Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Robert could not have been pleased with Ray’s insistence but knew him well enough not to be surprised. With Ray determined to go on tour against doctor’s orders, Robert insisted on going along with him to attend to the wound should anything happen to it, which, naturally, it did.

  Robert put a cast on the hand to protect it, but that only seemed to attract attention and endanger it more. “Everyone I met couldn’t resist touching it or shaking it,” Ray recalled. “The hand did get infected, but Bob was there to keep me straight.”

  The tour was a dream of Ray’s from back when he had gotten his start in those Jim Crow towns in Florida, where he could just see himself leading a big band like Duke Ellington’s—with trombones, trumpets, saxophones, guitars, him on piano, of course, and the Raelettes, his doo-wopping backup singers in their form-fitting sequins and stilettos.

  Robert traveled with them to St. Louis, checking on his most famous patient’s most precious instrument and loving his front-row seat to smoke-filled celebrity. The tour continued on to Detroit, where Ray struck up his orchestra and somebody decided to bring a blind teenager onto the stage. It was said that the teenager had been signed up by a new outfit called Motown and could sing and play the harmonica. It was Stevie Wonder, “Little Stevie,” as he was known back then, who, not surprisingly, idolized Ray Charles and got the chance to play a few songs with him that spring night in Detroit.

  Ray’s hard-driving life of drugs and women was beginning to catch up with him—he would end up arrested for drug possession in Boston and would end up fathering a total of twelve children, only three of them by his wife, Della Bea, who divorced him in 1977.

  But it occurred to him as he was writing his biography that he did not want to leave the wrong impression about his physician, a man he described as “one of the dearest people I’ve ever known.”

  He said: “I must say something about Bob, though, before anyone gets the wrong idea. Although he was my personal friend, and although he traveled with me for about ten days during the time my hand was in the cast, I never let him do anything illegal for me. I liked him too well for that. If you really love a person, you won’t get him involved in something which might hurt him.”

  The hand began to heal, and after a week and a half on the road, Robert felt it safe to return to Los Angeles and to his practice. “He sewed up my hand so smoothly that you can barely detect the cuts today,” Ray said years later. “He’s the man who got me through the crisis with my hand, and for a piano player, that’s some serious business.”

  It was time for Robert to leave the tour for another reason. Not only did he have a life and practice back in Los Angeles, he had another patient to attend to. Ray’s wife, Della Bea, was expecting her third child and wanted Robert to deliver her baby. She had had a difficult delivery with her first son before she had heard of Robert Foster and had now come to rely on him.

  The baby was born in May of 1961. It was a boy. After all that had happened in the preceding month and the time spent tending them before that, the couple decided to name the new baby Robert.

  THE NORTH, 1915–1975

  FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, scholars would debate the effects of the Migration, whether it was a success or a failure, whether the people who left had done better by leaving or would have been better off staying, whether the poorest among them merely imported the disorganized family systems inherited from slavery and carried into sharecropping or whether the anonymous, overpacked cities merely brought out the worst in the weaker souls. Usually these were macroeconomic, sociological questions as to the effect of the North or South on the people who left or stayed.

  But back when the Migration first began, the venerable Chicago Commission on Race Relations, convened after World War I, chose to ask the migrants themselves about their perceptions of how they were faring in the North. These were a few of their responses:

  DO YOU FEEL GREATER FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE IN CHICAGO? IN WHAT WAYS?

  Yes. Feel free to do anything I please. Not dictated to by white people.

  Yes. Can vote; no lynching; no fear of mobs; can express my opinion and defend myself.

  Yes. Feel more like a man. Same as slavery, in a way, at home. I don’t have to give up the sidewalk here for white people.

  Sure. Feel more freedom. Was not counted in the South; colored people allowed no freedom at all in the South.

  WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHICAGO?

  When I got here and got on the street car and saw colored people sitting by white people all over the car I just held my breath, for I thought any minute they would start something. Then I saw nobody noticed it, and I just thought this was a real place for colored people.

  Was completely lost, friend was to meet me but didn’t and I was afraid to ask anyone where to go; finally my friend came; was afraid to sleep first night—so much noise; thought the cars would finally stop running so I could rest.

  Always liked Chicago, even the name before I came.

  Didn’t like it; lonesome, until I went out.

  Liked Chicago from the first visit made two years ago; was not satisfied until I was able to get back.

  IN WHAT RESPECTS IS LIFE HARDER OR EASIER HERE THAN IN THE SOUTH?

  Easier, you can make more money and it means more to you.

  Find it easier to live because I have more to live on.

  Earn more money; the strain is not so great wondering from day to day how to make a little money do.

  Harder because of increased cost of living.

  WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT THE NORTH?

  Freedom and opportunity to acquire something.

  Freedom allowed in every way.

  Freedom of speech, right to live and work as others. Higher pay for labor.

  Freedom; privileges; treatment of whites; ability to live in peace; not held down.

  Freedom of speech and action. Can live without fear, no Jim Crow.

  The schools for the children, the better wages, and the privileges for colored people.

