The Warmth of Other Suns (69 page)

Robert Foster did not go back often either. His goal was to get as many of his loved ones from Monroe to move out to California, and he went back only when he had to. Alice had no interest in going, and he did not insist on Alice or the girls visiting Monroe. They would grow up knowing little of their father’s small-town Louisiana roots. When he returned home, he put on a show, as would have been expected of him, and made sure it was clear that he was now more California than Louisiana.

It would be a long time before George Starling would feel safe returning to Eustis, Florida, seeing how he had left. Southern sheriffs and planters were known to have long memories and even to go after migrants who had fled north. Some white southerners tried to convince the workers who had fled that conditions had improved. Some extradited people for whatever reason they saw fit.

“Even in the North, refugees were not always safe,” wrote Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy in the 1945 book
Anyplace but Here
.
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“One hard-working migrant was astonished when a detective from Atlanta approached him and informed him that he was wanted back home for ‘spitting on the sidewalk.’ ”

So George was not inclined to linger in the vicinity of Eustis, Florida. His job on the railroad took him south, but on a line that usually veered west toward Birmingham. The times he worked a train that happened to take him through Florida, he did not leave the station or request permission to go home. The few relatives he trusted drove thirty or forty miles from Eustis or Alachua to meet him at the Wildwood station, bearing gossip, good wishes, and hams. George, in his porter’s cap and uniform, leaned out of the coach door to see them and left weighed down with homemade cakes or fresh fish they had caught for him to take back up north.

“Where they stop the train and fuel up, they had to stop there a good little while,” George’s Uncle Andrew “Jack” Johnson said. “We’d go there and meet him. And most of the time we carry him something. Give him his handout, such as we had.”

It was a measure of their pride and devotion that the uncle and his wife drove close to two hours in thunderstorms and waited for however long it took the train to get there for the few minutes they’d get to see
him. “He’d have time enough to speak and pass a few words,” the uncle remembered, “while the train was fueling up.”

One time, George was hauling luggage at the train stop at Wildwood, when up stepped the most feared man in all of Lake County and one of the most notorious sheriffs in the South, Willis V. McCall. The sheriff was just one more reason that George went no closer to his hometown of Eustis than the depot at Wildwood.

McCall was the lawman who had shot two handcuffed prisoners, killing one, as he transported them from one jail to another for an upcoming trial in the Groveland rape case back in 1949. The trial and the subsequent shootings attracted nationwide attention partly because one of the men McCall thought he had killed had actually survived to tell what happened to him. The NAACP field secretary Harry T. Moore and his wife had died from a bomb placed under Moore’s bed after Moore had accused McCall of police brutality in the case.

Over the years, McCall would be accused, implicated, or indicted in dozens of cases of prisoners dying under suspicious circumstances while in his custody. He patrolled the colored section in his ten-gallon hat, interrogating and pistol-whipping colored men for any suspicion and putting colored fruit pickers in jail if he caught them not working on a Saturday.

The colored people of Eustis and the rest of Lake County lived in fear of his patrol car crawling through their gravel streets.

“Here come the Big Hat Man,” the people would say when they saw him approaching.

People scurried from the street. They cleared the benches on McDonald Avenue and fled behind the storefronts when they saw him coming.

“That bench would be cleared in two seconds,” George said.

The sheriff had free rein and used to come into Big George’s corner store and drink his sodas without paying.

“Well, see you, George,” McCall would tell Big George, slurping on a soda to which he had helped himself.

The day Lil George saw Sheriff McCall, George was loading baggage on a train heading north. The sheriff was there to get an escaped prisoner from one of the railcars. The sheriff saw George on the station platform and recognized him from George’s father’s convenience store.

“Hey, don’t I know you?”

“I guess you do.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name is George Starling, Jr.”

“Oh, you George’s boy, heh?”

“I’m George’s son.”

