The Warmth of Other Suns Page 6

  The facts of their lives unfurled over the generations like an over-wrapped present, a secret told in syllables. Sometimes the migrants dropped puzzle pieces from the past while folding the laundry or stirring the corn bread, and the children would listen between cereal commercials and not truly understand until they grew up and had children and troubles of their own. And the ones who had half-listened would scold and kick themselves that they had not paid better attention when they had the chance.

  And in this way, the ways of the South passed from one generation to the next in faraway cities by the Pacific Ocean and on the shores of the Great Lakes and along the Hudson and Potomac and Allegheny rivers. These are the stories of the forgotten, aggrieved, wishful generations between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement, whose private ambition for something better made a way for those who followed. Of the three whose lives unfold in these pages, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney left first, in the 1930s, George Swanson Starling in the 1940s, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster in the 1950s, in a current that swept up millions of others like them.

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  NEW YORK CITY, 1996

  HIS WORLD IS THE BASEMENT of a brownstone on 132nd Street west of Lenox Avenue, a shaft of light streaking through the burglar bars on a single window.47 Outside, there is Harlem—Tupac on boom boxes, street preachers on soap crates. Crack addicts scrounging for change. There are middle-aged volunteers planting beds of impatiens in a footprint of earth in the concrete, German tourists pressed against bus windows to see the Apollo Theater and the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

  He has lived here so long that not much of this fazes him anymore. He is a widower now. He walks lean and upright, and he towers over you as he leads you to the one room he keeps for himself out of the whole brownstone he owns. It is the product of all the hustling and saving he had to do when he arrived here a country boy from the South. His apartment is a cluttered storeroom, really, with a single bed, a couple of chairs, a dresser with a picture of his grandmother, Annie the root doctor, on it, and half-open boxes of his accumulated highs and regrets.

  The knees that used to climb suckling tree limbs to pick grapefruit back in Florida and worked the train aisles up and down the East Coast all those years are giving way to arthritis now. He takes a seat by the bed and talks in a monotone without taking a breath, there is so very much to say. He has catalogued in his mind every character who ever passed his way, can mimic their toothless drawl with wicked precision, recall every good and bad thing he has ever done or that has ever been done to him, every laughable contrivance of Jim Crow, every grievance and kind turn, all the people who made a way out of no way in that world growing up.

  George Swanson Starling came from the featureless way station of citrus groves and one-star motels between the Georgia border and Orlando, Florida, a place of cocksure southern sheriffs, overworked pickers, root doctors, pool hustlers, bootleggers, jackleg preachers, barely a soul you could trust, and a color line as hard as Mississippi’s. It comes back to him, one image after another, how Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege. George Starling left all he knew because he would have died if he had stayed.

  His face is long and creaseless. He was handsome in his day, a basketball player in high school, good with numbers, a ladies’ man. He holds out a crate of Florida oranges like the ones he used to pick and offers you one, says, even after all that picking and all that it cost him, they’re better than the ones from California. A smile lifts his face at the absurdities of the world he left, and which, in some ridiculous way, he still loves. Then his eyes well up over all that they have seen.

  EUSTIS, FLORIDA, 1931

  BEHIND THE ST. JAMES A.M.E. Church over at Prescott and MacDonald was an old orange tree that turned out oranges with dimpled skin as green as saw grass on the outside but inside sweet as sugarcane by September. To look at it, no one would know the fruit was ripe unless they climbed up and tried one, which George Starling and some other boys did once they made the discovery.

  The tree was taller than a telephone pole, and it was hard for the boys to pass it by knowing what they did about those oranges. They waited for nightfall, when church would start and the deacons would light the kerosene lamps by the pews.

  The boys climbed the twenty-foot tree and picked the oranges by the sanctuary light as the church people sang about Jesus. They steadied themselves in the crook of a limb and stuffed their shirts and trouser pockets until the buttons gaped. Then they turned back home, peeling and slurping, a trail of orange hulls following them all the way down MacDonald Avenue.

  The church people tried to wait for the fruit to turn orange. But George and the other boys picked the tree clean before the church people could get to it. And so it went, George Starling and others in his impatient generation outwitting the old folks they saw as too content in their spirituals and their place in that world.

  Here they were in Eustis, Florida, in the interior Citrus Belt of the state, hemmed into the colored part of town called Egypt. It was the haphazard cluster of dirt yards and clapboard bungalows, juke joints and corner churches where the colored people lived and conducted their affairs. It was unofficially policed by a man named Henry McClendon, a steward at another church in town. He lived across the street from St. James and saw George and his friends Sam Gaskin and Ernest Sallet sneak around the side of the church as he sat on his front porch one night.

  When the boys got up into the tree, he started probing the limbs with a flashlight.

  “Come down outta that tree in the name of the law!” he said.

