The Warmth of Other Suns (26 page)

It was late summer now and going into autumn. There were only two places he knew of to go and live. One was New York, where he had aunts and uncles and no job. The other was Florida, where he had a wife, a father, the dim hope of going back to school, and a patched-together work life of whatever came up.

He caught a bus home to Florida with a sense of dread and defeat. He had gone to college and gone up north and now was returning to exactly the same place he had left. He went back to picking fruit. But instead of hundreds of men in their prime standing at the corner of Bates and Palmetto hoping to board the truck, a small cluster gathered there—old men and women, errand boys and domestics, children, too, who would never have made the cut before the war, along with the few young men like Charlie “Mud” Bollar, and Sam Gaskin and George, who hadn’t been chosen to go off to fight.

With the high rollers gone, the three of them reveled in their good fortune. Here they were the only strong pickers left. The trees heavy
with fruit. The fruit rationed and prized like never before. The packinghouses helpless to get the fruit out of the trees and, not knowing how long the situation, meaning the war, would drag on, forced to pay an extra nickel a box to entice anybody who could crawl to get on the truck to come pick.

George, Mud, and Sam boarded the truck with the newcomers and rode out thirty, forty miles into the grove. Only it was different this time. George was seeing the world in a new light after being in Detroit. The three of them had gotten used to fair wages for their hard work up north and walked with their backs straight now. George, in particular, never had the constitution to act subservient, and his time up north, where colored people didn’t have to step off the sidewalk, only made him more impatient with the role the southern caste system assigned him.

He had gotten used to carrying himself in a different way, talking to white people as equals in Detroit. Now that he was back in Eustis, he made a point to do whatever he could to keep from addressing white people as “sir” or “ma’am.” “They’d say, ‘So and so and so, boy,’ ” he said. “I would never say, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir.’ I’d say, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Certainly.’ ”

“What you mean by
certainly?
” would come the indignant reply. “You don’t know how to say, ‘Yes, sir’?”

A colored teacher who had finished the University of Michigan ran into the same trouble in Mississippi at around the same time.
⁹⁷
He needed to send a wire to a colleague and went into a drugstore to do so. The drugstore owner asked where the wire was going.

“Do they have a phone there?” the druggist asked.

“Yes, they do,” the colored teacher replied.

“Do they have a phone there?” the druggist asked again.

“Yes, they have a phone,” the colored teacher said, wondering why the druggist hadn’t understood him the first time.

“Goddamn it, when you talk to a white man, you say, ‘sir’!”

The teacher, to avoid further escalation, addressed him as “sir” and walked out the door. There he saw a group of white men waiting. The teacher jumped into his car. “I didn’t run,” the teacher said, “but I made haste to my car and left that town just as fast as I could.”

George knew that the minutest breach of protocol could be risky but had a hard time submitting to it. The North had changed him, and Mud and Sam, too, and they couldn’t go back to the way they were before. The three of them had a plan. They were tired of having to take whatever
pennies the packinghouses decided to pay them, and with the war on and not enough pickers, this was one of the few times the workers had any leverage.

George, Mud, and Sam decided to make the most of the situation and stand up for themselves like men. They took to strolling the grove and assessing it themselves before setting their ladders in a tree. Sam and Mud walked the grove as if they were the foremen and looked over the density of the fruit to see what they were in for.

George stayed with the crew of old men and women warming themselves by a fire in the fog. The workers wanted to know when they could start picking. George stood with them and told them the plan.

“Now, look,” he said. “Everybody sit down till we get the price straight. Nobody go to work.”

“What about the foreman?”

“I don’t care what the foreman say. Nobody go to work until we give the word.”

The old men and women were used to cleaning white yards and cooking in white kitchens ten or twelve hours a day for seventy-five cents, maybe a dollar. George told them if they could get a good price, they could make that much in an hour or two. Sounded like voodoo talk to them.

“We got to take what the white folks tells us,” they told him. “You can’t do no different.”

George looked back down the row for Mud and Sam to show up and back at his skeptical army.

“I don’t want to hear that stuff,” George said. “I been listening to that all my life.”

The old men and women worried what would happen if they didn’t get their price and worried all the more if they got it. With the war on, it was a new day, George told them.

“We got a chance to kind of get back at them,” he said, trying to inspire them to stand up for themselves. “I ain’t thinking about no future. I’m thinking about right now.”

Besides, Sam and Mud had already tried to scare the pickers into submission.

“Anybody put a ladder up under them trees,” Mud told them, “we gonna snatch it from under you and stomp you when you hit the ground!”

The pickers waited. Mud and Sam emerged from deep in the grove.

“Well, what it looks like?” George asked.

“It’s pretty good over here in one spot,” they said.

“Well, what do you think?”

“We’ll do it for twenty-two cents.”

George spoke for the group since he was the one who had been to school. He went to the foreman to start the unthinkable act of negotiating with a white man.

“What you paying for this?” George asked the foreman.

