The Warmth of Other Suns

by Isabel Wilkerson

  By the time Lil George was old enough to notice, it seemed as if the whole world was crazy, not because of any single event but because of the slow discovery of just how circumscribed his life was turning out to be. All this stepping off the sidewalk, not looking even in the direction of a white woman, the sirring and ma’aming and waiting until all the white people had been served before buying your ice cream cone, with violence and even death awaiting any misstep. Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price whichever they chose.

  No one sat George down and told him the rules. His father was quiet and kept his wounds to himself. George’s teachers were fear and instinct. The caste system trained him to see absurdity as normal.

  Like the time George went for an ice cream cone at the pharmacy in downtown Eustis. He wouldn’t be able to sit at the counter, he knew that going in. Anytime a white customer walked up, he had to step back and wait for him or her to be served first. George had learned this, too, by now. The pharmacist had a dog, a little terrier. And when George walked up to the counter, three or four white men who were standing around looked at one another and then at the pharmacist. The owner called out to the dog. And the dog jumped up onto the counter.

  When the pharmacist had everyone’s attention, he turned to the dog.

  “What would you rather do?” the pharmacist asked the dog. “Be a nigger or die?”

  The dog rolled over on cue. It flipped onto its back, folded its legs, shut its eyes, and froze. The grown people at the counter and up front near George shook with laughter.

  George was a teenager and outnumbered. He was the only one of his kind in this place. All he could do was stand there and take it. Any other response would require an explanation. What’s the matter with you, boy? You don’t like it? he could hear them saying.

  All kinds of thoughts went through his mind. “A whole lot of things,” he said. “How you’d like to kill all of ’em, for one thing.”

  On its face, it looked to be a black-and-white world, but George learned soon enough that the caste system was a complicated thing that had a way of bringing out the worst in just about all concerned. Sometimes it seemed that loyalty didn’t stand a chance against suspicion and self-preservation. Even on the lowest rung, some people would squeeze what little they could even when nobody had anything.

  Reverend J. W. Brinson was a jackleg preacher who ran the colored grocery store on MacDonald in Egypt town. The store had a slot machine that took customers’ nickels and dimes but gave hardly any back. People went in and played the dime machine for an hour or two, and everybody could see that the machine was ready to deliver. That’s when Reverend Brinson would step in and close up shop. “He figure that machine is getting hot and is gonna start paying off,” George recalled. “And he run everybody out the store.”

  George and his friends walked out as told. Then they watched old man Brinson take the slot machine to his house next door. “We would tip up on the porch,” George said, “and we could hear him in there in the bedroom and hear that slot machine just ringing. And he just be burning it up trying to get that jackpot for himself.”

  On top of that, the merchandise in the grocery store was unjustly high, to hear George tell it, and he and his friends resented it. They found a way to get back what they figured they had overpaid.

  They noticed that Reverend Brinson went into town the same time every day, leaving the store in the care of his wife, Mary, who was a sweet woman but couldn’t count. One day the boys sat under a big old oak tree and waited for Reverend Brinson to pull away. Then they went in and played nice to Miss Brinson.

  “Hi, Miss Brinson.”

  “Hello, boys. How y’all?”

  “We wanna get something, Miss Brinson.”

  “Yeah, alright. What y’all want?”

  “We want ten cent worth of bologna.”

  The Brinsons had a scale in the back of the store where the icebox was, which required Miss Brinson to go back in the icebox, get the roll of bologna, and bring it to the butcher block near the counter. She carved enough slices until it looked about right, cutting less than she needed so as not to waste slices the customer didn’t want. Then she went back to the scales to weigh the bologna as the boys watched.

  “Oh, Miss Brinson, you ain’t quite got ten cent worth up there yet. You got to get some more.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she said, admitting the discrepancy.

  She hauled the loaf of bologna back to slice some more, leaving the slices she had already cut on the counter, two or three of which the boys slipped into their mouths. She came huffing back with the extra slices, only to learn it still wasn’t enough.

  “Oh, you ain’t got it yet, Miss Brinson.”

  Back and forth she went, the loaf shrinking and the scale not budging, until the boys were full from the extra slices they’d eaten.

  “Aw, that’s alright, Miss Brinson. That’s close enough. Just wrap it up.”

  Come summer, the Brinsons set watermelons out on the bare floor in front of the counter. George and the other boys saw them there and decided to go in one day. They lined up along the counter and started looking around. One pointed to a jar of pickles on the very top shelf.

  “Miss Brinson, how much is that jar of pickles up there?”

  “Well. Let me see now. Which one?”

