The Warmth of Other Suns (85 page)

“You know,” the nurse began, “seems like every time you get to thirteen thousand dollars, you start losing.”

That would not have been enough to stop him. It was not one of his better trips. But it was Vegas, and there was always another day. He was always playing to the crowd, knew all the casino workers, and loved it. Whatever he lost, he figured he would make it up tomorrow.

One time, Jimmy Gay, the man who had introduced Robert to Vegas and had been a boyhood friend of Limuary’s in the small world of southerners in the L.A.-Vegas circuit, ran into Robert after a big win.

Robert had forty or fifty thousand dollars in front of him, and Jimmy wanted to intercede to keep him from losing it.

“Bob, let me go put it up for you,” Jimmy said.

“No, I can handle my money,” Robert shot back. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need nobody to handle my money.”

A couple hours later, Robert came back, wanting to borrow two thousand dollars.

“He done lost that fifty thousand and wanted two thousand to get it back,” Limuary remembered. “Bob squandered a fortune.”

But he seemed only to remember the times when he hit it big. It was what he lived for. Like the time when a friend who went with him had to keep up with the kind of money you only heard of in bank robberies.
“We brought back fifty-three thousand dollars,” Robert said of one trip in the 1970s.

“He came back with a paper sack full of money,” Limuary remembered, “and everybody knew his business on the job, and he’d pay all the people he owed.”

But it was never really about the money for Robert. He had plenty coming in to begin with. It was hard really to know what it was about, except that he was weak for it and that deep inside him was a southerner with still a lot to prove. Gambling drew him, and he couldn’t stay away. When he couldn’t make it to Vegas, he bet on the horses at Santa Anita or played blackjack in a bare gymnasium of a space over by the Hollywood Park racetrack, anywhere he could escape into the nerve-jangling uncertainty and the rare seconds of elation that lasted only long enough to reel him back in.

He was handling sums of money that people back in Monroe could not fathom. “He won and lost several fortunes of a lifetime,” Jimmy Marshall, his fellow migrant and friend, said.

In the midnineties, Robert, never a good driver to begin with, had a car accident, rammed into a median strip over on Crenshaw. He tore up his Cadillac. Someone came to help him out of the car.

“Are you hurt?” the man asked.

“No, I’m alright,” Robert said.

“Did you get your bottle?” the man asked, figuring, why else would someone ram into a median strip?

“No, I don’t drink,” Robert told the man. Not anymore, anyway.

He would not be able to drive anymore. He shouldn’t have been driving in the first place, his friends would say. But that wasn’t going to stop him from getting to wherever he needed to gamble, even in a city of expressways and little in the way of public transportation.

He figured what he would do. “
I’ll take a taxi to the racetrack,” he thought to himself
.

One day, he summoned a cab to his house on Victoria. He got in and directed the driver to Hollywood Park racetrack. Then it hit him. Why go to Hollywood Park when he knew where he really wanted to go?

“How much would it be to take me to Vegas?” he asked.

The cab driver told him the fare. He told the driver to head to Vegas. That time, he won big, which he would have needed to in order to get home, and flew back to Los Angeles with a sack full of money—triumph and self-esteem in a sack, to his mind.

IDA MAE SETTLED INTO HER ROLE
as the sweet-natured but no-nonsense matriarch of the family now that her husband was gone. She had managed to re-create the village of extended family that existed on the plantations down south, her grown children and grandchildren surrounding her in the three-flat they had been in now for more than a decade.

The neighborhood had changed around them, had become all black and significantly poorer and more crime-ridden than it had been when they arrived. She and her family looked inward and lived their lives in the compound they created—her son, James, and his wife, Mary Ann, and their young children living on the first floor; Ida Mae living with Eleanor and her two children on the second floor; and a tenant named Betty, who was almost like a daughter to her, on the third floor.

There was always a commotion now that Kevin and Karen were out of high school and just starting their lives and Eleanor was divorced but with a full social schedule of house parties and lady friends from back in high school and new boyfriends, the phone always ringing for Eleanor.

Someone was always coming or going, wanting to know if the mail had arrived, if a job had come through, if a sweetheart had called yet, if a friend had said what time the party was, all of them expecting Ida Mae to keep up with this information since she was retired and home most of the time, and bending down and giving her a peck on the cheek as they got their coat and headed for the door again.

If they were all home at the same time, Kevin might be watching the White Sox in his room, Eleanor catching the news in hers, and Ida Mae watching a game show in the living room while keeping an eye on the drug busts and prostitutes on the street, which was usually better than any show on television anyway. There was a time back in Mississippi when nobody had a television—it hadn’t been invented yet—and now everyone had one and retreated into his or her separate world.

