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

by Isabel Wilkerson

  It occurred to him that he had squandered his energy on the easiest leg of the journey, on the closely set hamlets with their billboards and ranch signs, the distractions and margaritas at the Mexico border, even gassing up and eating in Lordsburg. He did not regret it, but he was paying for it now. Ahead was the long stretch of aloneness in the desert.

  He thought he’d better stop now. If he looped back to Phoenix, he could poke around for a colored boardinghouse and be in a bed of uncertain hygiene in a couple of hours. But the highway continued away from the lights and into a vast darkness. He could lose an hour just trying to find his way back to town.

  He considered the options. He was a safe distance from the South, long past Texas and well beyond New Mexico. This far west, he wouldn’t have to wander the city and hunt down the first colored person he saw for directions to where the colored people board. He was free now, like a regular American.

  Up ahead, a bank of neon signs popped up in the distance and fought one another over guests for the night. The motels sat low to the ground at angles from the road, little more than stretch trailers with rhinestone facades. He pulled up to the parking lot of the first one he came to.

  The car kicked up gravel dust as it crawled up to the vacancy sign that blinked the promise of a decent night’s sleep. He noticed a white Cadillac convertible pulling into the parking lot, its mirror-slick chrome and the headlights shining onto the building. A man who could have been in a Brylcreem commercial was at the wheel and next to him a blond lady friend. The man was laughing. The woman had her head on his shoulder. They were in their own world as they stepped out of the car and floated into the motel in front of him. It was a scene right out of the movies and Robert’s kind of place. He felt even better about this new citizenship he was acquiring.

  He had been driving since noon and was wrinkled from the ride. He was a formal man in a formal age, and so he couldn’t go in like this. He brushed his fingers along the sleeves of his shirt and ironed the front with his palm. He got his sport coat, shook the dust out of it, and afterward straightened his tie. He didn’t have a comb within reach; he hadn’t thought that far ahead. So he smoothed the top and sides of his head with his hand.

  He caught sight of his face in the mirror and the dark wood finish of his skin. The skin was moist and glistened in the blinking neon of the vacancy sign. Good lord. He had been sweating in the heat all day. They might think he was a common laborer. He felt his pockets for a handkerchief. He took it and wiped the shine off his nose, off his cheeks and chin, and mopped the sweat from his forehead. It was not his best presentation, but it would have to do.

  When he got out of the car, he dusted his coat sleeves and checked for wrinkles again. He stood up as if there were a brace strapped to his back. Then he walked up to the front desk for a room. At reception, he took a deep breath and put on the most charming rendition of himself.

  “I’d like to get a room for the night, please,” he said.

  The man looked flustered. “Oh, my goodness,” the man at the front desk said. “We forgot to turn off the vacancy sign.”

  Robert tried to hide his disappointment.

  “Oh, thank you,” Robert said.

  He climbed back into the car and drove away from the motel and the vacancy sign that continued to blink. He had been in the South long enough to know when he had been lied to. But there were plenty of motels on the road, and it didn’t matter what one man thought of him.

  He wasn’t thinking rights and equality. “I thought a bed and a shower and something to eat,” he would say years later.

  He drove to the next motel in the row, a hundred or so yards away.

  “I’d like to get a motel room,” he said, stiffer than before. He was cautious now, and the man must have seen his caution.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, polite and businesslike. “We just rented our last room.”

  Robert looked into the face, tried to read it. He noticed that “the face was awkward, trying to be loose and matter of fact. All calm and uncomfortable.”

  He thanked the man anyway, tried to prove himself even in rejection. “Usually when we try to fit in, we’re above them,” Robert thought to himself, sad and indignant at the same time. “If we’re going to be nice, we’re nicer than they would be to each other.”

  Knowing that wasn’t helping him now. He was getting anxious. The pulse was racing. He was agitated, sweating on a cool desert night.

  He went to a third motel and was sweetly rejected a third time. It was fully night now, the sky black and dense. He should have been in bed hours ago. His was the only car on the road now. The motel lots were quiet and still. The lamp lights on bedside tables were clicking off, that young couple in the Cadillac all situated now. The road was getting darker, lonelier, as the world settled in for the night.

  Anybody looking for a room had one by now. Any leftover rooms would go empty. And still they were turning him away.

  He replayed the rejections in his mind as he drove the few yards to the next motel. Maybe he hadn’t explained himself well enough. Maybe it wasn’t clear how far he had driven. Maybe he should let them know he saw through them, after all those years in the South. He always prepared a script when he spoke to a white person. Now he debated with himself as to what he should say.

  He didn’t want to make a case of it. He never intended to march over Jim Crow or try to integrate anybody’s motel. He didn’t like being where he wasn’t wanted. And yet here he was, needing something he couldn’t have. He debated whether he should speak his mind, protect himself from rejection, say it before they could say it. He approached the next exchange as if it were a job interview. Years later he would practically refer to it as such. He rehearsed his delivery and tightened his lines. “It would have been opening-night jitters if it was theater,” he would later say.

