered easy chair by the front window, on the second floor of her three-flat. Things are happening that she never saw growing up in Mississippi, and she isn’t always certain of exactly what it is she is looking at. She is watching the street from her window the afternoon I meet her.

  A man is selling drugs out of a trash can. She can see, plain as day, where he puts them and how he gets them out of the trash for the white customers in their SUVs with suburban license plates. Another hides his stash in his mouth. And when customers come up, he pulls a piece of his inventory from his tongue to sell to them. The police are on to it, too. “The police put flashlights down their mouth,” she says. “Sometimes the police make them stoop over.”

  A man is climbing out of an old Pontiac he sleeps in. He and the car have been outside her house for weeks. A teenage mother has just popped her son for something Ida Mae can’t make out because a car passes by just when the mother yells something at the boy. Usually it’s “M—f—” or “G—d—,” Ida Mae says, and it hurts her to see people do that to their children.

  The other night, she says, she was setting out the trash and saw a woman on her knees in the alley doing something to a man who was up against the garage. “I was looking for her head, and I never did see it,” Ida Mae says. She didn’t know exactly what the woman was doing but she knew they shouldn’t have been doing it and knew better than to say anything and thought it best to go back inside. “I just can’t get it out of my mind,” she says.

  When the police aren’t around, the people are out in the street like characters in a cable television drama and the drug dealers are up and down the block but mostly at the corner where there was once an ice cream parlor, back when she first moved here.

  These are the lost grandchildren of the Migration who have grown hard in the big city and did not absorb the lessons of the past or the good to be found in the steadying rituals and folk wisdom of the South. Ida Mae and James and Eleanor can’t understand how they do the things they do, how they would rather trawl the streets than go to work every day and be able to hold their heads high.

  Something about too many people packed together and nothing to guide them makes the children worse than they used to be, to her mind. At the moment, the city is in a crisis because two grade-schoolers, one of them only seven, have been accused of killing another child. Nobody knows for sure what happened and she certainly couldn’t say, but she knows one thing for sure: “They curse like sailors, they throw rocks, they do everything they big enough to do. They ain’t got no home training, and they mama can’t do nothing ’cause she on drugs. That seven-year-old, they say he was the ringleader. He know more than he telling. But they shouldn’t put them in the penitentiary. They too young. They not gone ever forget it.”

  She keeps going. “I know kids ’cause I been one,” she says. “I used to tease this girl that her mama was dead. I think about that a lot sometimes. She held that against me the rest of her life. She used to cry when I said it. I didn’t know what it was to lose a mother. I had lost my father. I thought everyone should die. I was nine or ten years old. I was bad. Now they double worse. What go in the wash come out in the rain. Watch what I say, now. You got to start working on those little ones early. I ain’t got much education, but I sho’ know folks. I ain’t scared of these kids but I stay out of their way.”

  The craziness has Ida Mae hemmed in on all sides. When she leaves to go to church, if she goes to buy groceries, if she takes a walk to get some exercise, the drug dealers and lookout boys greet her as she leaves and welcome her when she gets back. When she hears sirens or gunshots, she runs to the window to see what has happened now. She is an eyewitness to a war playing out on the streets below her. Staying on top of everything is how she makes peace with the craziness she cannot escape.

  She would never dream of going outside at night by herself. But it is not because she is afraid of the gangbangers and the drug dealers. She speaks to them and prays for them, and in turn they look out for her. They call her “Grandma” and tell her not to come out on certain days.

  “You better stay in the house,” they tell her. “Because we don’t know what time we gon’ start shootin’.”

  On a July afternoon, she is telling her story about
the ride up north and making her way in Chicago in those early days. We are in the middle of a conversation when something crashes outside the window. It rattles me, and I look toward the window to see what it might be. Ida Mae does not flinch. She has learned the difference between danger and mischief, between a gunshot and a rock through a window. Whatever it was, it’s as if it didn’t happen.

  “Did you hear that?” I ask her. “Sounds like some glass broke.”

