Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  The children could sense his fear and were afraid to move. “You scared, somebody talking to you like that,” Pat Botshekan, then the little granddaughter in the back seat, said almost half a century later.

  The grandfather and his wife walked up to the front desk, and he asked for a room as a white person would. The clerk checked him in and gave him the key and pointed him in the direction of the room.

  Now he had a place for the night, but he also had a problem. They had to get Jules into the room without the front desk discovering what Jules was.

  They went back to the car to gather their things. The grandfather got his wife and daughter and the two children who looked white out of the car. It was late at night now, and the grandfather, tired from the drive and the stress of the moment, scrambled to sneak Jules out of the car without detection.

  For the plan to work, Jules would have to do what was not natural for a ten-year-old boy. He would have to keep still and be perfectly quiet and not let his arms and legs stick out or rear up his head out of the blanket or let anybody see him. There was no time to explain why they had to hide him and not the other children, or why he was the only one who couldn’t under any circumstances be seen while the others would walk in like normal. Somehow he had to understand how imperative it was that he not let a patch of his brown skin show.

  Everywhere the family went, little Jules stood out from the rest of the family, and that was hard enough. Now he was being sneaked into a strange place in the middle of the night as if he were contraband.

  The grandfather put the blanket over Jules, sitting in the back seat. He tucked the little boy’s brown arms and legs under the blanket to make sure they didn’t show. He lifted the little boy in his arms like a bag of groceries and carried him into the room. That is how they managed to get a bed for the night. But it was said that the memory stayed with Jules and that he was not quite ever the same after that.

  Like most colored people making the journey, Robert could not pass for white and was not in a position to try to fool his way into a room, which is not to suggest that all who could did. In fact, he found it sad and equally humiliating to have to deny who you were to get what you deserved in the first place.

  No, for him and for most people in his predicament, you were not free till you had cleared the gate. But even a border’s borders are not always clear. Where is it safe to assume you are out of one country and well into another? When can you sigh a sigh of relief that you have passed from the rituals of one place into those of the other side?

  Robert took nothing for granted. He assumed he was not out of the South until he was a safe distance from El Paso. He gave himself breathing room and was more cautious than most. He did not want to subject himself to the indignities of being colored any more than he had to and so would make no attempt to stop and inquire until he was all but certain he had a shot at a room.

  He crossed into New Mexico and drove some more until he reached Lordsburg, some four hours past the border on those old two-lane roads.

  Lordsburg was a dusty old frontier town with saloons famous for fistfights and a Southern Pacific Railroad track paralleling Main. He would have had no reason to stop there if it didn’t happen to be the only place in New Mexico he had been told that he could be assured of a place to sleep.

  The rooming house in Lordsburg was part of a haphazard network of twentieth-century safe houses that sprang up all over the country, and particularly in the South, during the decades of segregation. Some were seedy motels in the red-light district of whatever city they were in. There were a handful of swanky ones, like the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. But many of them were unkempt rooming houses or merely an extra bedroom in some colored family’s row house in the colored district of a given town. They sprang up out of necessity as the Great Migration created a need for places where colored people could stop and rest in a world where no hotels in the South accepted colored people and those in the North and West were mercurial in their policies, many of them disallowing blacks as readily as hotels in the South.

  Thus, there developed a kind of underground railroad for colored travelers, spread by word of mouth among friends and in fold-up maps and green paperback guidebooks that listed colored lodgings by state or city.

  Colored travelers, hoping to plan their journeys in advance and get assurance of a room, carried the guidebooks in their glove compartments like insurance cards. But the books were often out of date by the time they were printed, the accuracy of their entries based on the fortunes of “hoteliers” who may have only been renters themselves. A colored traveler had to prepare for the possibility that he might arrive at a place in the guidebook only to find that the proprietor had been gone for years and then have to take up the search for a room all over again. Still, the mere presence of the guidebooks and of word-of-mouth advice about places to stay gave a sense of order and dignity to the dispiriting prospect of driving cross-country not knowing for sure where one might lay one’s head.

  The rooming house in Lordsburg was forgettable and left no impression on him other than it was like all the other rooming houses that took in colored people. A bedroom with no assurance of a key, an old toilet down the hall, sheets the previous guest may have slept on. The rooming houses that catered to a colored trade usually had no competition, and their clientele had no choice.

  And so neither would Robert. The only bed he knew between Houston and Lordsburg was the bench seat of the Buick. Lordsburg was the first chance in a thousand miles of road to sleep and was the only certain sleep and shower before Los Angeles. He made the most of it. He was fussy about such things as the proper shave and a well-pressed shirt, so he took his time the next day. He got a later start than he should have.

  He had known that there were no guarantees for the first half of the journey, meaning the South, except for his Buick and Dr. Beale back in Houston. Now he was crossing over into the land of the free. He had known the rules in the South. He hadn’t liked them, but he had expected them. “There were no hotels taking blacks then,” Robert remembered years later. “No. None. So if you had a friend who would take you in, you went there, period, and you were through. And then you worried about the next stop.”

