Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  He remade himself in California and still does not fully know what to make of the place.

  “It seemed like a fairyland the way they painted the picture,” he says, “and I bought it.”

  “What do you think now?” I ask him.

  “It’s not the oasis that I thought it was,” he says, “but I’ve got over that, too.”

  He pauses and considers the options of a stifled life under the deadly combination of Jim Crow and “little-townism,” as he calls it, if he had stayed in Monroe or even Atlanta.

  “I don’t think I could have done any better,” he finally says.

  Robert has a taste for collard greens and corn bread, and we go to his favorite soul food restaurant in Inglewood, over by Crenshaw and Manchester, run by some people from Mississippi. He orders up yams and collards and smothered chicken and remembers that it was here that he sat when the riots over the Rodney King verdict broke out in May 1992. He remembers telling the waitress to wrap everything up.

  “Let me get out of here,” he told her. He turned north on Crenshaw and raced to get back home.

  On this day four years later, the streets of his beloved adopted city are quiet, and Robert is momentarily back in the South with the comfort food of his youth. When it’s time to leave, I prepare to take him home, but he tells me he’d rather be dropped off somewhere else. He wants to go to Hollywood Park racetrack, which all too conveniently happens to be right around the corner from the restaurant. He assures me he will have a way to get home. On the short ride to the track, he talks about how it feels, just going into a casino, which, for him, is more than a casino, but freedom itself.

  “I walk into a casino,” he says, “and I act like I own it.”

  Walking in like that attracts just the kind of attention he craves.

  “What kind of surgeon are you?” a man asked him once, having heard he was a doctor.

  “A damn good one,” Robert told the man with a smile.

  We arrive at the track, and Robert gets out of the car in his windbreaker and pensioner’s slacks. He looks up at the exterior of the track, which looms high above him like a coliseum. He is a regal man, small-boned and slight in stature, and he looks out of place given his bearing and pedigree. But he quickens his step the closer he gets to the entrance. I watch him to make sure he gets in alright until he disappears into the crowd. He does not look back but straight ahead, as if he owns the place.

  THE WINTER OF THEIR LIVES

  That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary

  —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.

  — DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, The Negro Family

  NEW YORK, 1997

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  THE HARLEM THAT GEORGE STARLING FLED to in 1945 no longer exists. The Savoy Ballroom closed its doors in 1958. Small’s Paradise closed in 1986, its patrons now frail and the children of the Migration not dressing up and dancing the Lindy Hop late into the night. The Sunday stroll died off with the top hat. The black elites—the surgeons and celebrities who would have made their homes on Sugar Hill in previous generations—can now move wherever they want. Many of them live in Westchester or Connecticut now.

  The magnificent brownstones are aging and subdivided. Urban pioneers have only recently begun to turn them around. The streets have been given over to teenagers with boom boxes, to crack dealers and crack addicts, prostitutes and soapbox preachers, wig shops and liquor stores, corner stores selling single cigarettes for a nickel apiece and homeless people pushing their worldly possessions in shopping carts down what is no longer Lenox Avenue but Malcolm X Boulevard.

  George Starling has lived in Harlem for half a century and knows and loves it in spite of itself. Many of the people who came up from the South have passed away. There are fewer and fewer old-timers left. Still he makes his way around with a sense of ownership and belonging. He has lived there for longer than most of the people around him have been alive.

  It has gotten to the point that his mind is still sharp but he can’t drive anymore on account of his eyesight, and his knees fairly creak as he negotiates the steps to the basement apartment of his brownstone on 132nd Street.

  When he returns home in the evening from church or the grocery store, and if someone happens to stop to talk to him, someone who, say, maybe has not been seen on the block before, a voice might holler out from across the street in the dark. It is a neighbor watching out for him.

  “You alright, Mr. G.? Everything alright, Mr. George?”

  “Yeah, I’m alright.”

  “Okay. We just want to be sure.”

  Back in 1950, on the occasion of Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary as a black community, the New York Age asked residents why they had moved to Harlem and why they stayed.

  An ice vendor was one of the people who responded. “I know everybody in my block,” he said, “and I don’t think I want to go anywhere else to live, until I go to heaven.”

  George Starling knows how the ice vendor felt. As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, he has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.

  A neighbor passes and yells, “Hey, Mr. George!” He smiles and nods and lifts his hand in the neighbor’s direction.

  Despite all the changes, it is still a neighborhood with its own sense of order and kinship.

  “The people around here know more what’s going on over here than I do,” he says of his brownstone.

  Anyone coming up to his door might face an inquiry.

  “He know you?” somebody might ask on George’s behalf.

  When he was still driving, the crack addicts and prostitutes—or, more precisely, the addicts who were prostituting themselves to get more cocaine—would approach him as he pulled up to the curb.

  “You need some company tonight?”

  “No, darling, I don’t need no company tonight.”

  Sometimes they come to him with good news, knowing how upright he carries himself.

