“Who’s Jimmy Gay?”
James Arthur Gay was perhaps the most influential colored man in the still-segregated world of Las Vegas.112 He had migrated there from Fordyce, Arkansas, after World War II and found himself locked out of both the mortuary trade, for which he had been trained, and the resort industry, to which he aspired. College degree in hand, he worked his way up from a cook at a drive-in to become one of the first colored executives at a casino, the Sands, at a time when stars like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., were not permitted to stay in hotels on the Strip. Knowing how hard it had been for him to cross the color line in Vegas, he took it upon himself to help spirit other colored people in wherever he could, risking his own tenuous standing to do so.
Over time, he became the contact person, a secret agent of sorts, the one connection in an almost underground network in Las Vegas, where a colored visitor could not otherwise be assured of getting a room at a mainline hotel. Jimmy knew who to talk to in order to secure rooms for colored people at the Vegas hotels and knew how to do it discreetly, and he was in a position to screen, through word of mouth in that insular circle of colored people for whom he would perform such a service.
So Robert called him.
“This is Bob Foster, Jimmy,” Robert said. “Jackson and Beale told me to call you and find out if this was true. Have they opened Las Vegas up?”
“You planning to come up?”
“If we can go. Can we go? Could we come?”
“Well, how many in your party? When are you planning to come? Get your party together and call me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Robert couldn’t wait to tell his friends about it. It took them some time to get it together. A total of thirteen people signed up to go in what would be an early foray past the color line in Vegas: doctors, doctors’ wives, a school principal. They started planning right away. They made their plane and train reservations. They read up on the casinos and the shows they wanted to see. The women shopped for what seemed like weeks.
“They had three different outfits for every day,” Robert said. “Three completely different outfits.”
Jimmy had arranged for them to stay at the Riviera Hotel. Robert couldn’t wait. It was the first high-rise in Vegas. It had cost ten million dollars to build and had just opened that spring to worries that it was so big that the desert sand might sink under its weight. It was right on the Strip, its name in big letters on a V-shaped marquee above the sign for the Starlight Lounge. Dean Martin was part owner. Liberace played there. It would become the set for Ocean’s Eleven. It was so very Rat Pack, and Robert could just picture himself at a dinner show in the Clover Room. All summer, a jingle was running on the radio stations in Los Angeles about “The Riv,” as it came to be called, like it was the hottest thing going in Vegas. There’s a new high in the Las Vegas sky, the Riviera Hotel. Robert used to sing along with the jingle and only got more excited.
“You heard it a million times a day,” Robert said. “And, oh, I’d just be thinking about the trip we were going to have.”
The people who flew in piled into several taxicabs at the Vegas airport and pulled up to the canopied driveway of the Riviera with enough luggage for a celebrity road tour. They walked into the marble lobby, chatting and giddy.
“Now, we all dressed to the fingertips,” Robert said, “sharp as sharp could be. Everybody.”
Robert saw bellmen all around but noticed that no one stepped forward to get the luggage. Someone in the group asked for help. At last a bellman came and brought their luggage in, loads of it, to the front desk.
In the lobby, Robert’s group met up with the couple who had caught the train and had arrived ahead of them. The wife was named Thurma Adams. She jumped up and ran toward Robert and the others and began acting out of sorts. She was humming under her breath as if to warn them of something, but it was in a childlike code that Robert had trouble deciphering.
She was skipping as she sang, “La de, da, de, da, la de da, de da!”
“Thurma, Thurma, Thurma,” Robert said. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Just go on over to that desk,” she told him. “You’ll see.”
Robert understood instantly. “And chills went through me,” he remembered. “A wave of nausea.”
Phoenix again.
“Oh hell, we ain’t gonna get this room,” he thought to himself. “The same story, ‘There’s no room in here.’ ”
Here they were, thirteen travelers just arrived in a place they thought had opened up to people like them. They couldn’t have been sure of it but wanted so much to believe that they had taken the chance anyway, and now they were being told there were no accommodations for them, and they’re standing there in the gilded lobby like refugees, homeless in their tailored suits and sequins and with enough luggage for a European holiday.
Robert tried to calm himself and salvage the situation. He went over to the front desk just as he had in Phoenix, but more assured this time because he had been through this before and besides, he was a Californian now.
“This is Dr. Robert Foster,” he began. “We have a party of thirteen people from Los Angeles. We are supposed to have room reservations.”
“Who made them?” the clerk asked.
“Mr. Jimmy Gay made them,” Robert answered.
“Who’s Jimmy Gay?”
“Jimmy Gay knows somebody here. I didn’t get the name of the person who made them for me.”
The front-desk clerk called the reservations supervisor, and he came out.
“And they looked, and they looked and they looked and they looked,” Robert remembered.
“They looked for what they knew wasn’t there. And I know that one, too.”
The front desk said it could find no reservation for any of them, made no offer to accommodate them, and made no suggestions nor showed any interest in where else they might possibly go.
