The Warmth of Other Suns (37 page)

“Don’t you know you don’t go nowhere unlessen I tell you to?” the boss man said.

He pulled a Winchester rifle out of the truck. “Maybe I ought to kill you right now,” he said.

The man put the rifle to Eddie’s head.

“You don’t go nowhere unlessen I tell you to go,” he told him.

Eddie was seventeen. He decided that, somehow or other, he would find a way out. When he was twenty, he made his plans. A bus ticket to Chicago was twenty-one dollars, as he remembered it. It took him six or seven months to save up for it. But that was the easy part. Now he had to find out how to use it without calling attention to himself in that little town where everybody knew everybody and it seemed everyone was watching.

There was a bus that stopped near him, but he couldn’t catch that bus or inquire about it. “Everybody knew what you’d be trying to do if you caught that bus,” he said. And you had to walk six miles to get to it.

There was another little bus stop in a town nearby. It did not post the bus schedule, and he was not in a position to ask. “They didn’t tell you the schedule,” he would say years later. “A lot of things you’d want to know, you couldn’t ask.”

So he went to the station at different times of the day. Each time, he sat and waited for the bus to leave, and when it belched out of the depot, he looked at the station clock and made a note of it. Sometimes the bus left early, he found. Sometimes it left late. He tried to get an average time so he would not miss it on the day he wanted to go. That was how he learned the bus schedule.

“We had been checking for months,” he said.

He decided to leave in May 1963 and take his sister and her two children with him. He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” he said. “You had to sneak away.”

That day, he acted as if it were any other day. He went up to a man named Eason and casually asked him if he could give them a ride.

“We going to Greenville today,” he told Eason. “Could you take us?”

He didn’t tell Eason he was leaving Mississippi for good or that he needed to catch a bus pulling out at a certain time or that this was the moment of truth after planning this in his mind for most of his short adult life. The man might not have taken them if he knew. So Eddie kept it to himself.

The four of them got in the car with nothing but a few clothes in a paper bag. When they got to Greenville, they paid the man three or four dollars. Eason figured out what they were up to when he saw where they wanted to be dropped off.

“What do you call yourself doing?” he asked them.

“We getting out of town,” Eddie said. The man got scared himself after that.

Eddie and his sister and her two kids got on the bus, and before anybody knew it, they were out of the county with everything they had in a shopping bag wrapped in a rope of sea grass.

They sat in the back and kept their mouths shut. “The white folks could talk,” he would say years later. “You sit and be quiet. Where we came from, we didn’t move from the back. We just sat there. We weren’t the type to move around. We wasn’t sure we could move. So we didn’t move. That fear.”

He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, “What kind of god they got up inside that church?”

He was getting away from all that now. He looked out at the lights and the billboards. The driver announced that they were passing out of Mississippi and into Tennessee. He was out for sure now and on his way to Illinois, and at that moment he could feel the sacks of cotton dropping from his back. Years later, he would still tremble at the memory and put into words the sentiments of generations who went in search of a kinder mistress.

“It was like getting unstuck from a magnet,” he said.

THE
  
KINDER
 
 
MISTRESS

The lazy, laughing South
With blood on its mouth.…
¹
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic—
That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her
But she spits in my face.… 
So now I seek the North—
The cold-faced North,
For she, they say,
is a kinder mistress
.

—L
ANGSTON
H
UGHES
, “T
HE
S
OUTH
”

Timidly, we get off the train.
²
We hug our suitcases,
fearful of pickpockets.… 
We are very reserved,
for we have been warned not to act green.… 
We board our first Yankee street car
to go to a cousin’s home.… 
We have been told
that we can sit where we please,
but we are still scared.
We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear
in three hours
.

—R
ICHARD
W
RIGHT
,
12 Million Black Voices

CHICAGO, TWELFTH STREET STATION, OCTOBER 1937
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

THE LEAVES WERE THE COLOR
of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets. They had begun to fall from the branches and settle in piles at the roots of the elm trees. The leaves had begun to fall when Ida Mae and George walked into the cold light of morning for the very first time in the North.

Ida Mae and her family had ridden all through the night on the Illinois Central and had arrived, stiff and disheveled, in a cold, hurrying place of concrete and steel. People clipped past them in their wool finery and distracted urgency, not pausing to speak—people everywhere, more people than they had maybe seen in one single place in their entire lives, coming as they were from the spread-out, isolated back country of plantations and lean-tos. They would somehow have to make it across town to yet another station to catch the train to Milwaukee and cart their worldly belongings to yet another platform for the last leg of their journey out of the South.