  “I’m going to school now, Mr. G.,” they’ll say. “Can you give me two dollars for some cigarettes?”

  He looks them over and sees that they are only telling him what they think he wants to hear. “They come up, and they look like they just came out a garbage can,” he says, shaking his head.

  School is something he takes seriously because he hadn’t been able to complete his own education. He calls them on it.

  “Yeah? How long you been in school?”

  They might not have an answer, but he gives them a couple dollars anyway.

  “I give it to you Tuesday,” they assure him.

  “You don’t owe me,” George tells them. “ ’Cause I don’t want to get mad with you when you don’t pay me back.”

  Sometimes they come up to him to report their progress, as if he were everybody’s grandfather, and they feel the need to prove themselves to him.

  “I just dropped out of rehab, but I’m going right back,” they’ll say, even though George can see full well that they can’t be in rehab if they are running up and down the street as they have been all these months.

  From his front stoop George Starling watches a most desperate parade. On these streets, there were once people gliding down the boulevard as if on a Paris runway, the men in overcoats and fedoras, the women in mink-collared swing coats and butterfly hats, all rushing to work for the rich white people or the manufacturers of paint or hats or lampshades. Now there are the hooded and disheveled descendants of the least able of the migrants living out their lives on the streets.

  “I’m sitting out front now,” he is saying to me over the telephone, “and I see them ducking down these drug holes. They come here so beautiful, and in a few weeks look like they climbed out o
f a garbage can. We’re the ones that’s killing ourselves. I don’t see one white person in this block selling drugs. They got the nerve to be mad at the blue-eyed devil. You don’t have to take those drugs and sell ’em. Nobody’s making you sell drugs. We’re the ones that’s killing ourselves. They won’t learn in this century and maybe not in the next one.”

  He wishes he could take all of them aside and warn them of the path they are taking. And, to those willing to listen, he does. But he has seen so much, it has begun to affect how he looks at them.

  One time, a few years back, his door bell rang at two in the morning. He got up to see who or what it was.

  “What do you want? You know what time it is?”

  There before him was an addict, probably trying to sell him another trinket out of the trash that he didn’t need.

  “You know it’s two in the morning?” George asked the addict.

  “Your lights burning,” the addict said. “The lights on your car, Mr. G. I’m sorry, Mr. G., but your lights’re on in your car.”

  George thanked him. He rushed out to turn off the lights and promised himself he wouldn’t prejudge these people anymore.

  “I just thank the Lord,” he says, “that, by his grace, it’s not me.”

  LOS ANGELES, WINTER 1997

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  BY THE CLOSE OF 1996, Robert’s body began to fail him. Everything that happened to him he knew precisely what it was because he had diagnosed it in everyone else, divined it before they or their other doctors even knew they had it. It was a gift to those who turned to him for help, a curse when applied to oneself. He calculated the symptoms and risks of whatever he saw happening to him, second-guessed his doctors, naturally, and then surrendered to whatever they suggested, depending on if he agreed with them.

  His biggest frustration was not the natural breakdown of his body but not being able to reach his doctors when he wanted. He had always coddled his patients, brought a southern courtliness to his practice. He checked on them when they didn’t expect it, went over impending procedures four or five times to make sure they understood because he felt they would come out of the procedure better if they went into it in the right state of mind. Now, aging and ill in an anonymous city out west, he can go days or weeks without hearing from a doctor. Test results come not with the reassuring words or stroke on the shoulder from his physician but in a form letter from some laboratory out in Riverside.

  He has already had a heart attack and bypass surgery. Now his kidneys have succumbed, and he has to endure dialysis several times a week. He is growing frailer but is still sound of mind. He has a live-in nurse now, a sweet woman of good humor named Barbara Lemmons, who is from the South like most everybody else in his life and who indulges his idiosyncrasies.

  He has taken care of everyone else, outlived his brothers Madison and Leland and his sister, Gold, the only one he had managed to lure out to California and then only after her marriage broke up. He misses them terribly, but especially Gold, whom he had tried to protect as a young boy back in Monroe and couldn’t. Even when he had grown up, his money and status couldn’t protect her from herself. She had taken to drinking, a Foster weakness, as their nephew Madison would put it. “She liked the parties, liquor, men,” Madison said, “and broke up many a marriage.” Robert couldn’t protect her from her Billie Holiday of a life. And now she was gone.

  His mentor, Dr. Beck, who took him in when he first got to Los Angeles, and Dr. Beck’s son, William, who was almost like a brother to him, have passed away, along with so many others, Alice first among them. He has four grandchildren whom Alice did not live to see—Bunny’s son and Robin’s son, who are practically grown up and far away besides, and Joy’s two little ones, who are growing up in Long Beach but whom he sees mainly at birthdays and holidays.

  His world has grown smaller, and he is losing control, bit by bit, over his physical self. He seems to savor all the more the little joys in life—a perfectly broiled porterhouse steak, geraniums planted just so in the backyard, a call from a beloved patient.

