Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Before George took ill, Kenny went to George and let him know how he was doing. Kenny was married, had kids, was living in the Bronx. He told him he had converted to Islam, had changed his name to Amjad Mujaahid, which means, he said, “One who is noble, a warrior in the cause of God.”

  “Daddy,” Kenny told George, “that name is in memory of you.”

  “That’s real nice, son,” Kenny remembers George saying. “I’m still calling you Kenny.”

  Now the man he wished he’d had more time to get to know was dead. The service was a blur of song and testimonials. He took off his glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes, as his father had done whenever he sang.

  It was hurricane season at the time of George Starling’s death. Hurricane Bonnie and Hurricane Danielle had gathered east of the Leeward Islands that August. By mid-September, when George Starling was transported back to the state of Florida for the last time, a new hurricane had formed and was nearing the Florida coast. The National Weather Service had named it Hurricane Georges.

  Back in Eustis, the southern funeral commenced at Gethsemane Baptist Church. But Viola Dunham, the sister-in-law he used to stay with whenever he visited, could not bring herself to go. “It’s killing me,” she said. “I want to remember him sitting in my kitchen eating breakfast and running his mouth.”

  A cousin named Lila Mae went and spoke for the people who had stayed in the South, remembering him as the hometown boy who made good in the North with his railroad job and dignified bearing.

  “As he journeyed to New York and became a porter,” she began, “nothing was finer than to see this good-looking cousin come into Wildwood station and to bring him some sausage. All of his splendor and grace. It was something to see. Little George never forgot where he came from.”

  Reuben Blye, who’d known George most of his life, sat staring out into the sanctuary in a gray suit and tie in a front pew. Sam Gaskin, who had stood up with him against the grove owners back in the forties, was there, too. A processional of eight or ten cars led by a white hearse passed through town near the corner where George had stood and waited for the open-bed truck to take pickers to the citrus groves some sixty years before.

  The cortege turned off a main thoroughfare and crept down a dirt path to a clearing of wild grass scattered with the headstones of nearly all the black people who had ever lived and died in Eustis. The cars crossed a pebbled, pitted clearing and came to a stop at a green tent pitched before two juniper bushes in the middle of Mount Olive Cemetery. A dozen people took their places before the casket. The pastor stood and said his last words: “From dust thou art …”

  That evening, the sun fell behind the horizon and made what looked like streaks of fire across the sky after George Starling was returned for the last time to the Florida earth he had fled.

  THE EMANCIPATION OF IDA MAE

  My presence will go with you. And I will give you rest.

  — EXODUS 33:14

  CHICAGO, OCTOBER 15, 1998

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IDA MAE WAS GOING BACK to visit Mississippi. It was early autumn, the same time of year she had left sixty-one years before. It would be her first time on Mississippi soil since her sister Talma had died in Tupelo in 1983. Ida Mae had gone down when she got word that her youngest sister had taken ill. She sat at the side of her sister’s bed for her last hours on this earth.

  Ida Mae remembered she had been watching Talma, and Talma had been trying to speak.

  “Don’t you see all them people in white singing?” Talma had said, delirious. “They just singing away.”

  Ida Mae looked in the direction Talma was facing and tried to see the people in white but couldn’t. Days later, at Talma’s funeral, the choir sang in all white.

  “She saw them before,” Ida Mae said, convinced of it.

  Ida Mae and I are driving along Route 8, heading east toward Vardaman in the direction of Chickasaw County. We pass a cotton gin and bales of cotton bound in the field and covered with tarp. The bales are packed high and tight and look like cubes of Styrofoam the size of a school bus from a distance.

  We cross a gravel road with cotton on either side of it. “That cotton’s loaded,” Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big. “Let’s go pick some.”

  “You sure that’s alright?” I ask. “That’s somebody’s cotton. What if they see us?”

  “They not gon’ mind what little bit we pick,” she says, pushing open the passenger door.

  She jumps out and heads into the field. She hasn’t picked cotton in sixty years. It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to. It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.

  I follow her out, and she starts pulling at the bolls, and I pull at them too. No cars or trucks pass by, and we are surrounded by cotton.

  We carry a bouquet of cotton buds back to the car and head to her sister-in-law Jessie Gladney’s house. Along the route, there are no streetlights, traffic lights, or stop signs. There are no street signs to identify what road you are on. The directions to the house call for looking for a cotton gin, passing and keeping count of five or six bridges that are merely dirt mounds over dry creek beds, making a right at a Baptist church, and looking for the sister-in-law’s off-white double-wide on the right-hand side of the road, assuming we’re on the correct one.

  Jessie is Ida Mae’s sister-in-law twice over, in the small, insular circles of rural Mississippi. She was married to Ida Mae’s husband’s brother Ardee, and she is the sister of the man Ida Mae’s sister Talma married. Jessie moved up to Chicago in 1946 but recently returned to Mississippi, where her brother Aubrey lives. She went back south with her husband, but he was ill and not particular about moving back to Mississippi and did not live long after they had arrived. That left Jessie widowed and alone in the isolated double-wide with her sweet nature and bad knees.

