The Warmth of Other Suns (18 page)

“Who do you think you are?” Gilbert remembered the boy asking him.

The boy spat at him, and Gilbert hit the boy back. Gilbert’s father was
shaking with fear. He begged forgiveness from the boy who spat on his son. Then he turned to his son and upbraided him.

“Boy, what’s the matter with you?” his father said. “Are you crazy?”

The father fumed at him. “All the way home, he didn’t talk to me,” Gilbert remembered decades later. “I got home, he didn’t say a word.”

That night, Gilbert could hear his father confiding to his mother through the cardboard-thin walls of their cabin. “Sugar, that one son we got, Gilbert, I’m afraid for him,” the father whispered. “That boy’ll never live if he stays in Grenada.”

Gilbert knew that. He shared his dreams with Percy when they worked in the field hoeing and plowing and weighing up the cotton.

“We would plow side to side,” Gilbert remembered. “He’d have a row, and I’d have a row. We would talk. We would talk about school or what I’m gonna do when I get to be grown, when I leave here.”

His big sister’s stories of life up north had seeped into him, and one day when he got big enough, he told himself, he was going to follow her to Ohio. And he did.

Hundreds of miles away, out in the country near Jackson, North Carolina, a family named DeBreaux was in a tizzy whenever cousin Beulah was expected in from New York.
⁷⁸
The mother cooked all day. The daughters, Virginia and Lee, cleaned and swept and tried to imagine how she would look. It was as if the queen of England were coming.

Beulah blew into town in the latest silk dresses, her high heels click-clacking on the pavement. Her hair was pressed and shiny and swung when she turned her head. The girls touched it to see how it felt.

“If we could just look like that,” Virginia told her sister.

Virginia started dreaming then and there.
Someday, I’m going to New York
.

She sat and planned the whole thing out with her little brother. She wouldn’t have to pick cotton anymore or feel the spike of frost on the wet grass going barefoot to the outhouse in the morning.

In the early 1940s, she did, in fact, join the multitudes. The day she left, her mother made fried chicken and broke down crying. Her father was too hurt to speak. He stayed in the house as they left. “He did not bid us good-bye,” she said. She ended up in Brooklyn, where the elevated train shook the apartment and looked as if it were coming straight into the window, and where she would get her hair pressed and wear high heels click-clacking on the pavement like Beulah.

Sometimes, the young people had little choice but to leave, sooner than they had imagined. Such was the case with my mother’s older brother. He was a teenager in Rome, Georgia, working as a driver and office boy for an upstanding white man in town during the Depression. He would drive the man from Georgia to Miami for the man’s business trips, alone with him in the car for hours at a time. He liked the man because he let him keep the big new shiny car after dropping the man off at the white hotel. It was one of the few company jobs accorded colored teenagers in the South at that time and was thought to be a good one.

One day, he was straightening the man’s office when he opened a drawer and saw something white folded inside. He pulled it out and unfurled the fabric.

It was a white robe and hood.

Trembling, he put it back in the drawer, and had to reconsider everything he thought he knew about the man he had trusted and the world in which he lived. That night, he went home and told his parents and little sisters that he was leaving Georgia for Detroit, one of the receiving stations for people from that part of the South. He had made his decision, was shocked into it, really. He would get a job at Chrysler like a cousin of theirs. He was joining the Great Migration for the most personal and profound of reasons, and, without knowing it, planting a seed in my mother’s imagination, knowing as she did why her big brother had fled.

Several seeds were planted, too, in Ida Mae, Lil George, and Pershing. Ida Mae heard about this one or that one going north to freedom after a lynching or a raw deal at settlement. Her big brothers, Sam and Cleve, had fled to Toledo, her big sister Irene was talking about going to Milwaukee, and, as Ida Mae came of age, she saw the cloche hats and unobtainable finery of city living in the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue out of Chicago.

Lil George watched the Blye brothers, Babe and Reuben, older boys who’d gone north to New York, come back to Eustis in their zoot suits and fedoras. They talked about all the money they were making building the 9W highway up in Jersey, about the skyscrapers and streetlights,
the dance halls in Harlem, the parties in Corona, and the boulevards paved where the colored people lived.

