Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Well after Ida Mae, George, and Robert made their way out of the South, a man by the name of Eddie Earvin would always remember how he left because he went to such great lengths to escape the Mississippi Delta. It was the spring of 1963.

  Many of the observers and participants of the first wave of the Migration had passed away, having concluded that the phenomenon was long over. They would not have imagined that someone like Earvin might have a harder time leaving than many before him.

  But in the early 1960s, secluded regions of the rural South—Alabama and Mississippi in particular—had become war zones in the final confrontation between segregationists and the civil rights movement. Spies and traitors were everywhere, the violence raw and without apology, the segregationists standing more boldfaced, clamping down harder as outsiders tried to force integration on them. No one was exempt—not well-to-do white northerners like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, not upstanding family men like Medgar Evers, or even four little middle-class girls in church on a Sunday morning in Birmingham in 1963.

  Earvin’s story is evidence of just how long the Great Migration stretched across a hard century, how universal were the impulses of those who left, and how treacherous it could be to try to leave certain remote and Victorian pockets of the American South throughout the sixty-odd years the Great Migration lasted.

  Eddie Earvin was twenty in the spring of 1963. He was a day picker at a plantation in Scotts, Mississippi, walking with pieces of cardboard tied to his one pair of shoes to cover the bottoms of his feet. “We were still in slavery, like,” he would say years later.

  He started picking when he was five and chopping weeds off the cotton at six. And when he was seven or eight, a boy named Charles Parker was skinned alive for opening a door for a white woman and speaking to her in a way she didn’t like, as the grown folks told it. Eddie would never forget that.

  He picked because he had to and crawled on his knees to cut spinach because spinach is low to the ground. He got ten cents for a fifty-pound basket of spinach. He could pick only two or three baskets a day because spinach is light.

  One day when he was out cutting spinach, he sliced into his finger but was afraid to leave the field. It was six miles to the doctor in town. He worked two more days and on the third day decided to walk to town to see the doctor. The boss man passed him on his way back to the field and jumped out of his truck.

  “Don’t you know you don’t go nowhere unlessen I tell you to?” the boss man said.

  He pulled a Winchester rifle out of the truck. “Maybe I ought to kill you right now,” he said.

  The man put the rifle to Eddie’s head.

  “You don’t go nowhere unlessen I tell you to go,” he told him.

  Eddie was seventeen. He decided that, somehow or other, he would find a way out. When he was twenty, he made his plans. A bus ticket to Chicago was twenty-one dollars, as he remembered it. It took him six or seven months to save up for it. But that was the easy part. Now he had to find out how to use it without calling attention to himself in that little town where everybody knew everybody and it seemed everyone was watching.

  There was a bus that stopped near him, but he couldn’t catch that bus or inquire about it. “Everybody knew what you’d be trying to do if you caught that bus,” he said. And you had to walk six miles to get to it.

  There was another little bus stop in a town nearby. It did not post the bus schedule, and he was not in a position to ask. “They didn’t tell you the schedule,” he would say years later. “A lot of things you’d want to know, you couldn’t ask.”

  So he went to the station at different times of the day. Each time, he sat and waited for the bus to leave, and when it belched out of the depot, he looked at the station clock and made a note of it. Sometimes the bus left early, he found. Sometimes it left late. He tried to get an average time so he would not miss it on the day he wanted to go. That was how he learned the bus schedule.

  “We had been checking for months,” he said.

  He decided to leave in May 1963 and take his sister and her two children with him. He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” he said. “You had to sneak away.”

  That day, he acted as if it were any other day. He went up to a man named Eason and casually asked him if he could give them a ride.

  “We going to Greenville today,” he told Eason. “Could you take us?”

  He didn’t tell Eason he was leaving Mississippi for good or that he needed to catch a bus pulling out at a certain time or that this was the moment of truth after planning this in his mind for most of his short adult life. The man might not have taken them if he knew. So Eddie kept it to himself.

  The four of them got in the car with nothing but a few clothes in a paper bag. When they got to Greenville, they paid the man three or four dollars. Eason figured out what they were up to when he saw where they wanted to be dropped off.

  “What do you call yourself doing?” he asked them.

  “We getting out of town,” Eddie said. The man got scared himself after that.

  Eddie and his sister and her two kids got on the bus, and before anybody knew it, they were out of the county with everything they had in a shopping bag wrapped in a rope of sea grass.

  They sat in the back and kept their mouths shut. “The white folks could talk,” he would say years later. “You sit and be quiet. Where we came from, we didn’t move from the back. We just sat there. We weren’t the type to move around. We wasn’t sure we could move. So we didn’t move. That fear.”

  He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, “What kind of god they got up inside that church?”

  He was getting away from all that now. He looked out at the lights and the billboards. The driver announced that they were passing out of Mississippi and into Tennessee. He was out for sure now and on his way to Illinois, and at that moment he could feel the sacks of cotton dropping from his back. Years later, he would still tremble at the memory and put into words the sentiments of generations who went in search of a kinder mistress.

