Despite all the changes, it is still a neighborhood with its own sense of order and kinship.
“The people around here know more what’s going on over here than I do,” he says of his brownstone.
Anyone coming up to his door might face an inquiry.
“He know you?” somebody might ask on George’s behalf.
When he was still driving, the crack addicts and prostitutes—or, more precisely, the addicts who were prostituting themselves to get more cocaine—would approach him as he pulled up to the curb.
“You need some company tonight?”
“No, darling, I don’t need no company tonight.”
Sometimes they come to him with good news, knowing how upright he carries himself.
“I’m going to school now, Mr. G.,” they’ll say. “Can you give me two dollars for some cigarettes?”
He looks them over and sees that they are only telling him what they think he wants to hear. “They come up, and they look like they just came out a garbage can,” he says, shaking his head.
School is something he takes seriously because he hadn’t been able to complete his own education. He calls them on it.
“Yeah? How long you been in school?”
They might not have an answer, but he gives them a couple dollars anyway.
“I give it to you Tuesday,” they assure him.
“You don’t owe me,” George tells them. “ ’Cause I don’t want to get mad with you when you don’t pay me back.”
Sometimes they come up to him to report their progress, as if he were everybody’s grandfather, and they feel the need to prove themselves to him.
“I just dropped out of rehab, but I’m going right back,” they’ll say, even though George can see full well that they can’t be in rehab if they are running up and down the street as they have been all these months.
From his front stoop George Starling watches a most desperate parade. On these streets, there were once people gliding down the boulevard as if on a Paris runway, the men in overcoats and fedoras, the women in mink-collared swing coats and butterfly hats, all rushing to work for the rich white people or the manufacturers of paint or hats or lampshades. Now there are the hooded and disheveled descendants of the least able of the migrants living out their lives on the streets.
“I’m sitting out front now,” he is saying to me over the telephone, “and I see them ducking down these drug holes. They come here so beautiful, and in a few weeks look like they climbed out of a garbage can. We’re the ones that’s killing ourselves. I don’t see one white person in this block selling drugs. They got the nerve to be mad at the blue-eyed devil. You don’t have to take those drugs and sell ’em. Nobody’s making you sell drugs. We’re the ones that’s killing ourselves. They won’t learn in this century and maybe not in the next one.”
He wishes he could take all of them aside and warn them of the path they are taking. And, to those willing to listen, he does. But he has seen so much, it has begun to affect how he looks at them.
One time, a few years back, his door bell rang at two in the morning. He got up to see who or what it was.
“What do you want? You know what time it is?”
There before him was an addict, probably trying to sell him another trinket out of the trash that he didn’t need.
“You know it’s two in the morning?” George asked the addict.
“Your lights burning,” the addict said. “The lights on your car, Mr. G. I’m sorry, Mr. G., but your lights’re on in your car.”
George thanked him. He rushed out to turn off the lights and promised himself he wouldn’t prejudge these people anymore.
“I just thank the Lord,” he says, “that, by his grace, it’s not me.”
LOS ANGELES, WINTER 1997
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
BY THE CLOSE OF 1996, Robert’s body began to fail him. Everything that happened to him he knew precisely what it was because he had diagnosed it in everyone else, divined it before they or their other doctors even knew they had it. It was a gift to those who turned to him for help, a curse when applied to oneself. He calculated the symptoms and risks of whatever he saw happening to him, second-guessed his doctors, naturally, and then surrendered to whatever they suggested, depending on if he agreed with them.
His biggest frustration was not the natural breakdown of his body but not being able to reach his doctors when he wanted. He had always coddled his patients, brought a southern courtliness to his practice. He checked on them when they didn’t expect it, went over impending procedures four or five times to make sure they understood because he felt they would come out of the procedure better if they went into it in the right state of mind. Now, aging and ill in an anonymous city out west, he can go days or weeks without hearing from a doctor. Test results come not with the reassuring words or stroke on the shoulder from his physician but in a form letter from some laboratory out in Riverside.
He has already had a heart attack and bypass surgery. Now his kidneys have succumbed, and he has to endure dialysis several times a week. He is growing frailer but is still sound of mind. He has a live-in nurse now, a sweet woman of good humor named Barbara Lemmons, who is from the South like most everybody else in his life and who indulges his idiosyncrasies.
He has taken care of everyone else, outlived his brothers Madison and Leland and his sister, Gold, the only one he had managed to lure out to California and then only after her marriage broke up. He misses them terribly, but especially Gold, whom he had tried to protect as a young boy back in Monroe and couldn’t. Even when he had grown up, his money and status couldn’t protect her from herself. She had taken to drinking, a Foster weakness, as their nephew Madison would put it. “She liked the parties, liquor, men,” Madison said, “and broke up many a marriage.” Robert couldn’t protect her from her Billie Holiday of a life. And now she was gone.
His mentor, Dr. Beck, who took him in when he first got to Los Angeles, and Dr. Beck’s son, William, who was almost like a brother to him, have passed away, along with so many others, Alice first among them. He has four grandchildren whom Alice did not live to see—Bunny’s son and Robin’s son, who are practically grown up and far away besides, and Joy’s two little ones, who are growing up in Long Beach but whom he sees mainly at birthdays and holidays.
