The Warmth of Other Suns (64 page)

But after the sit-ins and marches in the South, things were beginning to change. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, 101 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation granting rights that would have to be spelled out again long after Lincoln was gone. Now blacks were entitled to the same privileges as any other citizens. They were not to be segregated in any sphere in life. But it would take time, up to a decade or more, for the message to sink in to those who chose not to recognize the new law.

In addition, it was not as if a copy of the Civil Rights Act went out to every black household. Some didn’t know what their new rights were exactly and had lived under the old order for so long that they were tentative about testing out the new one. In public conveyances, it fell to workers like George Starling, if they were so inclined—which it so happened he was—to alert their fellow migrants to rights they weren’t certain they could assert. On the train, it meant negotiating the tricky business of reorienting the black passengers when the train passed into or out of what had been Jim Crow territory.

For as long as most anyone alive could remember, this was the way things had worked on the railroad: a black passenger boarding a southbound train at, say, Pennsylvania Station in New York would be assigned a seat anywhere on the train and could sit there without a second thought until the train reached the border city of Washington, D.C. From the time of Reconstruction in the 1870s, Washington had been the dividing line between the free North and the segregated South. Black passengers getting off in Washington had nothing to worry about. But for those continuing south, the crews who ran the train, the porters who helped passengers on and off, and the black passengers themselves knew to gather their things and move to the Jim Crow car up front to make sure the races were separated when the train crossed into the state of Virginia.

The civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s changed all that, or was intended to. But custom had a way of lingering well after the ink was dry. So in the transition to integration, black passengers were not automatically granted the right to keep their seats no matter what their ticket or President Johnson said.

George was on the front lines in these early days of integration, when some conductors, many of them southern, held close the old traditions and ordered porters like George to move the colored passengers into the Jim Crow car, no matter the law. Some conductors, like many other southerners, resented the new laws that had been forced upon them. Others could always say that white southerners boarding the train below Washington were still not comfortable riding in the same coach as black people and might kick up a fuss.

As the train drew closer to Washington, the conductor gave George a passenger manifest identifying the passengers he wanted moved to the old Jim Crow car, meaning all the black passengers traveling below Washington.

George knew it wasn’t right and began discreetly approaching colored passengers as the train pulled out of Baltimore en route to Washington. He tried to alert them to what was about to happen and let them know they had a right to stay where they were. But it was a perilous act on his part. The passengers might get scared and turn him in. He might be accused of inciting the passengers and disrupting the orderly relocation of passengers who didn’t mind moving. It was especially dangerous because he was not heading north on the train but south into what might be considered enemy territory. Either way, he could be fired for what he was doing.

He knew he couldn’t be seen openly advising black passengers to defy the conductor’s orders. So from the moment he boarded the train in New York and began waiting on the black passengers in his charge, he paid close attention to them, scrutinized them to see which ones might be more receptive.

Then, as the train rumbled toward Union Station in Washington, and when he had made certain that the conductor wasn’t around, he began approaching colored passengers, one by one. He leaned over the seat and began speaking in whispers.

“Look,” he told them, “what I want to say to you is confidential, between you and me. If you don’t think you can keep it confidential, let me know now, and I won’t say any more. But it’s to your benefit.”

“Okay, okay.”

Then he would explain the situation.

“Well, now, going below Washington,” he would tell them, “they want us to move y’all up front in the Jim Crow car. But you have paid for a seat to wherever you’re going. You paid an extra fee to reserve this seat, and you’re entitled to keep this seat to your point of destination. But they not gonna tell you that. They gonna tell you, you got to move up front.”

He waited for their response, checked for a show of interest and curiosity instead of fear and distrust. Then he would know whether to proceed. If he felt safe, he would go on.

“What you do,” he continued, “is tell them that you don’t care to move. Just tell them that.”

Then he told them what to expect and gave them a little script. “They’re gonna give you an argument,” he said. “But just tell ’em, ‘Look, I have a reserved seat here from New York to Jacksonville. Washington isn’t my destination, and I’m not moving anywhere. Now, if you want me to move, you get the cops and come and move me. I’m not voluntarily moving anywhere.’ ”

He reassured them that they were within their rights. “They’re not gon’ bother you,” he told them. “Because they know if you got nerve enough to tell ’em that you’re not gonna move and if they force you to move, that they have a suit on their hands.”

But it occurred to him that he needed to protect himself. He couldn’t give any appearance of undermining the conductor’s orders or inspiring the black passengers to do something that would otherwise never occur to them. So he admonished them further. “And don’t go telling them, ‘Well, the attendant told me I didn’t have to move,’ ” George said. “Or you’ll get me killed. Just tell ’em you’re not gonna move. They not gonna move you.”

Some of them got scared at that kind of talk. So George gave them an out. “If you feel more comfortable, and you think you should go up to that Jim Crow car when you have paid to ride like everybody else, then you go,” he said. “I’ll move you.”

