The Warmth of Other Suns (12 page)

Big George didn’t see where it made much difference anyway, hardly anybody they knew went to college. The father had only gone to fifth grade, and he was doing alright, running the store and packing fruit at the Eichelberger Packing Company.

“With two years of college, you should be able to be president of the United States,” his father figured.

“But I’m taking a four-year course number, and you dropping me in the middle of the stream. I’m not prepared to do anything because I’m only halfway there.”

George had made valedictorian at Curtwright and, just as significant to him, was the only one from his high school to finish the first year of college without failing any subject. He thought he deserved better.

But his father had made up his mind. Lil George was his namesake, but he wasn’t his only concern. Big George had remarried since coming to Eustis. He had a wife now and two stepsons to think about. He had that little store to keep up and dreams of a little orange grove of his own for his old age. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had to send George back to school to study Socrates and polynomials. It was an outrageous indulgence when everybody else was working the groves every day.

A few days later, George was looking for some papers. Rummaging through a dresser drawer, he found some postal receipts for deposits his father had made in a savings account at the post office.

“He had a drawer full of them where he was saving in the post office,” George said years later. “But he was telling me he didn’t have any money. And that made me angry, and I couldn’t sense it into him that I needed to go on and get the other two years. So I just got angry and evil, and I decided I would do something to hurt him.”

George had gotten around with the girls, but he always seemed to come back to one in particular. Inez Cunningham was a girl from the backwoods with full cheeks and a narrow waist who had endured an even more unsettled childhood than he had. Her parents had died young and left her in the care of a Pentecostal aunt who trotted her to late-night church meetings with holy rollers talking in tongues. She spent so much of her girlhood in the quaking pews of the Pentecostal church that she swore she would never join a church again if she got free. She kept her word and never did.

She wore plaits and plain dresses and didn’t have the pomaded hair some other girls had or the stockings and jewelry that made certain girls look more refined. But she had a way of smiling and tilting her head to the side and some kind of simpatico, outsider way of looking at the world that appealed to a young man like George who felt life had never cut him a fair deal.

She had graduated from high school and was doing the common and necessary job of cleaning white people’s homes. But with George up in Tallahassee around those well-turned-out coeds training to be teachers, she fixated on her deficiencies. She imagined her competition in high heels and straight hair, their dignified talk turning George’s head. She convinced herself he would choose one of them over her and told him as much.

Big George didn’t want Inez around his son either. She was from the backwoods and, in the pecking order that emerged even on the lowest rung—people with house notes versus people who paid rent, factory workers versus servants—Big George saw Inez as lower than the Starlings.

During spring break of his sophomore year, the subject of school came up again. George asked his father if he would send him back, and again the answer was no. George was incensed and decided to do something about it. It was April 19, 1939. He took his father’s car and drove up to the house where Inez lived.

“Come on, let’s take a ride,” he said.

“What you doing?”

“Come on, let’s ride.”

“Well, where you going?”

“Oh, just a ride.”

She hopped in, and he drove south for five miles to Tavares, the county seat. He drove around to the back of the courthouse, where the jail was, and slowed to a stop.

“Where you going?” Inez asked, alarmed now.

He grabbed her hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

He led her upstairs and into the magistrate’s office.

“Well, what can I do for ya, boy?” the magistrate said.

“We come to get married,” George said.

Inez nearly fainted. She looked to George to explain himself.

“Well, you been pressuring me about gettin’ married. You’re telling me that I’m gonna end up marrying one of those college girls that’s getting a schoolteacher’s education. And you’re not gonna be good enough for me. And I keep telling you that that wouldn’t make any difference. But you can’t seem to believe that, and you don’t want to wait. I wanted to show you that you the only one that I wanted. So we just gonna get married now.”

Inez stood there with her mouth open. “I—I didn’t know” was all she could manage.

She was wearing whatever dress she happened to put on that morning, and he had on whatever he’d thrown on, too.

“Now, you know that’ll cost you a dollar fifty, boy,” the county judge, A. S. Herlong, said. “A dollar for the license. Fifty cent for a witness.”

“Yes, sir.”

The judge went through the vows and declared them man and wife. She was twenty-one. He was twenty and not legally old enough to marry.

“I told the man I was twenty-one,” George later said. “They didn’t care. If you black, they don’t care nothin’ about Negroes. They didn’t check it out. I would be twenty-one in a couple of months. But anyway, we got married.”

As they drove back to Eustis, George told Inez his plan.

“You gon’ have to continue to stay with your people. We got to keep this secret until I find out whether I’m going back to school or not.”

