The Warmth of Other Suns (36 page)

TT WAS EARLY IN SAN DIEGO
. Robert Foster could see the concrete skyline and the headlights of a city waking up. He drew closer to the heart of town. Trolley cars clanked past the palm trees on C Street. The Pacific Ocean was up ahead. He was finally on the other side of the desert. He was hours from Los Angeles but well into California, the end of the line when it came to the Migration. It was more a relief now than a wonder.

His eyes scanned the pedestrians for pigment. He stopped at the curb and flagged down the first colored person he saw. He had not talked to a soul during his night in the desert. This would be the first encounter in this new adopted land. His heart sank as he uttered the words that seemed an admission of failure.

“Pardon me,” he said, edgily, to the man. “Where can you find a colored hotel?”

“What do you mean, a
colored
hotel?” the man said with the casual annoyance of an urbanite interrupted by a tourist. “I can tell you where a hotel is. There’s a hotel right there.”

“No, I don’t want that,” Robert said. “Just tell me where most of the colored folks stay.”

Robert was too tired to argue. Three states without sleep. He had a stubble of beard on his face that he would otherwise never be seen in public with. He could not bear rejection again.

“I could not,” he began, still searching for the right words decades later, “the thought—it was overwhelming—of me being turned down again. I couldn’t do that.”

Robert repeated himself to the man. The man assured him he didn’t have to stay in a place like that in San Diego but gave him the name of a small, featureless hotel anyway, a place for colored people, since he was so insistent on that.

Robert found the place. He slept and showered and shaved for the first time since New Mexico. When he opened his eyes hours later, there he was in a segregated hotel. A week on the road, and he was in the exact same place, it seemed, that he left.

Later in the day, he headed north past the Joshua trees. Los Angeles was another 121 miles from San Diego. He didn’t know which city would be the right one for him—Los Angeles or Oakland—or where he would work or how he would set up a practice wherever he ended up. He had just come out of the desert, in every sense of the word, and the details of his future were too much to think about right now.

He drove north toward whatever awaited him. Billboards popped up on both sides of the highway. They whizzed past him as he drove. They had women in rouge and lipstick and men with stingy-brim hats with the cord above the brim selling lager beer and cigarettes. The people in the billboards were smiling and happy. They looked out onto the highway and straight into the cars.

They kept him company, and, although they weren’t talking to him, he told himself they were. “I played a game that it was for me,” he later said.

Soon one billboard stood out from the others.
IT’S LUCKY WHEN YOU’RE IN CALIFORNIA
, it said cheerfully. It was hawking Lucky lager beer to every car that passed. Robert repeated those words in his mind.

“It’s gonna be lucky for me in California. It’s gonna be good.”

It had to be. He said it over and over to himself until he actually started to believe it.

THE SOUTH, 1915–1975

FROM THE MOMENT
the first migrants stepped off the earliest trains, the observers of the Great Migration debated what made millions of rural and small-town people turn their backs on all they knew, leave the land where their fathers were buried, and jump off a cliff into the unknown.

Planters blamed northern recruiters, who were getting paid a dollar a head to deliver colored labor to the foundries and slaughterhouses of the North. But that only held for the earliest recruits, usually young men, field hands, with nothing to lose. Others said the
Chicago Defender
seduced them. But they could only be seduced if there was some passion already deep within them.

Economists said it was the boll weevil that tore through the cotton fields and left them without work and in even greater misery, which likely gave hard-bitten sharecroppers just one more reason to go. Still, many of them picked cotton not by choice but because it was the only work allowed them in the cotton-growing states. In South Carolina, colored people had to apply for a permit to do any work other than agriculture after Reconstruction.
¹¹
It would not likely have been their choice had there been an alternative. And besides, many of the migrants, people like George Starling and Robert Foster and many thousands more came from southern towns where they did not pick cotton or from states less dependent on it and thus would have made their decisions with no thought of the boll weevil or the pressure on cotton prices.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, an investigative body created after the World War I wave of migration, decided to ask migrants why they had left. A few of their responses were these:

• S
  OME OF MY PEOPLE WERE HERE
  .
  ¹²
  
• P
  ERSUADED BY FRIENDS
  .
  
• F
  OR BETTER WAGES
  .
  
• T
  O BETTER MY CONDITIONS
  .
  
• B
  ETTER CONDITIONS
  .
  
• B
  ETTER LIVING
  .
  
• M
  ORE WORK; CAME ON VISIT AND STAYED
  .
  
• W
  IFE PERSUADED ME
  .
  
• T
  IRED OF THE SOUTH
  .
  