  There is a long list of things he is not supposed to have anymore—fatback and ham hocks, watermelon and barbecue sauce, biscuits, corn bread, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes—just torture to a southerner. But Barbara and his friends manage to slip him some corn bread with the collards anyway because it makes him so happy, and what is the point of living if you can’t have a bit of joy in your life?

  Every morning she gets up at eight, opens the drapes, and turns on the sprinklers. She invariably finds him at the side of his bed on the telephone. He comes into the kitchen. She gives him grits, which are on the approved list, but with a little salt, which is not. No matter what the list says, he refuses to give up his bacon.

  He loves fried catfish, which is not approved, and he could eat that every day. “I know it’s not on the list,” he says. “But I don’t care. Let’s cook it.”

  She puts a chopping board onto the Formica-top island by the Thermador oven near the avocado green Frigidaire. She positions a chair so that he can watch her dust the fish in cornmeal and fry it.

  When it is time to get dressed, she pulls some things from the closet for him to wear even if he is not expecting to see anyone that day.

  “Yeah, that’s fine, but run the iron over those pants,” he’ll say.

  He has nothing but time on his hands, and he frets over the garden with its camellias and hollyhocks that he can no longer manage to his liking. He gets Barbara out there planting the annuals and worries over the placement and composition. They’ll be watching the news and he’ll be thinking about where he is going to put the begonias. They’ll be having their grits and bacon at breakfast, and all of a sudden Robert will blurt out an idea.

  “How do you think the geraniums would look over there in that corner?” he asks her. “I’m going to need some impatiens.” And the two of them tramp out to the backyard to position them just so.

  Robert has just gotten out of the hospital again, and the phone is ringing like mad. One time, Barbara picked up the phone and heard a gravel voice that sounded familiar.

  “This is Ray Charles,” the man said. “Let’s speak to the old man. I’m calling to see if he wants some steaks.”

  Barbara was holding the receiver to her ear and the cradle to her hip. She whispered to Robert, “Ray Charles is on the phone!”

  Robert took the receiver, and Ray got straight to the point.

  “You gon’ be at home?” Ray asked him. “You want these steaks? I’ll be over there with them.”

  Barbara was in a panic. Ray Charles was on his way. She had just cleaned the living room, but she hadn’t gotten to the kitchen or vacuumed the orange carpet in the den where Robert spent most of his day, when it occurred to her, what was the point of rushing?

  He can’t see anyway, she said to herself. He won’t know what room he’s in.

  She calmed herself down. When the doorbell rang and Ray Charles arrived, she sent him through the kitchen. “You just say step up or step down,” she later recounted. “Why should I let him trample through the living room I just finished vacuuming? He wasn’t dressed up, and he don’t know the difference.”

  Ray Charles came bearing ten or twelve steaks that Robert was not supposed to have but that no one in the world could stop Ray Charles from giving him—all New York cut and porterhouse, no T-bone, just as Robert liked it.

  Ray chided Robert for not letting him know what hospital he had been in.

  “Now, I had to call all over town, every hospital, looking for you,” Ray said. “Where in the hell did you go? Why did you go way out there? I’m a shoot you if you go off again and don’t let me know where you are.”

  The cancer diagnosis came in a form letter. He turned to Barbara and said, “Look at this.” He would never have allowed a patient of his to discover such news this way.

  “All he would do is look at it,” Barbara remembered.

  Now that he needed her more than eve
r, she would not be with him much longer. She already had high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. Now a blood clot had formed in her chest. It broke apart and traveled to her leg. “My leg felt like jelly,” she said. “It felt like it wasn’t there.”

  Barbara would no longer be able to work for Robert. By the late spring, a succession of nursing aides would come and go, but nothing would be the same after Barbara left.

  Without her to keep him company and indulge his whims as his body grew weaker, he was finding fewer reasons to keep going.

  Earlier in the year, he had received the most wonderful news about one of his grandchildren. Robin’s son, Daniel Moss, a brilliant boy who took after all of his ambitious forebears, had been in the enviable position of having turned down early admission to Harvard and an offer from Princeton. He had chosen Yale, where he would be a goalie on the soccer team. He had been spared the pain of Jim Crow and the second-class schooling in the South because his mother had been spared it when Robert had moved the family to California.

  Robert was too ill to fully enjoy the news about his grandson but could not help but contemplate how over the moon his mother, Ottie, would be if she were alive. All those years of scraping to send her four children to segregated colleges and never seeing her youngest son become the surgeon she so dreamed of. The idea of her great-grandson turning down Harvard and Princeton would have been beyond her comprehension.

  His daughters were preparing a trip back east for Daniel’s high school graduation. It was around the time of Father’s Day. Robert had hoped to go but was not well enough to make the trip. And that made him all the sadder. While everyone else was at Daniel’s graduation, a triumphant moment for the family and for Robert as the patriarch, he felt more alone than perhaps ever before. He started refusing to go to dialysis, knowing full well the consequences.