“Well, you know, this is good fruit, boy,” the foreman said. “Now, you can get well in here. These oranges big as grapefruit.”

“How much you paying?”

“We paying good. That’s fifteen cents a box.”

“That ain’t good enough. Nope. We can’t pick it for that. We want twenty-two cents a box.”

“Naw, we can’t give you that.”

George thought it over.

“Okay, we’ll do it for twenty-two cents. Straight through, good and the bad.”

“Naw, we can’t.”

“Well, we can’t pick it, then.”

“We forty miles from town.”

“I know. We still not gonna pick it.”

“Well, y’all pick a load. I don’t want to send the truck driver back empty. So y’all pick enough so he can take a load into the packinghouse. Then I’ll send word to the boss and tell him what y’all wantin’ to do.”

“No, we not gonna pick one. You can send the truck back to town, and we’ll wait. Got nothing to do.”

“Y’all just doing us this way because y’all got the advantage over us. This war ain’t gon’ last forever, and, by God, y’all gon’ pay for this.”

“We already paid,” George said. “All these years we couldn’t even ask how much you were paying for a box of fruit or we’d get fired. You gave us what you wanted to give us. You promised us one thing and give us another. You put the payday off whenever you get ready. Sometime you didn’t pay us, period. So now, far as I’m concerned, this is reckoning day. And I ain’t worried about after the war. You can pay us what we want, or else your fruit gonna hang out there. And they want it in New York. They want it all over the world, and you ain’t got nobody to pick it.”

The foreman needed the fruit out of the trees. He left with the truck
driver and before long was back from the packinghouse. He told them to go to work. He would pay them twenty-two cents. This time.

The old men and women set their ladders in the trees and commenced picking, and by nightfall, they and these cocksure boys had made more in a day than they would have otherwise made in a week.

People could buy stew meat now and put Sunday suits on will-call at Ferran’s. The Mason jars of quarters Lil George was saving up multiplied. He knew the wages they were making out in the groves couldn’t last forever. Everything depended on the supply and demand created by the war, and who knew how much more time they had? He decided to make the most of it while he could. The way things were going, he could earn enough money for college and then some. Until then, while the money was flowing, he thought it was time to rent a place of their own and get out from under his father. Maybe that was what he and Inez needed, now that she was back from her short course in beauty culture.

“Go downtown and look in Thompson’s,” he told her. “Pick out some things you think you would like to have for the house, so we know what we’re doing when we move.”

“I don’t want to go down there and ain’t got no money,” she said. George always had these grand ideas, planning their future in his head. “How you gon’ buy any furniture?” she asked. “You ain’t got no money to buy no furniture with.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just go and look. You never can tell what might take place.”

One day he just took her by the hand. “Come on,” he said. “I’m a take you down to Thompson’s, and you gonna pick out some furniture.”

“Pick it out? What you gon’ pay for it with?”

“Get your coat and come on, let’s go.” George scooped up seven or eight jars of quarters and halves, and they went to Thompson’s.

“What you see in here that you like?” he asked her.

She saw a bed, a sofa, a dining room set.

“How much is that?” George asked the clerk, a white man.

“You could pay two dollars down and seventy-five cents a week on it,” the clerk said.

“I don’t want to know all of that. I want to know how much does it cost, and if I pay cash for it, how much can I get off?”

“Cash?” the clerk asked. “You gon’ pay cash for all this, boy?”

“I just might.”

“Let me see now.”

The clerk gave him a figure. George did some adding himself and figured the quarters and halves would cover it.

“Okay, I’ll take it.”

“Well, you know this is for cash, you know.”

“Yeah, I’ll take it.”

George went out to the car and came back with a box of Mason jars and set the jars on the counter.

“You got a can opener?” George asked. He had glued the tops on to keep the money from falling out or a thief from getting in. They cut the tops off, and George dumped the quarters and halves out on the counter. The coins clinked and rolled, and George started counting.

Inez stood looking first at the money and then at George. The clerk ran out into the street.

“By God, y’all come in here. You ain’t gon’ believe this. This damn boy in here got over three hundred dollars in jars.”

They counted out quarters and halves until George paid him for every bit.

“And when I left out of there,” George said, “he was still shaking his head.” Inez too.

The pickers had more money in their pockets than they were raised to think they had a right to, and times were the best they had ever been, which said more about how meager the past had been than how great the present was. There was a war going on, after all. They hated that there was a war, but they knew that it made them indispensable for once, and deep inside they wished it would never end.

THINGS WERE SPINNING FAST AROUND PERSHING
, and, before he knew it, he had allowed himself to be pulled completely into the bourgeois world that he had become besotted with and that would be his
ticket out of the world he had come from. He had been squiring around the daughter of the president of Atlanta University for two years now. The daughter, Alice Clement, finished Spelman on June 4, 1941, and it was decided that it was time the two be married. Shortly after commencement, a breathless announcement ran in the
Chicago Defender: