The Warmth of Other Suns (29 page)

There was no way for Ida Mae to know what was transpiring between her husband and Mr. Edd at settlement. George had prayed over it and had hoped Mr. Edd would remain a man of his word. If all went well, George told Ida Mae, he would go to the train station in Okolona ahead of them. He wanted to get the tickets right away. He had arranged in advance for one of his brothers to take Ida Mae and the children to the station to meet him. The plan was for them to leave that night.

EUSTIS, FLORIDA, APRIL 1945
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

LIL GEORGE BROKE THE NEWS
to Inez that he was getting out of Eustis on the next train out of Wildwood. The grove owners had it in for him because he had roused up the pickers. The pickers had turned on him out of fear for themselves. He had no choice but to get out. He told Inez he was going up to Harlem, where his aunts were.

He started gathering his things right away. There was no time to waste. The yard boy who warned him about the grove owners’ meeting didn’t seem to know any more than what he’d happened to overhear—that the grove owners were plotting to take George and Mud and Sam out to the cypress swamps over at Blackwater Creek and hang them at “a necktie party,” that the owners were bent on teaching them a lesson for stepping out of their place, demanding an extra dime for the fruit they picked, and turning the heads of the faithful other pickers who had been content with whatever the owners gave them.

There was no telling whom the grove owners might have enlisted, when or how they might round the boys up, whether it would be the new big-hat sheriff, some crew foremen, or Klansmen currying favor, whether it might be somebody George would recognize right away after all these years or not know at all. He went about his last-minute arrangements, watchful of everybody and careful to mind his steps.

He could not be seen anywhere near the groves again. It was dangerous enough just being in Eustis during the hours it took to get out. There were so many things he wanted or needed to do—he was leaving forever, after all—but he was running out of time.

He dashed off a letter to his aunts, Annie and Lavata, to alert them to his situation. They would need to know to expect him.

He tried to reassure Inez that everything would work out, but she was still seething over the fact that he had turned their lives upside down and put all of them in danger. She hadn’t approved of what he had been doing anyway and didn’t know why he couldn’t make himself satisfied like everybody else.

“What did you expect from a bunch of handkerchief heads?” she asked him. “What do you expect?”

“I guess I expect the unexpectable,” he said, “because they don’t look at things like the way I do.”

Here he was running for his life, and the two of them were arguing over what couldn’t be undone. George didn’t ask Inez what he should do. He didn’t consult her as to where he should go or whether she would join him. He just told her he was going up to where his aunts were.

“I’m going to New York and get situated,” he said. “And when I get situated, I’ll send for you.”

Their anniversary, April 19, was coming up in a few days, but if everything worked according to plan, he would be gone by then. He felt there was no time for debating and thought he should be the judge of what would happen to him. “After all,” he would say years later, “it was my neck on the block.”

Inez heard the magic words—“I’ll send for you”—and did not put up much more of a fuss. He had not taken her to Detroit, but he would bring her to New York, and that was good enough for now. She warmed to the idea and felt better and better about it. She thought less now of the danger of the circumstances than of their new life up north. A chance to start over in a new place together.

He told Mud and Sam he was leaving. They were leaving, too. Sam was talking Washington, D.C., where he had a brother. Mud was talking about a place he had heard of called Rochester, New York. Then Lil George said good-bye to Inez and good-bye to his father, who, if he was worried, kept it to himself.

“Yeah, well,” Big George said, “I think this will be the best. I guess if you gonna still act that way, it’s best for you to go.”

MONROE, LOUISIANA, MARCH 1953
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

PERSHING WAS WORKING AT FORT POLK
, an hour’s drive from Monroe, for the singular purpose of saving up the money to go to California.
¹⁴⁵
His heart was already gone. His mother had died. His widowed father, Professor Foster, had been forced out as principal of the school to which he had devoted his life, by one of his own teachers. The coup left Professor Foster a leader in exile. He watched the new colored high school he had always dreamed of rise up under the name of his rival. Pershing grieved for his father and all that had happened in a caste system that seemed to rely on pitting the lowliest people against one another.

He drove between Monroe and Fort Polk at the edge of spring, blind to the wild grasses that blushed on either side of the Bayou Desiard. The bayou cut through town and bent toward the west, and the land was thick with crimson clover crawling up the folds in the land.

It was beautiful, but it didn’t matter. Pershing was thirty-four years old. His life was in front of him, and he was not going to live it out in a one-stoplight town in the South.

On that, he and Alice had agreed, and she would wait for him to send for her and the girls once he got situated. Still, his brother Madison tried to get him to stay, reclaim the family’s former glory. Madison had a small practice there and was ready to etch Pershing’s name beside his on the door. The two of them could work out of Madison’s second-floor office on Desiard. They could travel the parish in their portable hospital and tend to the colored schoolteachers and the women who took in washing, the athletes out at Grambling and the sharecroppers who might pay with buttermilk or the side of a freshly killed hog.

