The craziness has Ida Mae hemmed in on all sides. When she leaves to go to church, if she goes to buy groceries, if she takes a walk to get some exercise, the drug dealers and lookout boys greet her as she leaves and welcome her when she gets back. When she hears sirens or gunshots, she runs to the window to see what has happened now. She is an eyewitness to a war playing out on the streets below her. Staying on top of everything is how she makes peace with the craziness she cannot escape.
She would never dream of going outside at night by herself. But it is not because she is afraid of the gangbangers and the drug dealers. She speaks to them and prays for them, and in turn they look out for her. They call her “Grandma” and tell her not to come out on certain days.
“You better stay in the house,” they tell her. “Because we don’t know what time we gon’ start shootin’.”
On a July afternoon, she is telling her story about the ride up north and making her way in Chicago in those early days. We are in the middle of a conversation when something crashes outside the window. It rattles me, and I look toward the window to see what it might be. Ida Mae does not flinch. She has learned the difference between danger and mischief, between a gunshot and a rock through a window. Whatever it was, it’s as if it didn’t happen.
“Did you hear that?” I ask her. “Sounds like some glass broke.”
“Honey, they does that. They throw bottles at each other.”
“You didn’t even look up.”
“I hear too much of it,” she says. “I’d be lookin’ all day.” She lets out a big laugh.
Every day, there is something or other. On an otherwise quiet afternoon, we look out the window and see two police officers leading a black man in a white windbreaker and baseball cap, hands cuffed, down the sidewalk in front of the apartment building next door.
“That’s the janitor,” she tells me. “He works there. Wonder what did he do?”
He lopes along, head up, scanning the street like a politician on a tour of his district. He looks both ways before stepping off the curb to cross the street to the patrol car. He nods his respects to the teenage girls walking past.
Ida Mae doesn’t know what he has done, but figures she’ll find out in due course.
“People talk,” she says. “You don’t have to ask.”
She has an idea of what it was. There was a raid in the building a few weeks before. The police took seventeen or eighteen people out in handcuffs.
“Did it at night,” she says. “They carried them all out tied together. I got tired of counting. You know that still ain’t stop them? They still up in there. I don’t know what’ll stop ’em. I guess the Lord knows.”
She watches and makes note of what’s going on around her. Every month, there’s a neighborhood crime watch meeting, and she is sure to attend. Trouble is, she believes some of the police are not much better than the criminals. “The detectives are the ones doing the dirt,” she says. Somehow, some of the dealers are onto the police or get forewarning of their arrival. “They have a phone,” she says. “They know when the police coming.”
Still, she manages to stay out of everybody’s way. She may be stuck in her own home, but she has too much faith or stubbornness to let fear take over.
“I ain’t gone live nowhere scared,” she says. “I ain’t calling the police. Long as they don’t bother me. If I know what’s going on, they do, too.”
And she refuses to put bars on the windows. “My husband say, he never be behind no bars,” she says. “And neither am I.”
2
HARLEM, 1996
IT REQUIRES descending down a narrow set of stairs into an airless vestibule in the basement of a three-story brownstone to get to where the owner lives. He has taken the dankest, darkest space for himself and given over the rest of the building, the rooms with light and space, to whatever tenants he has.
George Starling never cared about creature comforts and finery but about getting a square deal, which he on occasion achieved, and the right to exercise the free will he was not permitted in the South. His life is scattered in boxes all over his room, file folders stuffed with pictures of him and Inez as teenagers in Florida, mimeographed copies of his lawyerly letters to the railroad or union leaders about this or that provision or instance of inequity, and the funeral programs of loved ones who have passed away.
He is seventy-eight now, a grandfather and great-grandfather, a deacon in the church. He sits upright and stoic. He enunciates each syllable in this early conversation and speaks in the deliberate and formal manner of the professor he once wanted to be. But the longer he talks, the more comfortable he gets and the more he sounds like the southerner he is inside.
He feels it his responsibility to share what he knows and takes it upon himself to explain whatever he says in the greatest detail. He talks for forty-five patient and exacting minutes about what it takes to pick string beans and describes the difference between the walking buds, the junior buds, the uncle buds, and seedling trees he used to pick back in Florida.
A car pulls up. It’s his pastor, Reverend Henry Harrison, dropping by to see Deacon Starling. The pastor, hearing the topic of the South and the Migration, begins telling the story of how his father escaped from a labor camp in South Carolina by swimming through a swamp, and, eventually, in 1930, finding his way to New York.
Both men start to lament the changes all around them, the sadder effects of the big city of the North on the people of the South. George waxes on about the days when “people would come down to 135th Street with their house chairs, and they would baptize people in the Harlem River.
“We used to have a boat ride off 125th Street in the Dyckman section,” he says.
“Spread the blankets out. Midsummer, people didn’t have air-conditioning. People would stay up there all night and play card games.
