The Warmth of Other Suns (21 page)

Pershing Foster was not what Rufus Early Clement would have had in mind for his only daughter. Clement had risen from a bellhop and delivery boy in Kentucky to become the head of one of the most elite colored universities in the country and its longest-serving president. He was a square-jawed, politically astute academic who rarely smiled and wore a look of professorial detachment at both the lectern and the many social engagements that demanded his attendance. He met regularly with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson in his capacity not only as a university president but as a leading figure among the colored bourgeoisie in the South.

Clement gained a reputation as a cautious and incurious steward whom history will record as the man who ousted W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual of his time, from a professorship at Atlanta University after years of clashing egos and temperaments.

W. E. B. Du Bois arrived at Atlanta University, already in his seventies and with plans for an ambitious study on race relations, at around the same time that Clement was confronted with this new boy interested in his only daughter. Clement would be at odds with Du Bois almost from the start, perhaps threatened by the long shadow of his celebrity or put off by the elder man’s impertinent disregard for Clement, who was thirty years younger than Du Bois. But it was just as likely a contest between the accommodating pragmatism of the southern-born Clement and the impatient radicalism of the northern-bred Du Bois. The two men were the very embodiment of the North-South divide among black intellectuals.

In any case, Clement blocked Du Bois’s every move, even standing in the way of a thousand-dollar grant Du Bois was pursuing, according to Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis.
⁸⁷
Du Bois suspected Clement of sabotaging him and said he “regretted the necessity of having to work with a president who seemed incapable of appreciating the great opportunity facing the university.” For his part, Clement complained that Du Bois “had become extremely difficult” and that he believed Du Bois’s age was impairing him. In 1943, Clement found a way to get rid of Du Bois altogether by invoking, with the support of the board of trustees he had lobbied, an arbitrary loophole requiring compulsory retirement at sixty-five. He informed Du Bois that he would be retired when his contract ended at the close of the school year.

“The result of this action was disastrous,” Du Bois wrote in his autobiography.
⁸⁸
“Not only was a great plan of scientific work killed at birth, but my own life was thrown into confusion.” Du Bois “fought back in despair” against his termination, Lewis wrote. Students from Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and Atlanta University rose up in support of Du Bois in a scornful letter to President Clement: “Our regret,” they wrote, “is that we did not have more courses under him, and the students who follow us will not have the opportunity which we have had in absorbing his rich experience and inspiration.”

Du Bois was beside himself. “There was no earthly reason why this wish of mine should not have been granted and applauded,” he said.
⁸⁹

His northern friends thought they knew what the trouble was.
⁹⁰
“He’s buried himself in the South too long,” Arthur Spingarn, the NAACP president, concluded, “protecting ideas nobody but he understands, and raising hope for change which may be comprehended in a hundred years.”

Du Bois returned north, to New York, where he took a position as director of special research at the NAACP, the organization he had co-founded thirty-four years before, and moved into an apartment on Sugar Hill in Harlem.

For his part, Rufus Clement had proven that, even if out of his own insecurities and desire for control, he could be a cunning and formidable adversary. He had prevailed in the short run, regardless of the consequences or of which side of history he would ultimately fall on.

As for this new young man at his doorstep wanting to court his only daughter, Clement was still sizing him up. Pershing was respectful and well mannered, as Dr. Clement would have expected of any Morehouse man. He was a math major—smart, clearly. But on the face of it, Pershing was just another student who had worked waiting tables at the cafeteria and who was just now making a name for himself as a soloist in the choir. He had come from some country town out in Louisiana. Someone said his parents taught school or something. Dr. Clement had never heard of the Fosters, nor had he any reason to recognize Monroe.

No young man with the courage to come courting his daughter would have had an easy time of it. Worse still, this was not looking like a move up in Dr. Clement’s estimation, so he looked judgingly through his spectacles.