But Pershing did not want to be paid with buttermilk or the side of a freshly killed hog and did not want to deliver babies in somebody’s kitchen.

There was a respectable hospital in town. St. Francis. It was a brick building that stood with the color and trim efficiency of a manila folder. It had white beds in one wing and colored beds in another and was closed to colored doctors. Pershing put St. Francis out of his mind and figured he would work at Fort Polk until he had the money to leave.

One day he went into town and walked into the old clothing shop of a white storekeeper. He had known the man since he was a little boy picking up clothes for his father.

“
I’m M. J. Foster’s boy. I think you have a suit for him
,” he used to go in and say.

Pershing was grown up now. He was in uniform with his captain’s bars and medical caduceus. The storekeeper noticed and asked what he was going to do when he got out of the army.

“Well, I’m going to go into practice, private practice,” Pershing said.

“Are you gonna come here with your brother?”

“No, I’m going to California and start my practice there when I get out of Fort Polk. And this is what I plan to do.”

“What’s wrong with St. Francis?”

Pershing shook his head. The man had lived there since before Pershing was born, and a central fact of colored people’s existence hadn’t registered after all these years.

“You know that colored surgeons can’t operate at St. Francis, Mr. Massur.”

The man looked startled and caught himself. White-only and colored-only signs were all over town, but the storekeeper had not thought about how segregation applied to the hospital. The storekeeper had watched Pershing grow into an upstanding young man and had known the Fosters for years. For a split second, the storekeeper seemed to see Pershing as no different than any other bright young physician. But Pershing’s words brought him back to reality: the rest of the white world did not see Pershing the way the storekeeper did, and that gave the storekeeper an uncomfortable glimpse of the burdens on one of his best customers.

There was a moment of awkwardness between the two men. And as the realization hit the storekeeper, the truth hit Pershing, too. He stepped outside himself and considered the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn’t operate in his own hometown.

The man tried to recover, offer advice and encouragement. “Well, why don’t you all build a hospital, you and your brother?”

“Mr. Massur, do you realize that we are doctors and not businessmen? The cost of building a hospital and operating one would be astronomical.”

There was very little to say after that. Even the storekeeper could see the impossibility of the situation. He wished Pershing well in whatever he did, and Pershing went on his way.

Mr. Massur had meant well. Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars. But he told himself it didn’t matter anyway because he was through with Monroe, through with small towns and small minds and particularly small-minded small towns in the South.

He didn’t like how you couldn’t get your teeth cleaned without everybody knowing it. He didn’t like how the white people couldn’t quite manage to call him “Dr. Foster” but spat out “Doc” as if they were addressing the cook. He didn’t like how his brother Madison denied himself certain twentieth-century conveniences to avoid submitting to the indignities of Jim Crow.

Madison never went to the side window of a white restaurant, never sat in the back of the Paramount Theater like other colored people. Because he never went. He drove his son, little Madison James, to the theater and watched the colored people climb the back stairs and pack the balcony to see whatever was playing. But he never went inside himself.

In the 1940s, Madison had petitioned St. Francis Hospital for a position on staff. The hospital rejected him. But he refused to leave town, and he didn’t let it stop him from working. If he couldn’t practice at a hospital, he would carry a hospital in his trunk. He had a portable operating table built especially for his patients and lugged it into their shotgun houses when it was time to do surgery or deliver their babies.

He didn’t suffer the humiliation of seeing a suit he wanted to try on in a store but couldn’t because colored people weren’t allowed that courtesy. He just never went. He sent his wife, Harriet, instead. The two of them would drive up and down Desiard Street from Hanes to the Palace, the finest men’s stores in town. Madison sat in the car and waited while Harriet went from store to store and came out with an armload of clothes. She held up each suit on its hanger. He inspected the weave and the cut from the car window and told her which ones to buy. And that is how Madison got his wardrobe.

Pershing wouldn’t stand for that. Pershing wanted to walk right into the Palace and try on a suit if he pleased and sit in a corner booth at The Lounge if he wanted. He was restless for a basic kind of freedom that was crazy at best and arrogant at worst for a colored man in that place at that time, and the two brothers knew it.

One last time, each made his pitch to the other. Pershing tried to get Madison to go with him to California, set up practice there. After all, they practically had a clientele waiting for them. Half of colored Monroe was already out there. Madison tried to get Pershing to stay. Louisiana was home, and things would never change if everyone gave up and left. What did Pershing know about starting a practice in California? He had never set foot in California. Running away meant Jim Crow had won, and Madison wasn’t going to give the rascals that. And besides, there was no guarantee Jim Crow wasn’t out in California.