  Ida Mae and Jessie greet and hug each other like sisters, and Ida Mae rests herself in Jessie’s recliner with a throw over it and starts talking about the cotton she and I picked by the side of the road.

  “Ooh, it was so much cotton,” she says. “Cotton everywhere.”

  “The highest I ever picked was one hundred eighty-seven pounds,” Jessie says.

  “I just couldn’t do it,” Ida Mae says. “I’d pick and cry. I ain’t never liked the field.”

  The two of them catch up on the latest with the kids and nieces and nephews, and then Ida Mae starts talking about life back up in the North.

  “You see everything up there, Jessie,” she says. “Seem like they choose this block to do all they dirt. They sell drugs there. They open their mouths and put it down their throat. That’s where they keep it. One lady died from swallowing it. It must have got hung up in her lung. I missed her and asked about her. She used to sit under the tree out there. She was in her fifties, and she died from it.”

  Ida Mae pauses and looks away. “I reckon people who’ve passed on wouldn’t want to come back if they could. They couldn’t take what’s going on now days.”

  Jessie mostly listens. She’s having trouble with her legs, and her husband’s death is still weighing on her heart.

  Which reminds Ida Mae of her husband. “I waited on George forty-seven years,” she says. “And I mean I waited on him. When he come home from work, and when he wanted his breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I give it to him. I served him. They expect too much. When he passed, I wasn’t thinking about no other husband. I laugh and talk with them, but that’s as far as it go.”

  The next day we are riding through the curving hills of Chickasaw County, rising and sinking along the red dirt road. We are retracing the corners Ida Mae and her family lived and sharecropped and looking for anyone she might know who is still around. We drive through pine woods draped in kudzu and through tumbling fields down a gravel road that kicks up dirt as we pass.

  Every now and then, the hills are broken by a cabin with a chicken-wire fence around it and a pickup t
ruck at the side. The land is quiet, at peace, as if the bloodshed of the twentieth century never happened. There appears a black man riding high up on a tractor as it inches down a gravel road in a cloud of gravel dust, and he tips his hat as he passes us, a courtly gesture from another century that one would never see in Chicago.

  Ida Mae’s brother-in-law Aubrey, who was married to her late sister Talma, is leading her from place to place. He knows the land because he returned to Mississippi decades ago after trying Chicago and not liking it.

  Aubrey tries to find Miss Theenie’s house, the one where the men came courting Ida Mae on the front porch. They spot a weathered shack leaning on its side. They stop to inspect it and conclude that it might have been Miss Theenie’s but they couldn’t say for sure. Falling-down shacks look pretty much the same.

  “Been so long,” Ida Mae says.

  In the car, Ida Mae looks out at all the cotton, the cotton that ruled her days and that she’s free from now.

  Aubrey points to a machine off in the distance.

  “That machine can pick fifteen to twenty bales of cotton in a day,” Aubrey says proudly of the advancements made since Ida Mae left.

  “Sho’ ’nough?” Ida Mae says blankly. She looks out with vague interest at the blur of field. Then she turns the conversation to the old friends she wants to see and how different things look to her now.

  She is getting a little disoriented, one hill indistinguishable from another, nothing but trees or cabins as guideposts and the terrain seeming wilder than before. “I don’t remember so many crooks and turns,” she says of the land and the gravel road we are on.

  She is having trouble with the heat after being in Chicago so long. “It’s a different kind of hot down here,” she says. And she’s feeling a little sick, as people do when they drink the water they are warned about when they visit developing countries. Later in the day she will put some nutmeg in the palm of her hand and lick it to settle her stomach, and not draw the least attention to herself among the people in Mississippi, which is, after all, where she learned it.

  In and around the settlements of Chickasaw County, Ida Mae visits with a succession of people who knew her. They greet her like a loved one they just discovered happens to be alive after all. She visits Isolena Harris, Marcelle Barr, Doretta Boston, a lady named Azaline.

  Aubrey has taken charge and takes great pride in being the one to ask bewildered home folks, “You know who this is?”

  The people inspect Ida Mae’s face. She was a young mother in her twenties the last time some of them saw her. Now she’s a great-grandmother. They look hard and see the pointed nose of her sister Talma or the nut butter coloring of Miss Theenie. Some catch on right away and startle themselves in the recognition.

  “You know I know Miss Ida Mae! I declare! How you doing!” one lady says, after figuring it out, grabbing Ida Mae, and smothering her in hugs.

  She stops by to see an old classmate named Castoria.

  “You know who this is?” Aubrey asks again.

  Castoria says she can’t place her, doesn’t know her.

  “Yes, you do,” Aubrey insists. “This is Ida Mae.”

  Castoria’s face brightens. The two of them embrace each other and let out gap-toothed smiles.

  “Girl, I ought to whoop you good!” Castoria says. “Lord have mercy on me. When have I seen Ida Mae?”

  “It’s been years and years and years,” Ida Mae says. “I went to school with you. Just a few of us living now.”

  “Lord have mercy on my soul!” Castoria says, still staring at Ida Mae.

