The Warmth of Other Suns (84 page)

Pat took Gerard to the hospital to see his father. “The moment he walked in and saw him, he broke down crying,” Pat said.

Gerard had to leave the room. He said he couldn’t stand to see his father that way. They didn’t stay much longer.

Gerard had not realized how grave his father’s condition was. He decided to head back to Florida, seeing as how there was nothing he could do to change things.

“Do you want to go and see him one more time before you get ready to go?” Pat asked him.

No, he said, he couldn’t bear it.

Gerard drove back to Florida weak and in despair. He had missed several rounds of dialysis and had used cocaine in the interim, Pat discovered. When he got back to Gainesville, he still did not go to dialysis.

“He had already given up,” Pat said.

Within days of seeing his father, Gerard suffered a massive seizure and died. He was fifty-one years old. His father was not conscious enough to know that he had lost his firstborn son. George, barely alive himself, was now the last one left of the nuclear family that had begun with him and Inez some sixty years before in Eustis.

There was no one in the hospital room when I went to see George Starling. The monitors attached to him beeped and flashed the minutest change in his vital signs. The robust onetime porter who could regale people for hours with his stories of the South and of the Great Migration was silent and motionless. He looked to be asleep, whatever wisdom or stories left now locked up inside of him. As much living as he had done, his seemed a life of missed chances and incompletion. Here was someone who had been born too early and in the wrong place to reach his true potential, had left to make a better way for himself, but had seemed to carry the sorrows of the South with him, without complaint.

I reached for his hand and squeezed it lightly and told him I had come from Chicago to see him. His face showed no reaction. His hand managed to press back into mine.

George Swanson Starling never came out of the coma. He died on September 3, 1998, a Thursday. Because he had migrated out of the South, lived most of his life in the North but remained connected to both, two funeral services were required. One was in New York, at the Baptist House of Prayer on 126th Street in Harlem, on September 17; the other in Florida, at Gethsemane Baptist Church in Eustis, two days later.

In the North, in Harlem, where he had found refuge from the South, the people turned out to see him one last time. The Deacon Board, the Pastor’s Aide Club, the 132nd Street Block Association, the neighbors who had looked out for him from across the street all packed into the church. The choir sang for him and shook the floor from the choir box as the fans whirred and oscillated around them.

One by one, people came forward to say they would miss his opening the church doors Sunday mornings, miss the sight of him reading the dictionary, and would remember him as “a gentleman of the first order.”

A man, tentative in his steps and taking in the measure of the sanctuary, had arrived an hour early. He had a shaved head and full beard. He sat alone in the third pew as the church began to fill. His eyes were red. He stared at the silver casket, then leaned onto the pew in front of him and buried his face in his arms. When Pat arrived, she went over and sat beside him. It was Kenny, George’s younger son, whose conception had broken Inez’s heart. And that heartbreak kept him from feeling part of the family or ever truly knowing his father.

Before George took ill, Kenny went to George and let him know how he was doing. Kenny was married, had kids, was living in the Bronx. He told him he had converted to Islam, had changed his name to Amjad Mujaahid, which means, he said, “One who is noble, a warrior in the cause of God.”

“Daddy,” Kenny told George, “that name is in memory of you.”

“That’s real nice, son,” Kenny remembers George saying. “I’m still calling you Kenny.”

Now the man he wished he’d had more time to get to know was dead. The service was a blur of song and testimonials. He took off his glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes, as his father had done whenever he sang.

It was hurricane season at the time of George Starling’s death. Hurricane Bonnie and Hurricane Danielle had gathered east of the Leeward Islands that August. By mid-September, when George Starling was transported back to the state of Florida for the last time, a new hurricane had formed and was nearing the Florida coast. The National Weather Service had named it Hurricane Georges.

Back in Eustis, the southern funeral commenced at Gethsemane Baptist Church. But Viola Dunham, the sister-in-law he used to stay with whenever he visited, could not bring herself to go. “It’s killing me,” she said. “I want to remember him sitting in my kitchen eating breakfast and running his mouth.”

A cousin named Lila Mae went and spoke for the people who had stayed in the South, remembering him as the hometown boy who made good in the North with his railroad job and dignified bearing.

“As he journeyed to New York and became a porter,” she began, “nothing was finer than to see this good-looking cousin come into Wildwood station and to bring him some sausage. All of his splendor and grace. It was something to see. Little George never forgot where he came from.”

