The Warmth of Other Suns (39 page)

Robert regaled the Becks with the story of his journey. And he told them that it was not yet over, that he was going up to Oakland to see about the prospects there.

“Now, when you get through looking it over,” Dr. Beck said, “come on back here, and I’ll give you all the surgery out of my practice.”

Robert was relieved and knew that Dr. Beck had the best of intentions. But he also knew he couldn’t make a living on one man’s referrals alone. So he made plans to drive up to Oakland and to see if it better suited him. In the meantime, he would take in L.A.

Johnny Warmsley, an old schoolmate from Morehouse, took him around, brought in another guy they knew from Atlanta, Wilbur Pew Beulow, who owned a gas station now, and showed him Hollywood and Vine, which actually meant something in those days, and Beverly Hills, the hills in general, the colored nightclubs on Central Avenue, the department stores on Wilshire, the palm trees, the billboards, the people dressed like Dean Martin and Doris Day, the broad silver sidewalks, and the mansions the color of cotton candy.

They rode and rode, and Robert drank it in. He saw what he had driven all this way for and had had in his mind for as long as he could remember, and there it was laid out before him better than a dream.

“I loved it,” Robert said. “
I loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it.
”

You could drive for hours and still not see the end of it. He could get lost in a town like this, be whoever he wanted to be. It was a blank canvas waiting for him to start painting on it. “Big, open, hustle and bustle,” he said. “It was big, big, big. It was the cleanest city I’d ever seen. It was clean enough to eat breakfast off the sidewalk.
Beautiful
. I loved it.”

Johnny Warmsley gave him the verbal map of the city.

“Now, Los Angeles is divided into East and West by Main Street,” Johnny told him. “All the boulevards go this way, and the streets go that way. The colored neighborhoods are mostly east. There are very few of us west of Crenshaw.” That meant most of the places you heard about in the movies: Bel-Air, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Malibu. They were off-limits to colored people, Johnny Warmsley told him.

Robert would have expected as much after his ordeal in Arizona and was too excited to muster much disappointment. After all, the Becks were living west of Crenshaw, the lawsuit notwithstanding, and that gave him hope that Los Angeles was making as much progress as most any city he might choose.

Johnny and Wilbur were happy to take him to where the movie stars lived and maybe make a sighting. But Robert said he didn’t care about that. He had already seen Barbara Stanwyck once. It was when he was based in Austria for the army and the colonel from Mississippi, rather than giving Robert an assignment, ordered him to make himself scarce. The Clements gave him and Alice the money for a trip. They went all over Europe and when they were in Venice, they were standing in St. Mark’s Square when they saw Barbara Stanwyck and whoever her husband was at the time.

“And she whispered to him, ‘Look at the blacks over there,’ ” Robert remembered. “I read her lips. She didn’t say it in a demeaning manner, but I saw him look over to where we were. And they were giving false grins for all the populants of the city. If you see a celebrity, sure, I want to see the celebrity. But I’d seen enough not to go gaga over it.”

He woke up from the city’s spell. The glamour was all well and good, but he had other things on his mind.

“I was thinking of more urgent things,” he said. “What will I do?
What will I do?
I had to think about surviving.”

And so something compelled him several hundred more miles through the mountains, a fear that he was on his own now, far from home, that failure was a distinct but unbearable possibility and that everyone was watching and ready to comment on how things turned out. There was a dread deep within him that he might not make it in L.A., however besotted he was. And so he prepared to drive to Oakland in order to settle on a city for good.

He was weighing every nuance and eventuality, and the stars seemed to have preordained Oakland. It had more people from Monroe than any other place on the coast. He would have a ready-made clientele. He would be looking up his old friend John Dunlap, who had been in the mortuary business in Monroe, knew everybody from back home, and had assured him of plenty of patients. It was as if Oakland were sitting there waiting for him. He could not rest until he had seen it.

He rode at God’s knee between the two great cities of California and saw the clouds search out folds in the mountains. He made his way across the San Francisco Bay and into Oakland, which by the early 1950s had become a satellite of colored Louisiana. The shipyards and the loading docks and the railroad jobs had called out to the southerners running from Jim Crow and had given them haven and jobs paying more than a dollar an hour. They settled in the foothills of west Oakland and Richmond, far from the wealthy white cliff-side mansions and nearer to the shipyards. They planted their collards and turnip greens, and let chickens forage out back.

