Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Some neighborhood groups went so far as to buy up properties themselves, “even at a financial loss, to prevent blacks from moving in,” wrote the historian Josh Sides.

  But the San Fernando Valley suburb of Pacoima got especially creative when a black government worker named Emory Holmes moved in with his family in 1959. The neighbors put their heads together and decided to make calls to every business in town posing as Holmes or his wife. The first week in the neighborhood, the Holmeses were flooded at odd times of the day with visits from “a life insurance sales representative, a milk delivery service, a drinking water company, three repair services, several taxis, an undertaker, a Los Angeles Times newspaper carrier, a veterinarian, a sink repair service, a termite exterminator, a pool installer,” Sides wrote. Finally, the neighbors threw rocks through their windows and spray-painted their garage: BLACK CANCER IS HERE. DON’T LET IT SPREAD!

  Robert wasn’t going to put himself through that. He found a safe place that suited him. Not only were black people there already, but they were among the finest and most socially connected in all of old Los Angeles. The house was a white Spanish Revival at 1680 Victoria Avenue, right next door to the most prominent colored architect in Los Angeles and maybe the country, Paul Williams. The street had physicians and dentists and socialites on it, people who regularly made the society pages of The Los Angeles Sentinel.

  The family moved in on Palm Sunday 1956, three years after Robert’s lonely drive through the desert. The girls each chose a room. The sofas and cocktail tables and dining room suite arrived. Now Alice could finally join the Links and host her bridge parties and socials, and they could all take up their rightful place, wherever it might lead them, in this bright new city of theirs. In the meantime, shortly before moving into their new home, Robert and Alice got a welcome surprise: a third daughter arrived in December 1955. They named her Joy.

  COMPLICATIONS

  What on earth was it, I mused,

  bending my head to the wind,

  that made us leave

  the warm, mild weather of home

  for all this cold,

  and never to return,

  if not for something worth hoping for?

  — RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man

  CHICAGO, 1939–1940

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THINGS HAD GROWN DESPERATE, and, although she had three little ones at home, Ida Mae had to find some kind of work if they were to survive another year. The options for colored women fresh from the field were limited up north—mainly, to cleaning white people’s homes, doing laundry, or working a factory line, if the factory was short of men or of white women. For Ida Mae, domestic work was the likeliest option for now.

  It was still the Depression, and it seemed as if the North just didn’t know what to do with colored women who were still learning the ways of the cities. Even in the best of times, many industries, while accepting black men for their strong backs, and then only in limited numbers, refused to hire black women, seeing no need to have them around. Throughout the North and West, black women migrants were having the hardest time finding work of all the people pouring into the big cities, harder than Polish and Serbian immigrants to Chicago, harder than Italian and Jewish immigrants to New York, harder than Mexican and Chinese immigrants of either gender in California. They were literally at the bottom of the economic hierarchy of the urban North, the least connected by race and gender to the power brokers in their adopted lands and having to stand in line to hire out scrubbing floors when times got hard during the Depression years.

  Some employers started requiring them to have college degrees, which neither they nor the vast majority of other unskilled laborers could have been expected to have. Some demanded that black women take voice tests to weed out those from the South, tests that Mississippians just up from the plantation would have been all but assured of failing. Even those lucky enough to land in a training course for assembly-line work found that they were often shunted to “positions in either the cafeteria or bathrooms.”

  Entire companies and classes of work were closed off to them without apology. A few years after Ida Mae arrived, a plant in Ohio, for instance, sent out a call for five hundred women, specifying that they be white. The plant had to alter its age limits, lower its requirements, and go to neighboring states like Illinois to get enough white women, who were more likely than colored women to be able to stay at home with their children. Even when it was unable to fill its quota, the plant still refused to hire colored women.

  Thus colored women were left to fight for even the most menial of jobs, facing intense competition from the Irish, German, and Scandinavian servant girls preferred by some of the wealthier white families.

  There emerged several classes of domestics. Those on the lowest rung resorted to “slave markets” where colored women gathered on street corners from as early as six in the morning and waited for white housewives from the Bronx and Brooklyn in New York or from Hyde Park or Pill Hill in Chicago to bid on them for as little as fifteen cents an hour.

  Twenty-five such markets were active in New York City alone by 1940. One was by a five-and-dime at 167th and Gerard near the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, where the lowliest women from Harlem sat on crates waiting to be picked. Another was a few blocks north at 170th and Walton, the waiting women a little better clothed and slightly less desperate, knowing that the Bronx housewives had to pass them first before getting to the market at Gerard. In Chicago, there was a crowded market at Twelfth and Halsted, where colored women jockeyed over the white housewives who were looking them over, the whole enterprise having the effect of bidding down the colored domestics’ wages. One woman at the Chicago slave market reported making fifty cents a day, what she would have made picking cotton in the field.