Reuben Blye, who’d known George most of his life, sat staring out into the sanctuary in a gray suit and tie in a front pew. Sam Gaskin, who had stood up with him against the grove owners back in the forties, was there, too. A processional of eight or ten cars led by a white hearse passed through town near the corner where George had stood and waited for the open-bed truck to take pickers to the citrus groves some sixty years before.

The cortege turned off a main thoroughfare and crept down a dirt path to a clearing of wild grass scattered with the headstones of nearly all the black people who had ever lived and died in Eustis. The cars crossed a pebbled, pitted clearing and came to a stop at a green tent pitched before two juniper bushes in the middle of Mount Olive Cemetery. A dozen people took their places before the casket. The pastor stood and said his last words: “
From dust thou art …
”

That evening, the sun fell behind the horizon and made what looked like streaks of fire across the sky after George Starling was returned for the last time to the Florida earth he had fled.

My presence will go with you. And I will give you rest
.

—E
XODUS
33:14

CHICAGO, OCTOBER 15, 1998
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

IDA MAE WAS GOING BACK
to visit Mississippi. It was early autumn, the same time of year she had left sixty-one years before. It would be her first time on Mississippi soil since her sister Talma had died in Tupelo in 1983. Ida Mae had gone down when she got word that her youngest sister had taken ill. She sat at the side of her sister’s bed for her last hours on this earth.

Ida Mae remembered she had been watching Talma, and Talma had been trying to speak.

“Don’t you see all them people in white singing?” Talma had said, delirious. “They just singing away.”

Ida Mae looked in the direction Talma was facing and tried to see the people in white but couldn’t. Days later, at Talma’s funeral, the choir sang in all white.

“She saw them before,” Ida Mae said, convinced of it.

Ida Mae and I are driving along Route 8, heading east toward Vardaman in the direction of Chickasaw County. We pass a cotton gin and bales of cotton bound in the field and covered with tarp. The bales are packed high and tight and look like cubes of Styrofoam the size of a school bus from a distance.

We cross a gravel road with cotton on either side of it. “That cotton’s loaded,” Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big. “Let’s go pick some.”

“You sure that’s alright?” I ask. “That’s somebody’s cotton. What if they see us?”

“They not gon’ mind what little bit we pick,” she says, pushing open the passenger door.

She jumps out and heads into the field. She hasn’t picked cotton in sixty years. It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to. It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.

I follow her out, and she starts pulling at the bolls, and I pull at them too. No cars or trucks pass by, and we are surrounded by cotton.

We carry a bouquet of cotton buds back to the car and head to her sister-in-law Jessie Gladney’s house. Along the route, there are no streetlights, traffic lights, or stop signs. There are no street signs to identify what road you are on. The directions to the house call for looking for a cotton gin, passing and keeping count of five or six bridges that are merely dirt mounds over dry creek beds, making a right at a Baptist church, and looking for the sister-in-law’s off-white double-wide on the right-hand side of the road, assuming we’re on the correct one.

Jessie is Ida Mae’s sister-in-law twice over, in the small, insular circles of rural Mississippi. She was married to Ida Mae’s husband’s brother Ardee, and she is the sister of the man Ida Mae’s sister Talma married. Jessie moved up to Chicago in 1946 but recently returned to Mississippi, where her brother Aubrey lives. She went back south with her husband, but he was ill and not particular about moving back to Mississippi and did not live long after they had arrived. That left Jessie widowed and alone in the isolated double-wide with her sweet nature and bad knees.

Ida Mae and Jessie greet and hug each other like sisters, and Ida Mae rests herself in Jessie’s recliner with a throw over it and starts talking about the cotton she and I picked by the side of the road.

“Ooh, it was so much cotton,” she says. “Cotton everywhere.”

“The highest I ever picked was one hundred eighty-seven pounds,” Jessie says.

“I just couldn’t do it,” Ida Mae says. “I’d pick and cry. I ain’t never liked the field.”

The two of them catch up on the latest with the kids and nieces and nephews, and then Ida Mae starts talking about life back up in the North.

“You see everything up there, Jessie,” she says. “Seem like they choose this block to do all they dirt. They sell drugs there. They open their mouths and put it down their throat. That’s where they keep it. One lady died from swallowing it. It must have got hung up in her lung. I missed her and asked about her. She used to sit under the tree out there. She was in her fifties, and she died from it.”

