Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  “Hey, fella, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

  “No,” Robert said, unable to manage much more.

  The man sensed something. He put his hand on Robert’s shoulder, and Robert tried to tell him what had happened. The man shook his head as if he understood.

  Something in the voice, in the way the man looked into his eyes and touched his shoulder and tried in the middle of a cool desert night to console him, made Robert feel all the sadder. It confirmed he wasn’t crazy, and that made him feel utterly alone. Yes, there was an evil in the air and this man knew it and the woman at the motel knew it, but here he was without a room and nobody of a mind to do anything had done a single thing to change that fact. And that made the pain harder, not easier, to bear.

  Robert broke down. The exhaustion, the rejection, the unwinding of his dreams in a matter of minutes, it all caught up with him at once. He had driven more than fifteen hundred miles, and things were no different. In fact, it felt worse because this wasn’t the South. It wasn’t even close to the South. He sat unable to speak for longer than is comfortable in front of a total stranger. His voice cracked as the story tumbled out of him.

  “I came all this way running from Jim Crow, and it slaps me straight in the face,” Robert said. “And just think, I told my friends, why did they stay in the South and take the crumbs? ‘Come to California.’ ”

  The man listened with the helplessness of the well-intentioned and tried to cheer him up.

  “Come on, let me get you a cup of coffee. Where are you going anyway?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Well, I went to USC, and I hate to disappoint you, but Los Angeles ain’t the oasis you think it is.”

  Robert was feeling sick now. It was too late to turn back, and who knew what he was heading into? The man told him to gear himself up. The man didn’t use the term, and nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it James Crow in California.

  “You will see it, and it’ll hit where it hurts,” the man said. “What are you in?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Well, you’re going to find it in the hospitals going to work.”

  Robert was thinking fast, reconsidering, weighing, and waking up. The dream looked to be over before he could even get to California. The man brought him a cup of coffee and filled his tank. Robert got back on the highway and drove into the black hole of night. Soon he came to a fork in the road and saw a sign that made his heart sink:

  LOS ANGELES 380 MILES

  SAN DIEGO 345 MILES

  He knew he couldn’t drive a mile farther than necessary in this condition, and so San Diego it would be. “I could just see numbers in my mind now,” he said many years later. “Los Angeles this way and San Diego that way. And the number was far less distance, and I chose that.”

  In the absolute darkness he found himself in, he could not see the will of the road. He went on faith that he was not driving off into a ravine.

  Every cell wanted sleep. He bit his tongue to keep his eyelids from sneaking shut. He sang, sang anything, to keep his mind from turning in for the night. Now when he needed the radio, there was no radio, just a crackle of white noise from someplace far away.

  Suddenly, somewhere around Gila Bend, the road got mean, turned without warning, a sharp left, then a sharper, uglier right, back and forth, and all over again. The car tilted upward, gaining elevation and resisting the climb as any car would. It forced him into an alertness his body wasn’t prepared for and that he hadn’t anticipated.

  The road shot more curves at him, one right after the other, so that he was going north and south as much as west, and he had to slow down to absorb the blind hooks and horseshoes coming at him. He knew he wasn’t the best driver in the world, hadn’t done that much of it really. And so he would have to brake to a crawl if he was going to make it.

  Before it hadn’t mattered much that this was a two-lane road with no reflector lights and no guardrails to catch him. Now it did. Interstate highways didn’t exist yet. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president who would go on to build them, had only recently taken office. Of course, Robert didn’t know that, and knowing it wouldn’t have helped him.

  The mountains closed in on him. He couldn’t make out the earth from the sky. The sky was black, the road was black. He could see the black shape of saguaro cactus standing helpless as he passed. He drove into the cave of night, more alone now than ever.

  It got to the point where he could go no further, and he pulled over to the side of the road. He unfolded himself from behind the wheel and caught an hour of half sleep. He would have to stop again two or three times that night. Each time, it left him not much more refreshed than before. He had no choice but to start the engine and take up the task again.

  He wound through rock canyons and crossed Fortune Wash near the Gila River. A film stuck to his skin and to his wrinkled shirt and trousers. He had not had a chance to wash yesterday off. He opened the windows and vents to get air.

  Another hour passed, and ahead was a valley, a black velvet plain with diamonds on it. It was the city of Yuma. He saw motel signs with amusing desert names. He gave them no thought. He knew better now.

  Soon he came upon the Colorado River. A road sign said he had reached the California line. But he was too beat down now to pay it much attention.

  His back pinched from days and nights of driving. His fingers were sore from clutching the steering wheel. His wrists ached, and still there was more road. The road would not end.

  Just past Felicity came the warnings of the desert: CHECK YOUR RADIATOR. LAST CHANCE FOR WATER. LAST CHANCE FOR GAS STATIONS. STRONG WINDS POSSIBLE.

  What was this place he was going to? What was he doing behind the wheel in the middle of the pitch-black desert by himself? Could it be worth all this? It had seemed so clear back in Monroe. Now he fought with himself over the fear and the doubt. He couldn’t bear to hear the I-told-you-so’s. If he turned back now, if he changed his mind or lost his nerve, the I-knew-its would ring in his ear. Dr. Clement would be the first to say it.

