The Warmth of Other Suns (72 page)

As the world began to change around him, he stood his ground in defense of the old order of things. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, “the only public building in the United States that refused to lower its flag to half-staff was McCall’s jail in Tavares,” the Lake County seat, according to the author Ben Green.
¹⁰

COLORED ONLY
and
WHITE ONLY
signs were coming down all over the South during the 1960s. But Sheriff McCall did not take down the
COLORED WAITING ROOM
sign in his office until September 1971, and then only under threat of a federal court order.
¹¹
He may have been the last elected official in the country to remove his Jim Crow sign, Green said.

McCall was reelected seven times, that is, until 1972, when Florida Governor Reubin Askew stepped in and suspended him after yet another violent assault on someone in his custody.
¹²
This time, McCall was indicted for second-degree murder for allegedly kicking a black prisoner to death. The prisoner was in jail for a twenty-six-dollar traffic ticket. McCall was acquitted.

But he lost the election that November. Blacks were now able to vote, and they turned out in force to defeat him the first chance they got.

“We sent cars out and taxicabs,” Viola Dunham, a longtime resident and a sister-in-law of George Starling, remembered. “We started getting these people out to vote.”

Then, too, a new generation of whites had entered the Florida electorate, the younger people who may have identified with the young freedom riders in Mississippi and Alabama even if they would not have participated themselves, and the snowbirds, the white northerners who were buying up vacation homes or retiring to central Florida with the boom that came with the arrival of Disney World and who couldn’t relate to the heavy-handedness of a small-town southern sheriff. And now it seemed that even the most steadfast traditionalists had finally tired of the controversies and felt it was time for him to go.

The defeated sheriff retreated to his ranch on Willis V. McCall Road in Eustis, where he tended his citrus grove, welcomed his partisans, and held forth on his decades of lordship over Lake County. He could take comfort in the fact that, for better or for worse, Lake County would not soon forget him, and he took pride in his role of protecting southern tradition.

The times might have changed, but he never would or sought to. Displayed in his home was the
COLORED WAITING ROOM
sign that once hung in his office and that he was forced to take down under threat of a court order. Nobody in the world was going to tell him what he could do or what he could hang in his own home on Willis V. McCall Road.

MONROE, LOUISIANA, EARLY 1970S
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

THE FOSTERS HAD ALWAYS
had a complicated relationship with their hometown of Monroe—or rather, with the few other ambitious and educated black people maneuvering among themselves for the few spoils allowed them in a segregated world. The rivalries would pass from one generation to the next until it no longer mattered because most of the Foster descendants had died or, like Robert, migrated away. As prominent as the Fosters had been, there would be no direct descendants living there by the 1970s, and the rivalries would play out from afar.

In the time since Robert drove away from Monroe for good, Robert’s father had died, his brother Madison had visited Los Angeles for surgery and died from complications there, his brother Leland had moved to the Midwest, his sister, Gold, had followed Robert to L.A. in the 1960s, and his nephew, Madison James, was in graduate school at the University of Michigan and not likely to move back.

But even before Robert migrated west, the Fosters had begun to languish like deposed monarchs on the outskirts of influence in town. By the 1950s, Professor Foster had been edged out of his principalship and a new colored high school had gone up to replace the old one the Fosters had run for decades.

There was a time when hardly any black child in Monroe could get through high school without getting past a Foster. Now a whole new generation was growing up not knowing who they were. Not only had many of the Fosters left, but the Migration had drained away many of the people who remembered them. It was the price they paid for migrating.

Some old-timers expected that the new high school would be named after Professor Foster for all his years of service.
¹³
He had taught, overseen, or influenced the education of most every black person in Monroe from the 1920s to the 1940s. But there were not enough partisans to push the case.

The new high school would take the name of a family that had stayed in Monroe, had not run north or west or forsaken Monroe for the so-called Promised Land. The Carrolls had been in Ouachita Parish since Reconstruction, and, like others who stayed, moved into greater prominence as possible competitors migrated away. When the new school went up, it was named after one of the Carrolls—Henry Carroll, who had become the first black member of the Monroe Board of Education—rather than the retired and nearly forgotten Professor Foster. Robert’s father had to watch from the sidelines as the new school he had always dreamed of rose up in the name of a rival.

“Papa was hurting, dying inside,” Robert said. “But he never let you know it.”

The next year, the Foster name was affixed to something the Fosters would not, in principle, have been against but would not have otherwise chosen for themselves, given their preoccupation with high-minded achievement. The Fosters lost out with the high school, but as a consolation prize, a public housing project was named after Professor Foster, the Foster Heights Homes on Swayze Street, a few blocks from the new high school. It was as if all that Professor Foster had endured and devoted his life to had been boiled down to an assemblage of low-rise apartments of pink brick and struggling lawn. Every shooting or drug bust or robbery that might happen there and make it to the evening news (“Last night, in a drug raid at the Foster Heights Homes …”) would resurrect the Foster name in a way that was counter to everything the family stood for.

Robert didn’t want to go back to see the housing project with his surname on it, but he did and found it neatly spread out, rather like a roadside motel. He would have to go back to bury his father and big brother and sister-in-law Harriet.

Each visit was a time of melancholy. Finally, no immediate family was left. There were still no sidewalks in New Town, and the streets were still unpaved, just as they were when he was a boy. It only confirmed that he could not have lived out his life in this place.

By the early 1970s, integration was beginning to filter into everyday life in Monroe. So, after visiting the graves of his mother and father and his big brother Madison, Robert decided to walk into a diner that used to be only for white people. It was a place he could only have dreamed of entering as a young man. He sat down without incident, ordered and ate, and nobody commented on it one way or the other. It was nothing special and, in fact, underwhelming after all those years of being denied entrance and dreaming of being inside. How could it be that people were fighting to the death over something that was, in the end, so very ordinary? He had crossed into territory forbidden him growing up, and now the circle was complete. It was much like returning to a building that had seemed so imposing when you were a child but was, in fact, small and forgettable when seen through the eyes of an adult.

Before leaving Monroe, he passed the big new colored high school on Renwick Street and could not help but think of his father walking to his old schoolhouse in the dark of morning to open up Monroe Colored High with its used books from the white school and secondhand desks. The new Carroll High School was something Professor Foster could only have dreamt of in those early days, and, for as long as he lived, Robert would remain convinced that it should rightly have carried his name.

Robert returned to L.A. and again tried to put Monroe behind him. He would never fully be able to. And so he worked harder at everything he did. He gave all of himself to whatever was his fancy at the moment.

Each December 23, he put aside his patients and gambling to devote himself to commemorating his marriage to Alice. He made the reservations and all the arrangements. Every year, the plan was exactly the same.

Robert and Alice would go to Scandia on Sunset Boulevard. The maître d’ would make a show of the appetizer and subsequent courses. There would be a gift immediately following the entrée—a diamond ring or a fur coat. There would be some grand gesture at the end and a toast to however many years it had been.

But things did not always go according to plan—not in any huge, irreversible way, but in the little ways that could easily rattle Robert, who was easily rattled anyway.

One anniversary, the maître d’ happened to seat them at a table in a darkened corner in the back.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Robert said.

He fumed and sulked. He could barely enjoy the anniversary he was supposed to be celebrating. When he could stand it no longer, he summoned the maître d’.

“Please move me to another table,” Robert said. “It’s too dark.”

(“
I tipped him, and that will work wonders. You have to be careful not to overdo it. Then you show your ignorance.”)

Another year, the maître d’ sat them at a booth. It was in the right place in the room. But something was wrong. The booth sank in where Robert was sitting.

“When I sat down in the booth, my wife was taller than I,” he said. “I didn’t like that.”

He told Alice to switch places with him, “so that I wouldn’t be shorter than she was.” Alice, having already settled on her side of the booth, had to collect her purse. The two got up and circled each other to take the other’s seat.

Only then could the evening commence.

“Leo, what are we going to eat tonight?”

There came the courses, and he would watch with pride and amazement as Alice negotiated whatever elaborate or towering concoction was put before her.

Then came the part Robert liked the most, the part he put the most ritual and planning into.

The morning of the dinner, he had called the florist.

“I want red roses and baby’s breath,” he had told the florist. “I want to be able to see over the table.”

The florist fretted over what that meant for the arrangement, precisely what the dimensions should be.

“Alright, get me the width and the length of the table,” Robert said. Someone called the restaurant and got the measurements for the particular table Robert had reserved for this particular anniversary, and the roses and ferns could then be cut and arranged.

“Each year I added one red rose to that bouquet,” he said.

It was their thirty-third anniversary. “We’re in the center of the dining room,” Robert remembered. The maître d’ came out with “thirty-three long-stemmed roses with white baby’s breath and fern and ribbon,” he remembered. “Each anniversary, one more ribbon.”