  “It was like getting unstuck from a magnet,” he said.

  PART FOUR

  THE KINDER MISTRESS

  The lazy, laughing South

  With blood on its mouth.…

  Passionate, cruel,

  Honey-lipped, syphilitic—

  That is the South.

  And I, who am black, would love her

  But she spits in my face.…

  So now I seek the North—

  The cold-faced North,

  For she, they say,

  is a kinder mistress.

  — LANGSTON HUGHES, “THE SOUTH”

  CHICAGO

  Timidly, we get off the train.

  We hug our suitcases,

  fearful of pickpockets.…

  We are very reserved,

  for we have been warned not to act green.…

  We board our first Yankee street car

  to go to a cousin’s home.…

  We have been told

  that we can sit where we please,

  but we are still scared.

  We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear

  in three hours.

  — RICHARD WRIGHT, 12 Million Black Voices

  CHICAGO, TWELFTH STREET STATION, OCTOBER 1937

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THE LEAVES WERE THE COLOR of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets. They had begun to fall from the branches and settle in piles at the roots of the elm trees. The leaves had begun to fall when Ida Mae and George walked into the cold light of morning for the very first time in the North.

  Ida Mae and her family had ridden all through the night on the Illinois Central and had arrived, stiff and disheveled, in
a cold, hurrying place of concrete and steel. People clipped past them in their wool finery and distracted urgency, not pausing to speak—people everywhere, more people than they had maybe seen in one single place in their entire lives, coming as they were from the spread-out, isolated back country of plantations and lean-tos. They would somehow have to make it across town to yet another station to catch the train to Milwaukee and cart their worldly belongings to yet another platform for the last leg of their journey out of the South.

  Above them hung black billboards as tall as a barn with the names of connecting cities and towns and their respective platforms and departure times—Sioux Falls, Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, Omaha, Madison, Dubuque—footfalls, redcaps, four-faced clocks, and neon arrows pointing to arrivals and track numbers. The trains were not trains but Zephyrs and Hiawathas, the station itself feeling bigger and busier than all of Okolona or Egypt or any little town back home or anything they could possibly have ever seen before.

  They would have to ride the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad for three more hours to get to their final stop in their adopted land. They could not rest easy until they had made it safely to Ida Mae’s sister’s apartment in Milwaukee. In the end, it would take multiple trains, three separate railroads, hours of fitful upright sleep, whatever food they managed to carry, the better part of two days, absolute will, near-blind determination, and some necessary measure of faith and just plain grit for people unaccustomed to the rigors of travel to make it out of the land of their birth to the foreign region of essentially another world.

  The great belching city she passed through that day was the first city Ida Mae had ever laid eyes on. That first glimpse of Chicago would stay with her for as long as she lived.

  “What did it look like at that time, Chicago?” I asked her, half a life later.

  “It looked like Heaven to me then,” she said.

  NEW YORK

  A blue haze descended at night

  and, with it, strings of fairy lights

  on the broad avenues.…

  What a city! What a world! …

  The first danger I recognized …

  was that Harlem would be

  too wonderful for words.

  Unless I was careful,

  I would be thrilled into silence.

  — THE POET ARNA BONTEMPS UPON FIRST ARRIVING IN HARLEM, 1924

  NEW YORK CITY, PENNSYLVANIA STATION, APRIL 15, 1945

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  IN THE SPACE OF TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, George Starling had put behind him the slash pines and cypress swamps of his former world and was finally now stepping out of Pennsylvania Station. He walked beneath the Corinthian columns and the iron fretwork of its barrel-vaulted ceiling and into the muted light of a spring morning in Manhattan. He could see a blur of pedestrians brushing past him and yellow taxicabs swerving up Eighth Avenue. Concrete mountains were obscuring the sky, steam rising from sewer grates, the Empire State Building piercing the clouds above granite-faced office buildings, and, all around him, coffee shops and florists and shoe stores and street vendors and not a single colored- or white-only sign anywhere.

  This was New York.

  He had made it out of Florida and was now reaching into his pocket for the address and telephone number of his aunt Annie Swanson, the one they called Baby, who lived up in Harlem. But he couldn’t find the slip of paper with her number on it, and, in his fatigue and confusion and the upset of all he had been through, couldn’t remember precisely where she lived even though he had been there before, and so he made his way to the apartment of the only friend whose Harlem address he could remember and who just happened to be home.

  “He took me in, and I sat there, and I tried to think,” George said. “The more I tried to think, the more confused I got.”

  All the streets were numbered. What number street was she on? All the tenements looked the same. Which tenement was she in? She had moved so much. Where was she the last time he was here?

  “Don’t worry about it,” the friend said. “It’ll come to you eventually. I’m a let you take you a good, hot bath, lay down, and relax a while.”

