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

by Isabel Wilkerson

  “You have two gangs operating in 421,” the officer is telling residents. “The Black Stones and the Mickey Cobras.”

  The residents listen, but they know they have a gang problem. They start to rattle off street names they want the police to check.

  The officer jumps in. “We been hitting that area hard,” the officer says. “Every day we’ve been locking someone up new. We’re hitting Colfax, Kingston, Phillips real hard. They know our cars. They got so many guys out there doing lookout, hypes who work for them. They whistle when we get close.”

  He tells the residents to report whatever they see. “I call the police enough, they should know my name,” a middle-aged woman in a brown beret says. “We got some terrible kids over where we are. It be raining and sleeting and they coming and going. And the girls are worse than the boys.”

  “Amen,” Ida Mae chimes in.

  The next meeting begins with a sober announcement: “We had a shooting of one of our CAPS members at Seventy-eighth and Coles.”

  “Did they catch the offender?” a resident asks.

  “No, not as of yet.” The people look down at their hot sheets.

  The beat meetings attract all kinds of visitors—city hall bureaucrats, politicians running for reelection, people heading rape crisis centers or collecting names for this or that petition. This time, the visitor is a legal advocate in a beard and corduroy pants who doesn’t live in the neighborhood. He rises to speak and tries to get the group to join him in opposing a city ordinance that would clamp down on loitering.

  “It will make open season on all black youth,” the man says of what he believes will happen if the ordinance were to pass.

  The residents want the ordinance anyway, anything to bring them relief.

  A man in his sixties stands up as if to speak for them all.

  “We live in this neighborhood,” the man says. “We own houses and pay taxes. We’re scared to go outside. Practically every evening there’s a shooting. I don’t care about their rights. Maybe you have to get the good ones to get the bad.”

  This being Chicago, famously local in its politics, the residents of South Shore have learned where to get their immediate needs met—a broken hydrant fixed, a pothole patched, a house condemned. The alderman is the closest politician to turn to. Most Chicagoans know their alderman by sight or even personally and will call upon him without hesitation if they think he can help.

  When Ida Mae’s alderman, William Beavers, shows up at her beat meeting, there is great anticipation because he is one of the most powerful black politicians in the city and everyone knows him. He has been the Seventh Ward alderman for fourteen years. He arrives in a brown double-breasted suit and has cameras and lights and a television crew with him, which only adds to the sense of the drama of his visit.

  “The area is coming back,” he announces to the residents. He then lists what he’s doing for the ward: “We got a new field house. We’re building a senior home at Seventy-fourth and Kingston. We have a new shopping center at Ninety-fifth and Stoney.”

  Then he gets to what matters to them most, the crime, says he’s seen it himself, especially the prostitutes over on Exchange Street. “They’re on Exchange all day and all night,” he says. “They be waving, ‘Hey, Alderman Beavers!’ ”

  A woman raises her hand with a complaint that is right up his alley. “There’s no curb across the street for us,” she says.

  “I put them on the other side,” he says without apology. “I put them where the people vote.”

  He then leaves them with a hotline number to call to report crime: the number, he says, is 1-800-CRACK-44.

  South Shore is in Police Beat 421, Ward Seven, State Representative District 25, and State Senate District 13. The officeholders of the latter two districts rarely figure into the daily concerns of most people in Chicago. The state legislators are just low enough on the political food chain to go unrecognized, focused as they are on approving budgets and legislation. They are just lofty enough, however, to be seen as of little help in an immediate crisis as when, say, a drug dealer sets up shop in front of your house. It could be argued that many people could not name their state legislators off the top of their heads. As for state senators, there are fifty-nine of them, they meet in Springfield, and they are not usually household names, as would be the mayor or even one’s alderman.

  So when, in 1996, a young constitutional lawyer and community activist from Hyde Park ran for the Illinois State Senate seat in District 13, Ida Mae, voting her usual straight Democratic ticket, would become among the first people ever to have voted for the man. She would not have to give it much thought. He did not have Chicago roots and the name was unusual—Barack Obama. But he was running unopposed, having edged out the woman who had asked him to run in her place before changing her mind. His wife, Michelle, had grown up in South Shore, in the more stable section of bungalows further to the west. So Ida Mae and an overwhelming majority of the Democratic stronghold of predominantly black South Shore voted him into office as their state senator.

  On August 14, 1997, exactly one month before Alderman Beavers shows up with cameras and lights at Ida Mae’s beat meeting, Barack Obama makes an appearance. He is introduced as the state senator for the district, which not everyone in the room could be expected to know, as he has only been in office since January. He is tall, slight of build, formal in speech and attire, looks like a college student, and he arrives without lights, cameras, or entourage.

  He stands before them and gives a minilecture to these bus drivers, secretaries, nurse’s aides, and pensioners about what state legislators do. He says that while the state legislature is not responsible for the police department, it passes laws that the police have to enforce. He describes the role of the legislature in education policy and in health care. And he invites those assembled to call his office anytime.