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me
.
¹⁴

—J
ACQUELINE
J
OAN
J
OHNSON,
WHO MIGRATED FROM
C
HARLESTON
,
S
OUTH
C
AROLINA, TO
N
EW
Y
ORK IN 1971
.

LOS ANGELES, DECEMBER 1974
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

WITHIN FOUR YEARS
of Robert’s big party of a lifetime, Alice, who had married him to the unspoken disappointment of her upper-crust parents, had followed him to Austria and Los Angeles and Vegas, allowed herself to be his mannequin and muse, given legitimacy to his aspirations and become his ticket to high society, which he both coveted and resented, Alice with her cat-eye glasses and teacher’s solemnity, had fallen gravely ill and died.

Again, like his brother Madison, here was another family member passing away, and his medical certifications and surgical expertise could do nothing to stop it. She died of cancer, as had Robert’s mother, on December 8, 1974, at the age of fifty-four. Her passing and burial rites were both headlined in the
Chicago Defender
and the
Atlanta Daily World
, the black newspaper that had charted her every coming and going for most of her life.

The
Defender
, taking interest from half a continent away, described her as “one of Los Angeles’ most prominent civic and social figures,” “wife of noted surgeon, Dr.
¹⁵
Robert Pershing Foster,” and “a tireless worker in numerous civic and philanthropic organizations.”

She was interred far from the tinseled veneer of Los Angeles in Louisville, Kentucky, at her father’s burial site, reclaimed in death as a Clement, not a Foster. They had been married thirty-three years, not one of them in Monroe. On that, they had both agreed.

As quiet and self-contained as she was, the house felt empty and unbearably silent after she was gone. The girls were all off on their own, two now married and living back east, the youngest away at college. Robert, along with Alice’s mother, Pearl, returned disheartened from the interment and took up their positions in their respective corners of the echoing mansion. As big as it was, it was feeling too small for two people so different from each other, who had put up an appearance of cordiality only to appease the one thing they had in common—sweet and devoted Alice. Neither had liked how the other seemed to control her, and now the reason they endured each other was gone and not coming back.

Each missed her more than they could have possibly anticipated. Even Robert—who had directed her choice of clothing, dissected her every attribute and deficit, stayed out late tending his patients and his vices, and taken for granted that she would be there whenever he needed her—felt her absence perhaps more than her presence now that he no longer had it.

With each passing day, Pearl grew angrier and more resentful. Of all the people in her life and all the people she had known and loved, here she was left with the one she least wanted to be around. How was it that the two of them had survived? It would never have occurred to her when she moved to Los Angeles, a widow from Atlanta, into the new wing Robert had built for her that her daughter would precede both of them in death and that so full a house would come down to just these two.

Now Robert was asking her to contribute a little in rent each month, which she took as an insult, given how the Clements had helped them in the early years of their marriage and how she had just now lost her only child. Robert thought it was only fair, given that he had vowed to take care of her daughter, not her, but still had done so, even building a wing for her, from the time Rufus Clement had died seven years before. He knew that Pearl had the money to share the household expenses from Clement’s pension and estate. And, besides, Robert said, “I had given her anything she wanted.” They could come to no agreement, and matters only grew worse.

The gambler and the socialite were marooned in a house that was big, but not big enough to escape each other. They were the oddest of couples and each was all that the other had. Day after day, he went to his office, hoping to avoid her on the way out. Day after day, she was stuck in the house where every lamp and figurine reminded her of the daughter she had lost.

She had never wanted to be part of the Great Migration or come out to California. She had lived her whole life in the South and was in Los Angeles only because her daughter’s husband had been so insistent on fleeing the South and had taken Alice and the girls with him. Now, with Alice gone, she was alone in a city she had never wanted to be in. She had little to fill the hours. Robert and Pearl ground through their days in slow motion and tried to pretend the other wasn’t there.

It wasn’t long until she realized she couldn’t take it anymore. She could no longer hold in the resentment. One day, she broke the silence.

“Why did you have to be the one to live, and not my daughter?” she finally said.

She had gotten it out, and there was nothing left to say after that. The tension had likely been building up from the moment they’d met. Her time in the house couldn’t last much longer. She packed her belongings and moved back to Kentucky, where her late husband and daughter were buried. And Robert was alone in the house and with himself for the first time in his life.

