The Warmth of Other Suns (11 page)

The grown people’s whispers of unspeakable things seeped into George’s subconscious like a nursery rhyme, even though he was too young to know the particulars or understand the meaning of it all. Surrounded as he was by the arbitrary violence of the ruling caste, it would be nearly impossible for George or any other colored boy in that era to grow up without the fear of being lynched, the dread that, in the words of the historian James R. McGovern, “he might be accused of something and suddenly find himself in a circle of tormentors with no one to help him.”
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By the time Lil George was old enough to notice, it seemed as if the whole world was crazy, not because of any single event but because of the slow discovery of just how circumscribed his life was turning out to be. All this stepping off the sidewalk, not looking even in the direction of a white woman, the sirring and ma’aming and waiting until all the white people had been served before buying your ice cream cone, with violence and even death awaiting any misstep. Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price whichever they chose.

No one sat George down and told him the rules. His father was quiet and kept his wounds to himself. George’s teachers were fear and instinct. The caste system trained him to see absurdity as normal.

Like the time George went for an ice cream cone at the pharmacy in downtown Eustis. He wouldn’t be able to sit at the counter, he knew that going in. Anytime a white customer walked up, he had to step back and wait for him or her to be served first. George had learned this, too, by now. The pharmacist had a dog, a little terrier. And when George walked up to the counter, three or four white men who were standing around looked at one another and then at the pharmacist. The owner called out to the dog. And the dog jumped up onto the counter.

When the pharmacist had everyone’s attention, he turned to the dog.

“What would you rather do?” the pharmacist asked the dog. “Be a nigger or die?”

The dog rolled over on cue. It flipped onto its back, folded its legs, shut its eyes, and froze. The grown people at the counter and up front near George shook with laughter.

George was a teenager and outnumbered. He was the only one of his kind in this place. All he could do was stand there and take it. Any other response would require an explanation.
What’s the matter with you, boy? You don’t like it?
he could hear them saying.

All kinds of thoughts went through his mind. “A whole lot of things,” he said. “How you’d like to kill all of ’em, for one thing.”

On its face, it looked to be a black-and-white world, but George learned soon enough that the caste system was a complicated thing that had a way of bringing out the worst in just about all concerned. Sometimes it seemed that loyalty didn’t stand a chance against suspicion and self-preservation. Even on the lowest rung, some people would squeeze what little they could even when nobody had anything.

Reverend J. W. Brinson was a jackleg preacher who ran the colored grocery store on MacDonald in Egypt town. The store had a slot machine that took customers’ nickels and dimes but gave hardly any back. People went in and played the dime machine for an hour or two, and everybody could see that the machine was ready to deliver. That’s when Reverend Brinson would step in and close up shop. “He figure that machine is getting hot and is gonna start paying off,” George recalled. “And he run everybody out the store.”

George and his friends walked out as told. Then they watched old man Brinson take the slot machine to his house next door. “We would tip up on the porch,” George said, “and we could hear him in there in the bedroom and hear that slot machine just ringing. And he just be burning it up trying to get that jackpot for himself.”

On top of that, the merchandise in the grocery store was unjustly high, to hear George tell it, and he and his friends resented it. They found a way to get back what they figured they had overpaid.

They noticed that Reverend Brinson went into town the same time every day, leaving the store in the care of his wife, Mary, who was a sweet woman but couldn’t count. One day the boys sat under a big old oak tree and waited for Reverend Brinson to pull away. Then they went in and played nice to Miss Brinson.

“Hi, Miss Brinson.”

“Hello, boys. How y’all?”

“We wanna get something, Miss Brinson.”

“Yeah, alright. What y’all want?”

“We want ten cent worth of bologna.”

The Brinsons had a scale in the back of the store where the icebox was, which required Miss Brinson to go back in the icebox, get the roll of bologna, and bring it to the butcher block near the counter. She carved enough slices until it looked about right, cutting less than she needed so as not to waste slices the customer didn’t want. Then she went back to the scales to weigh the bologna as the boys watched.

“Oh, Miss Brinson, you ain’t quite got ten cent worth up there yet. You got to get some more.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, admitting the discrepancy.

She hauled the loaf of bologna back to slice some more, leaving the slices she had already cut on the counter, two or three of which the boys slipped into their mouths. She came huffing back with the extra slices, only to learn it still wasn’t enough.

“Oh, you ain’t got it yet, Miss Brinson.”

Back and forth she went, the loaf shrinking and the scale not budging, until the boys were full from the extra slices they’d eaten.

