Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Alice never got to see the fruits of her labor, and, at weddings and holidays, it falls to Robert to be mother and father, neither of which he is naturally suited for. But he rises to the occasion when called upon to do so. When Joy brought home a young man she appeared to be serious about, Robert stepped forward as a father protecting his youngest.

  He asked the young man, Lee Ballard, to go out for a drive to the dry cleaners with him. He made it sound like a request, which, of course, it was not. Lee climbed into Robert’s white Cadillac, and Robert began driving, erratic as usual. Then Robert began his inquiries.

  “How do you like California?” he asked Lee once they were on their way. “And how do you plan to take care of my daughter?”

  The drive lasted two hours. The beau survived the drive and ended up marrying Robert’s youngest daughter. The marriage would last longer than those of the other girls.

  The telephone rings. It’s the third or fourth time in the space of a couple of hours. The phone usually starts ringing around three or four o’clock, after people get home from seeing their new doctors. Robert excuses himself to take the call in the kitchen. It’s another friend and former patient calling about an ailment and how best to treat it and to check to see if his new doctor is prescribing the right medication. Robert indulges the man, addresses his worries, gives him advice.

  “Demerol is the name of it,” Robert is telling the person on the other end of the line. “Now, put something in your stomach.”

  The person has more questions for Robert about what he’s been prescribed.

  “Percodan? Any of those things nauseate the heck out of you,” Robert tells him. “Take as little medicine as you can—”

  The person interrupts, and Robert listens.

  “Take your aspirin,” Robert tells him.

  The person cuts in again, still expressing concern. Robert reassures him. “Sounds like you going to be alright, Phil. God bless you.”

  EUSTIS, FLORIDA, JULY 1996

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  SOME FIFTY-ONE YEARS have passed since the standoff in the central Florida citrus groves that almost got George Starling killed. He has lived out his life in New York. The grove owners he stood up to are long dead, as is the high sheriff, old Willis McCall, who lorded over Lake County with a Smith and Wesson and a ten-gallon hat.

  George has felt it safe to come back to visit and is now sitting at a diner out by Ocala with his old friend Reuben Blye, who was one of George’s picking foremen back in the forties. They both had lived up north. Reuben, at age eighty-nine, is now living back in Florida with his sixth wife, having survived the treachery of the South and the temptations of the North and is at this moment reliving those days with George, who is back in town for a high school reunion.

  “Do you know a Florida man got more sense than a born New Yorker, George?” Reuben asks, not really looking for George to answer. “You know that?”

  “I had never given it a thought that way.”

  “One that’s been around like us, George. We know our way around better than some of them up there.”

  “Well, you had to have a lot of sense to learn how to survive down here during those times to stay out of trouble, you know.”

  “George, you done run that railroad so long up and down from coast to coast on the train,” Reuben says. “And look how we travel. Look at Rube, done travel, done made thirty-seven states. I already had it in my head. You don’t get me every day.”

  As torn as George was about his time in Florida, he had never truly left it in his mind. Ever since his father had died, he had kept a little piece of property in Eustis, vacant land with live oaks and scrub brush near the house where his father had run the little convenience store. He never knew exactly what he would do with it and had no plans to live there ever again. He just liked the idea of having control over something in a place that had controlled his every step for so long.

  “When I left, I swore that I would never come back under no circumstances anymore,” he said. “When I left, I was just that bitter. I didn’t intend to come back at all.”

  Ten years passed before he felt it safe to return. The deaths and illnesses lured him back and he began to see how the South seemed to be changing, in small ways and big ways, right before his eyes. “I never thought I would live to see the day,” he said of some of the strides being made. “If anybody told me that there would be a black mayor in Birmingham, I would have told them they were crazy. Now they have black mayors all over the place down south. How many black mayors we got up north?”

  He had once seen a black man and a white woman walking down the street in downtown Tavares, the county seat and the domain of old Willis McCall. George was having a hard time getting used to seeing what could have gotten him killed in his day.

  “I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would walk down the street holding hands with a white woman,” he said. “It amazes me when I see the intermingling. When I was a boy down here, when you went through the white neighborhood you had to be practically running. Now black people are living in there. They all mixed up with the whites right there in Eustis.”

  We are riding through Eustis and out to the orange groves near Sanford and the train station in Wildwood where the relatives would come to greet George when his train passed through. He and Reuben are returning to the places where they picked oranges and okra, the places they could and couldn’t go and where the black people lived. Reuben does most of the directing because he has been living back in Florida for several years now. George sits up and starts pointing when he sees something he recognizes.

  “They used to baptize us down here,” George says as we wind past Lake Eustis. “To the left are the water oak trees.”

  We drive farther out. The land is wild scrub brush broken by stands of domed trees, the citrus that ruled their lives growing up.

  “Over to the right, over here was woods,” George says, “just like you see to the right, but they cleared that up.”

  “Here go the seedling groves,” Reuben says.