CHICAGO, FEBRUARY 1975
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

IDA MAE’S SISTER IRENE
, the one who had urged Ida Mae to come north in the first place, saying, “
I just wouldn’t stay down there if I was you
,” and whom they moved in with upon arrival, was having eye surgery. She hoped Ida Mae would come up to Milwaukee to help her while she recovered. Ida Mae wanted to go but wasn’t sure she would be able to.

There was so much going on in Ida Mae’s household with everybody either coming or going to work and trying to take care of the grandkids, who were teenagers now, and get to church on time and pay the light bill and the house note. Ida Mae couldn’t drive and didn’t have a way to get there. And it was the darkest days of winter.

George and Ida Mae were not the youthful innocents fleeing the hard soil of the South for Chicago as they had been all those years ago. They were in their sixties now—George was sixty-eight and Ida Mae was sixty-two. They had lived in Chicago for longer than they had been in Mississippi and were still working, which they had been doing in one form or the other from the time they could pick up a hoe or reach over a wash pot.

They had reached the point in life where everyone around them seemed to be succumbing to something—high blood pressure, diabetes, which they called sugar, cancer, stroke, hysterectomies, heart attacks, or some combination of them all.

Ida Mae had had to go back to Mississippi some years before to see about her ailing mother. Miss Theenie had collapsed from a stroke and, isolated in the country as she was, had lain out in her yard, unable to move, for more than a day until someone happened to pass by on that lonely gravel road and see her. Miss Theenie did not live too much longer after that. Ida Mae went down to the funeral in the spring of 1959 and grieved mightily over it, but she had a family of her own to tend to.

Ida Mae herself had finally gotten over her fear of hospitals and had the hysterectomy her doctor said she needed. George had an enlarged heart and had already suffered two heart attacks. Each time, the family managed to get him to go to the hospital. But, stubborn as he was and disbelieving and suspicious of northern medicine, he wouldn’t submit to any surgery or medication upon release—the nitroglycerin or beta-blockers that would have been standard at the time. To him that was just some kind of northern trickery and against his faith in God.

“He didn’t have no medicine ’cause if he had it, he wouldn’t take it,” Ida Mae said. “He would never believe nothin’ was wrong with him. He didn’t believe in no doctors.”

Whatever he was feeling, he just said it was indigestion. Once when he went to the hospital, the triage nurse was asking him about his symptoms.

“Don’t ask so many questions,” he told her. “Just do something for me and ask questions later.”

Now her beloved big sister Irene was needing her, and Ida Mae was trying to figure out how to get to her. George told her she should stay home, tend to the family, and go to church. But it turned out that a friend named Evelyn happened to be heading to Milwaukee at around the same time, and Ida Mae’s daughter Eleanor told her she should make up her own mind and go see about her sister. Eleanor agreed to go with her.

They helped Irene as best they could. When they arrived back in Chicago and pulled up to the house, they knew something was wrong. It was a Sunday, midday, and George’s Chevrolet was still parked out front when he should have been at church.

Ida Mae and Eleanor walked into the vestibule. James came right out. He told them George had had another heart attack while Ida Mae was away. It was the third one her husband had had. It struck him that morning. This time he didn’t come back from the hospital.

James broke the news to Ida Mae and Eleanor that George had passed away. “They had to pick both of us up off the floor of the vestibule,” Ida Mae said.

She thought back to the start of the weekend. How she had chosen to see about her sister instead of staying home. How, the night before she left, the cat had slapped her in the face.

“I should have known then,” Ida Mae said.

She remembered George’s warning her over and over, “Now you work and make your own money,” he used to say, “ ’cause one day I ain’t gon’ be here.”

She thought about his last heart attack. “The doctor said he’d never pull out of another one,” she remembered.

Even Irene said she knew something was about to happen, although it wasn’t clear exactly how. “Ida Mae, I started to tell you to go back home,” Irene said after she learned that George had died.

James said he had found him.

“His arm was as hard as this seat.”

“No, I found him,” his wife, Mary Ann, said.

“No, you didn’t,” James said. “You fell out in the hallway.”

“I should have been there,” Ida Mae said in one of her rare displays of regret. For forty-five years, she had been the dutiful wife of a hard-working and stoic man, cooking and cleaning after him and obeying him—most of the time—like the pastor had said to do. And here, when he needed her, in his last moments on this earth, she wasn’t there.

She tried to remind herself why she had gone. “Eleanor said I was always doing what he said to do,” she remembered. “She said I should go on up and see about my sister. I ain’t saying he’d a lived. George went to a funeral that Saturday. Something told me, ‘Ida Mae, you better stay here.’ … You think about these things.”