His world has grown smaller, and he is losing control, bit by bit, over his physical self. He seems to savor all the more the little joys in life—a perfectly broiled porterhouse steak, geraniums planted just so in the backyard, a call from a beloved patient.
There is a long list of things he is not supposed to have anymore—fatback and ham hocks, watermelon and barbecue sauce, biscuits, corn bread, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes—just torture to a southerner. But Barbara and his friends manage to slip him some corn bread with the collards anyway because it makes him so happy, and what is the point of living if you can’t have a bit of joy in your life?
Every morning she gets up at eight, opens the drapes, and turns on the sprinklers. She invariably finds him at the side of his bed on the telephone. He comes into the kitchen. She gives him grits, which are on the approved list, but with a little salt, which is not. No matter what the list says, he refuses to give up his bacon.
He loves fried catfish, which is not approved, and he could eat that every day. “I know it’s not on the list,” he says. “But I don’t care. Let’s cook it.”
She puts a chopping board onto the Formica-top island by the Thermador oven near the avocado green Frigidaire. She positions a chair so that he can watch her dust the fish in cornmeal and fry it.
When it is time to get dressed, she pulls some things from the closet for him to wear even if he is not expecting to see anyone that day.
“Yeah, that’s fine, but run the iron over those pants,” he’ll say.
He has nothing but time on his hands, and he frets over the garden with its camellias and hollyhocks that he can no longer manage to his liking. He gets Barbara
out there planting the annuals and worries over the placement and composition. They’ll be watching the news and he’ll be thinking about where he is going to put the begonias. They’ll be having their grits and bacon at breakfast, and all of a sudden Robert will blurt out an idea.
“How do you think the geraniums would look over there in that corner?” he asks her. “I’m going to need some impatiens.” And the two of them tramp out to the backyard to position them just so.
Robert has just gotten out of the hospital again, and the phone is ringing like mad. One time, Barbara picked up the phone and heard a gravel voice that sounded familiar.
“This is Ray Charles,” the man said. “Let’s speak to the old man. I’m calling to see if he wants some steaks.”
Barbara was holding the receiver to her ear and the cradle to her hip. She whispered to Robert, “Ray Charles is on the phone!”
Robert took the receiver, and Ray got straight to the point.
“You gon’ be at home?” Ray asked him. “You want these steaks? I’ll be over there with them.”
Barbara was in a panic. Ray Charles was on his way. She had just cleaned the living room, but she hadn’t gotten to the kitchen or vacuumed the orange carpet in the den where Robert spent most of his day, when it occurred to her, what was the point of rushing?
He can’t see anyway, she said to herself. He won’t know what room he’s in.
She calmed herself down. When the doorbell rang and Ray Charles arrived, she sent him through the kitchen. “You just say step up or step down,” she later recounted. “Why should I let him trample through the living room I just finished vacuuming? He wasn’t dressed up, and he don’t know the difference.”
Ray Charles came bearing ten or twelve steaks that Robert was not supposed to have but that no one in the world could stop Ray Charles from giving him—all New York cut and porterhouse, no T-bone, just as Robert liked it.
Ray chided Robert for not letting him know what hospital he had been in.
“Now, I had to call all over town, every hospital, looking for you,” Ray said. “Where in the hell did you go? Why did you go way out there? I’m a shoot you if you go off again and don’t let me know where you are.”
The cancer diagnosis came in a form letter. He turned to Barbara and said, “Look at this.” He would never have allowed a patient of his to discover such news this way.
“All he would do is look at it,” Barbara remembered.
Now that he needed her more than ever, she would not be with him much longer. She already had high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. Now a blood clot had formed in her chest. It broke apart and traveled to her leg. “My leg felt like jelly,” she said. “It felt like it wasn’t there.”
Barbara would no longer be able to work for Robert. By the late spring, a succession of nursing aides would come and go, but nothing would be the same after Barbara left.
Without her to keep him company and indulge his whims as his body grew weaker, he was finding fewer reasons to keep going.
Earlier in the year, he had received the most wonderful news about one of his grandchildren. Robin’s son, Daniel Moss, a brilliant boy who took after all of his ambitious forebears, had been in the enviable position of having turned down early admission to Harvard and an offer from Princeton. He had chosen Yale, where he would be a goalie on the soccer team. He had been spared the pain of Jim Crow and the second-class schooling in the South because his mother had been spared it when Robert had moved the family to California.
Robert was too ill to fully enjoy the news about his grandson but could not help but contemplate how over the moon his mother, Ottie, would be if she were alive. All those years of scraping to send her four children to segregated colleges and never seeing her youngest son become the surgeon she so dreamed of. The idea of her great-grandson turning down Harvard and Princeton would have been beyond her comprehension.
His daughters were preparing a trip back east for Daniel’s high school graduation. It was around the time of Father’s Day. Robert had hoped to go but was not well enough to make the trip. And that made him all the sadder. While everyone else was at Daniel’s graduation, a triumphant moment for the family and for Robert as the patriarch, he felt more alone than perhaps ever before. He started refusing to go to dialysis, knowing full well the consequences.
