The Warmth of Other Suns (32 page)

For once he was riding in the front of something, as opposed to the customary back of everything else. On the railroad, the Jim Crow car was usually the first car behind the coal-fired locomotive that belched soot, fumes, and engine noise. It was the car that would take the brunt of any collision in the event of a train wreck. It was where the luggage and colored passengers were placed, even though their train fare was no different from what white passengers in the quieter rear of the train paid for the same class of service. He and the other colored passengers just had to live with it. George gave it little thought because he was on his way out.

EAST TEXAS, APRIL 1953
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

THE LAND WAS CHANGING
now as Robert passed over into Texas, the two-lane road fringed yellow with buttercups, the pine stands giving way to cattle ranches and barbecue joints in Panola County. He passed Fish Lake Slough and Flat Fork Creek north of Timpson. The air was moist and heavy now. As he drew near to Splendora County and on to Houston, there was a drizzle in the air and fog on the ground that hid the trees behind a gray veil.

He would eventually follow the country’s southern hemline along the Rio Grande. He could have taken the worn Mother Road of the Dust Bowl itinerants and young easterners in their convertibles with the wind whipping their Elvis pompadours. He could have joined Route 66 early on in Oklahoma City, due northwest of Monroe, or in Elk City, Oklahoma, or in Amarillo, Texas.

But that was not considered the most direct route to Los Angeles, and all along he had planned to stop in Houston, where he could stay with Dr. Beale, his friend from back in medical school. And as he never did anything ordinary and as he wanted to cross into another country if only by a few yards to say that he had tasted the tequila, he took a circuitous route to Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican border, which would satisfy his craving for adventure and for doing whatever he did with style and grandiosity.

He pulled into Houston and up to Dr. Beale’s house feeling good about his decision and the world. The trip so far had been smooth, as of course it would be in that Buick Roadmaster. He didn’t know when he had ever been so happy as the day he bought that car. It made a good impression wherever it went, which is exactly what he wanted.

“If you had seen it, you would have wanted it, too,” he would say years later. “They just took chrome and splashed it on that car when they made it, the Roadmaster Buick. And it rode like a chariot. I bought it in St. Louis and drove through a housing project, and I can hear the little kids screaming now, ‘
Good Lord, look at that car.
’ ”

Dr. Beale knew he was coming and took it upon himself to show Robert around Houston. They relived their medical school days, and Dr. Beale repeated his offer to help Robert set up practice there if Robert was willing to consider it. But Robert’s heart was set on California. He was trying to get away from the South. Texas, with its segregation and cotton fields, never stood a chance. And so Robert declined the offer and, after thanking his friend for the hospitality, set off in the direction of the nearest border town, Laredo.

There he crossed the bridge over the Rio Grande into Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. He drove past the clay storefronts where they sold garlic cloves and pictures of Jesus. The music cried out from second-floor windows, and the streets felt like alleys. He slowed near the places that peddled
vinos y licores
and came to a stop near the cantinas with their gringo girlie posters and red vinyl-top bar stools off Guerrero Street.

He got there in time to sample the margaritas before nightfall and, though he enjoyed the tequila, thought it best to head back before too long. He crossed the Rio Grande again and awaited clearance at U.S. customs. He waited longer than he thought he should, which might have been trivial under normal circumstances but was an eternity to him at the time.

He had a long drive ahead of him. There were 766 miles between Laredo and a town called Lordsburg, New Mexico, where friends had assured him he’d find safe lodging. That meant he had fifteen hours of driving without sleep, and that was only if he managed to keep an ambitious pace of fifty miles an hour on those two-lane highways winding through every whistle stop en route.

Robert was anxious to get back on the road. His turn in line had finally come, and here were the border patrolmen smoking and chatting it up with each other.

“I shouldn’t have to wait this long for you to check me clear,” he finally said.

“If you want to cross the border, you better shut up,” a patrolman said.

Night was forming and Robert needed to get on his way. He didn’t have the luxury of checking into a hotel that night as long as he was in the state of Texas. He didn’t need any further delay. So he did as they said. They waved him through.

He was more tired now than before. He had more than half of Texas in front of him and a couple of hours of margaritas in his veins. There were roadside motels on both sides of the highway, but he drove past them and gave them no thought. There was no point in asking for a room. They didn’t take colored people, and it did no good to think about it. They might as well not have existed.

He reassured himself with the advice he’d gotten that there was a motel in Lordsburg, New Mexico, that took in colored people. He drove over dry riverbeds and through the Stockton Plateau and came parallel to the Texas Pecos Trail near Del Rio.

He was leaving the wet green land for the dry dust land, and there were times he couldn’t go any further. The eyelids grew heavy, and the road seemed to blur. He would look for a safe place, the next town maybe, a mile or ten miles or twenty miles down the road, a place not so isolated and alone but quiet enough to be still. He would have to keep himself awake until he found such a place. He would pull over into an empty filling station or a wedge in the road and shut his eyes to rest.

