The Warmth of Other Suns (31 page)

So Pershing would have to think West, which was not a difficult thing to do. He had been hearing about California all his life, played
pretend with Clara Poe and always said he was going to California before he even knew what it was. Seemed like everybody who left Monroe was talking California. There was a contingent up in Oakland, a branch down in Los Angeles, spreading out to Fresno and over to San Bernardino. He had names, lots of names. More than enough to make a practice out of. Not only was it out of the South, it was about as far as you could get from the South and the Clements, too.

He began to get excited at the very thought. No more stepping to the side door to get your meal like a hog at a trough. No more operations in somebody’s kitchen and lynchings in the next county. He could dress like he wanted, act like he wanted, be who he wanted and how he wanted to be it. He would not have to try to protect his daughters from some planter with snuff in his mouth and know he couldn’t. In California, he could stand up straight and not apologize for it. He would know what white people’s water tasted like and drink it whenever he wanted. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything. He was going to be a citizen of the United States, like the passport said.

He told Alice his decision. They could start out fresh in California, the four of them. He would go first and see it for himself. She and the girls would stay in Atlanta for now, and she could start packing their belongings. He would send for them after he got settled. All he had to do now was save a little money. And figure how best to get out.

A SERIES OF UNPREDICTABLE EVENTS
and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration.

If there was a single precipitating event that set off the Great Migration,
it was World War I. After all, blacks had tried to escape the South with limited degrees of success from the time the first slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619. The Underground Railroad spirited hundreds of slaves out of the South and as far north as Canada before the Civil War. Later, in 1879, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a former slave who made coffins for colored lynching victims and was disheartened by the steadiness of his work, led a pilgrimage of six thousand ex-slaves, known as Exodusters, from the banks of the Mississippi River onto the free soil of Kansas.
¹¹³

In the ensuing decades, a continuous trickle of brave souls chanced an unguaranteed existence in the unknown cities of the North. The trickle became a stream after Jim Crow laws closed in on blacks in the South in the 1890s. During the first decade of the twentieth century, some 194,000 blacks left the coastal and border states of the South and settled in relative anonymity in the colored quarters of primarily northeastern cities, such as Harlem in New York and in North Philadelphia. Some were domestics for wealthy northerners; others were musicians, intellectuals, and exiled politicians of the Reconstruction era who would inspire colored people in the South by their very existence.

But the masses did not pour out of the South until they had something to go to. They got their chance when the North began courting them, hard and in secret, in the face of southern hostility, during the labor crisis of World War I. Word had spread like wildfire that the North was finally “opening up.”

The war had cut the supply of European workers the North had relied on to kill its hogs and stoke its foundries. Immigration plunged by more than ninety percent, from 1,218,480 in 1914 to 110,618 in 1918, when the country needed all the labor it could get for war production.
¹¹⁴
So the North turned its gaze to the poorest-paid labor in the emerging market of the American South.
¹¹⁵
Steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent labor scouts disguised as insurance men and salesmen to recruit blacks north, if only temporarily.

The recruiters would stride through groupings of colored people and whisper without stopping, “
Anybody want to go to Chicago, see me.
¹¹⁶
” It was an invitation that tapped into pent-up yearnings and was just what the masses had been waiting for. The trickle that became a stream had now become a river, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and about to climb out of its banks. Some 555,000 colored people left the South during the decade of the First World War—more than all the colored people who had left in the five decades after the Emancipation Proclamation,
which promised the freedoms they were now forced to pursue on their own.

At first the South was proud and ambivalent, pretended that it did not care. “As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter,” the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
happily noted.
¹¹⁷

Then, as planters awoke to empty fields, the South began to panic. “Where shall we get labor to take their places?” asked the
Montgomery Advertiser
, as southerners began to confront the reality observed by the
Columbia State
of South Carolina: “Black labor is the best labor the South can get.
^118
,
119
No other would work long under the same conditions.”

“It is the life of the South,” a Georgia plantation owner once said.
¹²⁰
“It is the foundation of its prosperity.…  God pity the day when the negro leaves the South.”

“With all our crimes of omission and commission, we still retain a marked affection for the Negro,” wrote David L.
¹²¹
Cohn in the 1935 book
God Shakes Creation
. “It is inconceivable to us that we should be without him.”