George left out a crucial bit of information in what he told Inez, although it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. “I didn’t tell her my ulterior motive,” he said years later. Now, in all fairness, he said, “I was in love with her. But I didn’t have no intention of getting married, not at that stage, until I got mad with my daddy. He didn’t even want me to be courting this girl, much less talking about marrying her.

“So I figured that would fix him up good ’cause he won’t send me back to school,” he said. “I got in all that trouble for a dollar fifty cents.”

George hadn’t really thought his revenge scheme through to completion. He held out hope that his father would change his mind. George would spring the news about Inez on him only if his father didn’t come around. The two of them kept their secret through the spring and into the summer, when George went to New York like a lot of college students from the South to make spending money for school.

He worked at a dry cleaner’s in Flatbush and lived with the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor in Ocala. Toward the end of the summer, he wrote his father:
I have my money for my books and everything. I bought what clothing I’ll need. Are you going to be able to pay my tuition?

Lil George didn’t know it, but the people back home had been grumbling in Big George’s ear. The father had already done more than he had to. Nobody else was spending all that money for school. None of them had gone off to college, and they had made out alright. Their kids were working in the groves and bringing in good money. What was Lil George doing? His father wrote him back:
No, I just won’t be able to do it. You’ll have to work, this year, and we’ll see how things are next year
.

The summer was almost over. The semester would be starting soon. George had run out of time. He realized his dream was over. He wrote his father again. He wanted to get back at him now:
Well, that’s alright, don’t worry about it ’cause I’m married anyhow. I’m married to Inez
.

George waited for the fireworks. But they never came. He caught the bus back home, and the old people who hadn’t seen him in months recognized him as he walked from the bus station. They called out to him from their front porches.

“Hey, ain’t that Lil George Starling?”

“Yes, ma’am, this is me.”

“Come here, boy. Lord have mercy, what is wrong with you? You done gone plumb fool. They tell me you done jumped up and married that Cunningham girl. And your daddy said, he was here gettin’ ready to send you back to school.”

George couldn’t speak. The old people went on.

“ ’Cause your daddy said he was gettin’ ready to send you back to school, and, before he know anything, you come writing him about you done got married.”

The word had spread all across Egypt town, and everybody knew about the ingrate son who had ruined his chance at college, marrying some girl from the wrong side of town.

Dog, the ole man done tricked me
, George thought to himself. He knew how they talked. And in the old people’s sweet scolding, he could hear how the story got repackaged in the telling, people in town with nothing better to do, who never had the chance at college themselves, maybe never tried or even wanted to go, delighting in the confusion and goading Big George over it.

“George, where is that boy? Is he going to school?”

“No, you know what that devilish boy done? I’m here gettin’ ready to send him back to school, and here he come writing me the other day tellin’ me about he married.”

“Well, I declare! You mean to tell! Now, I know that boy ain’t done nothin’ like that! And hard as you workin’ trying to send him to school!”

And so it went. If the father had ever intended on sending him back, he now had a publicly acceptable excuse for not doing so, and he had come out the hero in the deal.

As for Lil George, no colleges near Eustis nor any state universities in Florida, for that matter, admitted colored students. The closest colored colleges were hours away. He had a wife to support now. So he would have to do precisely what his father had intended all along. It looked as if he might never make it back to school.

And he would have to live with vows made in anger for the rest of his life. It would not be happy because he knew and she knew how it had come to be. But they would both try to make the best of it now that the deed was done.

LOS ANGELES, 1996

THE PANELED DOOR RISES
a story high and would befit a museum or government office but is actually the front door of a Spanish Revival south of Wilshire.
⁶⁶
The door opens, and there stands a onetime bourbon-swilling army captain and deft-handed surgeon who, now in his later years, is a regular at the blackjack tables and the trifectas at Santa Anita. But he is, at the heart of it all and perhaps most important, a long-standing, still bitter, and somewhat obsessive expatriate from the twentieth-century South, the heartbreak Jim Crow land he chose to reject before it could reject him again.

He is a Californian now, this Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. He is the color of strong coffee and has waves in his hair, which he lets grow as untamed as Einstein’s but then brushes back like the boys in the band. He’s wearing a white cotton island shirt, loose slacks, and sandals, the uniform of the well-to-do L.A. pensioner. He has the build and bearing of a Sammy Davis, Jr., and not a little of the showmanship and delightful superficiality that seem to grow on people in certain circles of L.A.