  He was dreading the place already. “But there was no turning back,” he would say years later. “I had to get here. I had to try.”

  He blinked at oncoming headlights, willing himself awake. Orion stretched over the highway and made an arc across the sky. It filled the windshield and stayed with him until the sun came back.

  Near the Tecate Divide, the pink light of morning came in from behind. He was in San Diego County. Another fifty miles to the coast. The sun was on his back as he pulled away for good from the South and the center of gravity.

  ON THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL AT THE ILLINOIS BORDER, OCTOBER 1937

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IN THE DARK HOURS OF THE MORNING, Ida Mae and her family crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, at the Ohio River, the border between Kentucky and Illinois, between the provincial South and the modern North, between servitude and freedom, without comment.

  The black night pressed against the windows and looked no different in the New World than in the Old. It was as thick and black in Illinois as it was in Kentucky or Tennessee. From the railcar window, the land looked to be indistinguishable, one state from another, just one big flat plain, and there was nothing in nature that one could see that said colored people should be treated one way on one side of the river and a different way on the other.

  Crossing the line was a thing of spiritual and political significance to the guardians of southern law and to colored people escaping it who knew they were crossing over. But going north, most migrants would have been asleep or unable to see whatever the line looked like if they even knew where it was.

  On the red-eye going north, the railroad would not likely have disrupted the entire train just so colored people could sit with white people now that they legally could. Ida Mae had no memory of such a commotion in any case, only that they’d made it out of Mississippi. They cros
sed into Illinois at Cairo and passed through Carbondale and Centralia. Then Champaign. Kankakee. Peotone. Matteson. Grand Crossing. Woodlawn. Hyde Park. Oakland. Twenty-second Street. Twelfth Street Station. Chicago.

  They would have to change trains yet again to continue on to Milwaukee, where Ida Mae’s sister Irene lived and where they could set about finding work to sustain them in the New World.

  ON THE SILVER METEOR, NORTHERN NEW JERSEY, APRIL 15, 1945

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  AT DAYBREAK, the Silver Meteor wound its way into Pennsylvania Station at Newark, New Jersey. The conductor called out the name of the station and the city, and after so long a ride through the night and now into day, some passengers from the South gathered their things and stepped off the train, weary and anxious to start their new lives and relieved to have made it to their destination at last.

  “Newark.” It sounded so tantalizingly close to “New York,” and maybe, some assumed, was the way northerners, clipping their words as they did, pronounced New York. It was confusing to have their intended destination preceded directly by a city with such a similar name and with an identically named station. And as they had been riding for as many as twenty-four hours and were nervous about missing their stop, some got off prematurely, and, it is said, that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those arriving in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.

  George Starling knew better. He had been to New York before, just not on the train. He remained in his seat until he arrived at the real New York, where the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor, to help raise him and his cousins were waiting for him at their Harlem doorsteps.

  SAN DIEGO COUNTY, APRIL 1953

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  TT WAS EARLY IN SAN DIEGO. Robert Foster could see the concrete skyline and the headlights of a city waking up. He drew closer to the heart of town. Trolley cars clanked past the palm trees on C Street. The Pacific Ocean was up ahead. He was finally on the other side of the desert. He was hours from Los Angeles but well into California, the end of the line when it came to the Migration. It was more a relief now than a wonder.

  His eyes scanned the pedestrians for pigment. He stopped at the curb and flagged down the first colored person he saw. He had not talked to a soul during his night in the desert. This would be the first encounter in this new adopted land. His heart sank as he uttered the words that seemed an admission of failure.

  “Pardon me,” he said, edgily, to the man. “Where can you find a colored hotel?”

  “What do you mean, a colored hotel?” the man said with the casual annoyance of an urbanite interrupted by a tourist. “I can tell you where a hotel is. There’s a hotel right there.”

  “No, I don’t want that,” Robert said. “Just tell me where most of the colored folks stay.”

  Robert was too tired to argue. Three states without sleep. He had a stubble of beard on his face that he would otherwise never be seen in public with. He could not bear rejection again.

  “I could not,” he began, still searching for the right words decades later, “the thought—it was overwhelming—of me being turned down again. I couldn’t do that.”

  Robert repeated himself to the man. The man assured him he didn’t have to stay in a place like that in San Diego but gave him the name of a small, featureless hotel anyway, a place for colored people, since he was so insistent on that.

  Robert found the place. He slept and showered and shaved for the first time since New Mexico. When he opened his eyes hours later, there he was in a segregated hotel. A week on the road, and he was in the exact same place, it seemed, that he left.

  Later in the day, he headed north past the Joshua trees. Los Angeles was another 121 miles from San Diego. He didn’t know which city would be the right one for him—Los Angeles or Oakland—or where he would work or how he would set up a practice wherever he ended up. He had just come out of the desert, in every sense of the word, and the details of his future were too much to think about right now.