Robert drove into west Oakland, past the fussy Victorian row houses and the worker cottages, turreted and marching in lockstep, barely a foot between them, roosters and pole beans growing in some of the postage stamp yards. It was looking familiar. It was looking like Monroe, which was perhaps one reason why people from Monroe had gravitated there in the first place and made a colony for themselves. It was precisely what Robert was looking to get away from. It was not living up to his glamour vision of California. It felt as if he had driven all this way for the same place he had left.

He was searching for Forty-second and Lusk, where John Dunlap lived. Dunlap, as Robert called him, had moved to Oakland at the height of the war, in 1943, not knowing a soul. The climate agreed with him. He got a room and sent for his wife. From then on, he saw southerners like Robert show up in Oakland looking for something they couldn’t name. “They started coming every week,” Dunlap said decades later. “They were coming in carloads.”

Dunlap had married into a family of morticians and so had taken up the trade himself. Robert was counting on Dunlap to show him around and help him build a clientele. Morticians were always good people to know. Having seen the villas in Los Angeles, Robert was expecting a spread befitting someone with the guaranteed customer base a mortician enjoys. But he pulled up to Lusk and found the little white worker cottage belonging to Dunlap.

Dunlap was glad to see him and showed Robert where he would be sleeping—on a makeshift bed in the front room. He apologized for not being able to take Robert around. But he was working hard to make ends meet in this new world and was too beat at the end of the day to be of much help. It turned out Dunlap hadn’t found work as a mortician in Oakland. He and other middle-class migrants from the South, it turns out, were not unlike the immigrant taxi drivers you hear about who had been doctors or engineers back in Pakistan. Dunlap had been somebody back home, but it didn’t translate at his destination. And so he had taken a job as a laborer at the shipyard.

Dunlap pointed Robert in the direction of the hospitals he knew of and the people Robert might like to see from back home in Monroe. Robert set out in the morning for the hospitals and clinics he’d heard about. He went to Kaiser, the big industrialist-shipping conglomerate, to see what possibilities there might be for a medical position. He came back empty.

“I’m not finding what I want,” he told Dunlap.

Dunlap knew what that meant. Not only was Robert having no luck finding a place to practice, he wasn’t liking Oakland. As Dunlap saw it, Dr. Beck had gotten to Robert first. Los Angeles had seduced him. And Oakland did not stand a chance. Robert made up his mind and phoned Alice and the Clements about his decision. And as soon as he did, he drove back to Los Angeles to start living for the first time in his life.

There were no Chinaberry trees.
¹¹
No pecan trees.… 
Never again would I pick dew berries
or hear the familiar laughter from the field truck.
This was my world now, this strange new family
and their cramped quarters over the tiny grocery store
they grandly called the “confectionery.
”

—C
LIFTON
T
AULBERT
,
The Last Train North

IN THE NORTH AND WEST, 1915–2000

WHEN THEY FLED
, there were things they left behind. There were people they might not see again. They would now find out through letters and telegrams that a baby had been born or that a parent had taken ill or passed away. There were things they might not ever taste or touch or share in again because they were hundreds of miles from all that they had known. From this moment forward, it would take great effort and resources merely to sit and chat over salt pork and grits with a beloved mother or sister who had chosen not to go. Perhaps the greatest single act of family disruption and heartbreak among black Americans in the twentieth century was the result of the hard choices made by those on either side of the Great Migration.

The South was still deep within those who left, and the sight of some insignificant thing would take them back and remind them of what they once were. For my mother, a vase of Casablanca lilies far from home took her back to the memory of this:

Once a year on a midsummer night that could not be foretold, a curious plant called the night-blooming cereus would decide to undrape its petals. It was said, among the colored people in the small-town South who followed such things and made a ritual of its arrival, that if you looked hard enough, you could see the face of the baby Jesus in the folds of the bloom.

My mother’s mother, who sang to her camellias and made showpieces of the most recalcitrant and unlovable of plants—the African violets and Boston ferns that died when other people just looked at them—did not want to leave the land of her ancestors, the drawl of small-town convention, the hard soil she had willed into a cutting garden. There was chaos in the Jim Crow world outside her picket fence. But inside, there was peace and beauty, and she insulated herself in her perennial beds.

She grew a night-blooming cereus on the front porch of her yellow bungalow. Its gangly branches coiled out of its pot and snaked along the porch planks. It was an unpleasant-looking orphan of a plant that was only worth growing for the one night in the year when its white, lily-like petals managed to open for a few hours when nobody would be up to see it.

