The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

  George climbed the high limbs of four or five grown seedlings one morning and was climbing deep into the next. The foreman that day was an old colored man named Deacon John Fashaw. They called him Uncle John. George knew him from Gethsemane Baptist Church. The deacon oversaw the harvest of some of the groves at the Eichelberger Packing Company. He called George out of the tree in the middle of the grove.

  “Number fourteen!” he yelled.

  Deacon Fashaw presided over his pickers with a suckle from an orange tree. It looked like a switch a mother whipped her children with. He called George over to him with the suckle in his hand.

  “Now, number fourteen,” the deacon said, looking up into the limbs at George.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come down here. Bring ya ladder.”

  “Dog, what Uncle John want?” George said under his breath and then, out loud, “I’ll be there, Uncle John.”

  If he didn’t move fast, next thing he’d know, Deacon Fashaw would be there shaking his ladder from under the tree.

  “Come down, young man. Come down.”

  George climbed down, and Deacon Fashaw swooshed the switch at him. Anybody else, and George would have had him on the ground. But it was Deacon Fashaw, and the men respected his position too much to fight him.

  “Now, you bring your ladder back here. I told you to bring your ladder back here.”

  George ran back to get the ladder and followed Deacon Fashaw back to the first tree he had picked.

  “Now, you see that orange up there in the top of the tree?”

  “Yeah, Uncle John.”

  “Well, you know they want that orange in New York, and you done left it up there in that tree. And I don’t like it. And Mr. Eichelberger don’t like it. Mr. Eichelberger don’t like it, and I ain’t gon’ have it. Now, you put that ladder back in that tree, and you go right on up there and pick that orange right now.”

  Deacon Fashaw stood and watched George position his ladder and climb into the tree for that one orange as the other pickers peered through the branches. It was all part of Uncle John’s plan. “He let you get four or five trees away so you have to drag that back,” George said. “You probably done lost five or six boxes while you doing that. You do that two or three times, you soon get the message that ‘I’m gonna be sure I clean my tree before I leave it.’ I mean clean it.”

  They moved from grove to grove in a single day. The flatbed truck rumbled down a highway past the bean fields and the turpentine stills. Midday, they finished one grove and were moving to the next. The truck reached an intersection and swung a hard left. The ladders broke from their lashes and shifted under the men. The loose ladders pushed the men off the open bed of the truck and onto the rough surface of the highway as if they had been shot from a gun.

  George felt himself thrown to the gravel. His heels nearly hit his back, and he tried to break the fall with his elbow and knee. Half the workers were on the ground. Some had fallen onto their heads and were lying unconscious. A man named Nathan Bailey was never able to work again. He got two hundred dollars for his injuries after the men petitioned the packing company for help. George got twelve dollars and forty-eight cents for his swollen knee and elbow, which he would remember for as long as he lived; they sent him two payments of six dollars and twenty-four cents each.

  Most of the men took it and were grateful. George wasn’t. The work was hard, and now it was dangerous. “You not getting anything to begin with, you know, at the best,” he said.

  George had some schooling, and the old men who teased him for it put their pride in their sack when they thought the packinghouse was cheating them.

  “Schoolboy, look a here,” a man said. “Tell me how much I got for my work. Here my envelope.”

  George took it and looked at it and turned to the man. “How many boxes of oranges did you pick?” George asked. “How many boxes of tangerines did you pick? How many boxes of grapefruit?”

  The man told him what he thought he had picked, and George did the math.

  “No, you three dollars short. They done cheated you out of three dollars somewhere ’cause if you picked the number of boxes you say you picked, you didn’t get paid for all of it.”

  Two or three days’ pay had disappeared. It was hard to keep up. Each kind of fruit paid a different rate—four cents a box for grapefruit one day, ten cents a box for tangerines the next, six cents a box for oranges. If they didn’t know how much they picked of each kind of fruit or lost the little ticket that said what they had picked or if the foreman added the numbers on the ticket wrong, whether on purpose or by accident, the pickers didn’t get what little they were due.

  “Sometimes they would tell you that they paying one thing and when you get your pay, you got less,” George said. “And if you couldn’t figure, you didn’t know the difference. They were very good at that. They promise you four cents for a box of grapefruit, and you get two cents.”

  The pickers took whatever they got. Some asked about the difference but didn’t dare press it. Some wrote it off, blamed themselves, said they must have been the ones who’d lost their ticket. There was no point in protesting. There wasn’t enough work as it was. It was the Depression. And for every man waiting at the corner of Bates and Palmetto in the black wet morning at picking time, hoping to board a truck to the groves, there were ten more out there hoping he would miss it.

  MONROE, LOUISIANA, 1935

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  PERSHING WAS SIXTEEN and making his first trip out of Monroe on his own on a bus ticket his brother Madison had given him for graduation. Pershing had just finished the eleventh grade, which was as far as you could go if you were colored in Louisiana, and he was beside himself with anticipation.

