The Warmth of Other Suns (67 page)

GEORGE STARLING WAS RUNNING
the rails up and down the East Coast, and, as he did, he was in a way running from Inez. George loved Inez. But Inez was not an easy woman to love. There was a storm inside her that nobody seemed able to calm.

It had started long before, when she and her toddler sister were left orphaned right after Inez was born. They were raised by poor, put-upon,
Bible-thumping Pentecostal aunts, who couldn’t afford two more mouths to feed, and by a Victorian grandmother, who thought the only way to break a girl as stubborn as Inez was to beat her the way the overseers beat their foreparents. They hauled Inez and her older sister to their Holiness church, where the aunts and the grandmother caught the spirit and talked in tongues. Inez’s sister did not let it get to her. Inez rebelled from the start.

George had taken a liking to Inez back in Eustis, maybe because she was as headstrong as he was and knew what it was like to feel tossed about as a child by the people charged with caring for her. He hadn’t given much thought to the consequences of marrying her, hadn’t given much thought to marriage at all. But now he found himself bound to her, with a young son she adored, and as principled and stubborn as he was, he wasn’t going to admit defeat no matter how blue and ornery she could be.

There were happy times, when the folks from back home paraded up from Florida. George could regale them with stories from the railroad, and Inez could show off how well they had made out in New York, how much better things were there than down south, how the little country orphan girl was living in a brownstone in the biggest, brightest city in maybe the whole world.

In the summer, it seemed as if there was someone from Eustis coming up every weekend. If George wasn’t on the rails, he would throw some ribs on the grill. Babe Blye, who lived upstairs from George and Inez in the second-floor apartment, would drive out to the woods, out to Westchester or Connecticut, and bring back some possum or run to the corner store and get the whiskey and chitlins. Inez and Babe’s wife, Hallie Q., would cook up the possum and the chitlins and stir up some collard greens, make the potato salad, and there would be a Florida reunion in the middle of Harlem. Everybody who came up to New York from Eustis knew to stop by George and Inez’s place.

Soon, after so many years with just the three of them, their household expanded further. They had a little girl in 1954. She looked just like George and had his temperament. They named her Sonya. Now they had two little ones to raise.

Then, one day in 1957, word arrived about a death in the family that would bring more changes to the household. Inez’s sister had taken ill and died back in Florida. She left behind a teenage daughter named Pat,
who was bright but distraught and who everyone feared was headed for trouble.

Like many people who had come up from the South, George and Inez sent for the girl to come live with them. Inez wasn’t especially happy about her niece coming. Life was hard enough in New York. Inez had put Eustis behind her and was working hard to take care of her own children. She and George had to leave the children alone more than they wanted to as it was in order to meet the house note and the property taxes, the utilities, and everything else that seemed to be high just because this was New York.

But George saw something in the girl, a quick mind and a good heart, and thought they could help her. Besides, he knew that most migrant families that moved up north took in a relative or two at some point or other. It was how a lot of newcomers got situated in the New World, and was the right and southern thing to do.

There were people in Eustis who never left and never wanted to leave and couldn’t see why anybody would go up north with all the crime and drugs and devilment. They felt sorry for the sheltered teenager whose mother had taken ill and died in her arms and who now was being shipped up north to live with an aunt and uncle she barely knew in a city she had never seen.

“All the people in my little town saw doom for me,” Pat said years later. “Uncle George took me in.”

George knew firsthand how the folks in Eustis could be. He told Pat she needed to make the most of the mind God had given her and warned her that there would be people pitying her and expecting her to fail.

“You must not fail,” George told Pat, “because they’re expecting you to.”

But when Pat arrived, George was hardly ever around, working the rails as he was. Inez couldn’t hide her resentment, and it was just the two of them, aunt and niece, in the first floor of their brownstone sometimes. Inez told her she would give her a week, and then Pat would have to start paying rent.

Pat protested that her mother had just died, that she didn’t have a job yet, she didn’t know the city well enough. Inez didn’t need to be told how rough life could be. She had never had the chance even to know her mother. She had little sympathy and didn’t want her around.

Inez got worried about the money it was costing to have Pat there and would lock the kitchen to control who could get in. Pat would have to sneak in there when the kitchen was open.

“I would go in there and snatch everything I could outta there,” Pat said.