Holidays brought everyone together, especially Thanksgiving. It’s not clear whether anybody gave it any thought, but turkeys had been one of the reasons they were in Chicago in the first place. Maybe they would have come to Chicago anyway, it was just meant to be. In any case, in the fall of 1977, Ida Mae’s family was chosen out of all the families on the South Side to represent the typical Chicago family at Thanksgiving. Someone at Jewel, the Chicago supermarket chain, knew someone who knew Ida Mae’s family, knew James and Mary Ann, knew they were good solid people and that Ida Mae was beloved by all who came in contact with her.

Jewel brought a camera crew to their three-flat in South Shore. The dining room table was draped with white lace and candles, filled with platters of green beans and cranberry sauce and sweet potato pie and a roasted turkey at the head of the table. James with a mustachioed grin and his mother’s narrow face, Mary Ann in auburn curls and a white silk blouse, and three of their four children sat smiling and happy as if in dinnertime conversation around the dining room table. A photographer captured the moment.

The picture ran as a full-page ad for Jewel Food Stores in the
Chicago Metro News
on Saturday, November 26, 1977. The headline read “Platters Full of Plenty Thanks.”
¹⁷
Near the center of the picture was Ida Mae with a platter full of salad, standing at the head of the table in a polyester
dress, her white hair in a French twist, her big goggle glasses taking up most of her face. Her eyes looked directly into the camera and she smiled as if unburdened and free despite the turmoil outside her front windows. For now, she was taking up a whole page in an ad out of Norman Rockwell in a city that had resisted people like her coming north, and, for one brief holiday weekend, had made it to the big time in Chicago.

INEZ WAS GONE
, but the churchwomen bearing homemade pound cakes held little interest for George Starling. Inez was the only woman he would ever consider as a wife, however unhappy they had been. Now that she was gone, he was left to watch helplessly as the children he was not around enough to raise got themselves into fixes. He would try to impart wisdom from what he had learned from his own mistakes to children and grandchildren who did not appear anxious to hear it. He was getting to be looked upon as just an old man from the South. What did he know of the frustrations of being young and black and wanting to be somebody and all the temptations and obstacles they faced and what it took to survive?

He had been the one to set the course of their lives by migrating to New York before they were born. The parts of the city that black migrants could afford—Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Bronx—had been hard and forbidding places to raise children, especially for some of the trusting and untutored people from the small-town South. The migrants had been so relieved to have escaped Jim Crow that many underestimated or dared not think about the dangers in the big cities they were running to—the gangs, the guns, the drugs, the prostitution. They could not have fully anticipated the effects of all these things on children left unsupervised, parents off at work, no village of extended family to watch over them as might have been the case back in the South. Many migrants did not recognize the signs of trouble when they surfaced and
so could not inoculate their children against them or intercede effectively when the outside world seeped into their lives.

George’s two children would come to resent the overcrowding and the vice and concrete, the people on top of one another and the perils all around. Both Gerard and Sonya would succumb to them in one form or another then run from the toxic influences that caught root in the city. They would move to Florida, the Old Country, by the 1980s, Sonya to Eustis, of all places, which she found smaller and, after the death of Jim Crow, more welcoming, and Gerard to Miami, where he made unheard-of sums of money dealing drugs during the cocaine boom, falling deeper into the drug world he was initiated into as a boy in New York.

Gerard blamed New York for the road he had taken, and he hated the city for it, unable to own up to the choices he himself had made.

“If I hadn’t been born and raised in New York,” he once told his cousin Pat, “I never would have been on drugs. I wouldn’t have lived the life that I lived. I hate New York.”

Both of George’s children went in the opposite direction from the one George had taken, went back to the place he had left and made decisions he couldn’t understand. It was as if their return was a rebuke to his attempt to spare them the pain he had endured and to give them chances at decent schools and work options other than fruit picking, choices he himself had never had growing up.

George would rarely talk about his children, so great was his disappointment.

The one constant in his life was the job on the railroad that took him along the path of the Great Migration he had made himself back during the war. Down and back, South and North, New York to Florida and New York again. He was sixty years old and had been working the rails for thirty-five years. How many times had he plied this route, passed through Wildwood, Jacksonville, Savannah, Raleigh, Richmond, and Washington and on up to New York, again and again? How many thousands of migrants had he helped up the train steps carrying their luggage? How much history had he seen unfolding in the faces of the people boarding those trains?