That was the only time in all the years that Willis McCall was sheriff that George actually spoke with him. George felt safe because he was about to jump up on the train, and so he spoke his mind as he never would have in Eustis.

“I was biggity then,” George said. “And he got a little red in the face, and he kind of grinned a little bit.”

McCall regained his composure.

“Well, when you coming home?”

“I ain’t,” George told him. “I live in New York. I ain’t coming back to Eustis.”

George turned away and hopped up on the train. “I ain’t, not long as you still living,” he said under his breath.

Emmett Till was perhaps the most memorialized black northerner ever to go south, if only because he never made it back alive and because of the brutal reasons that he didn’t. His mother had sent her only child south for the summer in 1955 to spend time with his great-uncle in Mississippi. She never saw him alive again. He was bludgeoned and shot to death a month after his fourteenth birthday. Three days later, two fishermen found his body in the Tallahatchie River. Against the advice of those around her, his mother, Mamie Till, decided to hold the funeral with an open casket, so people could see what Mississippi had done to him.

Mourners and the curious clogged Fortieth and State Streets to line up and see his swollen, disfigured body inside the old barrel-vaulted Roberts Temple Church of God. Many of the people paying their respects had come from Mississippi like Emmett Till’s family, had lived and escaped the violence, and here it was being brought back to Chicago in the form of a fourteen-year-old boy. It could just as easily have been one of their children lying there lifeless. How many of them had sent their children south to be with their cousins and grandparents, giving them the same warnings Mamie Till had given her son—that they mind themselves around white people?

Ida Mae went to Roberts Temple Church of God that day in early September and stood in line with the thousands of others waiting to see
him. She felt she had to. It took hours to reach the casket. She was unprepared for what confronted her when she leaned over the glass-covered coffin. The undertakers had done what they could, but an eye was out of its socket and the face so disfigured that it did not resemble a human being’s. She had to look away.

George said he didn’t want to go, and he didn’t. He had lived it and seen enough.

BY MIDCENTURY
, the receiving cities of the Great Migration strained under the weight of millions of black southerners trying to situate themselves as tens of thousands more alighted from Pontiacs and railroad platforms each week. In the spring of 1951, a colored bus driver and former army captain named Harvey Clark, and his wife, Johnetta, faced an impossible living situation.

It was a dilemma confronting Ida Mae and her family and just about
every colored household up from the South. There was not enough housing to contain them, and the white neighborhoods bordering the black belt were barricading themselves further, not flinching at the use of violence to keep the walls in place.

Ida Mae and her family moved from flat to flat within those walls. Once they lived in an apartment over a funeral home, where little Eleanor played among the caskets and rode with the undertaker to pick up bodies. As it was, Chicago was trying to discourage the migration of any more colored people from the South. In 1950, city aldermen and housing officials proposed restricting 13,000 new public housing units to people who had lived in Chicago for two years. The rule would presumably affect colored migrants and foreign immigrants alike. But it was the colored people who were having the most trouble finding housing and most likely to seek out such an alternative. And it was they who were seen as needing to be controlled, as they had only to catch a train rather than cross an ocean to get there. Nothing had worked before at keeping the migrants out once the Migration began, and this new plan wouldn’t either. But it was a sign of the hostility facing people like Harvey Clark and Ida Mae, as white home owners stepped up pressure on the city to protect their neighborhoods.

“They don’t want the Negro who has just moved out of rural Dixie as their neighbor,” a city official told the
Chicago Defender
in a story that described what it called a “2-Year City Ban on Migrants.”
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With close to half a million colored people overflowing the black belt by 1950, racial walls that had been “successfully defended for a generation,” in the words of the historian Allan Spear, were facing imminent collapse, but not without a fight.
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Chicago found itself in the midst of “chronic urban guerilla warfare” that rivaled the city’s violent spasms at the start of the Migration, “when one racially motivated bombing or arson occurred every twenty days,” according to the historian Arnold Hirsch.
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