My mother’s mother tended its homely stalks all through the year. She watched it close and made note when the buds were plump and ready to unfurl. As soon as she was certain, she alerted the neighbors as they passed her front yard with its roses the size of saucers, which she sold after some cajoling for a dollar apiece, and its crape myrtles the color of cotton candy.

“My night-blooming cereus is going to open tonight,” she told them.

Amanda Poindexter, Miss Lilybell Nelson, who lived up the hill and sang like a bird, Mrs. Jacobs next door, and a few other neighbor ladies on Gibbon Street would arrive at my grandmother’s front porch at around midnight. They drank sweet tea and ate freshly churned vanilla ice cream. They rocked in the porch swing, which creaked as they rocked, and they waited. As a young girl, my mother sat watching on the porch steps, mystified by the grown people’s patience and devotion.

The opening took hours. Sometime around three in the morning, the white petals spread open, and the women set down their sweet tea to crane their necks over the blossom. They inhaled its sugary scent and tried to find the baby Jesus in the cradle in the folds. Most exclaimed that they saw it; my mother said she never did. But she would remember the wait for the night-blooming cereus, the Georgia heat stifling and heavy, and take the memory with her when she left, though she would never share in the mystery of that Gibbon Street ritual again.

As best they could, the people brought the Old Country with them—a taste for hominy grits and pole beans cooking in salt pork, the “sure enoughs” and “I reckons” and the superstitions of new moons and itchy palms that had seeped into their very being.

In the New World, they surrounded themselves with the people they knew from the next farm over or their Daily Vacation Bible School, from their clapboard Holiness churches, from the colored high schools or the corner store back home, and they would keep those ties for as long as they lived. The ones from the country fired their shotguns into the night air on New Year’s Eve like they did back home in Georgia and Mississippi and ate black-eyed peas and rice for good luck on New Year’s Day. The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went. Even now, with barbecues and red soda pop, they celebrate June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers rode into Galveston, announced that the Civil War was over, and released the quarter-million slaves in Texas who, not knowing they had been freed, had toiled for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
¹²

Whole churches and social rituals in the North and West would be built around certain southern towns or entire states. Well into the 1990s, at the Bridge Street Church in Brooklyn, for instance, when people from South Carolina were asked to stand and make themselves known, half the flock would rise to its feet. To this day, people still wear sequins and bow ties to the annual Charleston Ball in Washington, where a good portion of the Carolinas went.

It turned out they were not so different from Sicilians settling in Little Italy or Swedes in Minnesota.

In the New World, colonies organized themselves into Mississippi and Arkansas Clubs in Chicago; Florida Clubs in Harlem; Carolina Clubs in Brooklyn and Philadelphia; and numerous Texas Clubs, general Louisiana Clubs, several New Orleans Clubs, and, among others, a Monroe, Louisiana, Club and a Lake Charles, Louisiana, Club in Los Angeles.

They met over oxtails and collard greens well into the turn of the new century or for as long as the original migrants lived to recall among their dwindling membership the things they’d left behind: the ailing parents and scuffling siblings and sometimes even their own children; the courtly tipping of one’s hat to a stranger; the screech owls and whippoorwills wailing outside their windows foretelling an imminent death; paper-shell pecans falling to the ground; mimosa trees, locust trees, dogwood trees, and chinaberries; the one-room churches where the people fanned themselves through parching revivals and knelt by the ancestors buried beside the sanctuary light. These things stayed with them even though they left, because a crying part of them had not wanted to leave.

“If I were half as well treated home as here,” a migrant in Pittsburgh told the economist Abraham Epstein early in the Migration, “I would rather stay there.”
¹³

They wired money back home, as expected, and sent a larger share of their straining paychecks than they could truly afford to the people they left behind. In his study of the Migration, Epstein found that eighty percent of the married migrants and nearly half of the single ones were sending money home, most sending five dollars per week and some sending ten or more dollars per week out of weekly wages of fifteen dollars back then for unskilled laborers, as many of them would have been.
¹⁴

There was something earnest and true-hearted about them. They greeted people on northern sidewalks a little too quickly and too excitedly for the local people’s liking and to the stricken embarrassment of their more seasoned cousins and northern-born children. They talked of a lush, hot-blooded land to children growing up fast and indifferent in a cold place too busy to stop and visit.