  “Is that Lake Ale there?”

  “That Lake Ale. Those seedling groves right in here had all them pecan trees.”

  “Was this the Natural?” George asks of the legendary grove that has withstood the worst winters and hardest of freezes.

  “The Natural’s out there by Emaraldi Island.”

  “I told you Reuben would know where everything is,” George says, turning in my direction.

  “If you dropped an orange in the Natural Grove, five minutes and it would just be hittin’ the ground. You could get up in one of those trees and look all over this south Florida.”

  “This is Ole Jones’ place.”

  “I picked in that grove where I had a thirty-six-foot ladder spliced with a twenty-six-foot ladder, and it just reached the bottom limb.”

  “That’s right. All us here, Charlie, Mud, me, we used to hunt coons and possum ’long here.”

  We drive further and further out.

  “This here is Ole Cannon Grove.”

  “This is not the way it looked before the last big freeze,” George says. “This is new. They reset, they put new trees there.”

  “All this here was froze out.”

  “Nineteen eighty-nine, it snowed in Florida. Had two and three inches of snow.”

  “Have you ever seen a forest that would burn out with a fire?” George asks me. “Well, that’s just the way those trees look. Them trees looked just like somebody went through there with a flamethrower.”

  George comes back to Eustis every two years for the biennial reunion of Curtwright Colored High School. He always comes down on the train he once worked. It’s owned by Amtrak now and, as a pensioner with thirty-five years of service, he gets to ride for free. He can finally sit like the passengers he served and look out the window to see what they saw, reliving with each trip the migration he made all those years ago.

  When George returns to Eustis, he is looked
upon with a distant kind of respect. He was one of them once, but he chose a different path, knows things they couldn’t know, survived in a place where they’re not sure they could make it. He’s been gone so long that whatever he knows about Eustis is either frozen in the 1940s or distorted through the secondhand recounting in long-distance phone calls and letters and rumor. He’s fuzzy on some of the names of the people who live there now.

  Whole generations have been born since he left, and he searches out his connections to them, the ways he might know them—through a grandparent, great-aunt, or second cousin of theirs whom he grew up with but who may not be around anymore. He stays with Viola, the widow of his deceased stepbrother, and spends much of his time visiting with the few people who were around when he was here, reliving those days, and catching up on the things he has missed. When people hear that he’s in town, they head over to Viola’s bungalow and remove their hats before they walk in to see a prodigal son of Eustis.

  It is Sunday on the July weekend of the high school reunion, and George puts on his burgundy polyester suit, burgundy tie, burgundy socks, and white straw hat to worship at the church he grew up in as a boy and where the doomed Harry T. Moore recruited him in the early drive for equal rights. Seventy parishioners take their places in the dark wood pews affixed to orange carpet.

  Pastor William Hawkins beseeches the congregation to take up a special plate for the black churches that have recently been burned throughout the South. It is as if it is 1963 again.

  “We ought to do something to assist them,” he says. “And this is one of the reasons we better secure our own church.”

  People pull out money to give to the other churches and pray that they won’t be next. The choir motions for George to come forward and sing the solo for the collection.

  “What you give, what more He gives to you,” he sings.

  Then the pastor turns to George. “We are always glad to see our member from New York,” Reverend Hawkins says, motioning to George to come to the pulpit to speak.

  George stands before the congregation of mostly new faces, the descendants of those he knew, and looks around at a church that was as much a part of him as the South itself.

  “Needless to say, I am grateful to be in your midst,” he says. “I look over and see my father and my mother and my daughter. And it always makes me a little full. So if I become emotional, I hope you will understand.”

  He then sings a hymn, “Without God I could do nothing … without him, I would fail.…”

  The congregation claps after he finishes, and he takes his glasses off and wipes the tears with his handkerchief before walking back to his seat at the side of the church. He takes his place and sits upright in a pew next to the pulpit with a silver cane beside him and tears escaping from his eyes.

  LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 23, 1996

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED BIMONTHLY MEETING of the Monroe, Louisiana, Club of Los Angeles, California, is not so much called to order as roused to life when ten of the sixteen surviving and currently active members trickle into the bungalow of Leo and Era Davis on Ninety-third Street east of Crenshaw. They gather in the Davises’ den with the circular metal staircase and prepare to catch up with one another and with news from back home in Monroe.

  It is surely one of the smallest Louisiana clubs in the city, not to mention its being overshadowed by all the Texas Clubs around town. “We’re a dying breed,” says Limuary Jordan, a club member who left Louisiana in his DeSoto more than half a century before. “It’s a fact. Everybody in the club is over sixty. And without any new Monroe people … there are Monroe people here, but they don’t affiliate with us. They don’t belong to no club. So we are of a particular time.”

  “A lot of them don’t have anything to do with the South,” his wife, Adeline, says. “A lot of them, when they left, they were gone.”