  The people, the freedom and liberty colored people enjoy here that they never before experienced.

  WHAT DIFFICULTIES DO YOU THINK A PERSON FROM THE SOUTH MEETS IN COMING TO CHICAGO?

  Getting accustomed to cold weather and flats.

  Rooming and “closeness” of the houses.

  Growing accustomed to being treated like people.

  Getting used to the ways of the people; not speaking or being friendly; colder weather, hard on people from the South.

  I know of no difficulties.

  ARE YOU ADVISING FRIENDS TO COME TO CHICAGO?

  Yes. People down there don’t really believe the things we write back; I didn’t believe myself until I got here.

  No. I am not going to encourage them to come, for they might not make it, then I would be blamed.

  Wish all the colored folks would come up here where you ain’t afraid to breathe.

  THE RIVER KEEPS RUNNING

  “Why do they come?” I asked a Negro minister in Philadelphia.

  “Well, they’re treated more like men up here in the North,” he said,

  “that’s the secret of it. There’s prejudice here, too, but the colour line isn’t drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South.

  It all gets back to a question of manhood.”

  — RAY STANNARD BAKER, Following the Color Line

  “Every train, every bus, they were coming.”

  — MANLEY THOMAS, a migrant from Tennessee to Milwaukee

  WHITFIELD, MISSISSIPPI, FEBRUARY 7, 1958

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IT WOULD BECOME LEGEND in Chicago among the migrants and their children, the lengths to which some colored people would go to get out of the South. The Great Migration was now into its fourth decade. People who were children when it began were well into middle age. And back in Mississippi, people were still trying to escape. Ida Mae would hear about these people and pray for them.

  One of the most desperate so
uls was a perfectly well man named Arrington High, who had been consigned to the Mississippi State Hospital for the Insane for protesting the southern order of things. The hospital and its hundred or so outbuildings, originally called the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum, took up some three thousand isolated acres in the pine woods southeast of Jackson, near Terrapin Skin Creek, in a place called Whitfield, some 170 miles from where Ida Mae was born. From the time it opened in 1935, anyone saying, “They took him to Whitfield,” meant nobody ever expected to see the person again.

  What got Arrington High in trouble was a weekly newsletter he published that argued for integration. He had been editor of a two-page mimeographed broadside, the Eagle Eye, for some fourteen years and had made a name for himself protesting the treatment of colored people in central Mississippi. What got him declared insane, however, was exposing the segregationists who were consorting with prostitutes at a colored brothel that catered only to white politicians. It was a death wish of a crusade that actually may have fit the legal definition of insanity for a colored man in Mississippi at the time.

  High was taken into custody and committed to the insane asylum in October 1957. It was a sentence that would shut him off, at age forty-seven, from the rest of the world and his wife and four children for the remainder of his life. He was held in confinement deep in the woods, surrounded by guards and hospital personnel, a good fifteen miles from the nearest city. It amounted to a total silencing of a revered dissident of the Mississippi order of things and a slow death in a crazy place where he would be subjected to whatever indignities his keepers devised.

  The world of Mississippi and the world of Chicago were intertwined and interdependent, and what happened in one did not easily escape the notice of the other from afar. Word of his capture made it to Chicago. Ida Mae, a faithful reader of the Chicago Defender even in the days when it was well past its prime, would take note of people like Arrington High back in her home state and wish them safety.

  A colored physician that Ida Mae and most everyone from Mississippi knew through word of mouth, a man named T. R. M. Howard, also made note of what happened to Arrington High. Dr. Howard had founded the Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a local precursor to the civil rights groups that would become household names in the 1960s. He organized protests from his base in the all-black town of Mound Bayou in the Delta. But his activities forced him to escape Mississippi a few years before Arrington High was committed to the asylum. From Chicago, Dr. Howard tried to figure out a way to help his friend.

  The asylum put patients to work in the dairy and truck farms and the orchards run by the state. Some of the patients had to be up at dawn to work the farms. Arrington High got up at 5 A.M. on February 7, 1958, a Friday, to milk the cows, which was one of his chores.

  It was still dark outside, and instead of heading to pasture, he scurried down a deserted path on the hospital grounds and came upon a row of five cars that were parked at the side of a quiet stretch of road.

  A door in the second car opened, and he got inside the only car with a colored driver. That car and the four other cars, driven by white men, inched their way to the exit so as not to kick up any more dust or engine noise. There, the white man driving the lead car in the caravan motioned to the hospital guard at the front gate. The guard waved the processional through with a tilt of his flashlight.

  Arrington High was out of the asylum but not out of danger. The motorcade took the highway, careful not to drive too fast or too slow as to attract attention. They drove 105 miles through Pelahatchie, Hickory, Meridian, and Toomsuba, Mississippi, to the Alabama line. It would take them more than two hours to get there, and they had to watch for cars tailing them and sheriffs hunting them, as surely by now the asylum officials knew that High had gone missing.