“Things were so much different,” he says. “Drugs wasn’t heard of where I came from. When I came to New York, I didn’t know what a reefer was.”
“We got to being Americanized,” Reverend Harrison is saying. “It got to where we don’t help each other.”
George has children and grandchildren and even a great-grandchild now, but there is an aloneness to the character of his life. He seems content in the solitude of his room with its dust-covered floor, barely made bed, and no sign of a woman’s touch. He seems on a mission to sort through the paperwork of his life, find some meaning in all the railroad pamphlets and official letters he wrote on behalf of workers’ rights that were politely dismissed or not acted upon.
His face turns ashen and he looks away when the subject turns to his children and grandchildren. His son by Inez had squandered the very opportunities George had left the South for, and he had limited contact with the now-grown son he had outside his marriage.
Then there was the daughter, Sonya. She was sweet but unsettled, too, back and forth between Florida and New York. George had been having heart trouble and had just come out of triple bypass surgery when he got word that Sonya had died in a car accident down in Eustis.
He flew down to Florida for the funeral. The people who had stayed in the South gathered around to console him.
“We would be in a room with a crowd of people,” his niece Pat said, “and he would get up and leave the room. He’d come back and just carry on the conversation. You knew he had been crying.”
He buried his daughter next to his wife.
3
LOS ANGELES, SPRING 1996
THIS IS THE 1970s set piece known as Dr. Robert Foster’s living room. It is a room that is little changed, you learn, from the time when his wife, Alice, was alive. You are encased in cream and raspberry upholstery, sea foam carpet, and harvest gold draperies cascading down from ten-foot ceilings, more space than one person could possibly need and, by that measure alone, the very picture of success in California.
The host has momentarily disappeared down a hall and into the avocado green and harvest gold kitchen. He emerges, takin
g care with his steps, with a tray of lemon pound cake with vanilla ice cream, which you would really prefer not to take, since you have only just eaten; but it is clear from the formality with which he presents it and then watches as you pick up the fork that there is no choice but to accept this gesture of hospitality.
In a bookcase, there are volumes of Tolstoy, Freud, Goethe, and Herodotus. On his face is a smile of satisfaction at the interest being taken in a life he loves to talk about.
You learn the basics of what he wishes you to know about his growing up in Monroe, marrying the daughter of a university president, leaving the South for California, about the three daughters and now the grandchildren, the gambling and the current state of his health and how he views the world as a southern émigré in California. Those things will be fleshed out in due time over the course of several months.
You learn that right now he has heart problems, has already had bypass surgery. “The chest pain is growing more frequent,” he says. “But I’m not going to have another operation. If anything happened to me tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any regrets. I have lived. I’ve done it all. The world don’t owe me nothin’.”
He is retired from the practice of medicine and spends most of his time at the blackjack tables or on the phone dispensing free medical advice to former patients and old friends or ordering around a gardener who indulges his every whim as to precisely where the begonias should be. Years before, Robert woke up the morning of his oldest daughter’s wedding, and, instead of taking his time dressing in his tuxedo, he got out and had the front yard dug up to plant flowers to match Bunny’s wedding bouquet.
Now, on this late spring afternoon, he was fretting over the backyard. “Now turn it a little more,” he was telling the gardener one day about a particular pot of geraniums. “Not to the left! To the right! To the right!”
He has come all this way and is living in a 3,600-square-foot monument to his success in California. But the most enduring accomplishments you cannot see: the cooks and teachers and postal workers all over southern California who would do just about anything for him because he had saved their lives or brought them into the world or repaired some broken piece of themselves. And the three daughters whom he spared from having to go to segregated schools in the South and who grew up free with their cotillions in California.
The daughters lead upper-middle-class lives, had married well if not long, and have children who can only be said to be brilliant. Bunny is now working as an artists’ agent in Chicago. Robin is a city manager who is living outside Washington with her second husband and her son, who is being courted by the Ivies. The youngest daughter, Joy, is a physician—a radiologist—married to a day trader, and has two precocious young children in Long Beach, about thirty miles south of Robert.
Alice never got to see the fruits of her labor, and, at weddings and holidays, it falls to Robert to be mother and father, neither of which he is naturally suited for. But he rises to the occasion when called upon to do so. When Joy brought home a young man she appeared to be serious about, Robert stepped forward as a father protecting his youngest.
He asked the young man, Lee Ballard, to go out for a drive to the dry cleaners with him. He made it sound like a request, which, of course, it was not. Lee climbed into Robert’s white Cadillac, and Robert began driving, erratic as usual. Then Robert began his inquiries.
“How do you like California?” he asked Lee once they were on their way. “And how do you plan to take care of my daughter?”
The drive lasted two hours. The beau survived the drive and ended up marrying Robert’s youngest daughter. The marriage would last longer than those of the other girls.