Above them hung black billboards as tall as a barn with the names of connecting cities and towns and their respective platforms and departure times—Sioux Falls, Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, Omaha, Madison, Dubuque—footfalls, redcaps, four-faced clocks, and neon arrows pointing to arrivals and track numbers. The trains were not trains but Zephyrs and Hiawathas, the station itself feeling bigger and busier than all of Okolona or Egypt or any little town back home or anything they could possibly have ever seen before.

They would have to ride the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad for three more hours to get to their final stop in their adopted land. They could not rest easy until they had made it safely to Ida Mae’s sister’s apartment in Milwaukee. In the end, it would take multiple trains, three separate railroads, hours of fitful upright sleep, whatever food they managed to carry, the better part of two days, absolute will, near-blind determination, and some necessary measure of faith and just plain grit for people unaccustomed to the rigors of travel to make it out of the land of their birth to the foreign region of essentially another world.

The great belching city she passed through that day was the first city Ida Mae had ever laid eyes on. That first glimpse of Chicago would stay with her for as long as she lived.

“What did it look like at that time, Chicago?” I asked her, half a life later.

“It looked like Heaven to me then,” she said.

A blue haze descended at night
and, with it, strings of fairy lights
on the broad avenues.…
³
What a city! What a world! …
The first danger I recognized …
was that Harlem would be
too wonderful for words.
Unless I was careful,
I would be thrilled into silence
.

—
THE POET
A
RNA
B
ONTEMPS UPON FIRST ARRIVING IN
H
ARLEM
, 1924

NEW YORK CITY, PENNSYLVANIA STATION, APRIL 15, 1945
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

IN THE SPACE OF TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
, George Starling had put behind him the slash pines and cypress swamps of his former world and was finally now stepping out of Pennsylvania Station. He walked beneath the Corinthian columns and the iron fretwork of its barrel-vaulted ceiling and into the muted light of a spring morning in Manhattan. He could see a blur of pedestrians brushing past him and yellow taxicabs swerving up Eighth Avenue. Concrete mountains were obscuring the sky, steam rising from sewer grates, the Empire State Building piercing the clouds above granite-faced office buildings, and, all around him, coffee shops and florists and shoe stores and street vendors and not a single colored- or white-only sign anywhere.

This was New York.

He had made it out of Florida and was now reaching into his pocket for the address and telephone number of his aunt Annie Swanson, the one they called Baby, who lived up in Harlem. But he couldn’t find the slip of paper with her number on it, and, in his fatigue and confusion and the upset of all he had been through, couldn’t remember precisely where she lived even though he had been there before, and so he made his way to the apartment of the only friend whose Harlem address he could remember and who just happened to be home.

“He took me in, and I sat there, and I tried to think,” George said. “The more I tried to think, the more confused I got.”

All the streets were numbered. What number street was she on? All the tenements looked the same. Which tenement was she in? She had moved so much. Where was she the last time he was here?

“Don’t worry about it,” the friend said. “It’ll come to you eventually. I’m a let you take you a good, hot bath, lay down, and relax a while.”

George got in the tub, and it came to him. “Oh shoot, I know where my aunt lives,” he said, and he hurried out of the tub. “Now I remember it. Now it has come to me. Maybe I needed to relax.”

He had crossed into another world and was feeling the weight of it all. “I think I was overtired,” he would say years later, “from getting ready to leave and getting out of there.”

The friend directed him to Aunt Baby’s three-room apartment on 112th Street between Fifth and Lenox, where he would sleep on the sofa in the front room until he could find work and a place of his own.

He set his things down just inside her front door, and, at that moment, he became a New Yorker, because, unlike on his other visits to the North, this time, he planned to stay. He would have to get accustomed to a concrete world with the horizon cut off by a stand of brownstones, to a land with no trees and where you couldn’t see the sun. Somehow, he would have to get used to the press of people who never seemed to sleep, the tight, dark cells they called tenements. He would quicken his steps, learn to walk faster, hold his head up and his back stiff and straight, not waving to everyone whose eyes he met but instead acting like he, too, had already seen and heard it all, because in a way, in a life-and-death sort of way, he had.

Curiously enough, one thing was for sure. He didn’t see himself as part of any great tidal wave. “No,” he said years later. “I just knew that I was getting away from Florida. I didn’t consider it like it was a general movement on and I was a part of it. No, I never considered that.”

He could only see what was in front of him, and that was, he hoped, a freer new life for himself. “I was hoping,” he said years later. “I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”