  George got in the tub, and it came to him. “Oh shoot, I know where my aunt lives,” he said, and he hurried out of the tub. “Now I remember it. Now it has come to me. Maybe I needed to relax.”

  He had crossed into another world and was feeling the weight of it all. “I think I was overtired,” he would say years later, “from getting ready to leave and getting out of there.”

  The friend directed him to Aunt Baby’s three-room apartment on 112th Street between Fifth and Lenox, where he would sleep on the sofa in the front room until he could find work and a place of his own.

  He set his things down just inside her front door, and, at that moment, he became a New Yorker, because, unlike on his other visits to the North, this time, he planned to stay. He would have to get accustomed to a concrete world with the horizon cut off by a stand of brownstones, to a land with no trees and where you couldn’t see the sun. Somehow, he would have to get used to the press of people who never seemed to sleep, the tight, dark cells they called tenements. He would quicken his steps, learn to walk faster, hold his head up and his back stiff and straight, not waving to everyone whose eyes he met but instead acting like he, too, had already seen and heard it all, because in a way, in a life-and-death sort of way, he had.

  Curiously enough, one thing was for sure. He didn’t see himself as part of any great tidal wave. “No,” he said years later. “I just knew that I was getting away from Florida. I didn’t consider it like it was a general movement on and I was a part of it. No, I never considered that.”

  He could only see what was in front of him, and that was, he hoped, a freer new life for himself. “I was hoping,” he said years later. “I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”

  LOS ANGELES

  Maybe we can start again,

  in the new rich land

  —in California,

  where the fruit grows.

  We’ll start over.

  — JOHN STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath

  LOS ANGELES, APRIL 1953

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  ROBERT DROVE UNDER A GRAY GAUZE SKY through the thicket of shark-fin taillights, up Crenshaw and Slauson and Century, the stickpin palms arched high above him. He went screeching and lurching with the distracted urgency of a man meeting a blind date, picturing the first glance and dreading the faint chance of disappointment.

  He drove into the white sun. Everything was wide open and new. The city unfurled itself, low and broad, the boulevards singing Spanish descriptions, La Cienega, La Brea, La Tijera. There were orange trapezoid signs staked high above the diners and auto dealerships and neon lights at the coin-op laundries.

  The farther he went, the better it got. The trees were not trees anymore but Popsicles and corncobs. The lawns spread out like pool tables, and you could cut yourself on the hedgerows. Everything was looking like a villa or a compound now, statues and gumdrop trees marching down overdone driveways and Grecian urns set out on the porticoes. The whole effect was like a diva with too much lipstick, and he loved it. The too-muchness of it all.

  He was drawing near the Wilshire district and was looking for St. Andrews Place, where a Dr. William Beck, an old professor from medical school, now lived.

  Dr. Beck started practicing medicine when Robert was just learning to crawl. However hard Robert thought he had it, Dr. Beck had had it rougher. It began with why Dr. Beck had become a doctor in the first place. Decades before, his father had tuberculosis. There were no colored doctors around, and no white doctors would come out to the farm. The father died, and so the son decided he would be the doctor that didn’t exist when they needed one. He specialized in tuberculosis and diseases of the lung and would spend the rest of his life fighting what took his father away.

  No colored man out on a
farm was going to die abandoned if he could help it. He took a job teaching at Meharry and on the weekends went out into the country making house calls on colored families who couldn’t make it into Nashville. Every Sunday he drove the back roads to the sharecropper shacks and the shotgun houses in his crisp suits and late-model car. Some of the white people accused him of being uppity and not knowing his place. Threats and shots were fired. One afternoon, some roughnecks pulled him from his car and beat him. From then on, his wife, Reatha, and their two young children, William, Jr., and Vivian, rode with him whenever he went.

  “They would drive out as a family, figuring that they wouldn’t kill him in front of them,” his granddaughter, Reatha Gray Simon, said years later.

  Mrs. Beck was prominent in her own right in the South’s distorted world of colored privilege. Her father, a dentist, was said to have been an outside child of an Alabama governor, a condition that afforded the family land and means when the son decided to set up house outside Monroe, Louisiana. The son had thirteen children, and all of them went to college in the days when most colored people did not make it to high school.

  Dr. and Mrs. Beck were in their fifties now, Robert’s parents’ generation. They themselves had arrived in Los Angeles only six years before. They were part of the postwar flood of colored Louisianans that was turning Los Angeles into New Orleans west. Dr. Beck arrived as an elder statesman who had taught many of the colored doctors practicing there, and Mrs. Beck arrived the very picture of a doctor’s wife. She was a beauty of the Lena Horne variety, who had never spent a day at work and was accustomed to maids and cooks and would thus not know what to do with either a typewriter or a mop. When they first arrived, they noticed to their dismay that most colored people were living on the more congested east side of town, east of Main Street and far from the circular driveways of Beverly Hills.