“So I’m standing there fuming,” Robert said many years later. “How do I get out of this? How we gonna get out this hotel with all this luggage? Humiliation galore. I felt everybody in the place looking at us. I felt as if the shower door had fallen, and I looked up and saw I had an audience of fifty people. I just felt that they could see clear through me that we had been rejected. And that was what I felt at that desk.”
He decided to call Jimmy Gay from a phone booth in the hotel. Maybe that would clear things up. Fortunately, Jimmy was home.
Jimmy told him that he would check on it and that Robert should stay by the phone booth.
“Don’t let anybody use the phone you on,” Jimmy said. “Block it. Leave the line open. I want to make a phone call, and I’ll call you right back. Stay by the phone.”
Jimmy couldn’t locate the reservations clerk he had talked to at the Riviera, late as it was. So he came up with an alternative.
“Go to the Sands Hotel,” he instructed. He told them who to ask for when they got there. “He’ll take care of you and the party.”
So Robert and the twelve others once again loaded into several cabs and went to the Sands Hotel. Because Jimmy had made reservations at the Riviera and not the Sands, the Sands didn’t have enough rooms for the entire party that night. The Sands made arrangements for them to stay at yet another hotel, the Flamingo Capri, further down on the Strip.
“We’ll come and get you tomorrow,” the front-desk clerk said. The Sands kept its word, and the next morning they were, at last, all unpacking their things at the Sands.
“I got a warm spot with Sands for what they did for us,” Robert would say years later.
Jimmy Gay and his wife, Hazel, puddle-hopped them from nightclub to nightclub where Jimmy knew they would be accepted. They heard Pearl Bailey in the lounge. They made three shows a night. And Robert got to go inside the casinos he had heard his fellow physicians brag and goad him about for months and that he dreaded hearing mention of. But now he didn’t have to dread it anymore.
“We lived the part,” Robert said.
&nbs
p; He remembered one night in particular. He was wearing a black mohair suit he ordered specifically for the occasion from the tailor who dressed Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra. He wore a black tie with a burgundy stripe, a white tab-collar shirt, gold cuff links, black shoes, black silk socks, and a white handkerchief with his initials, RPF, embroidered in silver.
All the humiliation melted away, the white doctors’ idle chatter, the rejection at the Riviera.
He was finally in the world he belonged in, living out a dream like an honorary member of the Rat Pack. Jim Crow, the South, Louisiana, Monroe, Phoenix, the downside of L.A.—all gone for now. He was in a casino out of a movie. Dean Martin could have walked in any minute, or so it seemed, and here was Robert, right in the middle of it, acting as if he’d been to it.
“And I am playing the roulette. And I’m enjoying myself, and I’m having a good time, and I’m standing up betting over some other people there, and I hit my number, and I eased the buttons loose on the coat, and I hit number eleven, and I reached over like this to pick up my chips and open my coat and show my blood red silk lining.
“People said, ‘Oh, look at that!’ A white woman said that. She had never seen a red lining in a suit. That was very avant-garde. All this conservative stuff outside. And this red satin lining inside.”
For once he would not be dreading lunchtime at the hospital that Monday
CHICAGO, EARLY 1939
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
GEORGE AND IDA MAE had been in the North for close to two years. They had three little ones to feed and were still having trouble finding work. They had arrived in the depths of the Great Depression with the fewest skills any migrant could have but with the most modest of expectations and the strongest of backs. They had taken their chances and found even the most menial jobs hard to come by.
Anything with the least amount of status or job security seemed reserved for people who did not look like them and often spoke with an accent from a small eastern European country they had never heard of. They were running into the same sentiment, albeit on a humbler level, that a colored man in Philadelphia faced when he answered an ad for a position as a store clerk. “What do you suppose we’d want of a Negro?” the storekeeper asked the applicant.113
George had been struggling since he arrived. He had worked on a coal truck, dug ditches for the Works Progress Administration, delivered ice to the tenements on the South Side, and been turned away from places that said they weren’t hiring or just had nothing for him. He would just keep looking until he found something.
Finally, he landed a job that suited his temperament on the soup-making line at the Campbell Soup plant, a place so big there was bound to be some work for him if the people were open to hiring him, which, fortunately for him, they were.114 The plant was on twenty-two acres at Thirty-fifth and Western by the panhandle tracks, where they mixed several thousand tomatoes and oxtails at a time to make soup for customers west of the Mississippi. He had been working all his life, but this was the first indoor job he had ever had.
His days would now turn on the directions of foremen and the spinning of machinery, the orderly and finite ticking of the company punch clock instead of the rhythms of the field, where he and Ida Mae used to work according to what an anthropologist once called “the great clocks of the sky.”115
The plant turned out six thousand cans of soup a minute along three miles of tracks and switches.116 He was entering the world of assembly-line factory culture, the final destination of many unskilled black southerners once they got established in the North. Whatever reception he got, good or bad, he kept it to himself, as was his way, and he carried out whatever duties he was to perform without complaint, whatever kind of soup was coming down the vats in his direction.
