The Warmth of Other Suns (68 page)

THE SONG HIT
the
Billboard
charts in May 1962. It stayed there for seven weeks and peaked at Number 20.

The song was by a famous migrant from Albany, Georgia, Robert’s most high-maintenance patient, Ray Charles. It was about Robert or, rather, an idealized version of him in a smoke- and drug-filled world of airless recording studios, martini nightclubs, cross-country road tours, and shimmying, wig- and rouge-wearing backup-singer love triangles that was the life of Ray Charles in the sixties and which Robert entered unavoidably and not unhappily as his personal physician during the peak of both men’s careers. The song was called “Hide Nor Hair,” and the chorus went like this:

Robert knew Ray was working on a song about him, or about a doctor at least. Ray asked Robert’s permission to use his name before recording it. Coming as it did just months after Robert had put his hand back together and delivered his son, it was Ray’s way of thanking a man he had come to depend on. Robert, always craving approval and enamored of show business, gave him the go-ahead.

Robert wasn’t looking to be the subject of a song and really didn’t need it. Years later, he didn’t talk about it much and, the times he did, it was rather like a footnote. But when it first hit the airwaves back in 1962, his practice took off like never before. He could see the effects of the Migration in his waiting room—former sharecroppers from east Texas, schoolteachers from Baton Rouge, gamblers from Arkansas, Creoles from New Orleans. He ended up with more patients than he could handle, more than was really fair to him or to the patients, seeing as how he liked to spend so much time with each one, get to know them and their lives and desires, and seeing how much they took to that kind of attention. He had more business than he ever could have imagined back when he was dreaming of getting out of Louisiana, trying to convince himself as much as everybody else that he really could make it in California.

It reached the point where the hallway outside his office began to look like some of the train stations during the Migration. Patients started lining up hours before he got there, a reunion of Texans and Louisianans and migrants from Arkansas, spilling out of the reception room and into the outer corridor, patients sitting cross-legged on the floor, heads tilted back against the wall, all waiting to hear their names called. They knew he might still be at the racetrack or just in from Vegas. He’d step over the dangling legs and watch out for their feet as he waded through the crowd to get to his office door.

Some would end up waiting all day to see him, and somehow he made each one feel as if he or she were the only patient in the world. He would stay until ten or eleven at night or until he had seen the very last patient.

It got so crowded, like a Saturday-night rent party, that some people just couldn’t take the waiting anymore, no matter how good he was. Reatha Gray Simon, his mentor Dr. Beck’s granddaughter, had a brief falling-out with him over the fact that she practically had to block out a whole day to see him.

“I knew he was sometimes in surgery,” she said, “but sometimes he was at the track. The waiting room was like the neighborhood barbershop.”

That was just how he wanted it. Gambling and medicine were basically his life. He could lose himself in both and had a hard time walling off his professional and personal lives. He doted on his patients and sometimes went gambling with them. He didn’t look down his speculum at the cooks and mailmen he treated and made sure to invite them to the parties he gave.

“Some wouldn’t come for whatever reason,” he said. The house was practically a mansion, and Robert threw out the red carpet, literally. “Most of them probably didn’t feel comfortable. But I was gracious as I could be if they came. I’d bend over backwards to make them come.”

THE ROAD SIGNS
were warning that the 1956 Pontiac with the shark-tooth grille and chrome racing stripes on the hood was drawing closer to the hill town of Rome, Georgia. My mother was driving, only it was clear from everything about her that she wouldn’t become my mother for a while. She would have been wearing a poodle skirt with a cinched waist, a scarf folded Marilyn Monroe–style atop her head and knotted breezily at the neck, pressed curls peeking out from the sides. Dark, movie star sunglasses dwarfed her face and shielded her eyes, the eyes
scanning for the one thing she needed, could not put off, had to do before pulling into her old hometown of Rome.

The car was brand-new, blue, the color of the flag, as my mother would remember it, with whitewall tires and white side panel trim. But it was dusty from the drive, its windshield spotted and speckled, and not looking anywhere close to the four thousand dollars she’d paid for it. Her sister Theresa, who had followed her up north, was with her, and they couldn’t roll into town like that. No migrant could, none would dare let on that their new life was anything less than perfect; they had to prove that their decision to go north was the superior and right thing to do, that they were living the dream and everything was out of a Technicolor movie set.

Besides, the people back home would be disappointed if they didn’t put on a show, and so they did. So she would have to find a car wash before she could get so close to town that some neighbor might see her in a dusty old automobile and conclude that things weren’t nearly as swell up north as they had been claiming. If she did not find a car wash, it would be all over North Rome before she turned onto Gibbon Street to greet her mother and nieces, who, at that very moment, were praying she was running late because they weren’t finished waxing the floors and shining the windows with old pages of the
Rome News Tribune
, hadn’t smoothed out the chenille blankets with the cotton-ball fringe in the guest bedroom, the corn bread hadn’t risen yet, the African violets needed watering, and what if she pulled up just now?

My mother delayed her arrival and the moment she would see her own beloved mother to stop in Cartersville to get the Pontiac washed and polished. That was the most important thing, after all. She had driven to Rome before, but it was in a Chevrolet, a used one at that. She had not long before started a new job teaching school, bought herself a row house in an all-white block in Northwest Washington, and now had this new car. But it wouldn’t mean as much unless the people back home could see the manifestation of all this for themselves.

“We wanted to arrive in the daytime so people would come out looking at us,” my mother remembered of the trip she made with her sister. “We tooted the horn, and Mother came out. I don’t know why we went to Rome. To show off the car, I guess.”

The car, with its precious Washington, D.C., license plates, would cause a commotion, like a UFO from another planet, which is just what she wanted, and all the little children would look at that shiny,
chrome-plated car and inspect the tags and ask, “What is a ‘District of Columbia’?”

At holidays and in summer, the migrants came home. They would leave a trail of Cadillac dust on Highway 61 in the Delta or along Route 1 through the Carolinas and Georgia. They had prepared all year for this moment of glory, and there were times when in some church parking lots in Grenada or Greenville, there were more Illinois license plates than those from Mississippi.

They had gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.

The homesick migrants loaded up their sleepy children in the dark hours of the morning for the long drive to the mother country when there was a death in the family or a loved one needing tending or just to show off how well they were making out up north. When they saw the cold airs of the New World seeping into their northern-bred children, they sent them south for the summer so the children would know where they came from. The migrants warned their children to be on their best behavior, especially when it came to the white people they might encounter.

But the children did not have the internalized deference of their southern cousins. They got into scrapes with the other children and couldn’t remember all the rules. One migrant’s son, Emmett Till, on a visit from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955, was killed for breaking protocol in some way that will probably never be known for sure, except that everyone agreed it involved something he had said to a white woman, which only served to remind those who left of the rightness of their decision and those who stayed how foolhardy it could be to forget for a moment where you were when you crossed into the very different country of the South.

Ida Mae did not go back often, not because she was afraid but because she had a family to tend to in Chicago. She went back for illnesses and funerals—when her mother, Miss Theenie, took ill and died, and years later, when her baby sister, Talma, got sick and died. Her husband,
George, went back only once—for the funeral of the brother who had raised him, Willie. And even then he did not stay the night; he left for Chicago right away.