  The sign on the front of the bus said ST. LOUIS and Pershing climbed on board with his suitcase in his hand and his back propped straight as if he were stepping onto the Queen Mary and going to France. He dusted the folds of his tweed suit and headed down the central aisle of the bus in search of a seat. The bus was not going to take him to the Big North of southern dreams but to a modest city in a border state where his brother was serving out his medical residency, and well enough out of the South.

  He scanned the aisle to find a place for himself. His eye caught the wooden shingle with the metal prongs on the bottom, the shingle that said COLORED on one side and WHITE on the other. It was set into holes at the top of a seat back toward the latter half of the bus. He didn’t like seeing it, but he knew to expect it. He took a seat behind the wooden shingle and looked out the window at the view.

  Those white and colored shingles were as much a part of the southern landscape as cotton growing in the field. Each state and city had a different requirement or custom to signal how the races were to be separated and to what extent the races were to be divided. In North Carolina, white and colored passengers could not occupy “contiguous seats on the same bench.”86 Virginia prohibited the two races from sitting side by side on the same bench unless all other seats were filled. Several states required that the placard saying WHITE or COLORED be “in plain letters, not less than two inches high.” In Houston, the race to which the seat belonged was posted on the back of the seat. In Georgia, the penalty for willfully riding in the wrong seat was a fine of a thousand dollars or six months in prison. Colored passengers were assigned to the front of the railcar on the train but to the rear of other conveyances to, in the words of the mayor of Birmingham, do “away with the disagreeable odors that would necessarily follow the breezes.”

  The bus headed north along the Mississippi River into Arkansas, picking up more people at stops along the way. The seats began to fill. More white passengers than colored seemed to be boarding. They had taken up some of the seats in the very front and were spreading further back. Now, each time new white people got on, they picked up the wooden shingle and inserted it in the seat back where Pershing was sitting. It seemed only the white people could touch the shingle and set the music
al chairs in motion.

  “Go ’head, boy. Move on back,” the driver told him.

  Pershing rustled himself up from the seat he was in. Gathered his things. Looked for an empty space behind him. Moved back a row. Sometimes the new passenger took up a whole row by himself, forcing Pershing back just so the newcomer wouldn’t have to sit next to anyone else.

  At every stop, they had to move again until the colored passengers were now crowded into a few seats in the back and Pershing found himself in the very last row.

  It was early summer, and road dust flew into the windows and rushed to the back seat, where Pershing in his brand-new tweed suit was pressed among the other colored passengers.

  The dust coated the tweed and his skin and his hair, and Pershing found it unbearable, packed as he was like livestock.

  “I was dressed as good as I could be,” Pershing said years later. “And I felt very down that I had to submit to this.”

  He looked around him at the other colored passengers to his left and to his right, grown people, beaten down, hunched in their seats. They dropped their eyes, and he dropped his.

  “Some have endured, and that’s all they’ve known,” Pershing said. “They don’t expect anything better, and nobody’s demanding anything better. You wouldn’t have survived if you had done too much demanding anyway.”

  It was a long ride, there was no toilet on the bus, and the back seats took every bump on the road. Before Pershing could make it to St. Louis, he passed his urine and sat in his soaked tweed pants and felt lower than he had in his entire short life.

  St. Louis was a blur. Madison carted Pershing all over St. Louis, took him into Homer G. Phillips Hospital, where Madison was a resident and where the nurses fawned over the cute little brother with the thick eyelashes and waves in his hair. Madison reminded him it was time to get ready for college. For a while, when he was thirteen or fourteen, Pershing actually thought he didn’t have to go. He told his mother that one day.

  “Mama, I’m gonna stop school.”

  He didn’t realize how impossible that was, his father being principal and all.

  Ottie indulged him.

  “Baby, why are you gonna stop school?”

  “I want some of the things the other boys got.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like clothes.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  Pershing couldn’t think of much in particular that he didn’t already have.

  “I want a suit. I want a pair of shoes.”

  “Now, I tell you what you do,” his mother said. “You save your little money you get from the milk. Now, get you a little job after school or in the summer, and you work and save your money. And when you got half of whatever it cost, I’ll give you the other half.”

  Pershing listened.

  “And you don’t pay down on anything,” she told him. “You can keep your money as well as that white man can.”

  The nearest college was right in Monroe, across the railroad tracks from where they lived. Northeast Louisiana College had a brand-new campus with reasonable fees, built with taxpayer money, to which his parents’ meager salaries contributed. Students who looked like Pershing weren’t permitted there. So the family debated where Pershing would go.

  His mother wanted him at Morehouse, the most prestigious college in the country for colored men. It was in Atlanta, which might as well have been Paris, and she wanted the biggest she could get for her baby. All these years she had saved up her teaching money, kept it in a chifforobe with a key, which the children knew not to touch. It would be their future. The last time she opened the chifforobe, it was to send Leland to Morehouse. It was expensive, and he had not fared well. Professor Foster blamed the school, but anyone who knew Leland knew the trouble was with Leland, whom the women called Woo and who was brilliant, beloved, and weak to life’s temptations. They had wasted their precious, second-class, colored teacher’s wages on Leland at Morehouse. Now Ottie was trying to send Pershing there, and Pershing wanted to go.