  “Honey, they does that. They throw bottles at each other.”

  “You didn’t even look up.”

  “I hear too much of it,” she says. “I’d be lookin’ all day.” She lets out a big laugh.

  Every day, there is something or other. On an otherwise quiet afternoon, we look out the window and see two police officers leading a black man in a white windbreaker and baseball cap, hands cuffed, down the sidewalk in front of the apartment building next door.

  “That’s the janitor,” she tells me. “He works there. Wonder what did he do?”

  He lopes along, head up, scanning the street like a politician on a tour of his district. He looks both ways before stepping off the curb to cross the street to the patrol car. He nods his respects to the teenage girls walking past.

  Ida Mae doesn’t know what he has done, but figures she’ll find out in due course.

  “People talk,” she says. “You don’t have to ask.”

  She has an idea of what it was. There was a raid in the building a few weeks before. The police took seventeen or eighteen people out in handcuffs.

  “Did it at night,” she says. “They carried them all out tied together. I got tired of counting. You know that still ain’t stop them? They still up in there. I don’t know what’ll stop ’em. I guess the Lord knows.”

  She watches and makes note of what’s going on around her. Every month, there’s a neighborhood crime watch meeting, and she is sure to attend. Trouble is, she believes some of the police are not much better than the criminals. “The detectives are the ones doing the dirt,” she says. Somehow, some of the dealers are onto the police or get forewarning of their arrival. “They have a phone,” she says. “They know when the police coming.”

  Still, she manages to stay out of everybody’s way. She may be stuck in her own home, but she has too much faith or stubbornness to let fear take over.

  “I ain’t gone live nowhere scared,” she says. “I ain’t calling the police. Long as they don’t bother me. If I know what’s going on, they do, too.”

  And she refuses to put bars on the windows. “My husband say, he never be behind no bars,” she says. “And neither am I.”

  2

  HARLEM, 1996

  IT REQUIRES descending down a narrow set of stairs into an airless vestibule in the basement of a three-story brownstone to get to where the owner lives. He has taken the dankest, darkest space for himself and given over the rest of the building, the rooms with light and space, to whatever tenants he has.

  George Starling never cared about creature comforts and finery but about getting a square deal, which he on occasion achieved, and the right to exercise the free will he was not permitted in the South. His life is scattered in boxes all over his room, file folders stuffed with pictures of him and Inez as teenagers in Florida, mimeographed copies of his lawyerly letters to the railroad or union leaders about this or that provision or instance of inequity, and the funeral programs of loved ones who have passed away.

  He is seventy-eight now, a grandfather and great-grandfather, a deacon in the church. He sits upright and stoic. He enunciates each syllable in this early conversation and speaks in the deliberate and formal manner of the professor he once wanted to be. But the longer he talks, the more comfortable he gets and the more he sounds like the southerner he is inside.

  He feels it his responsibility to share what he knows and takes it upon himself to explain whatever he says in the greatest detail. He talks for forty-five patient and exacting minutes about what it takes to pick string beans and describes the difference between the walking buds, the junior buds, the uncle buds, and seedling trees he used to pick back in Florida.

  A car pulls up. It’s his pastor, Reverend Henry Harrison, dropping by to see Deacon Starling. The pastor, hearing the topic of the South and the Migration, begins telling the story of how his father escaped from a labor camp in South Carolina by swimming through a swamp, and, eventually, in 1930, finding his way to New York.

  Both men start to lament the changes all around them, the sadder effects of the big city of the North on the people of the South. George waxes on about the days when “people would come down to 135th Street with their house chairs, and they would baptize people in the Harlem River.

  “We used to have a boat ride off 125th Street in the Dyckman section,” he says.

  “Spread the blankets out. Midsummer, people didn’t have air-conditioning. People would stay up there all night and play card games.

  “Things were so much different,” he says. “Drugs wasn’t heard of where I came from. When I came to New York, I didn’t know what a reefer was.”

