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

by Isabel Wilkerson

  George stayed with the crew of old men and women warming themselves by a fire in the fog. The workers wanted to know when they could start picking. George stood with them and told them the plan.

  “Now, look,” he said. “Everybody sit down till we get the price straight. Nobody go to work.”

  “What about the foreman?”

  “I don’t care what the foreman say. Nobody go to work until we give the word.”

  The old men and women were used to cleaning white yards and cooking in white kitchens ten or twelve hours a day for seventy-five cents, maybe a dollar. George told them if they could get a good price, they could make that much in an hour or two. Sounded like voodoo talk to them.

  “We got to take what the white folks tells us,” they told him. “You can’t do no different.”

  George looked back down the row for Mud and Sam to show up and back at his skeptical army.

  “I don’t want to hear that stuff,” George said. “I been listening to that all my life.”

  The old men and women worried what would happen if they didn’t get their price and worried all the more if they got it. With the war on, it was a new day, George told them.

  “We got a chance to kind of get back at them,” he said, trying to inspire them to stand up for themselves. “I ain’t thinking about no future. I’m thinking about right now.”

  Besides, Sam and Mud had already tried to scare the pickers into submission.

  “Anybody put a ladder up under them trees,” Mud told them, “we gonna snatch it from under you and stomp you when you hit the ground!”

  The pickers waited. Mud and Sam emerged from deep in the grove.

  “Well, what it looks like?” George asked.

  “It’s pretty good over here in one spot,” they said.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “We’ll do it for twenty-two cents.”

  George spoke for the group since he was the one who had been to school. He went to the foreman to start the unthinkable act of negotiating with a white man.

  “What you paying for this?” George asked the foreman.

  “Well, you know, this is good fruit, boy,” the foreman said. “Now, you can get well in here. These oranges big as grapefruit.”

  “How much you paying?”

  “We paying good. That’s fifteen cents a box.”

  “That ain’t good enough. Nope. We can’t pick it for that. We want twenty-two cents a box.”

  “Naw, we can’t give you that.”

  George thought it over.

  “Okay, we’ll do it for twenty-two cents. Straight through, good and the bad.”

  “Naw, we can’t.”

  “Well, we can’t pick it, then.”

  “We forty miles from town.”

  “I know. We still not gonna pick it.”

  “Well, y’all pick a load. I don’t want to send the truck driver back empty. So y’all pick enough so he can take a load into the packinghouse. Then I’ll send word to the boss and tell him what y’all wantin’ to do.”

  “No, we not gonna pick one. You can send the truck back to town, and we’ll wait. Got nothing to do.”

  “Y’all just doing us this way because y’all got the advantage over us. This war ain’t gon’ last forever, and, by God, y’all gon’ pay for this.”

  “We already paid,” George said. “All these years we couldn’t even ask how much you were paying for a box of fruit or we’d get fired. You gave us what you wanted to give us. You promised us one thing and give us another. You put the payday off whenever you get ready. Sometime you didn’t pay us, period. So now, far as I’m concerned, this is reckoning day. And I ain’t worried about after the war. You can pay us what we want, or else your fruit gonna hang out there. And they want it in New York. They want it all over the world, and you ain’t got nobody to pick it.”

  The foreman needed the fruit out of the trees. He left with the truck driver and before long was back from the packinghouse. He told them to go to work. He would pay them twenty-two cents. This time.

  The old men and women set their ladders in the trees and commenced picking, and by nightfall, they and these cocksure boys had made more in a day than they would have otherwise made in a week.

  People could buy stew meat now and put Sunday suits on will-call at Ferran’s. The Mason jars of quarters Lil George was saving up multiplied. He knew the wages they were making out in the groves couldn’t last forever. Everything depended on the supply and demand created by the war, and who knew how much more time they had? He decided to make the most of it while he could. The way things were going, he could earn enough money for college and then some. Until then, while the money was flowing, he thought it was time to rent a place of their own and get out from under his father. Maybe that was what he and Inez needed, now that she was back from her short course in beauty culture.

  “Go downtown and look in Thompson’s,” he told her. “Pick out some things you think you would like to have for the house, so we know what we’re doing when we move.”

  “I don’t want to go down there and ain’t got no money,” she said. George always had these grand ideas, planning their future in his head. “How you gon’ buy any furniture?” she asked. “You ain’t got no money to buy no furniture with.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just go and look. You never can tell what might take place.”

  One day he just took her by the hand. “Come on,” he said. “I’m a take you down to Thompson’s, and you gonna pick out some furniture.”

  “Pick it out? What you gon’ pay for it with?”

  “Get your coat and come on, let’s go.” George scooped up seven or eight jars of quarters and halves, and they went to Thompson’s.

  “What you see in here that you like?” he asked her.

  She saw a bed, a sofa, a dining room set.

  “How much is that?” George asked the clerk, a white man.

  “You could pay two dollars down and seventy-five cents a week on it,” the clerk said.

  “I don’t want to know all of that. I want to know how much does it cost, and if I pay cash for it, how much can I get off?”