He walks straight-backed and slew-footed into the foyer, past the curved, faux–
Gone With the Wind
staircase and the East Asian pottery. He gestures toward the living room, an imposing museum of a space that dwarfs him in its volume, fairly frozen in the sea foam carpet and hot pink tulip chairs out of a sherbety Doris Day movie from the fifties. The whole effect is as starched and formal as the tuxedos he used to wear to the parties he threw for himself back when his wife, Alice, was alive and the money was raining down like confetti. He seems accustomed to people fawning over the place and, with the prim air of leading men of his favorite movies from back in the forties, insists on serving his guests a slice of lemon pound cake and vanilla ice cream on Rosenthal china, whether they would like to have it or not.

His heavy-lidded eyes look straight into those of his listener and have a distractingly thick fringe of lashes like those seen on babies and starlets.

He is a physician—or was for most of his adult life and, by most accounts, a very good one—and is prone to pontificate like a man of his years and accomplishments. But he is just as likely to interrupt himself and check the time to see if he can still make the one o’clock at the Hollywood Park racetrack.

His photo albums are filled with an unlikely assortment of bookies and blues singers and dentists and fraternity men and surgeons and society people whose approval he craved even though he knew they were too pretentious to matter, really. He doesn’t say it because it would be gauche and hardly worth mentioning from his point of view, but there happen to be a lot of little Roberts around town, due to the fact that, over the years, he delivered a number of baby boys whose mothers were so grateful for his firm hand and calming reassurances at the precise moment of truth that they named their sons not after their husbands, but after the doctor who delivered their babies.

Before he begins his story, he tells you it’s a long one and you can’t get it all. He’s lived too many lives, done too much, known too many people, ridden so high and so low that there’s no point in fooling yourself into thinking you can capture the whole of it.

You could try, of course, and he agrees to give as much as he can.

“I love to talk,” he says, a smile forming on his still-chiseled face as he sits upright in his tulip chair. “And I am my favorite subject.”

MONROE, LOUISIANA, 1933

IT WAS SATURDAY
. Pershing Foster, the teenage son of ambitious but barely paid schoolteachers, began to stir in the thin light of morning. He lived across the railroad tracks from the rest of Monroe, in the worn colored section mockingly known as New Town despite its dirt roads and old shotgun houses on stilts. He pulled out his good pants with the three-inch waistband and the buttons on the side. A few hours from now, the Paramount Theater would go dark, and Jean Harlow or Errol Flynn or some other airbrushed and porcelain movie star would appear out of nowhere, big as a building.

Pershing wanted to be there when the curtain went up and escape his segregated cell of a life, if only for ninety-four minutes. But his father reminded him he couldn’t leave just yet. The cows had to be brought in from the grazing pasture and milked before he could go.

Morning after morning, his father had tried to teach him how to milk. Each time, Pershing bent down and pulled hard on the teats, but he could never get the hang of it, nor, truth be told, really wanted to. One time, the cow kicked over the bucket, and the milk spilled everywhere, which only proved to Pershing, who didn’t want to be there in the first place, that he wasn’t cut out for this line of work.

“I told you that cow didn’t like me,” Pershing said.

His father couldn’t afford to lose a whole bucket of milk. Madison Foster was the principal of the colored high school—a misnomer because it included every grade from the first through the eleventh, but, in any case, paid him a fraction of what the state openly and unapologetically paid his white counterparts and left him and his family only slightly better off than the colored servants in town. He needed that milk to supplement his wages, and he didn’t have milk to waste.

“Let him go,” his father finally conceded to his wife, Ottie. “Unloose him. Unloose him.”

Pershing got his way. He was the last child Ottie would ever bear, and, to the degree that a colored child could be spoiled when so much of the world was cut off to him, he was.

There were three children above him. Madison was the oldest and away most of the time, off in medical school. He was going to be the first doctor in the family, as Ottie, who set her sights higher than the teacher that she was, liked to say of her firstborn. Leland, the second son, was a star pitcher at Morehouse College in Atlanta. His parents had big plans for Leland, naming him as they did after their alma mater, Leland College in New Orleans. People were saying Leland had a shot at the Negro Leagues. He had to fight the girls off him as it was. He had a sculpted mahogany face and waves in his hair. He had the best mind of all the four children but, to his mother’s great sorrow, was a regular at the pool hall and the juke joints, despite her best efforts. The women called him Woo, which is what they whispered when they saw him.

There was a sister named Emlyn. They called her Gold owing to the sunset cast to her skin and her place as the only surviving girl. Her twin, Evelyn, had died as an infant. Everybody fussed over Gold and told her how beautiful she was, which she was.