One day, soon after she arrived, George and Inez left for work, and Gerard, now twelve, and little Sonya, who was about six, were left alone in the house with Pat, who was still getting used to all the lights and the noise and the perils of the big city.

About ten boys showed up at the front door. Gerard let them in, and they all headed straight for the kitchen.

“They had this white stuff, and they were doing something with it,” Pat remembered. She had never seen this in Eustis before. The boys were doing drugs, she later learned.

It was summer, and, each day, after George and Inez left, the boys would show up and head for the kitchen.

“They would come there to roll that stuff and then hit the door,” Pat remembered.

The temptations of the city had seeped into George and Inez’s house when they weren’t looking, when they were out trying to make a living to stay in the city that was swallowing up their son. Pat eventually got the nerve to confront Gerard.

“I’m gonna tell Inez,” she warned him.

Gerard knew how much his mother adored him and dared Pat to say anything.

Pat got up the courage to tell Inez. She told her that when she went off to work, Gerard was letting in a bunch of boys, and they were doing dope in the kitchen.

Inez grew enraged.

“How dare you say that about Gerard!” she told Pat.

George wasn’t around. He was on the train. And Inez told Pat she wanted her out of the house.

“I don’t appreciate you talking about my son taking drugs,” she said.

Pat was between jobs, was just a teenager, and had no money. But she was too proud to argue with her aunt.

“Well, if that’s what you want me to do,” she said.

She gathered what few things she had and started walking, not knowing where she was going. She got to a shoe-shine stand and asked the man if he knew of anyone with rooms for rent.

He took her to the apartment of a sweet old couple. The wife sang with a gospel group, and Pat stayed there until she got on her feet.

George got back from the rails, not knowing what had happened to Pat or where she was. He didn’t intercede because Pat was Inez’s blood relative, not his. It was only some time later that she saw George and told him what had happened.

“Pat, I had no idea,” George said. “I didn’t know where you were. She told me you had just left. I had no idea that she had done that.”

Inez was her aunt, but it was George she would always be closer to, like a second daughter to him.

“The man cared more about me than she did,” Pat said. “Had he been there that day, I would have waited and told him. My pride wouldn’t let me.”

Pat’s warnings turned out to be prophetic. Gerard would only sink deeper into drugs and watch his friends die from overdoses of heroin. One of them they found dead in an elevator. Gerard would go on to steal televisions and radios and cash from his parents, anything of value that they hadn’t locked up or hidden away or could be easily carried out the door. He would bring sadness and heartbreak to Inez and especially to George, who could rarely even bring himself to talk about his son. He had come all this way from Florida, and here was something that had turned out worse in ways he couldn’t have thought possible.

Gerard would get himself together for a time but would never truly get on his feet. And during those moments of victory, his father preached at him.

“You owe God,” he’d tell Gerard. “You owe it to him to go around and tell your generation the evil of dealing in drugs and how he rescued you.”

Inez, who had adored and indulged Gerard, retreated into herself and seemed to take the sorrows out on those around her. She had a coat that Pat used to beg her to let her wear.

“A little coat that I loved,” Pat said.

Pat had come up from the country with few clothes of her own, and when it got cold she wanted to wear one of Inez’s coats, that one in particular. Pat was always talking about that coat.

“Uncle George knew I liked it,” Pat said. “Everybody knew I liked it.”

One day, after she had moved out, she saw her Uncle George.

“Pat, I got some bad news for you.”

“What is it?”

“Your aunt threw that coat you so loved in the garbage can today,” he said. “I begged her not to, but she did it anyway.”

Pat went to their house and looked in the trash can for it.

“By the time I went there, it was gone,” Pat said.

It all came back to Pat, the things the family used to say about Inez, that they could never make sense of “how when she was a little baby, how stubborn she was and how their grandmother would whip them and she refused to bow.”

Pat would eventually make peace with her aunt. She would grow up, get married, have a family of her own, and join a church, which was what all of them had been raised to do. Inez never joined a church in New York. It reminded her too much of the hard life she’d had in Eustis and of a little girl’s imaginings of how different life might have been if her mother had lived, the mother who died bringing Inez into the world.

Pat managed to convince Inez to go with her on occasion.

And every time, Pat remembered, “she would break down crying, and she’d have to leave the church.”