  The boys froze and hoped he would go away.

  “I’m gonna come and tell your daddies. Y’all ’round here stealing these oranges, and y’all ’bout the same ones been stealing the wood from on the back porch.”

  “Man, we don’t eat no wood. We been getting these oranges from around here for years. Ain’t nobody want no wood.”

  “Oh yeah, y’all ’bout stole the wood. I’m coming out there, and I’m a tell your daddy.”

  The boys scrambled out of the tree and got on their knees because the worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child was acting up. There would be no appeals, the punishment swift and physical. The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.

  For a young colored boy in the South, “the caste barrier is an ever-present, solid fact,” John Dollard, an anthropologist studying the region’s caste system, wrote at the time.48 “His education is incomplete until he has learned to make some adjustment to it.… The Negro must haul down his social expectations and resign himself to a relative immobility.”

  Indeed, breaking from protocol could get people like George killed. Under Jim Crow, only white people could sit in judgment of a colored person on trial. White hearsay had more weight than a colored eyewitness. Colored people had to put on a show of cheerful subservience and unquestioning obedience in the presence of white people or face the consequences of being out of line. If children didn’t learn their place, they could get on the wrong side of a white person, and the parents could do nothing to save them.

  “The question of the child’s future is a serious dilemma for Negro parents,” wrote J.49 W. Johnson around the time George and his friends got caught picking those oranges. “Awaiting each colored boy and girl are cramping limitations …; and this dilemma approaches suffering in proportion to the parents’ knowledge of and the child’s innocence of those conditions.”

  There was no time for childish ideals of fair play and equality. Oh, you calling them grow
n folks a lie? George remembered parents saying. Them grown folks wouldn’t a said it if they didn’t see you doing it.

  So the boys pleaded with Mr. McClendon that night. “We make a promise. You don’t tell our daddies. We won’t come back here to get no more fruit. We won’t bother the oranges no more.”

  George didn’t actually believe this as he said it. He knew they were wrong, but he didn’t like how the grown people wouldn’t believe him no matter what he said, and he didn’t see the punishment as fitting the crime. He was getting to be a teenager now. He was learning that you didn’t have a right to stand up for yourself if you were in his position, and he wasn’t liking it.

  George Starling was a fairly new boy in town. He had spent most of his short life circling north-central Florida as his parents hunted for work. He was born on a tobacco farm out by the scrub oaks and wire grass near Alachua, Florida, halfway between Jacksonville and the Gulf of Mexico, on June 1, 1918. Lil George and his father—called Big George to distinguish him from the son—his mother, Napolean, and his half brother, William, all lived with a cast of uncles, aunts, and cousins headed by a hard-bitten curmudgeon of a grandfather, a man named John Starling.

  John Starling was a sharecropper who smoked a corncob pipe and had few good words for anybody. Once he kicked the cat into the fire when it tried to rub his leg. He was from the Carolinas, where the plantation owner he worked for used to come down to the field and flog the workers with a horsewhip if they weren’t going fast enough, as a rider might snap a whip at his mule. One day, the owner came down with the horsewhip, and the sharecroppers killed him. They swam across the river and never went back. That’s all the grandfather would say.

  It was before the turn of the twentieth century, and instead of going north, where there would have been no place for a colored farmer like him, John Starling went south to the warm, rich land of the Florida interior. There, Big George and the rest of that generation were born, and the family acquired its surname. Originally, they were Stallings. But nobody could pronounce it right. When they first joined their little country church, the preacher welcomed the newcomers every Sunday with a different mispronunciation.

  “And we’re glad to have the Stallions here with us today,” the preacher announced during service.

  “Stallings! Stallings!” John protested.

  He eventually settled on Starling, which was a close enough compromise to suit him and the people around them.

  By the time little George was born, John was working for a planter by the name of Reshard. He was living a hard enough life as it was and had other grandchildren in his care for whom he had little patience. He liked to put cotton between their toes and light it to wake them up in the morning. But the grandfather and his second wife, Lena, took a liking to little George. He was the only child of John’s firstborn (George’s half brother, William, had a different father), and Lena used to grab him close.

  “Come up here, boy, give your grandma some sugar.”

  He could see a bulge in her cheeks from the snuff in her mouth and snuff juice dripping down her chin. George tightened his face and twisted his head, but that didn’t stop her from planting a snuff-scented wet one right on the lips.

  They were farming tobacco and cotton, among other things, and the grandfather liked to take little George out to the field with him and out to the boiler when he went to fire up the tobacco. He would let George sleep on top of the boiler shed when he got tired. He’d have George right by him and seemed to make a show of it, which only made life tougher for little George, propped up as he was distinct from his cousins.

  “My cousins would be out there with their fists shaking at me,” he remembered.