  If she were desperate enough, a colored woman needing work would just show up in a white neighborhood, the wealthier the better, and simply walk down the street. “Someone would invariably call out the window,” wrote the sociologist Barbara Clegg Gray, and hire the woman on the spot to clean the toilets or scrub the floors or whatever the white housewife discovered she needed for maybe a dollar or two.

  In Los Angeles, due to the “great horde of jobless domestics, white families in one of the wealthiest cities in the country could hire colored domestics for as little as five dollars a week” in the 1930s. For that sum, families got someone who would work ten or twelve hours a day doing anything from washing dishes and clothes to cooking and scrubbing floors for not much more than she could have made picking cotton back in Texas.

  One colored woman in Los Angeles said she thought getting her high school diploma would make a difference. She kept trying to find different work. Jobs on assembly lines, running elevators, clerking in stores, filing in offices, were typical jobs open to unskilled women in those days. “But everywhere I went,” she said, “they wanted to keep me working as a domestic.”

  The randomness of this kind of work, hiring oneself out to total strangers with no standards in duties or wages, opened domestics to all kinds of exploitation for very little pay. They could never know for sure what they would be asked to do, how long they would be expected to do it, or if they would be paid what was promised.

  It seemed everyone was trying to wring the most out of whatever they had, some white housewives even turning back the hands of the clock to keep from paying a domestic for all the hours she actually worked. Older domestics took to forewarning the new ones to take their own clock to work with them and to prepare for any indignity. One housewife ordered a domestic to eat her lunch out of the pet’s bowl, not wanting the help to eat from the same dishes as the family.

  In many cases, the housewives were neither accustomed to hired help nor familiar with colored people, harboring assumptions and prejudices of the day due to lack of exposure. The housewives and their domestics brought differing expectations, and frequently each side felt somehow aggrieved. While an employer could go out and hire someone else, some
employees, having no legal recourse, took their frustrations out on their madames’ homes when not paid or otherwise exploited, slashing the draperies they had just ironed or defacing the floors they had scrubbed.

  Aside from these sources of friction, colored domestics could not know what perils they might face from opportunistic sons or husbands assuming that younger domestics would do more than just clean. As it was, the very act of walking the streets for work came awfully close in appearance to how prostitutes plied their trade—except that the domestics were working at the whim of Janes instead of Johns.

  The expectation that any colored woman walking in the white section of town was available to scrub floors and wash windows would continue into the 1960s, such that a colored professional woman appearing in a white neighborhood in the North had to be prepared to be called out to just because she was black. “Say, girl,” a woman called out to my mother in the late 1950s when she was on her way, in her tailored suit and heels, to decorate and fit slip covers in Cleveland Park, a wealthy neighborhood in Washington, D.C. “Could you come up here and clean my bathroom?”

  “I’m looking for someone to clean mine,” my mother yelled back to the woman.

  Ida Mae’s husband would not have stood for his wife to walk the streets for work, and in any case, Chicago had grown so segregated that the wealthy white neighborhoods were far from where they lived. But one day Ida Mae got word of a job from someone she knew from back home in Mississippi, and that felt a little safer.

  A girl who was doing day’s work for a well-to-do couple on the North Side needed someone to fill in for her. It would be temporary, Ida Mae’s friend told her, but would have to do for now.

  “Miss Gladney will work in your place,” Ida Mae’s friend told the girl.

  The job was more than an hour away on the streetcar, farther north of the Loop than she lived south, almost up near Evanston. The regular girl who mopped floors and folded laundry for the family would be away for a week. The job was paying something like four or five dollars a day. Ida Mae didn’t hesitate.

  “I was glad to take her place,” she would say years later.

  She dressed for the job and took a change of clothes with her. It turned out to be a man and his wife living in a grand apartment above a shoe store the wife ran.

  Ida Mae took the elevator up and went into a glorious apartment, where she found the husband alone in the couple’s bedroom. He was still asleep, which seemed odd to Ida Mae, so she began looking for things to do. The husband roused himself and told Ida Mae what he expected of her.

  “Get in the bed with me,” he said.

  He told her the regular girl stayed in bed with him all day long. He reassured Ida Mae not to worry, he’d do the cleaning later. He figured that was a fair exchange and good deal for her, a cleaning girl not having to clean at all and still getting paid for it.

  Ida Mae was in her midtwenties, a mother of three by then, married to a pious man who wouldn’t stand for another man touching his wife. She knew white men in the South took whatever liberties they wanted with colored women, and there was nothing the women or their husbands could do about it. All her life in Mississippi, she had managed to avoid unwanted advances because she had rarely worked in white people’s homes. Now here she was in Chicago, a white man expecting her to sleep with him as if that were what any colored woman would just naturally want to do. And no matter what happened, she would have no legal recourse. There would be no witnesses. It just would be a privileged man’s word against hers.