  “No, you don’t go to Morehouse,” Professor Foster said.

  “You’ll go to Morehouse,” his mother said.

  So it was settled. He would go to Morehouse. But the family had to save up the extra money it would take. Pershing would have to spend two years at the lesser-known alma mater of his parents, Leland College, before living out his mother’s dream.

  The summer after his freshman year at Leland, he needed a job. He heard the furniture store downtown needed janitors. He dressed and went down and got in line with all the other colored boys wanting to work.

  The white foreman called him to the front when it was his turn for an interview.

  “Boy, do you go to school?” the foreman asked.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” he said. “I just completed my first year at Leland College.”

  “Boy, if you go to college, you don’t need a job as a janitor.”

  Few people, white or black, in Ouachita County had the chance to go to college. Resentments ran deep, especially when it came to a colored boy getting to go when some southerners were still debating whether colored people were worth educating at all. Too many educated colored people, and it would upset the whole balance of power in the caste system and give other colored people ideas.

  The man turned to some other boys in line, who weren’t in school and didn’t need tuition, and hired them. Pershing had a long memory, and he would nurse that wound for years. Here he was trying to make something of himself, and the invisible hand was punishing the ambitious, and rewarding the servile to keep colored people in their place.

  Later in the summer, he went looking for work at the sawmill.

  He saw a classmate there from high school and was told the work wasn’t too hard. It was stacking wood staves to make barrels. Pershing asked the foreman for a job. There was nothing available, he was told. He was getting desperate. He spotted his friend stacking staves.

  “Show me how to do this.”

  The friend showed him what to do, and Pershing worked beside him. He looked up and saw the foreman watching him. Pershing pretended not to see him, worked even harder. The foreman left, and, when he came back, Pershing was still at work. At the end of the day, the foreman hired him. Pershing finished out the summer stacking staves, not minding the hard work and not finding it demeaning.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to stoop to conquer.”

  Morehouse was a heavenly place. Colored boys racing straight-backed and self-important in their sweater vests, hair brushed back with a hint of a center part. Arriving at chapel to sit with their respective fraternities and daring not take the wrong row. There was a sister school, Spelman, the women sealed off in their cloistered dormitories and emerging in fitted dresses and gloves to be paired with Morehouse men, who were the only men worthy of them. There was the graduate school, Atlanta University, where the brightest of both schools were expected to go to take their master’s and doctorates. It was all too perfect for words.

  Whatever future there was for colored America, they believed themselves to be it, and they carried themselves accordingly. Then there was Atlanta. Too many colored doctors and lawyers and businessmen to count, living in brick houses set back from the road and with staircases inside, driving fancy cars and not apologizing for it.

  “I saw blacks living like people ought to live,” Pershing would say years later.

  Atlanta was big enough to get lost in. Enough colored people to be anonymous. The colored people drew a fence around themselves and manufactured a world so grand they told themselves they didn’t want whatever Jim Crow was keeping from them.

  Pershing was at peace. It was the fall of 1937.

  After the first homecoming game, Pershing and a science classmate by the name of Morris Williams took two girls out dancing. They both chipped in the money they needed and bought sloe gin for the four of them and whiled away the night.

  They took the girls home and were walking back to the dor
mitory. As they crossed the intersection of Fair and Ashby, Pershing slowed down to a stop in the middle of the street. He was wobbling from the gin. He stood and looked around. He was in Atlanta in the middle of the night, far from the stooping and yessums of Monroe. He was surrounded by a whole campus of somebodies like him and doing whatever he pleased.

  He stood in the street, half drunk and half dreaming. Cars slowed and honked, and he paid them no mind.

  “Boy, come on,” his friend said. “Get out the street. That car’s gon’ hit you, you drunk fool.”

  “Yes, I’m drunk,” Pershing said. “I ain’t in Monroe, don’t nobody know me, and I don’t give a damn.

  “I’m free,” he said.

  Pershing did not know precisely where he would end up or how. But he knew at that moment that he would never live in another country Jim Crow town again. He would do whatever it took to get as far away as he could.

  “That bug got in me,” Pershing would later say. “I wanted, I wanted to get out.”

  Shadows still hung over him. His big brother Leland was rarely in class but was a four-letter man at Morehouse and a star pitcher on the baseball team. The Spelman women called out his name on the yard. And then there was Madison, his oldest brother. Madison still hung over him from afar. Madison was a doctor. Madison sang. Madison dressed. The women loved Madison.

  “So you hit school,” Pershing would remember years later, “and ‘That’s Foster’s brother. That’s Foster’s brother.’ It’s hard to be the little one. You fightin’ for identity. And everybody discussing everything you did. And when it was bad, they blew it up.”

  Pershing threw himself into the one thing that brought him the most attention. He had a voice as rich as an organ, so he joined the school choir. He started singing solo at the Christmas concert at Sisters Chapel at Spelman and made a name for himself. In time, people didn’t ask about Leland and baseball as much anymore or about his brother the doctor.