I visited him and found him inconsolable. I asked him if he wanted to go for a drive and get some sunshine. He shook his head no. I told him I had brought him some mangos and angel food cake. He looked away. “I hate to see you like this,” I told him. “What can I do to cheer you up?” He stared out the patio door at the begonias growing unattended and a lawn that was not as it should be or would have been if he had been well.
It got to the point that the only way he would go to dialysis was if someone insisted upon it. He was up and ready when I arrived to take him one day. His dark pants hung like draperies from his disappearing frame, and he took slow, labored steps as if he were walking in mud. He walked toward the stairs leading up to the landing above the den where the current aide, Renee, and I were setting up the wheelchair. As he neared the stairs, the hem of his pants got caught under his shoe and he teetered forward, reaching for my arm but missing it as he stumbled in a half-second fall on the top step. We rushed toward him and grabbed him at the waist and arm to lift him to an upright sitting position on the edge of the stairs. He sat flustered and defeated, his eyes lowered and looking at the floor in disbelief at his lot.
The dialysis center was at San Vicente and Third Street. He sat sinking into the passenger’s seat, pointing to direct me to the center, his finger wagging becoming more rapid and insistent when I took a turn he did not think right. He shook his head to show his disapproval and struggled to clear his throat to say no, make a right at this corner. His mind was sharp. He knew exactly where we were going and how best to get there.
It was getting to be late June. “I’m getting weaker and weaker,” he told me. “As soon as I put the walker on the landing to the den, it slid beneath me. I hit the landing hard. I called the nurse. She didn’t hear me. I tried three times. I took a hammer and banged on the coffee table to get her to help me.”
He turned his thoughts to more pleasant things, the visitors who had stopped by to see him that day. “I just know so many beautiful people,” Robert said.
Just the other day, he had told some friends, “I would give anything for a piece of watermelon,” which he conveniently did not say he was not supposed to have.
Sylvester Brooks, the president of the Monroe Club and a faithful admirer, came by and brought Robert the watermelon he so craved. He sat on a bar stool and told Robert what folks in the club were up to.
Robert’s old friend from back home Beckwith, who helped him set up his first office and even built furniture for it, stopped by to check on him. Robert was happy to see him. But it was a painful visit and did not last long.
“As well as I know him,” Robert said, “we had so little to say. He was not completely comfortable. But that doesn’t matter. No, it doesn’t matter.”
Then a man from back in Monroe, a man named Charles Spillers, dropped by. He had caught the bus from Slauson and Normandie in the center of South Central to see his old physician from the VA hospital.
He had heard of Dr. Foster before he’d ever gone to see him at the VA. He remembered Ray Charles’s song about him. “Dr. Foster got medicine and money too,” the man sang to himself. “I said, that must be some doctor, that Dr. Foster.”
Robert had been concerned about this new patient before him.
“You losing too much weight,” Robert had told him. “You’re sick. You need help.”
The man had been a deckhand on a dredge and done ground maintenance at the VA hospital. He had dug up old graves, the graves of people who had died of tuberculosis, and he had dug them without a mask. He had worked in fields that leaked uranium, where some of his co-workers had died within weeks of exposure.
He
was from the Old Country of Louisiana, believed in root doctors, and was suspicious after all he had seen in the South and West. He had pulled for Robert back at the VA, and he worried about what would happen to him after his trouble at the hospital.
“I’m not sure his kidneys went out on their own,” Spillers confided to me. “You have to watch a rattlesnake if you get in the bed with him.”
Charles Spillers felt he owed a debt to Robert as his physician even though he was too religious and superstitious to do some of what Robert told him. It was more that he felt inspired by him and appreciated Robert’s forewarnings, which Spillers promptly used as a cue to go see his root doctor.
“If it wasn’t for him, I would have been gone,” Spillers said.
He remembered the first time he went to see Robert in his office. “You’re just fading away right before me,” Robert had told him during the exam. “I’m going to admit you to the hospital.”
Spillers trusted the doctor but not the hospital and did not go. “The Holy Spirit came and told me don’t go to the hospital,” he said.
The man went to a root doctor instead, a woman from back south who was now in L.A. She plied him with root tea and Epsom salts in water. She made a fire in the house, even though it was August, and covered him with quilts until he sweated out the virus she believed to be in him. The fever broke, and he began to eat again and put weight back on.
Robert didn’t take it personally or prejudge the man. He had grown up in the South and knew and accepted its ways. And that endeared Robert to the man all the more. He felt he had Robert to thank for alerting him to the problem and for saving his life.
“He meant so much to so many people,” Spillers said. “I owe him so much.”
He had ridden the bus to see his doctor, who was now sick himself. He sat with him for a while and then prepared to leave. As he headed toward the door to catch the bus back home—not knowing how long the wait would be; this was, after all, L.A.—he turned to his old doctor and friend from the VA hospital with a mixture of worry and gratitude, and the sweet folk spirit of the ancestral South.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Page 58