But Pershing told of the great plans he had for himself. He talked about pursuing his doctorate in biology at Atlanta University. Or maybe going to a graduate school up north, like the University of Michigan or the University of Chicago. Pershing figured that southern elites always loved those northern status symbols even if they didn’t care to live there themselves. Maybe he would get a scholarship to go. Then he would apply for a fellowship in New York, maybe. His brother was a doctor, internal medicine, and he was considering that, too, by the way.

Pershing was talking the president’s language, the vocabulary of upward mobility. He had potential. He was ambitious, if nothing else. And Alice—quiet, demure Alice—had taken to him. He had a street wit about him that made her laugh. He was the life of the party she never was, and she seemed content to bask in his light.

Pershing graduated Morehouse with a major in math and a minor in biology in the spring of 1939 and sang solo at commencement. He took up graduate studies at Atlanta University while Alice completed her time at Spelman. He was moving into a world where great things were expected of him. Dr. Clement looked for him to make good on his promise to become someone worthy of his daughter. Madison wanted his baby brother to follow in his footsteps. His mother, too, wanted a second doctor in the family and knew her youngest had it in him. So he applied to Meharry Medical College in Nashville and was accepted. His mother sent him the registration fee.

“I sat awake all night,” he said. “Do I want to go? Or don’t I want to go?”

If he could have done anything in the world at that moment, he would have dropped it all and gone up north to New York or out west to California. He’d always had a thing for California. He would go into show business, maybe, and sing and perform onstage. The audiences would love him, and he would be who and where he was meant to be. But he kept his dreams to himself and did what was expected of him. He sent in the registration fee and would start medical school in the South, in the state of Tennessee, a place far from his dreams, in the fall.

A Thin Light Far Away

In the winter of 1919, when Ida Mae was trailing her father out to the field, George and Pershing were learning to crawl, and the first wave of migrants was stirring to life, an astronomer made a startling discovery.
⁹¹
The astronomer, named Edwin Hubble, working out of the University of Chicago, looked through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time
.

What he saw would eventually become the most significant astronomical find of the century and would come to parallel the awakening of an isolated people in his own country. It would confirm what for generations had been whispered of but dismissed as impossible.
⁹²
It occurred near the start of a long pilgrimage of Americans seeking to escape their own harsh, known world
.

Hubble identified a star that was far, far away and was not the same sun that fed life on Earth
.

It was another sun
.

And it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns
.

You sleep over a volcano,
which may erupt at any moment
.
⁹³

—L
AURA
A
RNOLD, DESCRIBING
THE
S
OUTH IN A DEBATE
ON THE MERITS OF MIGRATION,
TWO WEEKS BEFORE SHE HERSELF
LEFT
N
ORTH
C
AROLINA
FOR
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

I am in the darkness
of the south
and I am trying
my best to get out.
⁹⁴
O please help me
to get out of
this low down county
I am counted no more thin a dog
help me please help me
.

— 
AN UNIDENTIFIED
LETTER WRITER FROM
B
IRMINGHAM
, A
LABAMA

CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI,
LATE SEPTEMBER–EARLY OCTOBER 1937

ADDIE B.
, who lived down the road on the same plantation as Ida Mae, rose early to feed the turkeys at her cabin across the field. Addie B. always fretted about her turkeys. She looked all over and called out to them. But there was no clucking or nipping or kicking of dust. The yard was barren. The turkeys were gone. Mr. Edd, the boss man over all of them, would be coming for his turkeys soon, to sell in time for Thanksgiving. There would be no explaining the disappearance to Mr. Edd. The economics were simple. The turkeys were money when money was the one thing nobody had. The punishment—she did not want to think about the punishment. Besides, she had an idea of what happened to her inventory. She decided to tell Mr. Edd her suspicions before he could ask. Mr. Edd rounded up some men
.

