The Warmth of Other Suns (65 page)

There Robert examined Ray more closely and discovered that Ray had not only sliced an artery but severed a tendon as well. Robert would have to perform emergency surgery to reconnect the tendon if Ray was to regain use of his hand. After the surgery, Robert told Ray he was not to use the hand for six weeks.

“Naturally, I refused,” Ray said years later.
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His big tour was starting the next week, so he told Robert he would just play with one hand. A publicist had already devised an explanation for the public. They would say he had slipped in the bathtub.

Robert could not have been pleased with Ray’s insistence but knew him well enough not to be surprised. With Ray determined to go on tour against doctor’s orders, Robert insisted on going along with him to attend to the wound should anything happen to it, which, naturally, it did.

Robert put a cast on the hand to protect it, but that only seemed to attract attention and endanger it more. “Everyone I met couldn’t resist touching it or shaking it,” Ray recalled.
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“The hand did get infected, but Bob was there to keep me straight.”

The tour was a dream of Ray’s from back when he had gotten his start in those Jim Crow towns in Florida, where he could just see himself leading a big band like Duke Ellington’s—with trombones, trumpets, saxophones, guitars, him on piano, of course, and the Raelettes, his doo-wopping backup singers in their form-fitting sequins and stilettos.
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Robert traveled with them to St. Louis, checking on his most famous patient’s most precious instrument and loving his front-row seat to smoke-filled celebrity. The tour continued on to Detroit, where Ray struck up his orchestra and somebody decided to bring a blind teenager onto the stage. It was said that the teenager had been signed up by a new outfit called Motown and could sing and play the harmonica. It was Stevie Wonder, “Little Stevie,” as he was known back then, who, not surprisingly, idolized Ray Charles and got the chance to play a few songs with him that spring night in Detroit.

Ray’s hard-driving life of drugs and women was beginning to catch up with him—he would end up arrested for drug possession in Boston and would end up fathering a total of twelve children, only three of them by his wife, Della Bea, who divorced him in 1977.

But it occurred to him as he was writing his biography that he did not
want to leave the wrong impression about his physician, a man he described as “one of the dearest people I’ve ever known.”
¹⁵²

He said: “I must say something about Bob, though, before anyone gets the wrong idea. Although he was my personal friend, and although he traveled with me for about ten days during the time my hand was in the cast, I never let him do anything illegal for me. I liked him too well for that. If you really love a person, you won’t get him involved in something which might hurt him.”

The hand began to heal, and after a week and a half on the road, Robert felt it safe to return to Los Angeles and to his practice. “He sewed up my hand so smoothly that you can barely detect the cuts today,” Ray said years later. “He’s the man who got me through the crisis with my hand, and for a piano player, that’s some serious business.”

It was time for Robert to leave the tour for another reason. Not only did he have a life and practice back in Los Angeles, he had another patient to attend to. Ray’s wife, Della Bea, was expecting her third child and wanted Robert to deliver her baby. She had had a difficult delivery with her first son before she had heard of Robert Foster and had now come to rely on him.

The baby was born in May of 1961. It was a boy. After all that had happened in the preceding month and the time spent tending them before that, the couple decided to name the new baby Robert.

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING
, scholars would debate the effects of the Migration, whether it was a success or a failure, whether the people who left had done better by leaving or would have been better off staying, whether the poorest among them merely imported the disorganized family systems inherited from slavery and carried into sharecropping or whether the anonymous, overpacked cities merely brought out the worst in the weaker souls. Usually these were macroeconomic, sociological questions as to the effect of the North or South on the people who left or stayed.

But back when the Migration first began, the venerable Chicago
Commission on Race Relations, convened after World War I, chose to ask the migrants themselves about their perceptions of how they were faring in the North. These were a few of their responses:

IT WOULD BECOME LEGEND
in Chicago among the migrants and their children, the lengths to which some colored people would go to get out of the South. The Great Migration was now into its fourth decade. People who were children when it began were well into middle age. And back in Mississippi, people were still trying to escape. Ida Mae would hear about these people and pray for them.

One of the most desperate souls was a perfectly well man named Arrington High, who had been consigned to the Mississippi State Hospital for the Insane for protesting the southern order of things.
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The hospital and its hundred or so outbuildings, originally called the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum, took up some three thousand isolated acres in the pine woods southeast of Jackson, near Terrapin Skin Creek, in a place called
Whitfield, some 170 miles from where Ida Mae was born. From the time it opened in 1935, anyone saying, “They took him to Whitfield,” meant nobody ever expected to see the person again.

What got Arrington High in trouble was a weekly newsletter he published that argued for integration. He had been editor of a two-page mimeographed broadside, the
Eagle Eye
, for some fourteen years and had made a name for himself protesting the treatment of colored people in central Mississippi. What got him declared insane, however, was exposing the segregationists who were consorting with prostitutes at a colored brothel that catered only to white politicians. It was a death wish of a crusade that actually may have fit the legal definition of insanity for a colored man in Mississippi at the time.

High was taken into custody and committed to the insane asylum in October 1957. It was a sentence that would shut him off, at age forty-seven, from the rest of the world and his wife and four children for the remainder of his life. He was held in confinement deep in the woods, surrounded by guards and hospital personnel, a good fifteen miles from the nearest city. It amounted to a total silencing of a revered dissident of the Mississippi order of things and a slow death in a crazy place where he would be subjected to whatever indignities his keepers devised.