  There were aunts and uncles all around. One of the younger aunts, called Sing, was married to a short-tempered man named Sambo. Sing attracted the attention of men without trying, and Sambo could never get used to it. As it was, colored men had little say over their wives since the days when slave masters could take their women whenever they pleased and colored men could do nothing about it. Planters were known to take the same liberties the slave masters had, and the contradictions were not lost on colored men: white men could do to colored women what colored men could be burned alive for doing to white women. In this sexual testing of wills, Sambo was overcautious toward his wife. He told her if she kept it up with what he saw as flirting, he was going to kill her one day. She just laughed. He was always talking like that. Big George told his sister not to make light of her husband. But she didn’t pay it any mind.

  One day, Sambo went to John’s house and told Big George he was going rabbit hunting and needed some shells. Big George went and got the shells for Sambo. A few minutes later, he heard a shot from the woods.

  “I guess Sambo done got him a rabbit,” Big George said.

  Sambo had just killed Big George’s little sister.

  These became some of Lil George’s earliest memories. Each year, he saw his grandfather return from the planter’s house after another dispiriting settlement and recount to the family what had transpired.

  At the end of every harvest, the planter would call John Starling up to the big house. John would knock on the back door, the only door colored people were permitted to enter, according to southern protocol. He and the planter met in the planter’s kitchen.

  “Come on in, John,” the planter said. “Come here, boy. Come here. Have a seat. Sit down here.”

  The planter pulled out his books. “Well, John,” the planter began. “Boy, we had a good year, John.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Reshard. I’m sure glad to hear that.”

  “We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.”

  The grandfather had nothing to show for a year’s hard toiling in the field.

  “This is all he ends up, ‘We broke even,’ ” George would say years later. “He has no money, no nothing for his family. And now he’s ready to start a new year in the master’s debt. He’ll start all over again. Next year, they went through the same thing—‘We broke even.’ ”

  The following year, the grandfather went to the big house and got the same news from Reshard.

  “Well, by God, John, we did it again. We had another good year. We broke even. I don’t owe you nothin, and you don’t owe me nothin.”

  George’s grandfather got up from the table. “Mr. Reshard, I’m sho’ glad to hear that. ’Cause now I can go and take that bale of cotton I hid behind the barn and take it into town and get some money to buy my kids some clothes and some shoes.”

  The planter jumped up. “Ah, hell, John. Now you see what, now I got to go all over these books again.”

  “And when he go over these books again,” George said long afterward, “he’ll find out where he owed that bale. He gonna take that bale of cotton away from him, too.”

  John had no choice but to tell Reshard about that extra bale of cotton. In the sharecropping system, it was the planter who took the crops to market or the cotton to the gin. The sharecropper had to take the planter’s word that the planter was crediting the sharecropper with what he was due. By the time the planter subtracted the “furnish”—that is, the seed, the fertilizer, the clothes and food—from what the sharecropper had earned from his share of the harvest, there was usually nothing coming to the sharecropper at settlement. There would have been no way for George’s grandfather to sell that one extra bale without the planter knowing it in that constricted world of theirs. In some parts of the South, a black tenant farmer could be whipped or killed for trying to sell crops on his own without the planter’s permission.50

  Even though John wouldn’t be able to keep the extra bale, Reshard was considered “a good share, a good boss, a good master,” in George’s words, “ ’cause he let us break even.”

  Most other sharecroppers ended deeper in debt than before. “They could never leave as long as they owed the master,” George said. “That made the planter as much master as any master during slavery, because
the sharecropper was bound to him, belonged to him, almost like a slave.”

  The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, studying the sharecropping system back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money.51 “The Negro farm hand,” a colored minister wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, “gets for his compensation hardly more than the mule he plows, that is, his board and shelter.52 Some mules fare better than Negroes.”

  There was nothing to keep a planter from cheating his sharecropper. “One reason for preferring Negro to white labor on plantations,” Powdermaker, a white northerner, observed, “is the inability of the Negro to make or enforce demands for a just statement or any statement at all.53 He may hope for protection, justice, honesty from his landlord, but he cannot demand them. There is no force to back up a demand, neither the law, the vote nor public opinion.… Even the most fair and most just of the Whites are prone to accept the dishonest landlord as part of the system.”

  That did not keep some sharecroppers from trying to get what they were due after a hard year’s labor. During the lull before harvest time, one of George’s uncles, Budross, went to the little schoolhouse down in the field and learned to read and count. When it came time to settle up over the tobacco George’s grandmother Lena had raised, the uncle stood by while the planter went over the books with her. When they got through, George’s uncle spoke up.

  “Ma, Mr. Reshard cheatin’ you. He ain’t addin’ them figures right.”

  The planter jumped up. “Now you see there, Lena, I told you not to send that boy to school! Now he done learn how to count and now done jumped up and called my wife a lie, ’cause my wife figured up these books.”