  He was putting that all behind him now. He drove toward Arizona, confident that this was one thing he didn’t have to worry about anymore.

  CROSSING OVER

  Do you remember any good stopping places

  in Arizona or western Texas?

  Anything in Phoenix or El Paso?

  And what is the best route from here to the coast?

  I have never driven it, you know.

  — THE POET ARNA BONTEMPS IN A LETTER TO THE POET LANGSTON HUGHES BEFORE A CROSS-COUNTRY TRIP FROM ALABAMA TO CALIFORNIA

  WESTERN NEW MEXICO, APRIL 1953

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  LATE AFTERNOON. The desert was different from anything he had seen before. Great bowl of sky. Fringe of mountain in the distance. He was soon in Arizona. The desert began playing tricks on the eyes. It seemed he was driving and standing still at the same time. Road signs began warning of dust storms. Gas stations sold bags of water for people to placate their overheated radiators. He couldn’t wait to get to California.

  He drove through the dry earth and yucca as heat vapor stirred at the surface. He soon entered the flat plains of the Salt River Valley. The dry land sprouted fields of sorghum and soybeans. Crop dusters flew low in the distance.

  Night moved in from behind. The mountains were now crisp against the light of the falling sun.

  The next big city was Phoenix, and he drove in anticipation of it. As he drew nearer, a curtain of night cloud fell behind him to the east. He could see it coming in his rearview mirror. The sky turned navy, then black. He soon saw the outline of Phoenix off to his right, north of the highway.

  But the road would not take him where he wanted to go. It veered away from the lights and continued south and west along the outskirts of town. The fifteen hundred m
iles of driving caught up with him now. His eyelids grew heavy, and his head filled with the fog of the onset of sleep.

  It occurred to him that he had squandered his energy on the easiest leg of the journey, on the closely set hamlets with their billboards and ranch signs, the distractions and margaritas at the Mexico border, even gassing up and eating in Lordsburg. He did not regret it, but he was paying for it now. Ahead was the long stretch of aloneness in the desert.

  He thought he’d better stop now. If he looped back to Phoenix, he could poke around for a colored boardinghouse and be in a bed of uncertain hygiene in a couple of hours. But the highway continued away from the lights and into a vast darkness. He could lose an hour just trying to find his way back to town.

  He considered the options. He was a safe distance from the South, long past Texas and well beyond New Mexico. This far west, he wouldn’t have to wander the city and hunt down the first colored person he saw for directions to where the colored people board. He was free now, like a regular American.

  Up ahead, a bank of neon signs popped up in the distance and fought one another over guests for the night. The motels sat low to the ground at angles from the road, little more than stretch trailers with rhinestone facades. He pulled up to the parking lot of the first one he came to.

  The car kicked up gravel dust as it crawled up to the vacancy sign that blinked the promise of a decent night’s sleep. He noticed a white Cadillac convertible pulling into the parking lot, its mirror-slick chrome and the headlights shining onto the building. A man who could have been in a Brylcreem commercial was at the wheel and next to him a blond lady friend. The man was laughing. The woman had her head on his shoulder. They were in their own world as they stepped out of the car and floated into the motel in front of him. It was a scene right out of the movies and Robert’s kind of place. He felt even better about this new citizenship he was acquiring.

  He had been driving since noon and was wrinkled from the ride. He was a formal man in a formal age, and so he couldn’t go in like this. He brushed his fingers along the sleeves of his shirt and ironed the front with his palm. He got his sport coat, shook the dust out of it, and afterward straightened his tie. He didn’t have a comb within reach; he hadn’t thought that far ahead. So he smoothed the top and sides of his head with his hand.

  He caught sight of his face in the mirror and the dark wood finish of his skin. The skin was moist and glistened in the blinking neon of the vacancy sign. Good lord. He had been sweating in the heat all day. They might think he was a common laborer. He felt his pockets for a handkerchief. He took it and wiped the shine off his nose, off his cheeks and chin, and mopped the sweat from his forehead. It was not his best presentation, but it would have to do.

  When he got out of the car, he dusted his coat sleeves and checked for wrinkles again. He stood up as if there were a brace strapped to his back. Then he walked up to the front desk for a room. At reception, he took a deep breath and put on the most charming rendition of himself.

  “I’d like to get a room for the night, please,” he said.

  The man looked flustered. “Oh, my goodness,” the man at the front desk said. “We forgot to turn off the vacancy sign.”

  Robert tried to hide his disappointment.

  “Oh, thank you,” Robert said.

  He climbed back into the car and drove away from the motel and the vacancy sign that continued to blink. He had been in the South long enough to know when he had been lied to. But there were plenty of motels on the road, and it didn’t matter what one man thought of him.

  He wasn’t thinking rights and equality. “I thought a bed and a shower and something to eat,” he would say years later.