Ida Mae pauses and looks away. “I reckon people who’ve passed on wouldn’t want to come back if they could. They couldn’t take what’s going on now days.”

Jessie mostly listens. She’s having trouble with her legs, and her husband’s death is still weighing on her heart.

Which reminds Ida Mae of her husband. “I waited on George forty-seven years,” she says. “And I mean I waited on him. When he come home from work, and when he wanted his breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I give it to him. I served him. They expect too much. When he passed, I wasn’t thinking about no other husband. I laugh and talk with them, but that’s as far as it go.”

The next day we are riding through the curving hills of Chickasaw County, rising and sinking along the red dirt road. We are retracing the corners Ida Mae and her family lived and sharecropped and looking for anyone she might know who is still around. We drive through pine woods draped in kudzu and through tumbling fields down a gravel road that kicks up dirt as we pass.

Every now and then, the hills are broken by a cabin with a chicken-wire fence around it and a pickup truck at the side. The land is quiet, at peace, as if the bloodshed of the twentieth century never happened. There appears a black man riding high up on a tractor as it inches down a gravel road in a cloud of gravel dust, and he tips his hat as he passes us, a courtly gesture from another century that one would never see in Chicago.

Ida Mae’s brother-in-law Aubrey, who was married to her late sister Talma, is leading her from place to place. He knows the land because he returned to Mississippi decades ago after trying Chicago and not liking it.

Aubrey tries to find Miss Theenie’s house, the one where the men came courting Ida Mae on the front porch. They spot a weathered shack leaning on its side. They stop to inspect it and conclude that it might have been Miss Theenie’s but they couldn’t say for sure. Falling-down shacks look pretty much the same.

“Been so long,” Ida Mae says.

In the car, Ida Mae looks out at all the cotton, the cotton that ruled her days and that she’s free from now.

Aubrey points to a machine off in the distance.

“That machine can pick fifteen to twenty bales of cotton in a day,” Aubrey says proudly of the advancements made since Ida Mae left.

“Sho’ ’nough?” Ida Mae says blankly. She looks out with vague interest at the blur of field. Then she turns the conversation to the old friends she wants to see and how different things look to her now.

She is getting a little disoriented, one hill indistinguishable from another, nothing but trees or cabins as guideposts and the terrain seeming wilder than before. “I don’t remember so many crooks and turns,” she says of the land and the gravel road we are on.

She is having trouble with the heat after being in Chicago so long. “It’s a different kind of hot down here,” she says. And she’s feeling a little sick, as people do when they drink the water they are warned about when they visit developing countries. Later in the day she will put some nutmeg in the palm of her hand and lick it to settle her stomach, and not draw the least attention to herself among the people in Mississippi, which is, after all, where she learned it.

In and around the settlements of Chickasaw County, Ida Mae visits with a succession of people who knew her. They greet her like a loved one they just discovered happens to be alive after all. She visits Isolena Harris, Marcelle Barr, Doretta Boston, a lady named Azaline.

Aubrey has taken charge and takes great pride in being the one to ask bewildered home folks, “You know who this is?”

The people inspect Ida Mae’s face. She was a young mother in her twenties the last time some of them saw her. Now she’s a great-grandmother. They look hard and see the pointed nose of her sister Talma or the nut butter coloring of Miss Theenie. Some catch on right away and startle themselves in the recognition.

“You know I know Miss Ida Mae! I declare! How you doing!” one lady says, after figuring it out, grabbing Ida Mae, and smothering her in hugs.

She stops by to see an old classmate named Castoria.

“You know who this is?” Aubrey asks again.

Castoria says she can’t place her, doesn’t know her.

“Yes, you do,” Aubrey insists. “This is Ida Mae.”

Castoria’s face brightens. The two of them embrace each other and let out gap-toothed smiles.

“Girl, I ought to whoop you good!” Castoria says. “Lord have mercy on me. When have I seen Ida Mae?”

“It’s been years and years and years,” Ida Mae says. “I went to school with you. Just a few of us living now.”

“Lord have mercy on my soul!” Castoria says, still staring at Ida Mae.

Aubrey takes her to the church cemetery where many of the black people of Chickasaw County are buried. She finds her mother, Miss Theenie, and some cousins and aunts, but not the father she loved so dearly.