“Aw, that’s alright, Miss Brinson. That’s close enough. Just wrap it up.”

Come summer, the Brinsons set watermelons out on the bare floor in front of the counter. George and the other boys saw them there and decided to go in one day. They lined up along the counter and started looking around. One pointed to a jar of pickles on the very top shelf.

“Miss Brinson, how much is that jar of pickles up there?”

“Well. Let me see now. Which one?”

Miss Brinson went to get the ladder and climbed up to check. And as she stretched herself to reach the last jar, one of the boys took his foot and started a watermelon rolling. He kicked it to the next boy, who kicked it to the next boy, until the melon had rolled and creaked down the wood plank floor toward the front screen. The last boy was positioned to kick it outside, none of them for a second taking his eyes off Miss Brinson, still reaching for the jar of pickles. They would get two or three watermelons that way.

Poor Reverend Brinson must have suspected that they stole from him, and he kept his prices high, which only encouraged more pilfering. It was George’s and the other boys’ way of getting justice in an unjust world. And so it went in Egypt town, the poor at odds with the broke.

George was a boy interested in the things boys are interested in and not particularly wanting to live the life the preachers set out at Gethsemane Baptist Church. Not then, anyway. There wasn’t much to do around Eustis when school was out. Sure, they could fish and swim awhile in one of the lakes. But there weren’t any jobs, and so they got into the things that boys get into, like picking green oranges while the church people sang about Jesus.

He was friends with a bootlegger’s brother who lived behind the poolroom. Grown men roosted on the benches out front like crows on a fence, and there were big trees all around. The boys shot pool when the grown men let them and then made off with a pint of the bootlegger’s moonshine. They poured water in place of the liquor and put the bottle back where they found it. They figured they weren’t hurting anybody. The bootlegger was breaking the law anyway. They figured it was like taking something that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place.

George was growing taller and bigger and was in high school now. He grew to over six feet and started playing basketball at Curtright. He was walking taller and straighter. One day he went up to Ocala to see his grandmother the root doctor. He liked to surprise her, so he didn’t let her know that he was coming. But she knew anyway. “You think you slipped up on me,” she said once. “I knew you was coming ’cause my nose was itching. I just told somebody, ‘Somebody’s coming to see me.’ ”

She saw the change in him, how he was wearing grown folks’ clothes, walking taller, straighter, suddenly aware of how he looked in a mirror. It always happened that the young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth. “I see George got you in long pants now,” she said. “You must be smelling yourself.”

It’s true that George got into his share of devilment, but, fortunately for him, it turned out that he had a thing for numbers and words. He could remember just about anything that was set in front of him, and school came easy to him. He devoured books even though they were the white schools’ leftovers and had pages missing. He started to think about how he could escape this place, maybe even go to college.

The kids noticed and looked to George to help them with their lesson. But they seemed to wish they didn’t have to ask. They would turn around and tease him for doing what they should have been doing.

“So what you doing tonight, George?”

“Getting my lesson.”

“Yeah, you go on and get your lesson, and we’ll get the girls.”

George couldn’t abide the teasing and didn’t believe they were doing all they said they were anyway. He would finish his homework and tip over to the house of whatever girl they said they were having their fun with. He would sweet-talk the girl, and since he was tall and not, as they say, hard on the eyes, he managed to do quite well, in his estimation.

The next day in school, the boasting would commence.

“They brag about how they were with this girl last night,” George said years later. “I say to myself, ‘I know you lying.’ But I couldn’t tell them. I used to walk the back roads. Nobody would see me.”

George was always observing the developments around him, and here was a lesson in the underhanded nature of some human relations. “I know they would be telling lies on the girls,” he said years later, “ ’cause I be setting up there with that same girl in her house. That’s how I found out how the boys lie on girls.”

He didn’t want them knowing his business. He indulged them instead.

“What’d you do last night, Lil George?”

“Man, I had so much work. I was getting my lesson.”

By the time they got old enough to work, most of the kids had dropped out of school altogether. By graduation day, there were only six seniors in the Class of 1936 at Curtright Vocational Training School, and George Swanson Starling was valedictorian. He got accepted to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical State College in Tallahassee. His father did not really understand why he would want to go when he could be making a little money picking in the groves. But he sent him anyway.

George came home with better than decent grades. But a year passed and then another whole six months with other people working and George just reading books. His father didn’t see the point of it. In the middle of George’s sophomore year, his father told him he had gotten enough schooling and it was time for him to work. Maybe he could pick it up later.