The Warmth of Other Suns (35 page)

“May I help you?”

Robert couldn’t answer. The man repeated himself.

“Hey, fella, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

“No,” Robert said, unable to manage much more.

The man sensed something. He put his hand on Robert’s shoulder, and Robert tried to tell him what had happened. The man shook his head as if he understood.

Something in the voice, in the way the man looked into his eyes and touched his shoulder and tried in the middle of a cool desert night to console him, made Robert feel all the sadder. It confirmed he wasn’t crazy, and that made him feel utterly alone. Yes, there was an evil in the air and this man knew it and the woman at the motel knew it, but here he was without a room and nobody of a mind to do anything had done a single thing to change that fact. And that made the pain harder, not easier, to bear.

Robert broke down. The exhaustion, the rejection, the unwinding of his dreams in a matter of minutes, it all caught up with him at once. He had driven more than fifteen hundred miles, and things were no different. In fact, it felt worse because this wasn’t the South. It wasn’t even close to the South. He sat unable to speak for longer than is comfortable in front of a total stranger. His voice cracked as the story tumbled out of him.

“I came all this way running from Jim Crow, and it slaps me straight in the face,” Robert said. “And just think, I told my friends, why did they stay in the South and take the crumbs? ‘
Come to California.
’ ”

The man listened with the helplessness of the well-intentioned and tried to cheer him up.

“Come on, let me get you a cup of coffee. Where are you going anyway?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Well, I went to USC, and I hate to disappoint you, but Los Angeles ain’t the oasis you think it is.”

Robert was feeling sick now. It was too late to turn back, and who knew what he was heading into? The man told him to gear himself up. The man didn’t use the term, and nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it
James
Crow in California.

“You will see it, and it’ll hit where it hurts,” the man said. “What are you in?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“Well, you’re going to find it in the hospitals going to work.”

Robert was thinking fast, reconsidering, weighing, and waking up. The dream looked to be over before he could even get to California. The man brought him a cup of coffee and filled his tank. Robert got back on the highway and drove into the black hole of night. Soon he came to a fork in the road and saw a sign that made his heart sink:

LOS ANGELES 380 MILES
SAN DIEGO 345 MILES

He knew he couldn’t drive a mile farther than necessary in this condition, and so San Diego it would be. “I could just see numbers in my mind now,” he said many years later. “Los Angeles this way and San Diego that way. And the number was far less distance, and I chose that.”

In the absolute darkness he found himself in, he could not see the will of the road. He went on faith that he was not driving off into a ravine.

Every cell wanted sleep. He bit his tongue to keep his eyelids from sneaking shut. He sang, sang anything, to keep his mind from turning in for the night. Now when he needed the radio, there was no radio, just a crackle of white noise from someplace far away.

Suddenly, somewhere around Gila Bend, the road got mean, turned without warning, a sharp left, then a sharper, uglier right, back and forth, and all over again. The car tilted upward, gaining elevation and resisting the climb as any car would. It forced him into an alertness his body wasn’t prepared for and that he hadn’t anticipated.

The road shot more curves at him, one right after the other, so that he was going north and south as much as west, and he had to slow down to absorb the blind hooks and horseshoes coming at him. He knew he wasn’t the best driver in the world, hadn’t done that much of it really. And so he would have to brake to a crawl if he was going to make it.

Before it hadn’t mattered much that this was a two-lane road with no reflector lights and no guardrails to catch him. Now it did. Interstate highways didn’t exist yet. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president who would go on to build them, had only recently taken office. Of course, Robert didn’t know that, and knowing it wouldn’t have helped him.

The mountains closed in on him. He couldn’t make out the earth from the sky. The sky was black, the road was black. He could see the black shape of saguaro cactus standing helpless as he passed. He drove into the cave of night, more alone now than ever.

It got to the point where he could go no further, and he pulled over to the side of the road. He unfolded himself from behind the wheel and caught an hour of half sleep. He would have to stop again two or three times that night. Each time, it left him not much more refreshed than before. He had no choice but to start the engine and take up the task again.