  Aubrey takes her to the church cemetery where many of the black people of Chickasaw County are buried. She finds her mother, Miss Theenie, and some cousins and aunts, but not the father she loved so dearly.

  One of the headstones appears to be testimony to the hard times the people faced under Jim Crow.

  It reads simply: THY TRIAL’S ENDED.

  Aubrey scans the headstones of all the people they once knew.

  “Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?” Aubrey asks her.

  “No, I’m gonna be in Chicago,” she tells him.

  We pull up to a frame house with a pickup truck and farm implements in the yard. It’s where David McIntosh lives. He was the suitor who rode on horseback to court Ida Mae had when she was a young girl and who lost out to the man who married Ida Mae and carried her off to Chicago.

  Had things turned out differently, had she not married George, this might be where Ida Mae would be living: on a Chickasaw County farm with chickens and pole beans in walking distance from where she grew up. She would never have lived in Chicago, might never have seen it. She wouldn’t have been able to vote all those years or work in a big city hospital, to ride the elevated train and taste Polish sausage and be surrounded by family and friends most everywhere she went because most everyone she knew moved north like she did. Her children—James, Eleanor, Velma—not to mention the grandchildren, might not have existed or would surely have been different from what they were if they had. It’s almost incomprehensible now.

  David comes out of the house in his baseball cap. He has not seen her in half a lifetime. He recognizes her instantly. He breaks into a smile.

  “How you, Ida Mae?”

  “I’m blessed,” she says, smiling back.

  He is a compact man in soiled denim and bifocals, not much taller than Ida Mae. He stayed in Mississippi and lived his life close to the land, the opposite of how Ida Mae ended up. He studies her face across the decades and reaches out and grabs her hand.

  Just then, David’s wife, in white braids, comes out to see who is visiting, and Ida Mae and David keep it to a warm hug and a few words.

  Ida Mae climbs into the car, still looking back at David, and he still looking at her.

  “Bless his heart,” Ida Mae says, as the car backs out of his dirt yard. “I knew him the minute I saw him.”

  That turned out to be the last time they would see each other. He died the next year, and she would not mourn so much as contemplate the meaning of what might have been and what their lives had turned out to be.

  CHICAGO, MARCH 5, 1999

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IDA MAE’S LIVING ROOM had a pink glow to it. The new venetian blinds she dreamed of had finally arrived. Their pink slats cast a rose-colored light in the room. It was just how she liked to see the world, and she was happier for it. She was all dressed up, her hair in cotton white Shirley Temple curls, pink lipstick on, smiling and free. It was her eighty-sixth birthday.

  A thick snow was falling outside and coated the trees. Betty, who lived upstairs, waited with her for the guests to arrive.

  The news was on. There was a report about a white man who had gotten the death penalty for dragging a black man to death in Jasper, Texas. But this was Ida Mae’s birthday, and no one wanted to think about black men being dragged to death. They had lived it, and it hadn’t gone away, and there was nothing they could do about it. Plus, that was Texas, not Mississippi. They were from Mississippi.

  Outside, a man was parking his truck in front of the empty lot next to Ida Mae’s house. She heard the screeching of the brakes and turned toward the window to see what was going on.

  “He needs to move that truck,” Ida Mae said. “That rusted-back truck is blocking my view.”

  Eleanor’s daughter Karen arrived with a new boyfriend named Mike. He had a square jaw and specks of gray in his hair, looked to be late forties to midfifties. When Mike came in, Ida Mae noticed him right away. “I don’t know who that is,” she said, “but he sho’ ain’t bad on the eyes.”

  Their old friend Wilks Battle walked in and took a seat next to Ida Mae. He had just come from the hospital. His mother had been diagnosed with liver cancer. The doctor said there was no more they could do. He said it could be two months or two days, they just didn’t know. He bent his head down, eyes cast to the carpet.

  Ida Mae looked wide-eyed into his face with wonder and sympathy.
All the people she had lost and buried, and still she listened as if this were the first she had heard of death and the first she had seen of grief.

  “Well,” she said in a low and gentle voice, “God don’t make no mistakes.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know,” he said, looking away.

  “No, God don’t make no mistakes.”

  The meal was fish—“cat” and “buffalo” that Eleanor fried—coleslaw, and hush puppies. Mary Ann made the tuna macaroni salad and apple muffins. Karen brought a yellow layer cake with strawberries on top and the potato salad she was still refusing to divulge the recipe for no matter how much people begged.

  The ten or so people gathered for Ida Mae’s birthday that night stood in a circle around the dining room table as Mary Ann prayed, “Dear God, thank you for Grandmother …”

  Ida Mae made sure to sit across the dining room table from Mike, her granddaughter notwithstanding, and proceeded to tell her story.

  “I been in Chicago sixty-two years,” she began. “I came here in 1937. Well, I came to Milwaukee first. I came when Eleanor was three month old and James was three year old. In them days on the train, everybody had shoe boxes full of food.”

  “The ways we got here …,” Mike said, shaking his head.

  He had come up late, in 1969.

  “I came up as a young man from McComb, Mississippi,” he said. “I guess it was coming to an end then. People stopped coming when things got better in the South.”

  A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.