• T
  O GET AWAY FROM THE SOUTH
  .
  

The earliest departures were merely the first step in a divorce that would take more than half a century to complete.
¹³
At the time it was misunderstood as a temporary consequence of war and declared over when the war ended. But the people who before had been cut off from the North now had the names of neighbors and relatives actually living there. Instead of the weakening stream that observers predicted, the Great Migration actually gathered steam after World War I.
¹⁴

It continued into the twenties with the departure of some 903,000 black southerners, nearly double the World War I wave. It did not stop in the thirties, when, despite the Depression, 480,000 managed to leave. Among them was Ida Mae Gladney. World War II brought the fastest flow of black people out of the South in history—nearly 1.6 million left during the 1940s, more than in any decade before. George Starling was one of them. Another 1.4 million followed in the 1950s, when Robert Pershing Foster drove out of Louisiana for good. And another million in the 1960s, when, because of the more barefaced violence during the South’s desperate last stand against civil rights, it was actually more treacherous to leave certain isolated precincts of the rural South than perhaps at any time since slavery.

The numbers put forward by the census are believed by some historians to be an underestimate. Unknown numbers of migrants who could pass for white melted into the white population once they left and would not have been counted in the Migration. Colored men fearful of being extradited back to the South over purported debts or disputes would have been wary of census takers. And overcrowded tenements with four or five families packed into kitchenettes or day workers rotating their use of a bed would have been hard to accurately account for in the best of circumstances. “A large error in enumerating southern blacks who went North,” wrote the historian Florette Henri, “was not only probable but inescapable.”
¹⁵

The journey north was a defining moment for the people embarking upon it. Many years later, most everyone would remember how they chose where they went, the name of the train they took, and whom they went to stay with. Some would remember the exact day they departed and the places the train stopped on the way to wherever they were going. A man named Robert Fields, who as a teenager hid in the freight cars to flee Yazoo City, Mississippi, remembered arriving in Chicago on the day Rudolph Valentino died, which would make it August 23, 1926, because the news of Valentino’s death was on the front page of every newspaper and was all anyone was talking about that day.
¹⁶

Robert Pershing Foster would remember leaving right after Easter, which, unbeknownst to him, was a popular time to leave. Given a choice, southerners preferred not to go north facing winter, and leaving at Easter gave them plenty of time to adjust to the North before the cold set in. George Starling would remember that he left Florida on April 14, 1945, as if it were his birthday, which in a way it was.

Decades after she left, Ida Mae Gladney would remember that they got the cotton clean out of the field before they left, which would make it mid- to late October, and that she was pregnant with her youngest child but not yet showing, which would make it 1937.

Well after Ida Mae, George, and Robert made their way out of the South, a man by the name of Eddie Earvin would always remember how he left because he went to such great lengths to escape the Mississippi Delta.
¹⁷
It was the spring of 1963.

Many of the observers and participants of the first wave of the Migration had passed away, having concluded that the phenomenon was long over. They would not have imagined that someone like Earvin might have a harder time leaving than many before him.

But in the early 1960s, secluded regions of the rural South—Alabama and Mississippi in particular—had become war zones in the final confrontation between segregationists and the civil rights movement. Spies and traitors were everywhere, the violence raw and without apology, the segregationists standing more boldfaced, clamping down harder as outsiders tried to force integration on them. No one was exempt—not well-to-do white northerners like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, not upstanding family men like Medgar Evers, or even four little middle-class girls in church on a Sunday morning in Birmingham in 1963.

Earvin’s story is evidence of just how long the Great Migration stretched across a hard century, how universal were the impulses of those who left, and how treacherous it could be to try to leave certain remote and Victorian pockets of the American South throughout the sixty-odd years the Great Migration lasted.

Eddie Earvin was twenty in the spring of 1963. He was a day picker at a plantation in Scotts, Mississippi, walking with pieces of cardboard tied to his one pair of shoes to cover the bottoms of his feet. “We were still in slavery, like,” he would say years later.

He started picking when he was five and chopping weeds off the cotton at six. And when he was seven or eight, a boy named Charles Parker was skinned alive for opening a door for a white woman and speaking to her in a way she didn’t like, as the grown folks told it. Eddie would never forget that.

He picked because he had to and crawled on his knees to cut spinach because spinach is low to the ground. He got ten cents for a fifty-pound basket of spinach. He could pick only two or three baskets a day because spinach is light.

One day when he was out cutting spinach, he sliced into his finger but was afraid to leave the field. It was six miles to the doctor in town. He worked two more days and on the third day decided to walk to town to see the doctor. The boss man passed him on his way back to the field and jumped out of his truck.