  “Sometimes a call from the senator’s office,” he says like the professor he once was, “may be helpful in facilitating some issues that you have concerns about. Sometimes a call from my office will be answered much more quickly so we can move through some of the bureaucracy a little bit faster.”

  Ida Mae and the rest of the people listen politely and with appreciation. But, as this is just another meeting, they sit in anticipation of the reason they are here tonight: the discussion with police about the latest shootings, stabbings, and drug deals, the immediate dangers they will face just getting back home.

  The thirty-six-year-old freshman state senator finishes his presentation to Beat 421. The people clap with gratitude as they always do and then turn back to their hot sheets.

  That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States.

  NEW YORK, SPRING 1998

  THE TROUBLE BEGAN with a mysterious dark spot on the back of George Starling’s foot. One of his grandsons had been the first to notice it. George was a diabetic and knew not to take chances with such things. He made an appointment to see his doctor right away.

  The doctor admitted him to the hospital for tests. There was fear the foot might need to be amputated. “All these tests,” Pat, the niece who used to live with him and Inez, said.

  Pat came in from Washington, where she was now living, and her brother came in from New Jersey to see about their uncle. There was relief when it turned out that the foot would not need to be amputated. But George was now requiring dialysis. The knees that had always given him trouble could not be relied upon now to hold him up, and he was having a harder time keeping his balance.

  Pat and her brother helped George get up when they were there. But after they and his other visitors left, George slipped and fell in the hospital. In time, he appeared to be recovering and was looking to go home.

  “Well, they not gonna keep me no longer,” he told Pat.

  “Okay, now,” Pat said. “I’ll
be up there to see about you.”

  But he was instead transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation. While there, he lost his balance and fell again. This time he hit his head.

  By now, Gerard, his firstborn, had been alerted in Florida as to his father’s condition. The two had long been at odds. Gerard’s lifestyle was counter to everything George had worked for. Gerard had been a drug hustler operating out of Miami and Gainesville. He had had money, homes, cars, women. Wherever he showed up, he gave everybody a hundred dollars just because he could. But in recent years, he had been down on his luck. He had diabetes, like his father, and was on dialysis and insulin.

  Hearing that his father was in the hospital, he made plans to come up to New York. “We were all waiting on Gerard with great anticipation,” Pat remembered.

  It was while Gerard was trying to figure out what day to come to New York that George fell and hit his head. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and slipped into a coma. By the time Gerard made it to New York, George was unconscious and hooked up to machines to sustain him on the chance he might come out of the coma.

  Pat took Gerard to the hospital to see his father. “The moment he walked in and saw him, he broke down crying,” Pat said.

  Gerard had to leave the room. He said he couldn’t stand to see his father that way. They didn’t stay much longer.

  Gerard had not realized how grave his father’s condition was. He decided to head back to Florida, seeing as how there was nothing he could do to change things.

  “Do you want to go and see him one more time before you get ready to go?” Pat asked him.

  No, he said, he couldn’t bear it.

  Gerard drove back to Florida weak and in despair. He had missed several rounds of dialysis and had used cocaine in the interim, Pat discovered. When he got back to Gainesville, he still did not go to dialysis.

  “He had already given up,” Pat said.

  Within days of seeing his father, Gerard suffered a massive seizure and died. He was fifty-one years old. His father was not conscious enough to know that he had lost his firstborn son. George, barely alive himself, was now the last one left of the nuclear family that had begun with him and Inez some sixty years before in Eustis.

  There was no one in the hospital room when I went to see George Starling. The monitors attached to him beeped and flashed the minutest change in his vital signs. The robust onetime porter who could regale people for hours with his stories of the South and of the Great Migration was silent and motionless. He looked to be asleep, whatever wisdom or stories left now locked up inside of him. As much living as he had done, his seemed a life of missed chances and incompletion. Here was someone who had been born too early and in the wrong place to reach his true potential, had left to make a better way for himself, but had seemed to carry the sorrows of the South with him, without complaint.

  I reached for his hand and squeezed it lightly and told him I had come from Chicago to see him. His face showed no reaction. His hand managed to press back into mine.

  George Swanson Starling never came out of the coma. He died on September 3, 1998, a Thursday. Because he had migrated out of the South, lived most of his life in the North but remained connected to both, two funeral services were required. One was in New York, at the Baptist House of Prayer on 126th Street in Harlem, on September 17; the other in Florida, at Gethsemane Baptist Church in Eustis, two days later.

  In the North, in Harlem, where he had found refuge from the South, the people turned out to see him one last time. The Deacon Board, the Pastor’s Aide Club, the 132nd Street Block Association, the neighbors who had looked out for him from across the street all packed into the church. The choir sang for him and shook the floor from the choir box as the fans whirred and oscillated around them.

  One by one, people came forward to say they would miss his opening the church doors Sunday mornings, miss the sight of him reading the dictionary, and would remember him as “a gentleman of the first order.”