  He drove north toward whatever awaited him. Billboards popped up on both sides of the highway. They whizzed past him as he drove. They had women in rouge and lipstick and men with stingy-brim hats with the cord above the brim selling lager beer and cigarettes. The people in the billboards were smiling and happy. They looked out onto the highway and straight into the cars.

  They kept him company, and, although they weren’t talking to him, he told himself they were. “I played a game that it was for me,” he later said.

  Soon one billboard stood out from the others. IT’S LUCKY WHEN YOU’RE IN CALIFORNIA, it said cheerfully. It was hawking Lucky lager beer to every car that passed. Robert repeated those words in his mind.

  “It’s gonna be lucky for me in California. It’s gonna be good.”

  It had to be. He said it over and over to himself until he actually started to believe it.

  THE SOUTH, 1915–1975

  FROM THE MOMENT the first migrants stepped off the earliest trains, the observers of the Great Migration debated what made millions of rural and small-town people turn their backs on all they knew, leave the land where their fathers were buried, and jump off a cliff into the unknown.

  Planters blamed northern recruiters, who were getting paid a dollar a head to deliver colored labor to the foundries and slaughterhouses of the North. But that only held for the earliest recruits, usually young men, field hands, with nothing to lose. Others said the Chicago Defender seduced them. But they could only be seduced if there was some passion already deep within them.

  Economists said it was the boll weevil that tore through the cotton fields and left them without work and in even greater misery, which likely gave hard-bitten sharecroppers just one more reason to go. Still, many of them picked cotton not by choice but because it was the only work allowed them in the cotton-growing states. In South Carolina, colored people had to apply for a permit to do any work other than agriculture after Reconstruction. It would not likely have been their choice had there been an alternative. And besides, many of the migrants, people like George Starling and Robert Foster and many thousands more came from southern towns where they did not pick cotton or from states less dependent on it and thus would have made their decisions with no thought of the boll weevil or the pressure on cotton prices.

  The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, an investigative body created after the World War I wave of migration, decided to ask migrants why they had left. A few of their responses were these:

  SOME OF MY PEOPLE WERE HERE.

  PERSUADED BY FRIENDS.

  FOR BETTER WAGES.

  TO BETTER MY CONDITIONS.

  BETTER CONDITIONS.

  BETTER LIVING.

  MORE WORK; CAME ON VISIT AND STAYED.

  WIFE PERSUADED ME.

  TIRED OF THE SOUTH.

  TO GET AWAY FROM THE SOUTH.

  The earliest departures were merely the first step in a divorce that would take more than half a century to complete. At the time it was misunderstood as a temporary consequence of war and declared over when the war ended. But the people who before had been cut off from the North now had the names of neighbors and relatives actually living there. Instead of the weakening stream that observers predicted, the Great Migration actually gathered steam after World War I.

  It continued into the twenties with the departure of some 903,000 black southerners, nearly double the World War I wave. It did not stop in the thirties, when, despite the Depression, 480,000 managed to leave. Among them was Ida Mae Gladney. World War II brought the fastest flow of black people out of the South in history—nearly 1.6 million left during the 1940s, more than in any decade before. George Starling was one of them. Another 1.4 million followed in the 1950s, when Robert Pershing Foster drove out of Louisiana for good. And another million in the 1960s, when, because of the more barefaced violence during the South’s desperate last stand against civil rights, it was actually more treacherous to lea
ve certain isolated precincts of the rural South than perhaps at any time since slavery.

  The numbers put forward by the census are believed by some historians to be an underestimate. Unknown numbers of migrants who could pass for white melted into the white population once they left and would not have been counted in the Migration. Colored men fearful of being extradited back to the South over purported debts or disputes would have been wary of census takers. And overcrowded tenements with four or five families packed into kitchenettes or day workers rotating their use of a bed would have been hard to accurately account for in the best of circumstances. “A large error in enumerating southern blacks who went North,” wrote the historian Florette Henri, “was not only probable but inescapable.”

  The journey north was a defining moment for the people embarking upon it. Many years later, most everyone would remember how they chose where they went, the name of the train they took, and whom they went to stay with. Some would remember the exact day they departed and the places the train stopped on the way to wherever they were going. A man named Robert Fields, who as a teenager hid in the freight cars to flee Yazoo City, Mississippi, remembered arriving in Chicago on the day Rudolph Valentino died, which would make it August 23, 1926, because the news of Valentino’s death was on the front page of every newspaper and was all anyone was talking about that day.

  Robert Pershing Foster would remember leaving right after Easter, which, unbeknownst to him, was a popular time to leave. Given a choice, southerners preferred not to go north facing winter, and leaving at Easter gave them plenty of time to adjust to the North before the cold set in. George Starling would remember that he left Florida on April 14, 1945, as if it were his birthday, which in a way it was.

  Decades after she left, Ida Mae Gladney would remember that they got the cotton clean out of the field before they left, which would make it mid- to late October, and that she was pregnant with her youngest child but not yet showing, which would make it 1937.