The Warmth of Other Suns (89 page)

As torn as George was about his time in Florida, he had never truly left it in his mind. Ever since his father had died, he had kept a little piece of property in Eustis, vacant land with live oaks and scrub brush near the house where his father had run the little convenience store. He never knew exactly what he would do with it and had no plans to live there ever again. He just liked the idea of having control over something in a place that had controlled his every step for so long.

“When I left, I swore that I would never come back under no circumstances anymore,” he said. “When I left, I was just that bitter. I didn’t intend to come back at all.”

Ten years passed before he felt it safe to return. The deaths and illnesses lured him back and he began to see how the South seemed to be changing, in small ways and big ways, right before his eyes. “I never thought I would live to see the day,” he said of some of the strides being made. “If anybody told me that there would be a black mayor in Birmingham, I would have told them they were crazy. Now they have black mayors all over the place down south. How many black mayors we got up north?”

He had once seen a black man and a white woman walking down the street in downtown Tavares, the county seat and the domain of old Willis McCall. George was having a hard time getting used to seeing what could have gotten him killed in his day.

“I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would walk down the street holding hands with a white woman,” he said. “It amazes me when I see the intermingling. When I was a boy down here, when you went through the white neighborhood you had to be practically running. Now black people are living in there. They all mixed up with the whites right there in Eustis.”

We are riding through Eustis and out to the orange groves near Sanford and the train station in Wildwood where the relatives would come to greet George when his train passed through. He and Reuben are returning to the places where they picked oranges and okra, the places they could and couldn’t go and where the black people lived. Reuben does most of the directing because he has been living back in Florida for several years now. George sits up and starts pointing when he sees something he recognizes.

“They used to baptize us down here,” George says as we wind past Lake Eustis. “To the left are the water oak trees.”

We drive farther out. The land is wild scrub brush broken by stands of domed trees, the citrus that ruled their lives growing up.

“Over to the right, over here was woods,” George says, “just like you see to the right, but they cleared that up.”

“Here go the seedling groves,” Reuben says.

“Is that Lake Ale there?”

“That Lake Ale. Those seedling groves right in here had all them pecan trees.”

“Was this the Natural?” George asks of the legendary grove that has withstood the worst winters and hardest of freezes.

“The Natural’s out there by Emaraldi Island.”

“I told you Reuben would know where everything is,” George says, turning in my direction.

“If you dropped an orange in the Natural Grove, five minutes and it would just be hittin’ the ground. You could get up in one of those trees and look all over this south Florida.”

“This is Ole Jones’ place.”

“I picked in that grove where I had a thirty-six-foot ladder spliced with a twenty-six-foot ladder, and it just reached the bottom limb.”

“That’s right. All us here, Charlie, Mud, me, we used to hunt coons and possum ’long here.”

We drive further and further out.

“This here is Ole Cannon Grove.”

“This is not the way it looked before the last big freeze,” George says. “This is new. They reset, they put new trees there.”

“All this here was froze out.”

“Nineteen eighty-nine, it snowed in Florida. Had two and three inches of snow.”

“Have you ever seen a forest that would burn out with a fire?” George asks me. “Well, that’s just the way those trees look. Them
trees looked just like somebody went through there with a flamethrower.”

George comes back to Eustis every two years for the biennial reunion of Curtwright Colored High School. He always comes down on the train he once worked. It’s owned by Amtrak now and, as a pensioner with thirty-five years of service, he gets to ride for free. He can finally sit like the passengers he served and look out the window to see what they saw, reliving with each trip the migration he made all those years ago.

When George returns to Eustis, he is looked upon with a distant kind of respect. He was one of them once, but he chose a different path, knows things they couldn’t know, survived in a place where they’re not sure they could make it. He’s been gone so long that whatever he knows about Eustis is either frozen in the 1940s or distorted through the secondhand recounting in long-distance phone calls and letters and rumor. He’s fuzzy on some of the names of the people who live there now.