  He drove to the next motel in the row, a hundred or so yards away.

  “I’d like to get a motel room,” he said, stiffer than before. He was cautious now, and the man must have seen his caution.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, polite and businesslike. “We just rented our last room.”

  Robert looked into the face, tried to read it. He noticed that “the face was awkward, trying to be loose and matter of fact. All calm and uncomfortable.”

  He thanked the man anyway, tried to prove himself even in rejection. “Usually when we try to fit in, we’re above them,” Robert thought to himself, sad and indignant at the same time. “If we’re going to be nice, we’re nicer than they would be to each other.”

  Knowing that wasn’t helping him now. He was getting anxious. The pulse was racing. He was agitated, sweating on a cool desert night.

  He went to a third motel and was sweetly rejected a third time. It was fully night now, the sky black and dense. He should have been in bed hours ago. His was the only car on the road now. The motel lots were quiet and still. The lamp lights on bedside tables were clicking off, that young couple in the Cadillac all situated now. The road was getting darker, lonelier, as the world settled in for the night.

  Anybody looking for a room had one by now. Any leftover rooms would go empty. And still they were turning him away.

  He replayed the rejections in his mind as he drove the few yards to the next motel. Maybe he hadn’t explained himself well enough. Maybe it wasn’t clear how far he had driven. Maybe he should let them know he saw through them, after all those years in the South. He always prepared a script when he spoke to a white person. Now he debated with himself as to what he should say.

  He didn’t want to make a case of it. He never intended to march over Jim Crow or try to integrate anybody’s motel. He didn’t like being where he wasn’t wanted. And yet here he was, needing something he couldn’t have. He debated whether he should speak his mind, protect himself from rejection, say it before they could say it. He approached the next exchange as if it were a job interview. Years later he would practically refer to it as such. He rehearsed his delivery and tightened his lines. “It would have been opening-night jitters if it was theater,” he would later say.

  He pulled into the lot. There was nobody out there but him, and he was the only one driving up to get a room. He walked inside. His voice was about to break as he made his case.

  “I’m looking for a room,” he began. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.”

  A white woman in her fifties stood on the other side of the front desk. She had a kind face, and he found it reassuring. And so he continued.

  “It’s a shame that they would do a person like this,” he said. “I’m no robber. I’ve got no weapons. I’m not a thief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m a captain that just left Austria, which was Salzburg. And the German Army was just outside of Vienna. If there had been a conflict, I would have been protecting you. I would not do people the way I’ve been treated here.”

  It was the most he’d gotten to say all night, and so he went on with his delivery more determinedly than before. “I have money to pay for my services,” he said. “Now, if you don’t rent to colored people, let me know so I can go on to California. This is inhuman. I’m a menace to anybody driving. I’m a menace to myself and to the public, driving as tired as I am.”

  She listened, and she let him make his case. She didn’t talk about mistaken vacancy signs or just-rented rooms. She didn’t cut him off. She listened, and that gave him hope.

  “One minute, Doctor,” she said, turning and heading toward a back office.

  His heart raced as he watched her walk to the back. He could see her consulting with a man through the glass window facing the front desk, deciding in that instant his fate and his worth. They discussed it for some time and came out together. The husband did the talking.

  He had a kind, sad face. Robert held his breath. “We’re from Illinois,” the husband said. “We don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in, the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

  By now, if they had agreed to it, Robert would have been willing to check
out before dawn, before anybody could see him, if that’s what it took. It was a long shot, but some white proprietors had been known to sneak a colored traveler in on occasion, harbor them like a fugitive or a runaway slave, so long as he was out before the neighbors got wind of it. Robert would have accepted that even if he didn’t like it.

  In his delirium, he imagined the exchange between husband and wife in the back office minutes before, the woman arguing his case, the husband skeptical, wary.

  “Nobody’ll see him anyway,” the wife’s whispering.

  “Yes, they will,” the husband’s responding.

  “How will they know?”

  “Somebody might see him when he drives out of here. Or somebody might see his car. Where he’s been before, the people that turned him down. They’d know we let him stay here.”

  And so the answer was no. Robert thanked them anyway, especially the woman. If it had been up to her, he would have had the room. “I believe that with everything that’s in me,” Robert said when he was older and grayer. “This thing I’ve analyzed three thousand times.”

  Somehow Robert made it back to the car. He was in the middle of the desert and too tired to go on and too far along not to keep going. His mind took him back to Monroe, to the going-away party they gave him just a few nights ago. His own words rose up and laughed at him. How in the world can you stay here in this Jim Crow situation? Come go to Heaven with me, to California.

  He drove, erratic, in the direction of the road and, thus, California, although he was nowhere near California, and saw the lights of a filling station. He needed gas and could use some coffee if he was to make it through the desert and the night. He drove into the station and stopped at a pump.

  The owner, a middle-aged white man, came right out.

  “May I help you?”

  Robert couldn’t answer. The man repeated himself.