The telephone rings. It’s the third or fourth time in the space of a couple of hours. The phone usually starts ringing around three or four o’clock, after people get home from seeing their new doctors. Robert excuses himself to take the call in the kitchen. It’s another friend and former patient calling about an ailment and how best to treat it and to check to see if his new doctor is prescribing the right medication. Robert indulges the man, addresses his worries, gives him advice.
“Demerol is the name of it,” Robert is telling the person on the other end of the line. “Now, put something in your stomach.”
The person has more questions for Robert about what he’s been prescribed.
“Percodan? Any of those things nauseate the heck out of you,” Robert tells him. “Take as little medicine as you can—”
The person interrupts, and Robert listens.
“Take your aspirin,” Robert tells him.
The person cuts in again, still expressing concern. Robert reassures him.
“Sounds like you going to be alright, Phil. God bless you.”
EUSTIS, FLORIDA, JULY 1996
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
SOME FIFTY-ONE YEARS have passed since the standoff in the central Florida citrus groves that almost got George Starling killed. He has lived out his life in New York. The grove owners he stood up to are long dead, as is the high sheriff, old Willis McCall, who lorded over Lake County with a Smith and Wesson and a ten-gallon hat.
George has felt it safe to come back to visit and is now sitting at a diner out by Ocala with his old friend Reuben Blye, who was one of George’s picking foremen back in the forties. They both had lived up north. Reuben, at age eighty-nine, is now living back in Florida with his sixth wife, having survived the treachery of the South and the temptations of the North and is at this moment reliving those days with George, who is back in town for a high school reunion.
“Do you know a Florida man got more sense than a born New Yorker, George?” Reuben asks, not really looking for George to answer. “You know that?”
“I had never given it a thought that way.”
“One that’s been around like us, George. We know our way around better than some of them up there.”
“Well, you had to have a lot of sense to learn how to survive down here during those times to stay out of trouble, you know.”
“George, you done run that railroad so long up and down from coast to coast on the train,” Reuben says. “And look how we travel. Look at Rube, done travel, done made thirty-seven states. I already had it in my head. You don’t get me every day.”
As torn as George was about his time in Florida, he had never truly left it in his mind. Ever since his father had died, he had kept a little piece of property in Eustis, vacant land with live oaks and scrub brush near the house where his father had run the little convenience store. He never knew exactly what he would do with it and had no plans to live there ever again. He just liked the idea of having control over something in a place that had controlled his every step for so long.
“When I left, I swore that I would never come back under no circumstances anymore,” he said. “When I left, I was just that bitter. I didn’t intend to come back at all.”
Ten years passed before he felt it safe to return. The deaths and illnesses lured him back and he began to see how the South seemed to be changing, in small ways and big ways, right before his eyes. “I never thought I would live to see the day,” he said of some of the strides being made. “If anybody told me that there would be a black mayor in Birmingham, I would have told them they were crazy. Now they have black mayors all over the place down south. How many black mayors we got up north?”
He had once seen a black man and a white woman walking down the street in downtown Tavares, the county seat and the domain of old Willis McCall. George was having a hard time getting used to seeing what could have gotten him killed in his day.
“I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would walk down the street holding hands with a white woman,” he said. “It amazes me when I see the intermingling. When I was a boy down here, when you went through the white neighborhood you had to be practically running. Now black people are living in there. They all mixed up with the whites right there in Eustis.”
We are riding through Eustis and out
to the orange groves near Sanford and the train station in Wildwood where the relatives would come to greet George when his train passed through. He and Reuben are returning to the places where they picked oranges and okra, the places they could and couldn’t go and where the black people lived. Reuben does most of the directing because he has been living back in Florida for several years now. George sits up and starts pointing when he sees something he recognizes.
“They used to baptize us down here,” George says as we wind past Lake Eustis. “To the left are the water oak trees.”
We drive farther out. The land is wild scrub brush broken by stands of domed trees, the citrus that ruled their lives growing up.
“Over to the right, over here was woods,” George says, “just like you see to the right, but they cleared that up.”
“Here go the seedling groves,” Reuben says.
“Is that Lake Ale there?”
“That Lake Ale. Those seedling groves right in here had all them pecan trees.”
“Was this the Natural?” George asks of the legendary grove that has withstood the worst winters and hardest of freezes.
“The Natural’s out there by Emaraldi Island.”
“I told you Reuben would know where everything is,” George says, turning in my direction.
“If you dropped an orange in the Natural Grove, five minutes and it would just be hittin’ the ground. You could get up in one of those trees and look all over this south Florida.”
“This is Ole Jones’ place.”
“I picked in that grove where I had a thirty-six-foot ladder spliced with a twenty-six-foot ladder, and it just reached the bottom limb.”
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 55