  The few members who are still active approach the club with a sense of formality and ritual. Robert Foster had to secure approval beforehand to invite a guest, who brings the attendance at today’s meeting to eleven. As the graying expatriates from Monroe begin to take their seats, I explain my presence as his guest and tell them about my work on the Great Migration. They listen without emotion or much in the way of comment, not seeing exactly what the Migration has to do with them, even though they had all been right in the middle of it. At the appointed hour, John Collins, whom they just call Collins, stands up like a proper reverend and prays stiffly in his black suit and gray vest and fedora.

  “Lord, we thank you for this food we are about to receive, and we thank you for another day,” he begins. “We pray for the lady visitor and the book she’s trying to put together. Give her knowledge and wisdom and watch over her. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  Spread out before the assembled are oxtails, collard greens, corn bread, sweet potatoes, potato salad, red beans and rice, and pound cake on an orange tablecloth in the wood-paneled dining room.

  It is a time of unaccustomed quiet in the city after so much upheaval. The Rodney King beating, police acquittals, and ensuing riots were only a few years back, the business districts of South Central still in recovery. The people have been divided and whipsawed by the O. J. Simpson trial, the saga of a once-loved black football player acquitted of killing his white wife and her friend, the people by now just wishing the whole thing would go away but unable to escape it, billboards and headlines in every direction.

  That very day, Robert passed a newspaper box with a poster about the O.J. trial. “I’m so sick of O.J.,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. They have choked us with this.”

  No one in the Monroe Club wants to talk about it. Instead, as if on cue, the never-ending loop of how people are faring back home and in Los Angeles and what they have been through in both places picks up where it left off from the last meeting as if it were fresh and new and has never come up before.

  “If you look at it,” Howard Beckwith begins, “we in the same instance as in the South. They throwing them in jail just like the South. The jails filled with colored people. The South has made a desperate change. Things you couldn’t do in the South, you can do now. You can walk down the street with a white woman. The mayor is black.”

  “Who’s that?” someone asks.

  “You know Dr. Pierce what run the drugstore,” Beckwith says. “One of his sons.”

  “No, it’s not,” someone breaks in, one-upping Beckwith and trying to prove who has the better connections to a place they still feel tied to even if nobody else cares about the distinctions. “It’s one of Dr. Pierce’s cousin’s sons. The cousin of Dr. Pierce, one of his sons.”

  “That’s Eliza Davis’s son,” a woman whispers to me by way of explanation. “She was my classmate,” she wants me to know.

  Somehow the line of conversation reminds Collins about being black in the South and the talk turns to a kind of testifying rather than an interaction, each member reciting an experience independent from the others and at times seemingly unrelated. Here it is, fifty years after most of them left, and they can’t stop talking about the South. They are exiles with ties to two worlds, still obsessed with the Old Country, and have never let it go.

  Collins tells them about the time a white man slapped a ladle of water out of his hand as he was taking a drink. A woman describes being home from college and a policeman coming up and asking why she wasn’t picking cotton or in the kitchen. Someone else mentions the movable sign on the trolley car and how “you had to sit and look at that sign that said ‘Colored.’ ” Everyone nods in recognition.

  Marshall brings up the segregated lines and the swiveling ticket agent at the Paramount Theater again. “The woman in the ticket counter swiveled to the white side to sell tickets and then swiveled to the colored,” he says. “We walked up all those flights of stairs.”

  “That’s all over the South,” Beckwith says. “You didn’t know nothing different.”

  Robert breaks in, mome
ntarily distracted by the meal. “Era, what did you do with the oxtail? It’s out of sight.”

  “Cake and ice cream? Cake and ice cream?” Mrs. Davis asks with a sugar voice, cake held up high.

  Marshall then remembers an incident at Woolworth’s, a seemingly small thing that let him know he was not meant to stay in the South.

  “A white girl waited on me and gave me a token for my change,” Marshall begins. “I went to tell on the woman, that she had taken my money and given me a token back that was worthless. All I got was the satisfaction of telling the man and of telling my mother when I got home.”

  He recounted what his mother told him: “You’re going to have to leave this place, you keep that up.”

  Which is why Marshall ended up in California.

  Then Robert joins in. “I had taken my bath in the tin tub,” he begins. “I was clean.”

  “Was that the Saturday-night bath?” Beckwith’s wife, Isabel, asks.

  Everyone laughs in recognition. Like most black people in the South, none of them had had indoor plumbing back then, and Saturday was the one night in the week when they could manage the time-consuming ritual of boiling water from the well and filling a tin tub so everyone in a given family could take a bath.

  They knew just what Robert meant. They let him finish his story.

  “A white man called me over,” Robert goes on. “ ‘Hey, boy, I’ll pay you if you can tell me where I can find a clean colored girl.’ ”

  He pauses for effect.

  “I told him, ‘I’ll get you one if you get me your mother.’ ”

  “Foster, did you really say that?”

  “So help me God.”