He wouldn’t sleep in another bed until he got out of the state of Texas.

The long and thinly populated stretches were the hard gasp of the journey. Every fifty or sixty miles, you saw a crippled Hudson or Pontiac, overheated, engine trouble, out of gas. It reminded you of the treachery of it all and how lucky you were still to be moving. In west Texas, there were fewer and fewer towns, and what towns there were, were smaller and farther apart. If you got stranded, you could only sit and hope that help arrived before the next meal. There was no assurance of a telephone and no way to reach anyone in the event of an emergency. If a tire went flat or a fan belt broke or the car let out a strange crackle or groan, your fate was in the hands of the gods. You could go an hour without seeing another car on the road.

At night, when you couldn’t see, you were grateful for the occasional truck wheezing up the hill ahead of you and lighting your path. You might piggyback him even though he was going slower than you would like.

There developed a code of the road among colored people making the crossing. When you got sleepy, there were places you stopped and places you didn’t. You stopped at a filling station and asked if the owner minded if you parked there. If you saw a car or two stopped on the side of the road, you might pull up. Somebody else might pull up behind you and do the same.

You tried to stay awake until you found such a place. It might take fifteen minutes. It might take an hour. Before stopping, you ran your eyes over the resting car’s bumper and rear windshield, checked for a Confederate flag. You would be crazy to pull up behind one of those. If you saw a pack of cars, you were wary. If you had to stop, you wanted to stop behind one car resting, someone tired and alone like yourself.

The next morning, not having been able to check into a motel, you might stop at a gas station and slap water on your face in the restroom or gargle with ginger ale or fountain water under a colored-only sign.

It called for exquisite planning and a certain surrender to whatever lay ahead. In making the crossing two years before, Limuary Jordan, whom Robert knew back in Monroe, loaded up on bread and lunch meat at the grocery store for himself and his family. They stopped only once, at a colored motel in El Paso. They would drive their DeSoto for three full days and three full nights.

They carried with them twenty-five pounds of ice in a lard bucket as a makeshift air conditioner—or for the radiator if it overheated, an affliction so many of those wheezing old jalopies were prone to suffer—along with a copy of the 121st Psalm:

I raise my eyes toward the mountains.
From where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
the maker of heaven and earth.
God will not allow your foot to slip;
your guardian does not sleep.… 
By day the sun cannot harm you,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will guard you from all evil,
will always guard your life.
The Lord will guard your coming and going
both now and forevermore
.

Robert was not a particularly religious man, but he was a determined one. He might not have known the blessing for pilgrims making a dangerous trek, the Old Testament prayer some other migrants carried with them, but the spirit of it would follow him nonetheless, and, whether he knew it or not, he would come to need its reassurance and protection for the long, lonely journey into the desert.

ON THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL RAILROAD, OCTOBER 1937
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

THE RAILCARS CLATTERED ALONG THE TRACKS
, and Ida Mae and her family swayed with every rocking motion as the train wound north in the pitch black of night. The countryside gave way, and they passed out of Mississippi into Tennessee and away from the Pearson Plantation and the arbitrary rules they had lived under. They did not know precisely what they would do for work in the North, but they would never again drag another sack of cotton on their backs through a hot, bearing-down field.

From the overcrowded seats in the Jim Crow car, Ida Mae could not have imagined what finery filled the buffet lounges and Pullman cars where the white people sat and would not have let her mind dwell on it even if she had. While the Illinois Central and its counterparts on the East Coast and along the Rio Grande were effectively freedom trains for colored people, deliverance out of the South did not come without its own humiliations, which could eat away at the spirit if one let it. There was no guarantee, for instance, that they could get food on the long ride in either direction because the great bulk of the dining car was reserved for whites and partitioned off by an insistent green curtain.

There was rarely enough room for the many people in steerage. My father would remember trying to get from Washington to Tuskegee, Alabama, where he was a pilot during World War II, and having trouble just getting food. “I rode the train from Washington to North Carolina standing up,” he said decades later, “waiting to get into the dining car.” The line was several cars long, and there were only four seats in a back corner of the dining car where colored people could sit. For that reason, colored people learned to pack their own food to avoid needing what they couldn’t get—cold fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and biscuits in a shoe box—which Ida Mae and thousands of others carried on board and which led people to call the migration trains “the Chicken Bone Special.”

Still, just being on the train set them apart from the people they left behind. These great creatures on tracks were as big as buildings and longer than roads. They had grand, triumphant-sounding names—Silver Meteor, Broadway Limited—and took people to grand, triumphant-sounding places, and just a little bit of that prestige could rub off on them, and they could walk a little taller in their overalls knowing they were going to freedom.

The train rumbled toward the western tip of Kentucky, wending north toward Illinois. There, on the stiff seats of the colored car, they sat bundled together, George, stoic and straight-backed, keeping whatever apprehensions he had to himself, Ida Mae, wide-eyed and homesick at the same time, Velma’s head pressing against her arm, James wriggling in her lap, and another one restless in her belly.