  Miss Brinson went to get the ladder and climbed up to check. And as she stretched herself to reach the last jar, one of the boys took his foot and started a watermelon rolling. He kicked it to the next boy, who kicked it to the next boy, until the melon had rolled and creaked down the wood plank floor toward the front screen. The last boy was positioned to kick it outside, none of them for a second taking his eyes off Miss Brinson, still reaching for the jar of pickles. They would get two or three watermelons that way.

  Poor Reverend Brinson must have suspected that they stole from him, and he kept his prices high, which only encouraged more pilfering. It was George’s and the other boys’ way of getting justice in an unjust world. And so it went in Egypt town, the poor at odds with the broke.

  George was a boy interested in the things boys are interested in and not particularly wanting to live the life the preachers set out at Gethsemane Baptist Church. Not then, anyway. There wasn’t much to do around Eustis when school was out. Sure, they could fish and swim awhile in one of the lakes. But there weren’t any jobs, and so they got into the things that boys get into, like picking green oranges while the church people sang about Jesus.

  He was friends with a bootlegger’s brother who lived behind the poolroom. Grown men roosted on the benches out front like crows on a fence, and there were big trees all around. The boys shot pool when the grown men let them and then made off with a pint of the bootlegger’s moonshine. They poured water in place of the liquor and put the bottle back where they found it. They figured they weren’t hurting anybody. The bootlegger was breaking the law anyway. They figured it was like taking something that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place.

  George was growing taller and bigger and was in high school now. He grew to over six feet and started playing basketball at Curtright. He was walking taller and straighter. One day he went up to Ocala to see his grandmother the root doctor. He liked to surprise her, so he didn’t let her know that he was coming. But she knew anyway. “You think you slipped up on me,” she said once. “I knew you was coming ’cause my nose was itching. I just told somebody, ‘Somebody’s coming to see me.’ ”

  She saw the change in him, how he was wearing grown folks’ clothes, walking taller, straighter, suddenly aware of how he looked in a mirror. It always happened that the young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth. “I see George got you in long pants now,” she said. “You must be smelling yourself.”

  It’s true that George got into his shar
e of devilment, but, fortunately for him, it turned out that he had a thing for numbers and words. He could remember just about anything that was set in front of him, and school came easy to him. He devoured books even though they were the white schools’ leftovers and had pages missing. He started to think about how he could escape this place, maybe even go to college.

  The kids noticed and looked to George to help them with their lesson. But they seemed to wish they didn’t have to ask. They would turn around and tease him for doing what they should have been doing.

  “So what you doing tonight, George?”

  “Getting my lesson.”

  “Yeah, you go on and get your lesson, and we’ll get the girls.”

  George couldn’t abide the teasing and didn’t believe they were doing all they said they were anyway. He would finish his homework and tip over to the house of whatever girl they said they were having their fun with. He would sweet-talk the girl, and since he was tall and not, as they say, hard on the eyes, he managed to do quite well, in his estimation.

  The next day in school, the boasting would commence.

  “They brag about how they were with this girl last night,” George said years later. “I say to myself, ‘I know you lying.’ But I couldn’t tell them. I used to walk the back roads. Nobody would see me.”

  George was always observing the developments around him, and here was a lesson in the underhanded nature of some human relations. “I know they would be telling lies on the girls,” he said years later, “ ’cause I be setting up there with that same girl in her house. That’s how I found out how the boys lie on girls.”

  He didn’t want them knowing his business. He indulged them instead.

  “What’d you do last night, Lil George?”

  “Man, I had so much work. I was getting my lesson.”

  By the time they got old enough to work, most of the kids had dropped out of school altogether. By graduation day, there were only six seniors in the Class of 1936 at Curtright Vocational Training School, and George Swanson Starling was valedictorian. He got accepted to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical State College in Tallahassee. His father did not really understand why he would want to go when he could be making a little money picking in the groves. But he sent him anyway.

  George came home with better than decent grades. But a year passed and then another whole six months with other people working and George just reading books. His father didn’t see the point of it. In the middle of George’s sophomore year, his father told him he had gotten enough schooling and it was time for him to work. Maybe he could pick it up later.

  Big George didn’t see where it made much difference anyway, hardly anybody they knew went to college. The father had only gone to fifth grade, and he was doing alright, running the store and packing fruit at the Eichelberger Packing Company.

  “With two years of college, you should be able to be president of the United States,” his father figured.

  “But I’m taking a four-year course number, and you dropping me in the middle of the stream. I’m not prepared to do anything because I’m only halfway there.”

  George had made valedictorian at Curtwright and, just as significant to him, was the only one from his high school to finish the first year of college without failing any subject. He thought he deserved better.

  But his father had made up his mind. Lil George was his namesake, but he wasn’t his only concern. Big George had remarried since coming to Eustis. He had a wife now and two stepsons to think about. He had that little store to keep up and dreams of a little orange grove of his own for his old age. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had to send George back to school to study Socrates and polynomials. It was an outrageous indulgence when everybody else was working the groves every day.

