The Warmth of Other Suns (48 page)

A survey of new migrants during World War II found that an overwhelming majority of them looked up to the people who were there before them, admired them, and wanted to be as assured and sophisticated as they were.
¹⁰¹
But a majority of the colored people already in the New World viewed the newcomers in a negative light and saw them as hindering opportunities for all of them.

The anxious old settlers were “like German Jews who in the late nineteenth century feared that the influx of their coreligionists from eastern Europe would endanger their marginal but substantial foothold in gentile Chicago,” wrote the historian James R.
¹⁰²
Grossman.

“Those who have long been established in the North have a problem,” the
Chicago Defender
acknowledged.
¹⁰³
“That problem is the caring for the stranger within their gates.”

It turned out that the old-timers were harder on the new people than most anyone else. “Well, their English was pretty bad,” a colored businessman said of the migrants who flooded Oakland and San Francisco in the forties, as if from a foreign country.
¹⁰⁴
To his way of looking at it, they needed eight or nine years “before they seemed to get Americanized.”

As the migrants arrived in the receiving stations of the North and West, the old-timers wrestled with what the influx meant for them, how it would affect the way others saw colored people, and how the flood of black southerners was a reminder of the Jim Crow world they all sought to escape. In the days before Emancipation, as long as slavery existed, no freed black was truly free. Now, as long as Jim Crow and the supremacy behind it existed, no blacks could ever be sure they were beyond its reach.

One day a white friend went up to a longtime Oakland resident named Eleanor Watkins to ask her what she thought about all the newcomers.

“Eleanor,” the woman said, “you colored people must be very disgusted with some of the people who have come here from the South and the way they act.”
¹⁰⁵

“Well, Mrs. S.,” Eleanor Watkins replied. “Yes, some colored people are very disgusted, but as far as I’m concerned, the first thing I give them credit for is getting out of the situation they were in.…  Maybe they don’t know how to dress or comb their hair or anything, but their children will and
their
children will.”

In the early years of the Migration, the
Chicago Defender
took it upon itself to help correct the country people it had helped lure to the North to better fit the city people’s standard of refinement. “It is our duty,” the
Defender
wrote, “to guide the hand of a less experienced one, especially when one misstep weakens our chance for climbing.”
¹⁰⁶

The
Defender
ran periodic lists of “do’s and don’ts” that recirculated over time and were repeated to newcomers like Ida Mae:

D
ON’T HANG OUT THE WINDOWS
.
¹⁰⁷

D
ON’T SIT AROUND IN THE YARD AND ON THE PORCH BAREFOOT AND UNKEMPT
.

D
ON’T WEAR HANDKERCHIEFS ON YOUR HEAD
.

D
ON’T USE VILE LANGUAGE
IN PUBLIC PLACES
.
¹⁰⁸

D
ON’T ALLOW CHILDREN TO BEG ON THE STREETS
.

D
ON’T APPEAR ON THE STREET WITH OLD DUST CAPS, DIRTY APRONS AND RAGGED CLOTHES
.

D
ON’T THROW GARBAGE IN THE BACKYARD OR ALLEY OR KEEP DIRTY FRONT YARDS
.

The Chicago Urban League, which helped direct migrants to temporary shelter, rental options, and jobs, was the closest the migrants got to Customs in the North. It held what it called “Strangers Meetings” to help acclimate the newcomers, and its members went door-to-door, passing out leaflets advising the migrants as to their behavior and comportment. To the
Defender
’s do’s and don’ts, the Urban League distributed cards adding the following admonishments:

1. D
   O NOT LOAF
   . G
   ET A JOB AT ONCE
   .
   ¹⁰⁹
   
2. D
   O NOT LIVE IN CROWDED ROOMS
   . O
   THERS CAN BE OBTAINED
   .
   
3. D
   O NOT CARRY ON LOUD CONVERSATIONS IN STREET CARS AND PUBLIC PLACES
   .
   
4. D
   O NOT KEEP YOUR CHILDREN OUT OF SCHOOL
   .
   
5. D
   O NOT SEND FOR YOUR FAMILY UNTIL YOU GET A JOB
   .
   

Ida Mae didn’t take it personally when people pointed these things out to her, like the neighbor lady who had brought the wine. Ida Mae wouldn’t likely have seen her again because the family moved so much in those early months in Chicago. But she thanked people like her and a lady who mentioned her head scarf on the bus one day. She was grateful for the advice and, in fact, took most of it.