“We used to sit up all night,” George remembered, “and listen to Babe and M.B. and Reuben and Freeman and all them talkin’ about New York. And I said, ‘Boy, that sounds just like heaven. I wanna see some of that.
New York
. I’m sure going to New York soon as I get big enough.’ ”

And in Monroe, Louisiana, if Mantan Moreland passed through town, there was a stir in the pews and talk in the pool hall. Everyone wanted to sit down with the native son who had made it to Hollywood, even if it was only as a shuffling sidekick in the movies.

Pershing saw the parade of people from the North and the movie scenes at the Paramount of life beyond Louisiana and began dreaming of escape, too. When he was still small enough to fit in the crawl spaces of the houses on cinder-block stilts, he played pretend with a girl down the street named Clara Poe. They peeked out from under the floor joists and waited for a car to rumble down Louise-Anne Avenue and fought over whose it was
. It’s my car. No, it’s my car
. Then they pretended they were in the car leaving.

Clara always said she was going to Chicago, where her uncles were. But no matter how many times Clara said Chicago, Pershing said he was going to California. He didn’t have any family there. All he knew was that, one day, somehow, whenever he got big and whatever it took, he was going.

IDA MAE’S NEW HUSBAND
took her to live in a little wood cabin on Edd Pearson’s plantation on a clearing past the Natchez Trace. Ida Mae was sixteen. In the morning, the sun poked at them through the gaps in the roof. At night, they could see the stars through the ceiling cracks over their bed. It just about rained inside as much as out.

They set about working cotton for Mr. Edd. All around them, the land was in a state of being cotton or becoming cotton, brown and rutted for planting, green shoots willed into rows of coddled bushes until the land was white out to the tree line. Every so often, a wood cabin broke the clearing, raw and thrown-together, built uneasily on a footprint of land that was a fraction of what was devoted to the field.

The people who lived in the cabins gave the best hours of their days to cotton, working until the sun went behind the trees and they couldn’t see their hands anymore.

Early morning, the mist rose over the fields and made a halo on the surface of the earth. Ida Mae’s new husband and the sharecroppers working other sections of Pearson’s land tried to pick as much as they could before the sun got high.

Edd Monroe Pearson was a decent boss man, as decent as could be expected from a planter in Mississippi in the 1920s. He presided over the lives of some dozen families who grew his crops, as Ida Mae would recall, and he took half of whatever they produced, whether it was cotton or turkeys or hogs. At the end of the season, he deducted the debts he said they owed—cottonseed, fertilizer, implements, ginning fees, cornmeal, salt pork—the “furnish,” as it was called, of their half of the harvest. Money rarely changed hands between planter and sharecropper, as the entire system was built on credit. The sharecroppers owed the planters, the planters owed the merchants, the merchants owed the banks, and the banks were often beholden to some business concern in the North, where most of the real money was in the first place.

Unlike some planters, Mr. Edd actually gave George and Ida Mae a few dollars when settling time came at the end of the harvest, although they never knew whether they would get anything or how much it might be or if it was actually what they were due, nor could they complain if it wasn’t. Edd Pearson was about the best boss man a colored sharecropper could hope for.

But he was a ranking member of the dominant caste and felt it within his right to involve himself in the private affairs of his serfs.

He came through the field on his horse one day and saw George bent over picking through the rows. George and Ida Mae had been out for hours and the sun had cooked their backs. Ida Mae had no gift for picking like her new husband did and had fallen farther and farther behind, stooping from the weight of the sack.

George had called out to her, but she was too far back and too beat from the sun to catch up. After a few dozen pounds, her knees gave way.
She saw a clear path up ahead and dropped onto her sack, collapsed in the dirt aisle between the cotton rows.

Mr. Edd rode up to George and questioned him about it.

“Your wife don’t do nothing, do she, but sit down,” Mr. Edd said to George.

George would have liked to have said it was his business and not Mr. Edd’s, but colored men could not say such things to a white man in Mississippi and get away with it in 1929.

When Mr. Edd was gone, George went back to Ida Mae.