  A man, tentative in his steps and taking in the measure of the sanctuary, had arrived an hour early. He had a shaved head and full beard. He sat alone in the third pew as the church began to fill. His eyes were red. He stared at the silver casket, then leaned onto the pew in front of him and buried his face in his arms. When Pat arrived, she went over and sat beside him. It was Kenny, George’s younger son, whose conception had broken Inez’s heart. And that heartbreak kept him from feeling part of the family or ever truly knowing his father.

  Before George took ill, Kenny went to George and let him know how he was doing. Kenny was married, had kids, was living in the Bronx. He told him he had converted to Islam, had changed his name to Amjad Mujaahid, which means, he said, “One who is noble, a warrior in the cause of God.”

  “Daddy,” Kenny told George, “that name is in memory of you.”

  “That’s real nice, son,” Kenny remembers George saying. “I’m still calling you Kenny.”

  Now the man he wished he’d had more time to get to know was dead. The service was a blur of song and testimonials. He took off his glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes, as his father had done whenever he sang.

  It was hurricane season at the time of George Starling’s death. Hurricane Bonnie and Hurricane Danielle had gathered east of the Leeward Islands that August. By mid-September, when George Starling was transported back to the state of Florida for the last time, a new hurricane had formed and was nearing the Florida coast. The National Weather Service had named it Hurricane Georges.

  Back in Eustis, the southern funeral commenced at Gethsemane Baptist Church. But Viola Dunham, the sister-in-law he used to stay with whenever he visited, could not bring herself to go. “It’s killing me,” she said. “I want to remember him sitting in my kitchen eating breakfast and running his mouth.”

  A cousin named Lila Mae went and spoke for the people who had stayed in the South, remembering him as the hometown boy who made good in the North with his railroad job and dignified bearing.

  “As he journeyed to New York and became a porter,” she began, “nothing was finer than to see this good-looking cousin come into Wildwood station and to bring him some sausage. All of his splendor and grace. It was something to see. Little George never forgot where he came from.”

  Reuben Blye, who’d known George most of his life, sat staring out into the sanctuary in a gray suit and tie in a front pew. Sam Gaskin, who had stood up with him against the grove owners back in the forties, was there, too. A processional of eight or ten cars led by a white hearse passed through town near the corner where George had stood and waited for the open-bed truck to take pickers to the citrus groves some sixty years before.

  The cortege turned off a main thoroughfare and crept down a dirt path to a clearing of wild grass scattered with the headstones of nearly all the black people who had ever lived and died in Eustis. The cars crossed a pebbled, pitted clearing and came to a stop at a green tent pitched before two juniper bushes in the middle of Mount Olive Cemetery. A dozen people took their places before the casket. The pastor stood and said his last words: “From dust thou art …”

  That evening, the sun fell behind the horizon and made what looked like streaks of fire across the sky after George Starling was returned for the last time to the Florida earth he had fled.

  THE EMANCIPATION OF IDA MAE

  My presence will go with you. And I will give you rest.

  —EXODUS 33:14

  CHICAGO, OCTOBER 15, 1998

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IDA MAE WAS GOING BACK to visit Mississippi. It was early autumn, the same time of year she had left sixty-one years before. It would be her first time on Mississippi soil since her sister Talma had died in Tupelo in 1983. Ida Mae had gone down when she got word that her youngest sister had taken ill. She sat at the side of her sister’s bed for her last hours on this earth.

  Ida Mae remembered she had been watching Talma, and Talma had been trying to speak.

  “Don’t you
see all them people in white singing?” Talma had said, delirious. “They just singing away.”

  Ida Mae looked in the direction Talma was facing and tried to see the people in white but couldn’t. Days later, at Talma’s funeral, the choir sang in all white.

  “She saw them before,” Ida Mae said, convinced of it.

  Ida Mae and I are driving along Route 8, heading east toward Vardaman in the direction of Chickasaw County. We pass a cotton gin and bales of cotton bound in the field and covered with tarp. The bales are packed high and tight and look like cubes of Styrofoam the size of a school bus from a distance.

  We cross a gravel road with cotton on either side of it. “That cotton’s loaded,” Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big. “Let’s go pick some.”

  “You sure that’s alright?” I ask. “That’s somebody’s cotton. What if they see us?”

  “They not gon’ mind what little bit we pick,” she says, pushing open the passenger door.

  She jumps out and heads into the field. She hasn’t picked cotton in sixty years. It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to. It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.

  I follow her out, and she starts pulling at the bolls, and I pull at them too. No cars or trucks pass by, and we are surrounded by cotton.

  We carry a bouquet of cotton buds back to the car and head to her sister-in-law Jessie Gladney’s house. Along the route, there are no streetlights, traffic lights, or stop signs. There are no street signs to identify what road you are on. The directions to the house call for looking for a cotton gin, passing and keeping count of five or six bridges that are merely dirt mounds over dry creek beds, making a right at a Baptist church, and looking for the sister-in-law’s off-white double-wide on the right-hand side of the road, assuming we’re on the correct one.