  A few days later, George was looking for some papers. Rummaging through a dresser drawer, he found some postal receipts for deposits his father had made in a savings account at the post office.

  “He had a drawer full of them where he was saving in the post office,” George said years later. “But he was telling me he didn’t have any money. And that made me angry, and I couldn’t sense it into him that I needed to go on and get the other two years. So I just got angry and evil, and I decided I would do something to hurt him.”

  George had gotten around with the girls, but he always seemed to come back to one in particular. Inez Cunningham was a girl from the backwoods with full cheeks and a narrow waist who had endured an even more unsettled childhood than he had. Her parents had died young and left her in the care of a Pentecostal aunt who trotted her to late-night church meetings with holy rollers talking in tongues. She spent so much of her girlhood in the quaking pews of the Pentecostal church that she swore she would never join a church again if she got free. She kept her word and never did.

  She wore plaits and plain dresses and didn’t have the pomaded hair some other girls had or the stockings and jewelry that made certain girls look more refined. But she had a way of smiling and tilting her head to the side and some kind of simpatico, outsider way of looking at the world that appealed to a young man like George who felt life had never cut him a fair deal.

  She had graduated from high school and was doing the common and necessary job of cleaning white people’s homes. But with George up in Tallahassee around those well-turned-out coeds training to be teachers, she fixated on her deficiencies. She imagined her competition in high heels and straight hair, their dignified talk turning George’s head. She convinced herself he would choose one of them over her and told him as much.

  Big George didn’t want Inez around his son either. She was from the backwoods and, in the pecking order that emerged even on the lowest rung—people with house notes versus people who paid rent, factory workers versus servants—Big George saw Inez as lower than the Starlings.

  During spring break of his sophomore year, the subject of school came up again. George asked his father if he would send him back, and again the answer was no. George was incensed and decided to do something about it. It was April 19, 1939. He took his father’s car and drove up to the house where Inez lived.

  “Come on, let’s take a ride,” he said.

  “What you doing?”

  “Come on, let’s ride.”

  “Well, where you going?”

  “Oh, just a ride.”

  She hopped in, and he drove south for five miles to Tavares, the county seat. He drove around to the back of the courthouse, where the jail was, and slowed to a stop.

  “Where you going?” Inez asked, alarmed now.

  He grabbed her hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  He led her upstairs and into the magistrate’s office.

  “Well, what can I do for ya, boy?” the magistrate said.

  “We come to get married,” George said.

  Inez nearly fainted. She looked to George to explain himself.

  “Well, you been pressuring me about gettin’ married. You’re telling me that I’m gonna end up marrying one of those college girls that’s getting a schoolteacher’s education. And you’re not gonna be good enough for me. And I keep telling you that that wouldn’t make any difference. But you can’t seem to believe that, and you don’t want to wait. I wanted to show you that you the only one that I wanted. So we just gonna get married now.”

  Inez stood there with her mouth open. “I—I didn’t know” was all she could manage.

  She was wearing whatever dress she happened to put on that morning, and he had on whatever he’d thrown on, too.

  “Now, you know that’ll cost you a dollar fifty, boy,” the county judge, A. S. Herlong, said. “A dollar for the license. Fifty cent for a witness.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The judge went through the vows and declared them man and wife. She was twenty-one. He was twenty and not legally old enough to marry.

  “I told the man I was twenty-one,” George later said. “They didn’t care. If you black, they don’t car
e nothin’ about Negroes. They didn’t check it out. I would be twenty-one in a couple of months. But anyway, we got married.”

  As they drove back to Eustis, George told Inez his plan.

  “You gon’ have to continue to stay with your people. We got to keep this secret until I find out whether I’m going back to school or not.”

  George left out a crucial bit of information in what he told Inez, although it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. “I didn’t tell her my ulterior motive,” he said years later. Now, in all fairness, he said, “I was in love with her. But I didn’t have no intention of getting married, not at that stage, until I got mad with my daddy. He didn’t even want me to be courting this girl, much less talking about marrying her.

  “So I figured that would fix him up good ’cause he won’t send me back to school,” he said. “I got in all that trouble for a dollar fifty cents.”

  George hadn’t really thought his revenge scheme through to completion. He held out hope that his father would change his mind. George would spring the news about Inez on him only if his father didn’t come around. The two of them kept their secret through the spring and into the summer, when George went to New York like a lot of college students from the South to make spending money for school.

  He worked at a dry cleaner’s in Flatbush and lived with the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor in Ocala. Toward the end of the summer, he wrote his father: I have my money for my books and everything. I bought what clothing I’ll need. Are you going to be able to pay my tuition?