   Later that night, around nine or ten o’clock, the pounding started on Ida Mae’s door. It was like the sound of wild dogs trailing raw meat. It seemed far away at first, and then it drew closer, mad fists beating the bare face of the cabin. The cabin was dark, and Ida Mae was asleep. She was alone in the house with little Velma and James and her sister-in-law Indiana, who was meek and of little help. Her husband was not yet back from his errands in town. She threw back the coverlet and fingered the sides of the walls to get to the front door. She stumbled past the two little ones, who were, by some miracle, still asleep, stepped around the hearth and between the two beds on each side of the door. Indiana, in the bed closest to the ruckus, got up to follow her and stood behind her and watched.

Ida Mae cracked open the door and saw the men, four or five of them with chains and shotguns. She recognized the boss man, Mr. Edd. And she recognized his friend Mr. Willie Jim, another planter, but could not make out the faces of the others standing before her in the middle of the night.

She tried to dispense with them, told them her husband wasn’t in and she didn’t know when he would be back. That wasn’t why they were there. Willie Jim stepped forward to speak for them all. They wanted to know if Joe Lee was in her house.

Joe Lee was her husband’s cousin, who lived further down the road and would have had no business there that time of night, which is what she told them. He worked the land like the rest of them and, though well into his twenties, still lived on his father’s farm. He had a reputation for taking things that weren’t his. She said she hadn’t seen him.

“
Joe Lee is in there. And we want him outta there.
”

“
What’d he do?
”

“
That’s alright, we want him outta there.
”

They had searched the other sharecropper cabins. Somebody said they saw Joe Lee escape to her house. Willie Jim was getting agitated, thought she was ornery, disputing them like she was, and raised up his chain and drew it back to hurl at her. Mr. Edd stepped forward and told him not to. He liked George and Ida Mae, and he needed that cotton out of the field.

“
Don’t you hit her
,” Mr. Edd said.

“
That’s alright. Let ’em hit me
,” Ida said, stiffening herself.

“
No, he ain’t gon’ hit you now
,” he told her.

Willie Jim stepped back, reminded of what they had come for. The men fanned out, their heavy boots clomping the old wood boards on the porch. They surrounded the house and ran toward the back door of the kitchen, the cabin’s only other way out, and caught Joe Lee trying to get away. He had fled into the house as Ida Mae slept. He had darted past Indiana as she lay in bed in the front room. But Indiana was too afraid to tell anybody.

“Why ain’t you tell me you saw Joe Lee come through here?” Ida Mae asked her afterward. Then she thought about it and realized that if they had caught her in a lie, it would have been worse. And so the two of them concluded it was best that Indiana knew but didn’t tell and that Ida Mae didn’t know and didn’t lie.

Ida Mae couldn’t go back to sleep, and she couldn’t wait for her husband to get back home. Finally, she heard a motor rumbling outside. She ran out to get him.

“Get out. I got something to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“They come and got Joe Lee out the house.”

“Who?”

“Your boss.”

“I know Mr. Edd ain’t did that.”

“They caught him trying to step out the back door.”

They stood absorbing what it meant and not knowing why it happened.

“What way they went with him?” George asked.

A part of him wanted to go and set things straight, try to talk some sense into his boss man. Ida Mae didn’t want him to go. No good could come of it. She didn’t see which way they went anyway, black as it was. And they had been gone a good while.

EUSTIS, FLORIDA, DECEMBER 1941
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EARTH
, at a harbor in Hawaii, a bomb exploded. It was at a naval base. Pearl Harbor. People heard it on the radio, not knowing what it meant.

The United States was joining the war over in Europe. George Starling got notice to report for an army physical. But the doctor looked him over and disqualified him on account of what the doctor said was a weak heart. George was scared he would die at any minute. But the minutes turned into weeks and then months, and he figured either the doctor didn’t know what he was talking about or his heart had recovered.