  “We got to being Americanized,” Reverend Harrison is saying. “It got to where we don’t help each other.”

  George has children and grandchildren and even a great-grandchild now, but there is an aloneness to the character of his life. He seems content in the solitude of his room with its dust-covered floor, barely made bed, and no sign of a woman’s touch. He seems on a mission to sort through the paperwork of his life, find some meaning in all the railroad pamphlets and official letters he wrote on behalf of workers’ rights that were politely dismissed or not acted upon.

  His face turns ashen and he looks away when the subject turns to his children and grandchildren. His son by Inez had squandered the very opportunities George had left the South for, and he had limited contact with the now-grown son he had outside his marriage.

  Then there was the daughter, Sonya. She was sweet but unsettled, too, back and forth between Florida and New York. George had been having heart trouble and had just come out of triple bypass surgery when he got word that Sonya had died in a car accident down in Eustis.

  He flew down to Florida for the funeral. The people who had stayed in the South gathered around to console him.

  “We would be in a room with a crowd of people,” his niece Pat said, “and he would get up and leave the room. He’d come back and just carry on the conversation. You knew he had been crying.”

  He buried his daughter next to his wife.

  3

  LOS ANGELES, SPRING 1996

  THIS IS THE 1970s set piece known as Dr. Robert Foster’s living room. It is a room that is little changed, you learn, from the time when his wife, Alice, was alive. You are encased in cream and raspberry upholstery, sea foam carpet, and harvest gold draperies cascading down from ten-foot ceilings, more space than one person could possibly need and, by that measure alone, the very picture of success in California.

  The host has momentarily disappeared down a hall and into the avocado green and harvest gold kitchen. He emerges, taking care with his steps, with a tray of lemon pound cake with vanilla ice cream, which you would really prefer not to take, since you have only just eaten; but it is clear from the formality with which he presents it and then watches as you pick up the fork that there is no choice but to accept this gesture of hospitality.

  In a bookcase, there are volumes of Tolstoy, Freud, Goethe, and Herodotus. On his face is a smile of satisfaction at the interest being taken in a life he loves to talk about.

  You learn the basics of what he wishes you to know about his growing up in Monroe, marrying the daughter of a university president, leaving the South for California, about the three daughters and now the grandchildren, the gambling and the current state of his health and how he views the world as a southern émigré in California. Those things will be fleshed out in due time over the course of several months.

  You learn that right now he has heart problems, has already
had bypass surgery. “The chest pain is growing more frequent,” he says. “But I’m not going to have another operation. If anything happened to me tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any regrets. I have lived. I’ve done it all. The world don’t owe me nothin’.”

  He is retired from the practice of medicine and spends most of his time at the blackjack tables or on the phone dispensing free medical advice to former patients and old friends or ordering around a gardener who indulges his every whim as to precisely where the begonias should be. Years before, Robert woke up the morning of his oldest daughter’s wedding, and, instead of taking his time dressing in his tuxedo, he got out and had the front yard dug up to plant flowers to match Bunny’s wedding bouquet.

  Now, on this late spring afternoon, he was fretting over the backyard. “Now turn it a little more,” he was telling the gardener one day about a particular pot of geraniums. “Not to the left! To the right! To the right!”

  He has come all this way and is living in a 3,600-square-foot monument to his success in California. But the most enduring accomplishments you cannot see: the cooks and teachers and postal workers all over southern California who would do just about anything for him because he had saved their lives or brought them into the world or repaired some broken piece of themselves. And the three daughters whom he spared from having to go to segregated schools in the South and who grew up free with their cotillions in California.

  The daughters lead upper-middle-class lives, had married well if not long, and have children who can only be said to be brilliant. Bunny is now working as an artists’ agent in Chicago. Robin is a city manager who is living outside Washington with her second husband and her son, who is being courted by the Ivies. The youngest daughter, Joy, is a physician—a radiologist—married to a day trader, and has two precocious young children in Long Beach, about thirty miles south of Robert.