The Warmth of Other Suns (34 page)

Late into the evening, Ivorye’s husband, N.E., turned down the record player in the front room, clearing the haze of chatter and bebop. The dancing by the credenza came to a stop. And Napoleon Brown and
Pless Hill, Big Madison and Harriet and the rest raised their glasses to Pershing, who was joining the Migration without them.

Pershing looked out into the faces and could not for the life of him figure out why these people were frittering away their lives in a place like this.

“How in the world can you stay in Monroe,” he finally said, “and live in this Jim Crow situation?”

It was pompous, as he was at times known to be, and perhaps out of place at so well meaning a send-off. But he had convinced himself it was crazy to stay and wrong if he left without coming right out and saying it.

“How can you stay here and take the crumbs?” he said. “Come go to Heaven with me. To California.”

He knew no more about California than they did, and he won no immediate converts that night. But he had planted the seed and would follow up once he had seen the state for himself.

AS THEY SUMMONED THE WILL TO LEAVE
, it would never have occurred to Ida Mae, George, and Pershing, or the millions of others who continued to flee the South over the decades of the Great Migration, that it was supposed to have ended in World War I, when they were just coming into the world. They joined a flight already in progress when the narrow straits of their lives compelled them to do so. Theirs is a kind of living testimony that migrations fed by the human heart do not begin and end as neatly as statisticians might like.

The Great Migration in particular was not a seasonal, contained, or singular event. It was a statistically measurable demographic phenomenon marked by unabated outflows of black émigrés that lasted roughly from 1915 to 1975. It peaked during the war years, swept a good portion
of all the black people alive in the United States at the time into a river that carried them to all points north and west.

Like other mass migrations, it was not a haphazard unfurling of lost souls but a calculable and fairly ordered resettlement of people along the most direct route to what they perceived as freedom, based on railroad and bus lines. The migration streams were so predictable that by the end of the Migration, and, to a lesser degree, even now, one can tell where a black northerner’s family was from just by the city the person grew up in—a good portion of blacks in Detroit, for instance, having roots in Tennessee, Alabama, western Georgia, or the Florida panhandle because the historic rail lines connected those places during the Migration years.

“Migratory currents flow along certain well-defined geographical channels,” wrote E.
¹⁴⁷
G. Ravenstein, a British historian, in his landmark 1885 study of human migration. “They are like mighty rivers, which flow along slowly at the outset and after depositing most of the human beings whom they hold in suspension, sweep along more impetuously, until they enter one of the great … reservoirs.”
¹⁴⁸

The Great Migration ran along three main tributaries and emptied into reservoirs all over the North and West. One stream, the one George Starling was about to embark upon, carried people from the coastal states of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up the eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and their satellites. A second current, Ida Mae’s, traced the central spine of the continent, paralleling the Father of Waters, from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh. A third and later stream carried people like Pershing from Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast, with some black southerners traveling farther than many modern-day immigrants.

The chronology of this Great Migration, as is the case in many immigrant experiences, was sometimes a more circuitous affair than might be expected and has at times been reported. Some participants of the Great Migration made trips outside the South before their actual and final leaving, which suggests that a great deal of ambivalent churning preceded a fair number of departures.
¹⁴⁹
Many served overseas during wartime, in the First and Second World Wars and in the conflict in Korea. Some managed to visit relatives up north; some tried to make a go of it in one city before trying out another. These trips often exposed them to the freedoms they were denied back home, served as way stations
where they could earn enough money for the next leg of their journey, or otherwise emboldened them and fed their desire to migrate. Thus, leaving the South was not always a direct path but one of testing and checking of facts with those who had left ahead of them, before making the great leap themselves.

Yet the hardened and peculiar institution of Jim Crow made the Great Migration different from ordinary human migrations. In their desperation to escape what might be considered a man-made pestilence, southern blacks challenged some scholarly assumptions about human migration. One theory has it that, due to human pragmatism and inertia, migrating people tend to “go no further from their homes in search of work than is absolutely necessary,” Ravenstein observed.
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“The bulk of migrants prefers a short journey to a long one,” he wrote. “The more enterprising long-journey migrants are the exceptions and not the rule.”
¹⁵¹
Southern blacks were the exception. They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.

IDA MAE AND THE CHILDREN
rumbled over curled ribbons of dirt road in a brother-in-law’s truck from Miss Theenie’s house to the train depot in Okolona. Piled high around them were all the worldly possessions they could manage to carry—the overalls and Sunday clothes, the cook pots and kerosene lamps, a Bible and the quilts that Ida Mae and Miss Theenie had sewn out of used-up remnants of the clothes they had worn out tilling the Mississippi soil. Miss Theenie had not wanted them to go and had prayed over them and with them and then watched as her second-born daughter left the rutted land of the ancestors. “
May the Lord be the first one in the car,” Miss Theenie had whispered about the train they were hoping to catch, “and the last out.
”

Heading to the depot through the dust hollows and the cotton fields
and away from the only place she had ever lived, Ida Mae did not know what would become of them or if her husband could actually pull this thing off. She did not know if Mr. Edd would let them go or stand in their way, if her husband would get anything from Mr. Edd at settlement, if they would be better off up north or, if they failed, worse off for having the nerve to try to leave—and if, in the end, they would truly make it out of Mississippi at all.

But there at the depot was her husband, the taciturn man who kept his emotions to himself, who had courted her and won her over despite Miss Theenie’s objections, and who had decided that he did not want his family under the mercurial thumb of Mississippi for one more hour. He had not asked Ida Mae what she thought about leaving or whether she wanted to go. He had merely announced his decision as the head of the family, as was his way, and Ida Mae had gone along with it, as was hers.

She had not wanted to leave Miss Theenie and her sister Talma and all the people she had ever known, but her lot was with her husband, and she would go where he thought it best. Both she and Miss Theenie could take comfort in knowing that Ida Mae’s sister Irene would be there to receive them in Milwaukee and that half her husband’s siblings were up north in Beloit, Wisconsin, and in Chicago, and so Ida Mae would not be alone in that new land.

Mr. Edd had been a man of his word. He did not try to keep George and Ida Mae from leaving. George had gotten a few dollars from Mr. Edd and managed to secure four train tickets to Milwaukee via Chicago, having likely secured them not in Houston, where he might have been recognized, but in Okolona, where he was less likely to be noticed and where they would be leaving from.

And so the family—Ida Mae, George, Velma, James, and the little one still forming in Ida Mae’s belly—boarded a train in Okolona. They were packed in with the baggage in the Jim Crow car with the other colored passengers with their babies and boxes of fried chicken and boiled eggs and their belongings overflowing from paper bags in the overhead compartment. The train pulled out of the station at last, and Ida Mae was on her way out of Chickasaw County and out of the state of Mississippi for the first time in her life.

GEORGE HAD NO TIME
for formalities or the seeking of advice or reassurance. He had to go. There was no point in discussing it, and no one he told tried to argue him out of leaving, except for Inez, who wasn’t so concerned that he was going but that he wasn’t taking her with him. He hadn’t had time to figure out what to do with Inez. All he knew was he had to get himself out of Lake County, Florida, before the grove owners got to him first.