He wound through rock canyons and crossed Fortune Wash near the Gila River. A film stuck to his skin and to his wrinkled shirt and trousers. He had not had a chance to wash yesterday off. He opened the windows and vents to get air.

Another hour passed, and ahead was a valley, a black velvet plain with diamonds on it. It was the city of Yuma. He saw motel signs with amusing desert names. He gave them no thought. He knew better now.

Soon he came upon the Colorado River. A road sign said he had reached the California line. But he was too beat down now to pay it much attention.

His back pinched from days and nights of driving. His fingers were sore from clutching the steering wheel. His wrists ached, and still there was more road. The road would not end.

Just past Felicity came the warnings of the desert:
CHECK YOUR RADIATOR. LAST CHANCE FOR WATER. LAST CHANCE FOR GAS STATIONS. STRONG WINDS POSSIBLE
.

What was this place he was going to? What was he doing behind the wheel in the middle of the pitch-black desert by himself? Could it be worth all this? It had seemed so clear back in Monroe. Now he fought with himself over the fear and the doubt. He couldn’t bear to hear the I-told-you-so’s. If he turned
back now, if he changed his mind or lost his nerve, the I-knew-its would ring in his ear. Dr. Clement would be the first to say it
.

He was dreading the place already. “But there was no turning back,” he would say years later. “I had to get here. I had to try.”

He blinked at oncoming headlights, willing himself awake. Orion stretched over the highway and made an arc across the sky. It filled the windshield and stayed with him until the sun came back.

Near the Tecate Divide, the pink light of morning came in from behind. He was in San Diego County. Another fifty miles to the coast. The sun was on his back as he pulled away for good from the South and the center of gravity.

ON THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL AT THE ILLINOIS BORDER, OCTOBER 1937
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

IN THE DARK HOURS OF THE MORNING
, Ida Mae and her family crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, at the Ohio River, the border between Kentucky and Illinois, between the provincial South and the modern North, between servitude and freedom, without comment.

The black night pressed against the windows and looked no different in the New World than in the Old. It was as thick and black in Illinois as it was in Kentucky or Tennessee. From the railcar window, the land looked to be indistinguishable, one state from another, just one big flat plain, and there was nothing in nature that one could see that said colored people should be treated one way on one side of the river and a different way on the other.

Crossing the line was a thing of spiritual and political significance to the guardians of southern law and to colored people escaping it who knew they were crossing over. But going north, most migrants would have been asleep or unable to see whatever the line looked like if they even knew where it was.

On the red-eye going north, the railroad would not likely have disrupted the entire train just so colored people could sit with white people now that they legally could. Ida Mae had no memory of such a commotion in any case, only that they’d made it out of Mississippi. They crossed into Illinois at
Cairo
and passed through
Carbondale
and
Centralia
. Then
Champaign. Kankakee. Peotone. Matteson. Grand Crossing. Woodlawn. Hyde Park. Oakland. Twenty-second Street. Twelfth Street Station. Chicago
.

They would have to change trains yet again to continue on to Milwaukee, where Ida Mae’s sister Irene lived and where they could set about finding work to sustain them in the New World.

ON THE SILVER METEOR, NORTHERN NEW JERSEY, APRIL 15, 1945
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

AT DAYBREAK
, the Silver Meteor wound its way into Pennsylvania Station at Newark, New Jersey. The conductor called out the name of the station and the city, and after so long a ride through the night and now into day, some passengers from the South gathered their things and stepped off the train, weary and anxious to start their new lives and relieved to have made it to their destination at last.

“Newark.” It sounded so tantalizingly close to “New York,” and maybe, some assumed, was the way northerners, clipping their words as they did, pronounced New York. It was confusing to have their intended destination preceded directly by a city with such a similar name and with an identically named station. And as they had been riding for as many as twenty-four hours and were nervous about missing their stop, some got off prematurely, and, it is said, that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those arriving in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.

George Starling knew better. He had been to New York before, just not on the train. He remained in his seat until he arrived at the real New York, where the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor, to help raise him and his cousins were waiting for him at their Harlem doorsteps.

SAN DIEGO COUNTY, APRIL 1953
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER