The Warmth of Other Suns (46 page)

Perhaps the earliest indication of what the migrants were unknowingly up against came from an outbreak directly related to the Great Migration, or rather to how the North reacted to the newcomers from the South. These were the riots that erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the summer of 1917 after companies being struck by white workers hired colored migrants to replace them. The migrants were flocking to the city at a rate of a thousand a month, some eighteen thousand having arrived that spring, and they instantly became the perfect pawns, an industrialist’s dream: they were desperate to leave the South, anxious for work, untutored in union politics or workers’ rights—as most could not have imagined unionizing themselves as field hands, thus uncomprehending of the idea of a worker making demands and unlikely to complain about whatever conditions they might face.

Once the strike was over, the colored migrants, resented by the unions and unprotected by the plants that had hired them, paid the price. One union wrote its members that “the immigration of the southern Negro into our city for the past eight months has reached a point where drastic action must be taken” and demanded that the city “retard this growing menace, and devise a way to get rid of a certain portion of those who are already here.”
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On the night of July 1, a carload of whites fired shots into colored homes. The colored residents fired back when a second car filled with whites passed through, killing two policemen. The next day, full-scale rioting began. Colored men were “stabbed, clubbed and hanged from telephone poles.”
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A colored two-year-old “was shot and thrown into the doorway of a burning building.”

“A black skin was a death warrant on the streets of this Illinois city,” wrote an observer shortly afterward.

The police, charged with quelling the riot, in some cases joined in, as did some in the state militia sent in to restore order, actions that resulted in seven courts-martial.
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All told, thirty-nine blacks and eight whites were killed, more than a hundred blacks were shot or maimed, and five thousand blacks were driven from their homes.

After the two riots, city leaders in Chicago could see no end to the racial divisions without intervention and a public appeal for tolerance. A white-led, biracial commission set up to investigate the climate and circumstances leading to the riots produced a 672-page report,
The Negro in Chicago
. It stands to this day as one of the most comprehensive examinations of both the early stages of the Great Migration and race relations in a northern American city.

With a sense of urgency, it set out fifty-nine recommendations for improving race relations.
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It urged that the police rid the city’s colored section of the vice and prostitution that plagued the black belt; that the schools hire principals with an “interest in promoting good race relations”; that white citizens seek accurate information about blacks “as a basis of their judgments”; that restaurants, stores, and theaters stop segregating when they weren’t supposed to; that companies “deal with Negroes as workmen on the same plane as white workers” and stop using them as strikebreakers and denying them apprenticeships; that labor unions admit colored workers when they qualified; that employers “permit Negroes an equal chance with whites to enter all positions for which they are qualified by efficiency and merit”; that the press avoid using epithets in referring to blacks and treat black stories and white stories with the same standards and “sense of proportion.”

With the commission having no authority to enforce its recommendations and a good portion of the citizenry not likely even to have seen them, much of its counsel went unheeded. So Ida Mae arrived in a world that was perhaps even tenser than before the riots. In the ensuing decades, the color line would only stiffen. The South Side would become almost totally black and the North Side almost totally white. Ida Mae’s adopted home would become one of the most racially divided of all American cities and remain so for the rest of the twentieth century.

NEW YORK, SUMMER 1945
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

GEORGE FINALLY BROUGHT INEZ
to New York in June of 1945 to begin life on their own for the first time in their marriage. Now that he had a decent job on the railroad, he was hoping she could now get a job as a beautician like she had trained for and they could make a go of it in New York.

But Inez was still nursing a grudge over how little time they had spent together since they’d been married, how he’d gone off to Detroit without her, how he had taken so long to send for her, and now, here he was, likely to be gone half the time working the rails.

He was always the one with big dreams, and he had them now. He wanted to make up for all they didn’t have and couldn’t have back in Florida. He located a little beauty shop around the corner from the brownstone where they lived that had six available booths for her to use.

“Inez, this is your chance,” he told her. “We can rent this place, and you can do hair in one booth and rent out the other five booths. You can build you up a business here, and then after a while you don’t have to do no hair at all, just supervise.”

But Inez wasn’t of a mind to do much of what he said, given all they had been through, so she decided to forgo hairdressing after all. She would never work at it a day in her life. Instead she took a short nursing course and got a job at a hospital to show her independence, to spite him, or both.