The table seemed set before Pershing was even born, and he couldn’t see how to stand out on his own or figure out how he fit in as the youngest. A few years before, when he was about ten, he hit upon something that he thought he could do. He was in fifth grade, and when the school bell rang, he ran to meet his mother in her seventh-grade classroom. He told her his discovery as they walked home together.

“Mama, I believe I can play the piano.”

“You think you can?”

“Yes, Mama, I know I can.”

“What makes you know?”

“Mama, all you got to do is do like this,” he said, banging his fingers on an invisible keyboard as he walked, “and hum the song, and it’ll come out.”

“You think so, baby?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Well, tomorrow after school, you go down, and you try it on the piano, and you let me know how you come out.”

The next day, he did as she said. Noise came out of the piano instead of the music in his head, and that was the end of his short career as a pianist. He never spoke of it again. And, seeing that he didn’t bring it up, neither did his mother.

The day the cow kicked over the bucket, they let Pershing have his way. He was a teenager now and off to the Paramount. It sat gaudy and beautiful on the other side of the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks from the colored section of town. He stepped out of the white frame bungalow with his pants creased to a knife edge, the crinkled waves in his hair pomaded and patted down, and proceeded down the dirt roads leading downtown. He went past the little plank houses that stood on cinder blocks due to the rains and floods and jumped over the dirt ditches that made grass islands of every yard around.

He picked up paper-shell pecans that fell in people’s yards like litter. Soon he came to the places where the white people lived. The streets were paved and smooth now. In New Town, the roads were earthen humps with a ditch on either side to catch the bayou when it ran out of places to go. Whenever it rained, the streets turned to mud, and Pershing and the other children jumped in the ditches and splashed around as if the ditches were a swimming pool. They didn’t know what a real pool was like because the only one in town didn’t allow children who looked like them.

Trucks rumbled down the road and flung dust on the porches and through the screens and into the front rooms of the houses on Pershing’s side of town. The mud and dust were an affront to Pershing, and he defied it the best he could. He made a game out of proving he could outwit his lower-caste world.

“It was my personal pride to wait till a rainy day and polish my black-and-white shoes,” he said, “and wear them when the rain had stopped and jump over puddles and not get a spot of anything on them.”

Those dirt roads were the reason he never learned to skate, and he could never forget that.

“We could buy skates,” Pershing would remember even as an old man. “But we couldn’t buy sidewalks.”

Downtown was called Five Points, the intersection of Eighteenth and Desiard, and when Pershing got there, he walked further down Desiard Street past Piccadilly’s restaurant, where the white people ate, and on to the Paramount straight ahead. He could see the double glass doors in front and a crowd forming outside. He knew to ignore the front entrance. It was off-limits to people like him.

He went to get his ticket. It was a more complicated affair than it had to be, owing to the whims and peculiarities of how Jim Crow played out in a particular town or establishment. For a time, there was a single ticket agent working both booths—the window for the colored and the one for the white. The agent swiveled between the two openings to sell the movie tickets, a roll to the white line and then a pivot to the colored. It created unnecessary confusion and waiting time for one line or the other, the waiting borne more likely by the colored moviegoers than the white, as waiting to be served after colored people would have been unacceptable to the white clientele. By the time Pershing was nearly grown, the swiveling ticket agent was dispensed with in favor of altogether separate windows and ticket sellers, which would cost a little more but would move the white and colored lines along more quickly and was more in keeping with the usual protocols of Jim Crow.

The Paramount fancied itself like one of the great opera houses of Europe with its crimson velvet curtains and pipe organ rising from the orchestra pit. A double-wide staircase ushered theatergoers to its box seats. But Pershing would not be permitted near them. He followed the colored crowd to the little door at the side entrance, while the white people passed through the heavy glass doors on Desiard. He saw Jimmy and Clarence and Nimrod and just about every other kid from New Town on his way in.

The side door opened onto a dark stairway. Pershing mounted the steps, anxious to get a seat before the lights went dim. He went up one flight, two flights, three, four, five flights of stairs. The scent of urine told him he was getting closer to the colored seats.

At the top of the stairs, there was Bennie Anderson, the colored ticket taker, ready to take his stub. The urine aroma was thick and heavy now. The toilet was stopped up most of the time, and the people did what they had to. Some relieved themselves on the way up. Pershing thought they did it on purpose—a protest maybe for the condition of the place, not registering that it was other colored people who had to suffer for it. He could understand it, but he didn’t much approve.