  He pulled into the lot. There was nobody out there but him, and he was the only one driving up to get a room. He walked inside. His voice was about to break as he made his case.

  “I’m looking for a room,” he began. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.”

  A white woman in her fifties stood on the other side of the front desk. She had a kind face, and he found it reassuring. And so he continued.

  “It’s a shame that they would do a person like this,” he said. “I’m no robber. I’ve got no weapons. I’m not a thief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m a captain that just left Austria, which was Salzburg. And the German Army was just outside of Vienna. If there had been a conflict, I would have been protecting you. I would not do people the way I’ve been treated here.”

  It was the most he’d gotten to say all night, and so he went on with his delivery more determinedly than before. “I have money to pay for my services,” he said. “Now, if you don’t rent to colored people, let me know so I can go on to California. This is inhuman. I’m a menace to anybody driving. I’m a menace to myself and to the public, driving as tired as I am.”

  She listened, and she let him make his case. She didn’t talk about mistaken vacancy signs or just-rented rooms. She didn’t cut him off. She listened, and that gave him hope.

  “One minute, Doctor,” she said, turning and heading toward a back office.

  His heart raced as he watched her walk to the back. He could see her consulting with a man through the glass window facing the front desk, deciding in that instant his fate and his worth. They discussed it for some time and came out together. The husband did the talking.

  He had a kind, sad face. Robert held his breath. “We’re from Illinois,” the husband said. “We don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in, the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

  By now, if they had agreed to it, Robert would have been willing to check out before dawn, before anybody could see him, if that’s what it took. It was a long shot, but some white proprietor
s had been known to sneak a colored traveler in on occasion, harbor them like a fugitive or a runaway slave, so long as he was out before the neighbors got wind of it. Robert would have accepted that even if he didn’t like it.

  In his delirium, he imagined the exchange between husband and wife in the back office minutes before, the woman arguing his case, the husband skeptical, wary.

  “Nobody’ll see him anyway,” the wife’s whispering.

  “Yes, they will,” the husband’s responding.

  “How will they know?”

  “Somebody might see him when he drives out of here. Or somebody might see his car. Where he’s been before, the people that turned him down. They’d know we let him stay here.”

  And so the answer was no. Robert thanked them anyway, especially the woman. If it had been up to her, he would have had the room. “I believe that with everything that’s in me,” Robert said when he was older and grayer. “This thing I’ve analyzed three thousand times.”

  Somehow Robert made it back to the car. He was in the middle of the desert and too tired to go on and too far along not to keep going. His mind took him back to Monroe, to the going-away party they gave him just a few nights ago. His own words rose up and laughed at him. How in the world can you stay here in this Jim Crow situation? Come go to Heaven with me, to California.

  He drove, erratic, in the direction of the road and, thus, California, although he was nowhere near California, and saw the lights of a filling station. He needed gas and could use some coffee if he was to make it through the desert and the night. He drove into the station and stopped at a pump.

  The owner, a middle-aged white man, came right out.

  “May I help you?”

  Robert couldn’t answer. The man repeated himself.

  “Hey, fella, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

  “No,” Robert said, unable to manage much more.

  The man sensed something. He put his hand on Robert’s shoulder, and Robert tried to tell him what had happened. The man shook his head as if he understood.

  Something in the voice, in the way the man looked into his eyes and touched his shoulder and tried in the middle of a cool desert night to console him, made Robert feel all the sadder. It confirmed he wasn’t crazy, and that made him feel utterly alone. Yes, there was an evil in the air and this man knew it and the woman at the motel knew it, but here he was without a room and nobody of a mind to do anything had done a single thing to change that fact. And that made the pain harder, not easier, to bear.

  Robert broke down. The exhaustion, the rejection, the unwinding of his dreams in a matter of minutes, it all caught up with him at once. He had driven more than fifteen hundred miles, and things were no different. In fact, it felt worse because this wasn’t the South. It wasn’t even close to the South. He sat unable to speak for longer than is comfortable in front of a total stranger. His voice cracked as the story tumbled out of him.

  “I came all this way running from Jim Crow, and it slaps me straight in the face,” Robert said. “And just think, I told my friends, why did they stay in the South and take the crumbs? ‘Come to California.’ ”

  The man listened with the helplessness of the well-intentioned and tried to cheer him up.

  “Come on, let me get you a cup of coffee. Where are you going anyway?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Well, I went to USC, and I hate to disappoint you, but Los Angeles ain’t the oasis you think it is.”

  Robert was feeling sick now. It was too late to turn back, and who knew what he was heading into? The man told him to gear himself up. The man didn’t use the term, and nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it James Crow in California.

  “You will see it, and it’ll hit where it hurts,” the man said. “What are you in?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Well, you’re going to find it in the hospitals going to work.”