George had escaped Florida but could not run away from the frustrations of an impulsive, ill-advised marriage. Inez had arrived in Harlem, but nothing had changed. They were getting along no better than before. So when he wasn’t on the rails, he began to fall under Harlem’s spell like many of the new arrivals suddenly free of the South. Between the people he knew from back in Florida and the co-workers he met riding the rails, he had a ready-made set of diversions every night of the week in a place that never shut down and was spilling over with people.

It was said that Harlem was one of the most crowded places in all of the country. Some half a million colored people were crammed into a sliver of upper Manhattan that was about fifty blocks long and only seven or eight blocks wide. A 1924 study by the National Urban League confirmed what colored tenants already knew: that colored renters paid from forty to sixty percent higher rents than white tenants for the same class of apartment. So colored people in Harlem took in boarders and worked second and third jobs.

Beginning in World War I, as many as seven thousand people were estimated to be living in a single block in Harlem. The crush of people begging for space forced rents even higher in what became a landlord’s paradise. Cash-strapped renters looked for new ways to make their rent. They began throwing end-of-the-month parties, “where they drank bathtub gin, ate pig knuckles and danced with the lights off,” as Arna Bontemps wrote.
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They called them rent parties. They charged twenty-five cents admission for a few hours of smoke-hazed, gin-juiced, tom-tom caterwauling, and poker playing with people from back home and with worldly-wise northerners they did not know just to help make that month’s rent.

Up and down the side streets off Lenox and Seventh Avenues, people flung open their apartment doors the Saturday night before the rent was due. They served pork chops and pigs’ feet and potato salad just like down south, except that the food and spirits were for sale, and they put Count Basie on the record player to give people something to dance to. Total strangers looking for a good time could stroll down the block looking for a red, pink, or blue light in a window and listening for the rabble of a rent party in progress. Signs went up inviting anybody willing to pay. One read:

There’ll be brown skin mammas
High Yallers too
And if you ain’t got nothing to do
Come on up to Roy and Sadie’s
West 126 St.
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Sat. Night May 12th.
There’ll be plenty of pig feet
An lots of gin
Jus ring the bell
An come on in.

Tenants stood to make the most money if they got the partygoers playing poker, and George was all for it. There were some people from Eustis, Florida, living up on Seventh Avenue, between 146th and 147th Streets. They lived right next door to each other and started running their parties simultaneously.

“We just go from one house to the other,” George said. “We get tired of playing over to Freeman’s, or we get mad with him about something, and we go over to M.B.’s. We go from one house to the other. We would be gambling the whole weekend.”

When they got tired of the people on Seventh Avenue, they went over to the Bronx, where the Blye brothers had a sister named Henry living over at Third Avenue and Seventeenth Street, and played some more.

The wives and girlfriends served the gin and bourbon and the grits and eggs and biscuits and smoked pork from the pork store down the street, the big poker players never getting up from the table, shoveling forkfuls of grits into their mouths between hands.

They were playing five-card stud, and sometimes there were so many people there’d be two or three games running, people just in or visiting from Eustis and Ocala, people who had been in Harlem for years, hustlers who made a life out of circulating at the gambling tables of the rent parties to beat the tenants out of their own rent money. It was an open invitation, after all.

George saw the money they were making—some of them were pulling in hundreds of dollars a weekend—and decided to throw some parties himself.

He went in with his friend Babe Blye, one of the Blye brothers from back home in Florida (there were nine brothers in all, plus three girls that the parents had given boys’ names to, but that’s another story). Babe was working as an auto painter for General Motors in New York and was living upstairs from George and Inez in the brownstone George was buying. Sometimes Inez served food, sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes she would stay down in their apartment. Working the rails mostly for tips, George could use the extra money for the house note and went in with Babe to run some poker parties.

George figured out the system. “If you stay outta the game, and if you run a game for four or five hours or more, you gonna have most of the money,” George said. “You’re gonna have most of the money and the cut. Because most of the players are going to lose.”

Trouble was, Babe couldn’t just sit back and watch. “See, that was our weakness,” George said. “Babe couldn’t stay outta the game. He just had to get in the game, and he’d lose pretty near everything that we take in.”

Like most migrants from the South, George had surrounded himself with the people he knew from back in the Old Country, but the Old Country was still in the people no matter where they went, and George found that, as much as he loved the people from back home, he could never truly move up with the country people still acting country. He never put it in so many words, but he didn’t keep his resentment to himself.

“We done sat up here all night, and you done gambled all the money out of the cut box,” he told Babe. “We just set this whole thing up for nothing. And now we got to clean up and see how many cigarette spots somebody done burned in the furniture. And we don’t have a thing to show for it.”