  “Cash?” the clerk asked. “You gon’ pay cash for all this, boy?”

  “I just might.”

  “Let me see now.”

  The clerk gave him a figure. George did some adding himself and figured the quarters and halves would cover it.

  “Okay, I’ll take it.”

  “Well, you know this is for cash, you know.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take it.”

  George went out to the car and came back with a box of Mason jars and set the jars on the counter.

  “You got a can opener?” George asked. He had glued the tops on to keep the money from falling out or a thief from getting in. They cut the tops off, and George dumped the quarters and halves out on the counter. The coins clinked and rolled, and George started counting.

  Inez stood looking first at the money and then at George. The clerk ran out into the street.

  “By God, y’all come in here. You ain’t gon’ believe this. This damn boy in here got over three hundred dollars in jars.”

  They counted out quarters and halves until George paid him for every bit.

  “And when I left out of there,” George said, “he was still shaking his head.” Inez too.

  The pickers had more money in their pockets than they were raised to think they had a right to, and times were the best they had ever been, which said more about how meager the past had been than how great the present was. There was a war going on, after all. They hated that there was a war, but they knew that it made them indispensable for once, and deep inside they wished it would never end.

  ATLANTA, 1941

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  THINGS WERE SPINNING FAST AROUND PERSHING, and, before he knew it, he had allowed himself to be pulled completely into the bourgeois world that he had become besotted with and that would be his ticket out of
the world he had come from. He had been squiring around the daughter of the president of Atlanta University for two years now. The daughter, Alice Clement, finished Spelman on June 4, 1941, and it was decided that it was time the two be married. Shortly after commencement, a breathless announcement ran in the Chicago Defender:

  Enlisting widespread interest is the engagement of Miss Alice Clarissa Clement, charming and attractive daughter of President and Mrs.98 Rufus E. Clement of Atlanta University, to Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, son of Mr. and Mrs. Madison James Foster of Monroe, La.

  The announcement was made on Thursday evening at a party honoring Miss Clement.

  That December, on the evening of the twenty-third, a Tuesday, and not by coincidence the anniversary of Dr. and Mrs. Clement’s own wedding twenty-two years before, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster married Alice Clarissa Clement and entered the insular and parallel universe that was colored society. Dr. Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse College and a celebrated figure of the day, married them. The groom was two days shy of his twenty-third birthday. The bride was twenty-one.

  The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor just a few weeks before. But the troubles of the outside world were put aside that night. It was the social event of the season, played up in the Atlanta Daily World, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Amsterdam News; and here was Pershing right in the middle of it.99

  “The wedding—” Pershing began many years later. “Can I brag a little? It was a monster. If you can visualize a Gothic chapel. Stained-glass windows. Long mahogany benches. Then a balcony. Pipe organs up the wall. A master organist.”

  There were eight bridesmaids and a maid of honor in floor-length white taffeta and with tiaras on their heads. They carried long-stemmed red roses, heavy in their arms. There were eight groomsmen, including Pershing’s brothers Madison and Leland, in white tie and tails.

  “White kid gloves,” Pershing continued. “Patent-leather shoes. We were clean as chitlins.”

  As he recounted that day half a century later, he would not for some reason speak of the bride as much as the details of the spectacle itself. The Atlanta Daily World reported that she wore a gown of ivory satin, its neckline embroidered with seed pearls, and a floor-length veil that “fell from a crown of orange blossoms.” The altar was “banked with palms and ferns,” “numerous sixteen branch candelabra and three huge urns of gladioli and lilies,” in what the paper called “a setting of splendor and beauty.”

  One of the groomsmen, Jimmy Washington, would always remember the night they got married. Because it was beautiful, he said years later, and it rained in sheets that night.

  There would not be much of a honeymoon. School took them in opposite directions. Alice went off to New York to study music at Juilliard, an extraordinary thing for a young colored woman of the day. Pershing prepared to go to Nashville to attend Meharry Medical College, and the two saw each other when they could. It was wartime, and it seemed everybody was separated from their sweethearts.

  Alice completed a year at Juilliard, and then it was decided that it was better for her to stay with her parents and teach in Atlanta than to live in Nashville with Pershing, who was caught up in his medical studies. She would be in familiar surroundings in Atlanta. Her father could secure an ideal position at a public school there for her, and neither she nor Pershing would have to trouble themselves with the messy details of keeping house at this stage in their lives.

  By the time Pershing found out, it had all been decided. Pershing had no choice but to go along with it. What money he and Alice had was coming from Dr. Clement, and he was calling the shots. So Alice taught in Atlanta and visited Nashville when she could.

  After a visit in the early spring of 1943, Alice discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth to a girl that December. They named her Alberta Ann, after Pershing’s beloved mother, Ottie Alberta. She had a brown velvet Gerber baby face. They wrapped her in baby bunting and began to call her Bunny, a name that would stick for as long as she lived.