  She was thinking fast. She was as mad at the girl who sent her without warning her of what the job really entailed as she was at the man expecting her to climb into bed with him with his wife just a floor below. She started to leave. But she had come all this way, had spent the train fare, and she needed the money.

  Her body stiffened, and she backed away from the man.

  “Just show me what you want cleaned,” Ida Mae said.

  Somehow, something in the way she stood or looked straight at him as she said it let the man know she meant business. He didn’t press the matter. He left her alone.

  “He didn’t say no more ’cause he seen I wasn’t that type of person,” Ida Mae said years later.

  And perhaps in that moment Ida Mae discovered one difference between the North and South. She would not likely have gotten out of it in Mississippi. Her refusal would have been seen as impudence, all but assuring an assault. And there would have been nothing done about it. Here, the northern man seemed to view such a conquest as a hoped-for fringe benefit rather than a right. That, along with Ida Mae’s indignation over the whole thing, appeared to keep her safe.

  That day, she cleaned the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, and changed the linens as she had gone there to do. The man stayed in his room. She never went back.

  She missed out on the rest of the week’s pay, which she desperately needed. Later, she confronted the regular girl who worked for the couple.

  “So you don’t do nothin’ but stay in the bed all day, huh?” Ida Mae said. “Don’t ask me to go back up there again.”

  The girl paid Ida Mae out of the money she was making off the couple. The whole sordid affair stayed with Ida Mae for years. She couldn’t see how the girl could live with herself.

  “I just don’t know,” Ida Mae would say years later. “Supposing the wife came back home? I just couldn’t see how she did it.”

  With five mouths to feed, the family couldn’t go much longer unless Ida Mae found a job. In the fall of 1939, something finally opened up at Inland Steel, over at Sixty-third and Melvina, on the city’s southwest side. George had a brother working there. At this point, Ida Mae didn’t much care what it was as long as it wasn’t day’s work cleaning toilets and fighting off the madame’s husband.

  It was her first real job in Chicago. They called her a press operator. She was in the canning department, where her job was to work the presser that attached the curved tops that cover cans as they came down the assembly line. She had to fit the tops on, her arms going up and down and up and down, over and over and over again.

  She was excited at first but then found it to be a nerve-jangling endeavor. The factory was loud, the noise a little like being inside a car engine. The mechanical arms that she operated were sharp and heavy and were known to slice off people’s fingers and hands.

  She was on the line one day when another worker, a colored woman, got some of her fingers cut off. Ida Mae was a couple of machines down from her.

  There wasn’t much of a commotion, as Ida Mae remembered it.

  “They stopped everybody for a while,” she said. “Then they went out with her so fast. And she never did come back.”

  Ida Mae quit soon after that. A line job turned up at Campbell Soup, where George was working. It wouldn’t last long either, after a woman stole her coat that winter. She got a job at a printing press, and it looked to be a good one. But in time she would get a job at a hospital, Walther Memorial on the West Side of Chicago, working as a hospital aide. She sterilized instruments, cheered up patients, which was her specialty, and organized the gauzes, bandages, and intravenous lines in central supply.

  It took her a while to learn how everything worked and how to get the little scissors and scalpels cleaned just so.

  “I wash tray by tray and put the instruments back in there till I learned it,” Ida Mae said. “And I learned all them instruments. Some of them I couldn’t call the name, but you better believe I know where they went.”

  Sometimes she would poke her head in during surgery when she dropped off a tray of instruments she had sterilized. She liked to see the babies come into the world, and the doctors let her stay sometimes.

  She had been through it four times herself and still marveled at the sight and sound of a new life making its entrance. “They always come out hollering,” she said. Just like her babies had.

  “You know, that’s amazing, ain’t it?” she said.

  With Ida Mae worki
ng, the family could move out of the one-room apartment at Twenty-first and State and into a flat big enough for everyone. In the coming years, they would live all over the black belt.

  Now that they were getting situated, people from back home in Mississippi started to make their way north to stay or to visit and see what it was like.

  Saint, who had helped them move their things from Edd Pearson’s plantation and get out of Mississippi, came up with his wife, Catherine, and their children, and stayed for good. Ida Mae’s brother-in-law Aubrey, her younger sister Talma’s husband, came up for a while to see if he would like it, but he didn’t and moved back to Mississippi, where the people tipped their hat to you as they passed and looked up to him because of his family’s long years in the South, where he had made peace and found a way to get along with the white people and benefit from it. Joe Lee, whose flogging was the reason George and Ida Mae had left, even came up and lived there for a while. But he was never quite right after all he had been through. He never married and did not make out very well or live too long, and nobody cared to talk about him very much.