He forewarned them that if they decided to take the chance, they should know that he would have to feign indifference, pretend to have no knowledge of the matter if the conductor got involved. “He’s gonna be telling me to take you up front, and you gonna be tellin’ him that you’re not going, and I’m gonna just be standing there. I’m gonna be saying, ‘Naw, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.’ ”

By the time the train got halfway to Washington, he had a good idea of who he had in the railcar with him and which of them might be safe to approach.

“You could tell just by who brings them to the station,” he said, “how they depart, the conversations.”

But sometimes he would misjudge a passenger and come close to getting caught. Some passengers would loud-talk him.

“What? What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?” they’d ask, not comprehending his plan.

George would speak in an even quieter whisper to get their voices down, which only meant they couldn’t hear him and made them ask more questions, even louder than before.

“What? I don’t have to move? How come I don’t have to move?”

George would just shake his head and step away. “You know to leave them alone,” he said.

What gave George the greatest sense of defeat were the people who went up to the Jim Crow car anyway. “They move anyway to avoid trouble,” he said. “Quite a few would move up because the other attendants—they wouldn’t tell the people. They wouldn’t go to ’em like I would. Some of them would even support the conductor in telling them, ‘You better move. You gotta move.’ ”

George didn’t see it that way, and after all he had been through in the South, and even in the North, he felt it his duty to let the people know. It was the same George who tried to rouse the fruit pickers some twenty years before, to get them to stand up for what was due them.

In this case, on the train, George was fortunate. “None of them ever exposed me,” he said.

And what’s more, of the cases he saw, the people who resisted got to stay in their rightful seats. “Every incident that came up,” George said, “they left them alone.”

CHICAGO, SPRING 1967
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

IT HAD BEEN CLOSE TO THIRTY YEARS
since Ida Mae and her family had come up north. The children were grown now. And by the late 1950s, the first generation born in the North had arrived. Eleanor, who had come north in Ida Mae’s belly, had gotten married right out of high school and had two kids. James and his wife, Mary Ann, soon followed with four kids of their own. Ida Mae held the babies close and prayed for the first members of the family born free in the Promised Land.

There were different branches now, and they were getting by, but still renting and not settled in a place of their own. From flat to flat, in and around the straining borders of the South Side, Ida Mae and her family had moved more in Chicago than they had when they were sharecroppers in Mississippi, as they had never moved in Mississippi like some of the people they knew because they had always stayed with their one planter, Mr. Edd.

They had lived at Twenty-first and State, Thirty-third and State, Forty-fifth and St. Lawrence, and were now in the 700 block of West Sixty-sixth Place. They had been all over the South Side.

They felt they had been in Chicago long enough without owning something. George had been at Campbell Soup for years. Ida Mae was working as a nurse’s aide at Walther Memorial Hospital. Velma was teaching, James was driving a bus for the Chicago Transit Authority. Eleanor was a ticket agent for the elevated train. So together, they had enough to put something down on some property.

Not unlike many immigrant families, they wanted to stay together and wanted a place big enough for all of them. Their search led them to a beige brick three-flat in a long-contested but, they believed, newly opened-up neighborhood called South Shore on the southern tip of the black belt. It was a few blocks west of Lake Michigan. The street was lined with oak trees along the sidewalk and brick bungalows and multiflats with little patches of yard in front.

They went to see the place at night.

An Italian car salesman and his family lived there. It had room enough for James and his family on the first floor, Ida Mae and her husband on the second, Eleanor and her kids on the third, or if necessary, a tenant to help with the house payments. Ida Mae and her family didn’t have enough furniture to fill the flat. They wanted the place and everything in it: the plastic-covered upholstery, the marble-topped coffee table, the lamps, the dining room table, the breakfront and buffet, and the baby blue draperies over the front windows.

The Italian car salesman said he liked them and wanted them to have it. The family paid thirty thousand dollars and moved in without incident. There was the little matter of a bullet hole in one of the windows in the front room, but Ida Mae didn’t let it bother her as it appeared the shot had been fired sometime before they moved in. Thirty years after they arrived in the New World with little more than their kids and the clothes on their backs, Ida Mae and her husband were finally homeowners in Chicago.

“It was beautiful,” Ida Mae said years later. “Trees everywhere, all up and down the block.”

Weeks passed. Ida Mae went to work one morning and came back that evening on the streetcar over on Exchange. She walked down Colfax in the neighborhood of brick apartment buildings, barbershop storefronts, and frame bungalows along a route that she was just beginning to learn.

It was then that she noticed something missing across the street from her three-flat. A house had vanished. The people across from her had moved it, or so it appeared. There was now a small crater in the earth where, just that morning, a house used to be.

It was a wonderment to Ida Mae and to James and Eleanor and the grandkids. Why would their nice white neighbors move their house clear off the street? Where did they go? What did this mean?