  Robert was thinking fast, reconsidering, weighing, and waking up. The dream looked to be over before he could even get to California. The man brought him a cup of coffee and filled his tank. Robert got back on the highway and drove into the black hole of night. Soon he came to a fork in the road and saw a sign that made his heart sink:

  LOS ANGELES 380 MILES

  SAN DIEGO 345 MILES

  He knew he couldn’t drive a mile farther than necessary in this condition, and so San Diego it would be. “I could just see numbers in my mind now,” he said many years later. “Los Angeles this way and San Diego that way. And the number was far less distance, and I chose that.”

  In the absolute darkness he found himself in, he could not see the will of the road. He went on faith that he was not driving off into a ravine.

  Every cell wanted sleep. He bit his tongue to keep his eyelids from sneaking shut. He sang, sang anything, to keep his mind from turning in for the night. Now when he needed the radio, there was no radio, just a crackle of white noise from someplace far away.

  Suddenly, somewhere around Gila Bend, the road got mean, turned without warning, a sharp left, then a sharper, uglier right, back and forth, and all over again. The car tilted upward, gaining elevation and resisting the climb as any car would. It forced him into an alertness his body wasn’t prepared for and that he hadn’t anticipated.

  The road shot more curves at him, one right after the other, so that he was going north and south as much as west, and he had to slow down to absorb the blind hooks and horseshoes coming at him. He knew he wasn’t the best driver in the world, hadn’t done that much of it really. And so he would have to brake to a crawl if he was going to make it.

  Before it hadn’t mattered much that this was a two-lane road with no reflector lights and no guardrails to catch him. Now it did. Interstate highways didn’t exist yet. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president who would go on to build them, had only recently taken office. Of course, Robert didn’t know that, and knowing it wouldn’t have helped him.

  The mountains closed in on him. He couldn’t make out the earth from the sky. The sky was black, the road was black. He could see the black shape of saguaro cactus standing helpless as he passed. He drove into the cave of night, more alone now than ever.

  It got to the point where he could go no further, and he pulled over to the side of the road. He unfolded himself from behind the wheel and caught an hour of half sleep. He would have to stop again two or three times that night. Each time, it left him not much more refreshed than before. He had no choice but to start the engine and take up the task again.

  He wound through rock canyons and crossed Fortune Wash near the Gila River. A film stuck to his skin and to his wrinkled shirt and trousers. He had not had a chance to wash yesterday off. He opened the windows and vents to get air.

  Another hour passed, and ahead was a valley, a black velvet plain with diamonds on it. It was the city of Yuma. He saw motel signs with amusing desert names. He gave them no thought. He knew better now.

  Soon he came upon the Colorado River. A road sign said he had reached the California line. But he was too beat down now to pay it much attention.

  His back pinched from days and nights of driving. His fingers were sore from clutching the steering wheel. His wrists ached, and still there was more road. The road would not end.

  Just past Felicity came the warnings of the desert: CHECK YOUR RADIATOR. LAST CHANCE FOR WATER. LAST CHANCE FOR GAS STATIONS. STRONG WINDS POSSIBLE.

  What was this place he was going to? What was he doing behind the wheel in the middle of the pitch-black desert by himself? Could it be worth all this? It had seemed so clear back in Monroe. Now he fought with himself over the fear and the doubt. He couldn’t bear to hear the I-told-you-so’s. If he turned back now, if he changed his mind or lost his nerve, the I-knew-its would ring in his ear. Dr. Clement would be the first to say it.

  He was dreading the place already. “But there was no turning back,” he would sa
y years later. “I had to get here. I had to try.”

  He blinked at oncoming headlights, willing himself awake. Orion stretched over the highway and made an arc across the sky. It filled the windshield and stayed with him until the sun came back.

  Near the Tecate Divide, the pink light of morning came in from behind. He was in San Diego County. Another fifty miles to the coast. The sun was on his back as he pulled away for good from the South and the center of gravity.

  ON THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL AT THE ILLINOIS BORDER, OCTOBER 1937

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IN THE DARK HOURS OF THE MORNING, Ida Mae and her family crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, at the Ohio River, the border between Kentucky and Illinois, between the provincial South and the modern North, between servitude and freedom, without comment.

  The black night pressed against the windows and looked no different in the New World than in the Old. It was as thick and black in Illinois as it was in Kentucky or Tennessee. From the railcar window, the land looked to be indistinguishable, one state from another, just one big flat plain, and there was nothing in nature that one could see that said colored people should be treated one way on one side of the river and a different way on the other.

  Crossing the line was a thing of spiritual and political significance to the guardians of southern law and to colored people escaping it who knew they were crossing over. But going north, most migrants would have been asleep or unable to see whatever the line looked like if they even knew where it was.

  On the red-eye going north, the railroad would not likely have disrupted the entire train just so colored people could sit with white people now that they legally could. Ida Mae had no memory of such a commotion in any case, only that they’d made it out of Mississippi. They crossed into Illinois at Cairo and passed through Carbondale and Centralia. Then Champaign. Kankakee. Peotone. Matteson. Grand Crossing. Woodlawn. Hyde Park. Oakland. Twenty-second Street. Twelfth Street Station. Chicago.