  Pershing finished Meharry in 1945 and moved to St. Louis to serve out his residency at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the colored facility where Madison had served his. Alice was expecting their second child now, and her parents argued against her trying to raise two babies in St. Louis with Pershing working three and four nights straight as a resident.

  “Why do that when you can live here?” they asked.

  “See, they can show you a million reasons to keep that daughter and granddaughter at home,” Pershing said years later. “They were logical reasons. And you couldn’t beat ’em.”

  That October, the second girl was born. Pershing named her Alice Emlyn, after his wife and the beloved sister he could never protect from the white men who called out to her in Monroe. Little Alice inherited her father’s big eyes and sharp nose and looked like a lighter incarnation of him. Everyone came to call her Robin, similar to Pershing’s actual first name, Robert.

  She was born in Atlanta surrounded by the Clements while Pershing was working the ward twenty-four hours straight, until he was crosseyed and crazy from it.

  “In the evening when you got through work,” Pershing said, “you said, ‘Whew, thank God.’ And you run upstairs, taking your clothes off on the elevator. Run to the shower. Get you a gulp, throw your whiskey, and get you two, three shots. Towel around you and hit the shower. And get out and get a cab and hit the streets. Anywhere. It didn’t matter where you went. Let me get away from this. And then you had to come home sober. And you had to sleep fast ’cause you had to get up the next morning looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in a crisp, clean uniform and white shoes. And you had to ‘Good morning, Mr. So-and-So.’ ”

  A resident ahead of him noticed his work and suggested he go up for a surgery residency when the time came.

  “You think I can do it?” Pershing asked.

  “Yes,” the resident said. “Try.”

  Pershing did as he said and started a new round of training that would last several more years and take him to hospitals in North Carolina and New York City to train in surgery.

  Soon he began getting disturbing reports from home. His mother had taken ill.

  It was cancer. Her kidney. He left to be with her. She had prayed to God every night to let her see her baby become a doctor. There he sat, a doctor in training now, reading aloud the Reader’s Digest to her. She tried to stand up to go over to him. But she couldn’t.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  He got up to kiss her on the cheek. She tried to speak. She was worried what would become of her son in this bourgeois world he was entering.

  “Baby,” she said, “always be independent. You don’t want to be dependent all your life and have to depend on someone else for a drink of water.”

  Pershing kept those words inside of him. In a few years, he completed his training, and, though she would not live to see it, he would become a surgeon at last.

  For a time, Madison was the only colored physician in all of Ouachita County, Louisiana, after a doctor by the name of Chandler died. Years before, two colored doctors had been forced out of Monroe, the author Ray Stannard Baker reported, “because they were taking the practice of white physicians.”100

  So Madison learned to step judiciously in his practice. He tended to the students at a colored college out from town and the poor people out in the country where the white doctors would not go. The country people paid him with the side of a freshly killed hog until they could get the money, which some never did. When Madison’s patients needed to go to the hospital, Madison could not admit them. He was not allowed in the hospital to practice. So he carried a hospital in his medical bag and made the front room of every shotgun cabin an operating room.

  Madison had his hands full, and he enlisted Pershing’s help with his patients out in the countryside when Pershing was on break from his residency. Pershing was glad to help. But he did not want to be a country doctor. And he was thinking even then that he would have t
o get out of Monroe to be the doctor and the man he knew he could be. He wanted the shiny fixtures of a modern hospital and a staff of nurses at his side that he could direct like an orchestra.

  Pershing was visiting once when someone sent for him to deliver a baby out in the country. He arrived with his satchel. Someone met him at the door.

  “Doc, I think she’s ready.”

  The fireplace was spitting ashes. The woman’s kinfolk stood drinking strong coffee and waiting for the woman to pass the baby.

  Pershing saw her splayed flat on a cot, looking ready to burst. He set down his satchel and went over to her. He reviewed in his head the principles of the obstetrics course he had only recently completed. There was no point in pining for the trappings of a modern hospital or the equipment he was used to in medical school. He would have to make do with whatever was in the cabin and his medical bag. They would get through it somehow.

  He reached toward her and felt for the hard surface of a human head at the beginning of life. The woman bore down and grunted. He in turn made note of the contractions and the baby’s position. He tried to help her bear down. But the baby didn’t come.

  The woman had been through more births than Pershing had and could sense the tentative touch of a book-learned delivery. All this analysis, and still no baby.

  “That’s alright, Doc,” she finally said. “Get on out the way.”

  She rolled her round body off the edge of the cot. She grunted and squatted on the bare surface of the floor and pushed hard. Pershing watched and did as she said.

  “Come on, now,” she said. “Catch it.”

  He moved into position. A few grunts more, and the baby plopped into his hands. Shoop, bingo.

  The woman paid what she could, which in the usual currency was not much more than food and a promise but was beyond calculating when it came to wisdom. He learned that all the book knowledge and equipment in the world didn’t make you a good doctor if you didn’t know what you were doing or listen to your patients. He learned a lesson that night that would stay with him for the rest of his life and would pay off in ways he couldn’t imagine.