The Warmth of Other Suns (54 page)

The Migration made giddy landlords of some of the old-timers. It gave them the chance to get extra money and bragging rights, too, by renting their spare rooms and garages to the new people. In Los Angeles and Oakland, it became a status symbol to have the wherewithal to take in roomers.

“I got a sharecropper,” a woman in Los Angeles was heard boasting.
⁹⁶

“Honey, I got me three sharecroppers!” another one said.

The churches stood to gain the most, and did. They ran notices in the
Defender
proclaiming, “Strangers welcome.”
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Walters African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago tripled in membership. The city’s Olivet Baptist Church got five thousand new members in the first three years of the Migration, making it one of the largest Baptist churches and one of the first megachurches in the country. A migrant from Alabama said she couldn’t get in the first time she went. “We’d have to stand up,” she said. “I don’t care how early we’d go, you wouldn’t get in.”

But soon the cultural and class divisions between the newcomers and the old-timers began to surface. Many of the migrants, seeking the status and security they could not get back home, filled the stained-glass sanctuaries of the mainline churches. Others were overwhelmed by the size of the congregations and the austerity of their services. One migrant said she “couldn’t understand the pastor and the words he used” at Olivet and couldn’t get used to the singing. “The songs was proud-like,” she said.

A migrant from Louisiana felt out of place at Pilgrim Baptist, another
big, old-line church. “Nobody said nothing,” the migrant said. “But there were whispers all over the place.”

The migrants did as much moving around from church to church as they did from flat to flat. They tended to favor smaller storefront churches opened up by ministers fresh from the South, where they could sing the spirituals, catch the spirit, and fan themselves like they were used to. The reason one woman left a mainline church was because it was “too large—it don’t see the small people.”

The migrants brought new life to the old receiving stations. But by their sheer numbers, they pressed down upon the colored people already there. Slumlords made the most of it by subdividing what housing there was into smaller and smaller units and investing as little as possible in the way of upkeep to cash in on the bonanza. It left well-suited lawyers and teachers living next to sharecroppers in head scarves just off the Illinois Central. The middle-class and professional people searched for a way out.

“They tried to insulate themselves by moving further south along the narrow strip that defined the gradually expanding South Side Black Belt,” wrote the historian James Grossman.
⁹⁸
“But the migrants inevitably followed.”

Unlike their white counterparts, the old settlers had few places to go and were met with hostility and violence if they ventured into white neighborhoods. The color line hemmed them in—newcomers and old-timers alike—as they all struggled to move up. “The same class of Negroes who ran us away from Thirty-seventh Street are moving out there,” a colored professional man said after moving further south to Fifty-first Street ahead of the migrants.
⁹⁹
“They creep along slowly like a disease.”

The fate of the city people was linked to that of the migrants, whether they liked it or not, and the city people feared that the migrants could jeopardize the status of them all. A colored newspaper called
Searchlight
chastised them for boarding the streetcars in soiled work clothes after a day at the stockyards and accused them of threatening the freedoms colored people had in the North.
¹⁰⁰
“Don’t you know that you are forcing on us here in Chicago a condition similar to the one down South?”

A survey of new migrants during World War II found that an overwhelming majority of them looked up to the people who were there before
them, admired them, and wanted to be as assured and sophisticated as they were.
¹⁰¹
But a majority of the colored people already in the New World viewed the newcomers in a negative light and saw them as hindering opportunities for all of them.

The anxious old settlers were “like German Jews who in the late nineteenth century feared that the influx of their coreligionists from eastern Europe would endanger their marginal but substantial foothold in gentile Chicago,” wrote the historian James R.
¹⁰²
Grossman.

“Those who have long been established in the North have a problem,” the
Chicago Defender
acknowledged.
¹⁰³
“That problem is the caring for the stranger within their gates.”

It turned out that the old-timers were harder on the new people than most anyone else. “Well, their English was pretty bad,” a colored businessman said of the migrants who flooded Oakland and San Francisco in the forties, as if from a foreign country.
¹⁰⁴
To his way of looking at it, they needed eight or nine years “before they seemed to get Americanized.”

As the migrants arrived in the receiving stations of the North and West, the old-timers wrestled with what the influx meant for them, how it would affect the way others saw colored people, and how the flood of black southerners was a reminder of the Jim Crow world they all sought to escape. In the days before Emancipation, as long as slavery existed, no freed black was truly free. Now, as long as Jim Crow and the supremacy behind it existed, no blacks could ever be sure they were beyond its reach.

One day a white friend went up to a longtime Oakland resident named Eleanor Watkins to ask her what she thought about all the newcomers.

“Eleanor,” the woman said, “you colored people must be very disgusted with some of the people who have come here from the South and the way they act.”
¹⁰⁵

“Well, Mrs. S.,” Eleanor Watkins replied. “Yes, some colored people are very disgusted, but as far as I’m concerned, the first thing I give them credit for is getting out of the situation they were in.…  Maybe they don’t know how to dress or comb their hair or anything, but their children will and
their
children will.”

In the early years of the Migration, the
Chicago Defender
took it upon itself to help correct the country people it had helped lure to the North to
better fit the city people’s standard of refinement. “It is our duty,” the
Defender
wrote, “to guide the hand of a less experienced one, especially when one misstep weakens our chance for climbing.”
¹⁰⁶

The
Defender
ran periodic lists of “do’s and don’ts” that recirculated over time and were repeated to newcomers like Ida Mae:

The Chicago Urban League, which helped direct migrants to temporary shelter, rental options, and jobs, was the closest the migrants got to Customs in the North. It held what it called “Strangers Meetings” to help acclimate the newcomers, and its members went door-to-door, passing out leaflets advising the migrants as to their behavior and comportment. To the
Defender
’s do’s and don’ts, the Urban League distributed cards adding the following admonishments:

Ida Mae didn’t take it personally when people pointed these things out to her, like the neighbor lady who had brought the wine. Ida Mae
wouldn’t likely have seen her again because the family moved so much in those early months in Chicago. But she thanked people like her and a lady who mentioned her head scarf on the bus one day. She was grateful for the advice and, in fact, took most of it.

But there were some things she was not ever going to do. She was never going to change her name to something citified and highfalutin. She was never going to take on northern airs and name-drop about the pastor she knew from this or that church or the alderman who stopped to greet her at the polls, even though she would come to know famous people who made good up in the North because she had known their kin people back in Mississippi. She was never going to forget the folks back home and how she loved them so. She was never going to change her Mississippi drawl, not in the least, not even after she had spent more of her life in the North than in the South, not even when some northerners still had trouble understanding her decades after she’d been there; though she wasn’t trying to be difficult and was just being herself, she simply didn’t care what anybody thought. It didn’t matter, because people seemed to love her for it.

She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself, where nobody could judge her, and inside the walls of their kitchenette apartment where she made turnip greens and peach cobbler and sweet potato pie flecked with nutmeg and sang spirituals like in Mississippi as often as she liked.