The Macon Telegraph
put it more bluntly: “We must have the negro in the South,” it said.
¹²²
“It is the most pressing thing before this State today. Matters of governorships and judgeships are only bagatelle compared to the real importance of this negro exodus.”

Yet as reality sank in, nobody could agree on what to do about it, debating to the point of exasperation. “Why hunt for the cause when it’s plain as the noonday sun?” wrote a white reader in the
Montgomery Advertiser
.
¹²³
“He doesn’t want to leave but he knows if he stays here he will starve. They have nothing to eat, no clothes, no shoes, and they can’t get any work to do and they are leaving just as fast as they can get away.…  If the Negro race could get work at 50 cents a day he would stay here.”

And a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, put this question to the ruling caste: “If you thought you might be lynched by mistake,” the paper asked, “would you remain in South Carolina?”

When the South woke up to the loss of its once guaranteed workforce, it tried to find ways to intercept it.
¹²⁴
Southern authorities resurrected the anti-enticement laws originally enacted after the Civil War to keep newly freed slaves from being lured away, this time, however, aimed at northern companies coveting the South’s cheapest and most desperate workers.

“Conditions recently became so alarming—that is, so many Negroes were leaving,” wrote an Alabama official, that the state began making anyone caught enticing blacks away—labor agents, they were called—pay
an annual license fee of $750 “in every county in which he operates or solicits emigrants” or be “fined as much as $500 and sentenced to a year’s hard labor.”
¹²⁵

Macon, Georgia, required labor agents to pay a $25,000 fee and to secure the unlikely recommendations of twenty-five local businessmen, ten ministers, and ten manufacturers in order to solicit colored workers to go north.
¹²⁶
But by the middle of World War I, those laws were useless. Northern industries didn’t need to recruit anymore. Word had spread, and the exodus took on a life of its own. “Every Negro that makes good in the North and writes back to his friends, starts off a new group,” a Labor Department study observed.
¹²⁷

So the South tried to choke off the flow of information about the North. The chief of police in Meridian, Mississippi, ordered copies of the
Chicago Defender
confiscated before they could be sold, fearing it was putting ideas into colored people’s heads.
¹²⁸

When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out. In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with fifty colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days.
¹²⁹
In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape.
¹³⁰
A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, Georgia, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities simply closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on.
¹³¹

Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologists Willis T.
¹³²
Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.”

To circumvent the heavy surveillance, some migrants simply bought tickets to cities two or three stations away where they would not be recognized or where there was less of a police presence.
¹³³
There, under less scrutiny, they bought tickets to their true destination. Those who had somehow gotten on the wrong side of somebody in the ruling class had to go to unusual lengths to get out, one man disguising himself as a woman to flee Crystal Springs, Mississippi, for Chicago in the 1940s.
¹³⁴

Chastened by their losses, some businessmen tried conciliation, one
delegation going so far as to travel to Chicago to persuade former sharecroppers that things had changed and it was time they came back.
¹³⁵
(The sharecroppers showed no interest and instead took the opportunity to complain about being cheated and whipped while in their employ.) In the 1920s, the Tennessee Association of Commerce, the Department of Immigration of Louisiana, the Mississippi Welfare League, and the Southern Alluvial Land Association all sent representatives north to try to bring colored workers back.
¹³⁶
They offered free train tickets and promised better wages and living conditions. They returned empty-handed.

When these efforts didn’t work, some planters increased wages, if only temporarily, and tried easing up on their workers to induce them to stay. “Owing to the scarcity of labor,” the Labor Department reported, “a Georgia farmer near Albany this year laid aside his whip and gun, with which it is reported he has been accustomed to drive his hands, and begged for laborers.”
¹³⁷

Oblivious to the hand-wringing, trainloads of colored people took their chances and crowded railroad platforms. Men hopped freight trains and hoboed out of the South in grain bins.
¹³⁸
Women walked off cotton fields in Texas, hiding their Sunday dresses under their field rags, bound for California. A granite quarry in Lithonia, Georgia, had to shut down because its workers had vanished. “One section gang left their tools on the spot, not stopping to get their pay,” Arna Bontemps wrote of one work site.
¹³⁹

All the while, in the places they left, the weeds grew up over the cotton, the rice and tobacco lay fallow and unpicked, and the mules wandered the pastures because, as the historian James R.
¹⁴⁰
Grossman noted, there was no one to hitch them to a plow.