In the spring, there would be no work after the fruit was picked from the trees. George was hearing talk of war jobs up in a place called Detroit. The factories that made cars were rolling out planes and weapons twenty-four hours a day. He did not particularly want to go to Detroit. He didn’t have people there, nor did he know much about it. But they were paying a ridiculous sum of money—dollars an hour instead of pennies a box. He could make enough in a couple of months to last him a year. He heard they were so desperate you could get a job right off the bus. He floated the idea to his wife.

Inez didn’t want him to go. For most of their marriage, they had been living with Big George at his house on Bates Avenue. She spent her days sweeping up after the white family she had inherited from her mother and aunt and from her grandmother before them. She was scrubbing toilets when what she really wanted to do, she told George, was to go to beauty school in Tampa, the Angelo Beauty College, it was called, and learn how to fix hair.

She hardly ever saw George as it was. When he wasn’t out picking fruit, he was out in the backwoods selling insurance. Lately, he had taken to ferrying people around in his old car as if he were a cab driver. There were no taxis for colored people, so he took people to town for groceries or picked them up after the show to make a little extra money. Friday nights, all day Saturday, and into Sunday evening, George was gone, carrying other people to the things he and Inez could be doing together.

He called himself saving for the future. He had it all planned out. He would save enough money to put her through beauty school. Then she would start working and help him finish college in Tallahassee. That would be their freedom.

So he gave his weekends to his passengers. Sometimes they just showed up at his house for him to take them somewhere. Inez was stirring the grits for breakfast when Lil George came into the kitchen one morning.

“Well, I’m a run this guy downtown to do his shopping,” George said. “I’ll be back by the time you get breakfast ready.”

He took the man downtown and dropped him off with his groceries. On his way home, somebody else flagged him down.

“Hey, Lil George, whatchu doin’?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“How ’bout running me downtown?”

He would start his morning with the best of intentions and not get back until dark. “But all the while I’m away from home, I’m working,” George said.

He knew he would be in for a fight as soon as he stepped in the door. “My wife would be swole up big as this room by then ’cause I’m gone all day.”

George figured as much and tried to soften her up.

“I know you thought I wasn’t never coming back,” he said.

She grunted, fuming still.

He told her what had happened and how people had flagged him down in the street and had no way to get their groceries and how one thing had led to another and you know there was no way to reach you because there weren’t any phones to call from and, anyway, look at what I got.

Fifty cents on this trip, a dollar on that one, and at the end of the day, George pulled in five, ten, twenty, sometimes thirty dollars in change.

“See how much money I made while I was out. I made all of this.”

He dumped it all on the bed, quarters, halves, and paper money. Inez was too mad to look at it.

“Well, all of this goes toward your going to school. That’s what I’m scuffling for. So you can go to school.”

She kept quiet. So he went on.

“I’m a let you save it now,” he said. “ ’Cause you know I was sincere. You put it in the trunk so you know where it is. So when you get enough to go you can go.”

But she wouldn’t get over all those lost weekends so easily. If he took her wants for granted, she would do the same for his. She stood there as if she hadn’t heard him. So George went and put the money away himself. Soon he had Mason jars full of quarters and halves, fruit jars filled with nickels and change rattling in tin cans, the start of a future in bottles all over the house.

It was the start of 1943. When the picking season was over and it was nearing spring, everybody’s money went dry. The people needing rides trailed off. George saw it coming and started talking again about going to Detroit for the summer to make enough for them to go to school. He made a note to himself: 1943 was the year for Inez to go to beauty school.

“When it gets a little bit warmer, when the fruit season is over,” he told her, “I’m going to Detroit to work. Then I could send you to school. It’s nothing to do around here during the summer. Ain’t no working. I can’t even make no money hustling. So I’m going out to Detroit and work and send you to school.”

George had it all worked out. Inez just listened. The neighbors had been telling her to watch after her husband. He wasn’t going to Detroit to work, they said, he was going to be with some woman, probably one of those schoolteachers he went to school with up in Tallahassee.
Heard one of them was up in D.C. Bet he’s going up there to be with her. He’s not going to Detroit
.