Whole generations have been born since he left, and he searches out his connections to them, the ways he might know them—through a grandparent, great-aunt, or second cousin of theirs whom he grew up with but who may not be around anymore. He stays with Viola, the widow of his deceased stepbrother, and spends much of his time visiting with the few people who were around when he was here, reliving those days, and catching up on the things he has missed. When people hear that he’s in town, they head over to Viola’s bungalow and remove their hats before they walk in to see a prodigal son of Eustis.

It is Sunday on the July weekend of the high school reunion, and George puts on his burgundy polyester suit, burgundy tie, burgundy socks, and white straw hat to worship at the church he grew up in as a boy and where the doomed Harry T. Moore recruited him in the early drive for equal rights. Seventy parishioners take their places in the dark wood pews affixed to orange carpet.

Pastor William Hawkins beseeches the congregation to take up a special plate for the black churches that have recently been burned throughout the South. It is as if it is 1963 again.

“We ought to do something to assist them,” he says. “And this is one of the reasons we better secure our own church.”

People pull out money to give to the other churches and pray that
they won’t be next. The choir motions for George to come forward and sing the solo for the collection.

“
What you give, what more He gives to you
,” he sings.

Then the pastor turns to George. “We are always glad to see our member from New York,” Reverend Hawkins says, motioning to George to come to the pulpit to speak.

George stands before the congregation of mostly new faces, the descendants of those he knew, and looks around at a church that was as much a part of him as the South itself.

“Needless to say, I am grateful to be in your midst,” he says. “I look over and see my father and my mother and my daughter. And it always makes me a little full. So if I become emotional, I hope you will understand.”

He then sings a hymn, “
Without God I could do nothing … without him, I would fail.…
”

The congregation claps after he finishes, and he takes his glasses off and wipes the tears with his handkerchief before walking back to his seat at the side of the church. He takes his place and sits upright in a pew next to the pulpit with a silver cane beside him and tears escaping from his eyes.

THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED BIMONTHLY MEETING
of the Monroe, Louisiana, Club of Los Angeles, California, is not so much called to order as roused to life when ten of the sixteen surviving and currently active members trickle into the bungalow of Leo and Era Davis on Ninety-third Street east of Crenshaw. They gather in the Davises’ den with the circular metal staircase and prepare to catch up with one another and with news from back home in Monroe.

It is surely one of the smallest Louisiana clubs in the city, not to mention its being overshadowed by all the Texas Clubs around town. “We’re a dying breed,” says Limuary Jordan, a club member who left Louisiana
in his DeSoto more than half a century before. “It’s a fact. Everybody in the club is over sixty. And without any new Monroe people … there are Monroe people here, but they don’t affiliate with us. They don’t belong to no club. So we are of a particular time.”

“A lot of them don’t have anything to do with the South,” his wife, Adeline, says. “A lot of them, when they left, they were gone.”

The few members who are still active approach the club with a sense of formality and ritual. Robert Foster had to secure approval beforehand to invite a guest, who brings the attendance at today’s meeting to eleven. As the graying expatriates from Monroe begin to take their seats, I explain my presence as his guest and tell them about my work on the Great Migration. They listen without emotion or much in the way of comment, not seeing exactly what the Migration has to do with them, even though they had all been right in the middle of it. At the appointed hour, John Collins, whom they just call Collins, stands up like a proper reverend and prays stiffly in his black suit and gray vest and fedora.

“
Lord, we thank you for this food we are about to receive, and we thank you for another day,” he begins. “We pray for the lady visitor and the book she’s trying to put together. Give her knowledge and wisdom and watch over her. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
”

Spread out before the assembled are oxtails, collard greens, corn bread, sweet potatoes, potato salad, red beans and rice, and pound cake on an orange tablecloth in the wood-paneled dining room.

It is a time of unaccustomed quiet in the city after so much upheaval. The Rodney King beating, police acquittals, and ensuing riots were only a few years back, the business districts of South Central still in recovery. The people have been divided and whipsawed by the O. J. Simpson trial, the saga of a once-loved black football player acquitted of killing his white wife and her friend, the people by now just wishing the whole thing would go away but unable to escape it, billboards and headlines in every direction.

That very day, Robert passed a newspaper box with a poster about the O.J. trial. “I’m so sick of O.J.,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. They have choked us with this.”