The Warmth of Other Suns (81 page)

He is wearing mutton-chop sideburns, flecked gray, and an Afro shaped like a mushroom cap. Hip as you got in those days. He greets his guests with a cigarette between his fingers and his legs purposely slew-footed, as if he were posing for
Esquire.
It will make better pictures for the photographer he has hired to trail him and the guests all night
.

Soon the set piece begins to take shape. There’s Joe Luellen, who hit town back in the thirties and played in
The Great White Hope.
And three men standing together in velvet suits that forewarn the fashion crimes of the seventies
.

On a foot-high stand above the crowd, Sweets Edison is on trumpet under the green-striped tent over the patio. Hampton Hawes is playing piano with his head reared back. Everybody has a glass of something in one hand and a cigarette in the other like jewelry
.

There’s his mother-in-law near the hot pink tulip-upholstered love seat, in a four-hundred-dollar gown and a solid gold bracelet he bought her and which he complained she never gave him credit for. And she’s greeting and upstaging as if she paid for the whole shebang. (“I ignored it, I ignored it,” he would say years later, betraying that he most certainly had not.)

There are two or three wet bars, help everywhere, dressed in maid’s uniforms and monkey suits, people checking coats, people parking cars, people pouring martinis, people picking up dishes before they have a chance to clink the top of an end table
.

There’s Bunny sticking her tongue out at the camera. And Ray Charles under the tent over the patio by the band. And Robert’s bookie. And a judge. A postmaster. And a dentist. Robert’s sister, Gold, in pink chiffon on a barstool, holding a pack of Marlboros. Keisha Brown, a gospel rock singer, sweating on stage in blood-red velvet. Madison, in a three-piece suit that thankfully met Robert’s approval, doing the funky chicken with a woman in white bell-bottoms. Alice in her cat-eye glasses, posing for pictures, calm and dignified in that heavy beaded dress by the staircase
.

The following Thursday, December 31, 1970, a breathless review ran on page C2 of the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, declaring it “certainly ‘The Party of the Year,’ without a doubt” (phrasing that unwittingly introduced the very doubt it sought to dispel). The column ran without pictures and began like this:

Robert had a photo album made of the night’s festivities. It was made of brown leather, and etched onto the front was “Robert’s Birthday” in gold italics. Over the succeeding decades, he would pull out the party album before he would his wedding pictures or his medical degree. The brown leather got worn in spots from the viewing. Usually, he would not bother to mention the
Sentinel
story nor the party itself so much as what went into it.

“For some reason, it drops,” he told me years later when I asked him about the particulars. “It’s not any less valuable or delicious. But for some reason, it didn’t seem as important as when I was putting it together.”

Some of the guests he never saw again. Some died. Some lost touch. It was a wrap, and everyone was marvelous.

He took comfort in any sign of the night’s immortality. One day he passed the stationery department at Bullock’s. The invitations to his party were mounted and on display. “I went in once and told the lady, ‘That’s mine,’ ” he said. “She looked at me like I was a fool. I just smiled.”

Talking about it kept the party going, and so it never really ended in his mind. He did not wait for reviews, he solicited them. He called Jimmy Marshall, one of his oldest friends from back in Monroe, right after the party.

“Jimmy, did I wig ’em?” he asked.

“Yeah, you hit it,” Jimmy said.

What are they saying, what are they thinking?
Robert asked Jimmy. Everyone was bowled over, of course. Jimmy didn’t want to say it, but the Monroe people thought he had gone too far. The black maid in the
black-and-white dress and white bow in the foyer was over the top even for Robert.

“We’ve been maids long enough,” Jimmy told Robert. “People didn’t go for that.”

Robert didn’t take it too well. “Either he answered or cussed,” Jimmy said decades later, “which I didn’t care, in either case.”

As long as the two had known each other, Robert’s fixations never made sense to Jimmy. “He always sought approval,” Jimmy said. “And I never understood it because he had it all.”

THE RAW WOOD CABINS
and gravel roads that broke the clearings in the bottomlands of Chickasaw County did not change much in the thirty years after Ida Mae and millions of other black people left the South in a migration that was now slowing down as Mississippi began fitfully opening up. Mr. Edd, whose land Ida Mae and her husband had sharecropped, died of a heart attack back in 1945, a few years after Ida Mae went north.
³
Willie Jim, who came with Mr. Edd looking for Joe Lee that night all those years ago over the missing turkeys, was still
alive. He ran a thousand-acre plantation with up to two hundred hoe hands and forty sharecropper families well into the 1960s.

The land was still devoted to cotton, but big combines and mechanical harvesters now did most of the work. The people who had not gone north now worked in factories, textile mills, and hardware plants, factories that made poly foam and felt for the manufacture of furniture, and factories that made trailers, sewer pipes, corrugated boxes, shipping crates.
⁴

The county and the rest of Mississippi and the old Confederacy had come out on the other side of a second civil war, the war over civil rights for the servant caste of the South. Chickasaw County had not been in the middle of it, had not been a focus of Martin Luther King or the freedom riders. It was too sparsely populated and too out of the way. But it was no less resistant to change, especially when it came to black people voting (where “intemperate individuals of both races created incidents best forgotten,” the Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society wrote dismissively of the era), and when it came to the integration of the schools, which had been segregated for longer than most anyone had been alive.
⁵

It was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed.”

Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester. One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate.

The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own. They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.

It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the
Brown
ruling and then only under additional court orders.

“This was passionately opposed,” wrote the Chickasaw Historical Society, “not only by most of the whites—but by some of the blacks as well.” That sentiment, if true, would have been explained away by the
blacks who left as an indication that the blacks who stayed may have been more conciliatory than many of the people in the Great Migration.

It wasn’t until the 1970–71 school year that integration finally came to Chickasaw County, and then only after a 1969 court order,
Alexander v. Holmes
, that gave county and municipal schools in Mississippi until February 1970 to desegregate. But even that deadline would be extended for years for particularly recalcitrant counties.

All the marching and court rulings did little to change some southerners’ hearts. A 1968 survey found that eighty-three percent of whites said they preferred a system with no integration. And they acted on those preferences. By 1970, 158 new white private schools had opened up in Mississippi. By 1971, a quarter of the white students were in private schools, the white families paying tuition many could scarcely afford. Mothers went back to work to help cover tuition, “spent all their savings and forfeited luxuries and necessities in life,” some splitting their children up and enduring the “expense and inconvenience of transporting the children long distances to and from school,” according to the Mississippi-born scholar Mark Lowry, to avoid having their children sit in the same classroom with black children.
⁶

In the meantime, in the middle of the turmoil over what would become of the children of Mississippi, dozens of school districts forwent federal funding rather than integrate their schools.
⁷
During the worst of things, at least one school superintendent, Lowry wrote, committed suicide.