Like so many others, he had gone from the mind-numbing sameness of picking cotton to the mind-numbing sameness of turning a lever or twisting a widget or stoking a flame for one tiny piece of a much larger thing he had no control over. He had moved to a different part of the country but was on the same rung of the ladder. It was, in some ways, not all that different from picking cotton. The raw bolls went off to some mill in Atlanta or Massachusetts to be made into something refined and unrecognizable from what he saw of it, from the poorly remunerated kernel of the thing that represented George’s and other sharecroppers’ contribution to the final product intended for someone far better off than he. Except now, in Chicago, he would get paid.
Just by being able to keep his job, which he would for many years, George would be spared the contentious relations at so many plants in the North, where the migrants were scorned if they were hired at all, or outright turned away. Most migrants like George were hired into either menial labor—janitors or window cleaners or assembly-line workers—or hard labor—longshoremen, coal miners, stokers of foundries and diggers of ditches, which is what he had done before landing the assembly-line job at Campbell Soup.
Many companies simply didn’t hire colored workers at all but for altogether different reasons from the South. It wasn’t because of an explicit Berlin Wall of exclusion, written into law and so engrained as to not need to be spelled out for people on either side, as in the South. Instead, in the North, companies and unions said that, however much they might want to hire colored people, their white workers just wouldn’t stand for it. And, for the sake of morale, the companies and unions weren’t going to force the issue.
A glass plant in Pittsburgh tried to hire colored workers, but the white workers ran them out, the researcher Abraham Epstein reported, by cursing them and “making conditions so unpleasant they were forced to quit.”117 At a steel mill there, the white bargemen threatened to walk out “because black workers were introduced among them.” The white workers at the mill were appeased only “by the provision of separate quarters” for the colored workers.
A factory in Chicago reported that after it hired colored workers, there was “friction in the washrooms” and that “for every colored girl employed, we lost five white girls.”118
“I find a great resentment among all our white people,” the manager of a wholesale millinery in Chicago reported.119 “I couldn’t overcome the prejudice enough to bring the people in the same building, and had to engage outside quarters for the blacks.… We thought it would be nice if we would start a school for machine operators.… I received a delegation from our sewing hall who said they resented the idea. They wouldn’t listen to it at all, and I had to abandon the project. Their argument was: ‘If you let them in it won’t be long until we are out entirely.’ The attitude against the colored is only the same as it was against the Slavs or the foreign races when they first intruded the field.”
Somehow the migrants persisted, partly because they had little choice and could only hope that open-minded whites might see past the preconceptions. A Chicago laundry, for instance, reported that when it hired its first colored girl, “the white girls threatened to quit. The manager asked them to wait a week and, if they still objected, he would let her go.” As it turned out, the white girls grew to like the colored girl, and she was permitted to stay.
Overall, however, what was becoming clear was that, north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.
The dynamic was not lost on northern industrialists, who hired colored workers as strikebreakers and resorted to them to keep their labor costs down just as companies at the end of the twentieth century would turn to the cheap labor of
developing nations like Malaysia and Vietnam. The introduction of colored workers, who had long been poorly paid and ill treated, served as a restraint on what anyone around them could demand.
“Their presence and availability for some of the work being performed by whites, whether they are actually employed or not,” wrote the sociologist Charles S.120 Johnson, “acts as a control on wages.”
By the time George managed to find steady work, he was joining the forty percent of black men doing unskilled or semiskilled work in Chicago in the 1940s. Another thirty-four percent of black men were working as servants, meaning that, for three out of four black men, the only work they could get was work that nobody else wanted—lowly and menial or hard, dangerous, and dirty. Nearly the inverse was true for white men, the majority of whom—some sixty percent—were doing skilled, clerical, business, or professional work, clean indoor jobs.
The ceiling was even lower and the options fewer for colored women, a situation that was making it even harder for Ida Mae to find work. By 1940, two out of every three colored women in Chicago were servants, as against seventeen percent of white women (most of those newly arrived immigrants).121 Only a fraction of colored women—a mere seven percent—were hired to do clerical work—common and upstanding positions for women of the day—compared to forty-three percent of white women.
Under these conditions, Ida Mae and George found themselves at the bottom looking up at the layers of immigrants, native-born white people, and even northern-born black people who were stacked above them in the economic hierarchy of the North. It was all well and good that George now had a job at Campbell Soup. But they would never be able to get settled in Chicago until Ida Mae found reliable work. So Ida set out to look whenever George wasn’t at work and, the rest of the time, took care of the children.
By now it was winter in Chicago, and the cold was beginning to get to her. She had never felt anything like it before. It was a supernatural kind of cold that burned the tips of her fingers and hunted her down through the layers of sweaters to the half inch of skin that happened to have been left unprotected.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 37