But there were some things she was not ever going to do. She was never going to change her name to something citified and highfalutin. She was never going to take on northern airs and name-drop about the pastor she knew from this or that church or the alderman who stopped to greet her at the polls, even though she would come to know famous people who made good up in the North because she had known their kin people back in Mississippi. She was never going to forget the folks back home and how she loved them so. She was never going to change her Mississippi drawl, not in the least, not even after she had spent more of her life in the North than in the South, not even when some northerners still had trouble understanding her decades after she’d been there; though she wasn’t trying to be difficult and was just being herself, she simply didn’t care what anybody thought. It didn’t matter, because people seemed to love her for it.

She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself, where nobody could judge her, and inside the walls of their kitchenette apartment where she made turnip greens and peach cobbler and sweet potato pie flecked with nutmeg and sang spirituals like in Mississippi as often as she liked.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 1947
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

IT TOOK EIGHT YEARS OF MARRIAGE
, broken by fearsome silences and fitful separations due to George’s work on the railroad and the circumstances under which he had to migrate north. But finally George and Inez had a baby. It was a boy. He was born in January 1947, and they named him Gerard. There were already enough Georges in the family, and Gerard was close enough.

“I was the happiest man in the world when this boy came,” George said. “I thought we weren’t gonna never have no children.”

George couldn’t stop taking pictures of the baby. And the arrival of their son gave Inez a new purpose. She threw herself into motherhood. That was a good thing, because, soon after the baby was born, George had to take to the road again to care for his growing family.

In no time George was back on the rails, working the legendary trains that followed the East Coast route of the Great Migration. His job put him in the middle of one of the biggest population shifts in the country’s history. He saw firsthand the continuing stream of people pouring out in front of him. He helped them carry their cardboard boxes tied with string, the hand-me-down suitcases, the hatboxes and steamer trunks. Some came north with only a cotton sack or a paper bag with all they owned or were able to get out with.

“Time they get their seat and their bags up, here come the shoe boxes,” he said. Fried chicken, boiled eggs, crackers, and cakes.

He was working the Silver Comet from New York to Birmingham, the Silver Spur from New York to Tampa, and the other Great Migration trains. His job was to help people load their bags, direct them to their seats, warm their babies’ milk, and generally attend to their needs and clean up after them. The ride could last as long as twenty-eight hours from the southernmost stop to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.

George walked up and down the train aisles, helping people board or disembark at every stop along the way. He rarely got a chance to sit down, much less sleep. The pay was lower than it might otherwise have been because he was expected to get tips to compensate for it. But when he was working the Jim Crow car, he was mostly servicing the lowliest, poorest-paid workers in the South—or in the country, for that matter. Many of them had never been on the train before and knew nothing about the protocol of gratuities.

They gave him food instead. “Want some fried chicken?” the colored passengers would ask him. “I give you some fried chicken. You already gettin’ paid.”

He had come from the place they were leaving and knew not to expect a tip or hold it against them. He knew the fear and uncertainty in their hearts because he had felt it himself. He had ridden the night train north just as they had and spoke their language and could read the worried optimism in the faces.

When the train approached Washington, D.C., the dividing line between the Jim Crow South and the free North, and rode deeper into the Promised Land, his role took on an unexpected significance.

As they neared the final stops, it became necessary for George to become more than a baggage handler, but tutor and chaperone to nervous charges arriving in the New World. At the moment of the migrants’ greatest fear and anxiety, it fell to him to ease them into the Promised Land, tell them whatever he knew about this new place, which bus or subway to take, how far the station was from their cousin’s apartment, to watch out for panhandlers and hustlers who might take what little change they had left, and usher them and their luggage off to whatever the future held for them.

It was his tap on the shoulder that awakened them as the train neared their stop and alerted them to their new receiving city. He and other colored porters were men in red caps and white uniforms, but they functioned as the midwives of the Great Migration, helping the migrants gather themselves and disembark at the station and thus delivering to the world a new wave of newcomers with each arriving train.