  At the Alabama line, the drivers took no chances. They did not cross the state border themselves with their Mississippi license plates. Instead they took Arrington High to the state line and instructed him to get out of the car and walk over into Alabama. There a caravan of five other cars, all with Alabama license plates, were waiting for him. As before, there were four white drivers and one colored driver. The caravan would attract less attention if two colored men were driving together than it would if Arrington High were riding with a white man.

  He was in Alabama but still not safe. He was still in the South and within siren call of any Mississippi sheriff. The cars took him to a predetermined location. There waiting for him was a pine coffin. He was told to get inside. The coffin had breathing holes in it for him to get air. The men sealed him in the coffin and loaded it onto a hearse. On top of the coffin, the men placed a load of flowers so that it would appear that the coffin had just been driven from a funeral.

  The hearse drove to a railroad station, where the coffin was loaded on a train bound for Chicago. He lay still and quiet, unable to turn over or adjust himself for the fifteen-hour ride to the North.

  The moment the train pulled out of the station in Alabama bearing Arrington High’s coffin, Dr. Howard, awaiting word in Chicago, got a long-distance telephone call.

  “The Eagle has flown the coop,” the voice on the line said.

  High made his escape in a ritual of last resort that, in some way or another, had been used to deliver black people out of the South from the time of the Underground Railroad, the slaves using whatever means they had at their disposal. Men disguised themselves as women, women dressed as men to elude detection.

  A century before High was nailed into his coffin, a man named Henry Brown, a slave on a tobacco plantation near Richmond, Virginia, began plotting his escape the moment he saw his wife and three young children carted away in chains to some unknown part of North Carolina. His master had sold them off. Brown did not know they were being sold, did not get to hold them one last time, did not know where they were being taken, and would have been flogged or worse if he tried to search for them in North Carolina. He chose to leave the South and the “whips and thumbscrews” altogether. He prayed over it, and it came to him that he should pack himself into a box and get himself “conveyed as dry goods to a free state.”

  He had a carpenter build a crate of a size commonly sent on the railcars. The box was three feet, one inch wide by two feet, six inches high and had three little gimlet holes for air. Brown then went to a white man he thought he could trust. The man asked if the box was for Brown’s clothes. Brown said, no, he was going to get into it himself. The five-foot, six-inch Brown would have to fold himself into the fetal position and remain that way for the twenty-odd hours it would take to reach the North. His white friend did not think it safe and did not want to seal Brown inside the box.

  “I insisted upon his placing me in it, nailing me up,” Brown wrote in his autobiography, “and he finally consented.”

  The friend had promised to accompany the box to protect it on the journey, but at the last minute decided against it. Brown would have to go it alone. The friend sent a telegram to an acquaintance in Philadelphia “that such a box was on its way to his care.”

  The morning of March 29, 1849, the friend carried the box, with Brown folded inside with a few small biscuits, to the express office. There, it was later placed upside down, which left Brown sitting on his head, even though the box explicitly said, THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE. From the express office, the box went to the train depot and “tumbled roughly into the baggage car” where it happened to fall right side up, only to be put on a steamboat upside down again and left that way for close to two hours.

  Brown was in agony but dared not moan. He waited for death and prayed. Then he heard the men say, “We have been here two hours and have traveled twenty miles. Let us sit down and rest ourselves.” In so doing, the men happened to turn the box over.

  The box then arrived at the depot in Washington. There he heard a voice say, “There is no room for this box. It will have to remain behind.”

  Brown, stiff and contorted and now fearful, had to keep silent. He felt a man
’s hands reach for the box and squeeze it onto the railcar, his head pointing down again, until someone righted it at the next stop. He arrived in Philadelphia at three in the morning. He had been doubled up in the box for twenty-six hours.

  Before daylight, a wagon drove up and a white man got out and inquired about the box. He carried the box to an office on North Fifth Street. Several abolitionists had gathered to witness the opening of the parcel.

  They locked the door behind them. But once the box was placed before them, the men seemed afraid to open it. Finally one of them said, “Let us rap upon the box and see if he is alive.”

  Someone then tapped on the sides of it.

  “Is all right within?” the voice asked, trembling.

  “All right,” Brown replied.

  The people were joyful. And Brown was free. He would go on to Boston, which was judged to be safer, and for the rest of his life he would go by the name of Henry Box Brown, in light of how he had gained his freedom.

  Some one hundred years after Henry Brown shipped himself north, the train bearing Arrington High’s coffin arrived at the Twelfth Street station in Chicago. Dr. Howard, the friend who had helped organize the escape, met the train at the station that had come to symbolize the Great Migration itself. The coffin would now have to be transported by hearse to a funeral home. There, a group of men opened the lid and welcomed Arrington High to the receiving city of Chicago. The people were joyful.

  How many people fled the South this way during the Great Migration is impossible to know, due to the very nature of the mission. For the operation to work, it required the highest level of secrecy, coordination and planning worthy of the Secret Service, the active and willing participation of sympathetic white southerners, the cooperation of funeral homes in both the departure and receiving states, the complete trust of the person being ferried out by friends and loved ones willing to put themselves in danger to save a single soul, and a good measure of courage and faith on everyone’s part.