The Warmth of Other Suns (90 page)

No one in the Monroe Club wants to talk about it. Instead, as if on cue, the never-ending loop of how people are faring back home and in Los Angeles and what they have been through in both places picks up where it left off from the last meeting as if it were fresh and new and has never come up before.

“If you look at it,” Howard Beckwith begins, “we in the same instance
as in the South. They throwing them in jail just like the South. The jails filled with colored people. The South has made a desperate change. Things you couldn’t do in the South, you can do now. You can walk down the street with a white woman. The mayor is black.”

“Who’s that?” someone asks.

“You know Dr. Pierce what run the drugstore,” Beckwith says. “One of his sons.”

“No, it’s not,” someone breaks in, one-upping Beckwith and trying to prove who has the better connections to a place they still feel tied to even if nobody else cares about the distinctions. “It’s one of Dr. Pierce’s
cousin’s
sons. The cousin of Dr. Pierce, one of his sons.”

“
That’s Eliza Davis’s son
,” a woman whispers to me by way of explanation. “
She was my classmate
,” she wants me to know.

Somehow the line of conversation reminds Collins about being black in the South and the talk turns to a kind of testifying rather than an interaction, each member reciting an experience independent from the others and at times seemingly unrelated. Here it is, fifty years after most of them left, and they can’t stop talking about the South. They are exiles with ties to two worlds, still obsessed with the Old Country, and have never let it go.

Collins tells them about the time a white man slapped a ladle of water out of his hand as he was taking a drink. A woman describes being home from college and a policeman coming up and asking why she wasn’t picking cotton or in the kitchen. Someone else mentions the movable sign on the trolley car and how “you had to sit and look at that sign that said ‘Colored.’ ” Everyone nods in recognition.

Marshall brings up the segregated lines and the swiveling ticket agent at the Paramount Theater again. “The woman in the ticket counter swiveled to the white side to sell tickets and then swiveled to the colored,” he says. “We walked up all those flights of stairs.”

“That’s all over the South,” Beckwith says. “You didn’t know nothing different.”

Robert breaks in, momentarily distracted by the meal. “Era, what did you do with the oxtail? It’s out of sight.”

“
Cake and ice cream? Cake and ice cream?
” Mrs. Davis asks with a sugar voice, cake held up high.

Marshall then remembers an incident at Woolworth’s, a seemingly small thing that let him know he was not meant to stay in the South.

“A white girl waited on me and gave me a token for my change,” Marshall begins. “I went to tell on the woman, that she had taken my
money and given me a token back that was worthless. All I got was the satisfaction of telling the man and of telling my mother when I got home.”

He recounted what his mother told him: “You’re going to have to leave this place, you keep that up.”

Which is why Marshall ended up in California.

Then Robert joins in. “I had taken my bath in the tin tub,” he begins. “I was clean.”

“Was that the Saturday-night bath?” Beckwith’s wife, Isabel, asks.

Everyone laughs in recognition. Like most black people in the South, none of them had had indoor plumbing back then, and Saturday was the one night in the week when they could manage the time-consuming ritual of boiling water from the well and filling a tin tub so everyone in a given family could take a bath.

They knew just what Robert meant. They let him finish his story.

“A white man called me over,” Robert goes on. “ ‘Hey, boy, I’ll pay you if you can tell me where I can find a clean colored girl.’ ”

He pauses for effect.

“I told him, ‘I’ll get you one if you get me your mother.’ ”

“Foster, did you really say that?”

“So help me God.”

“You lucky to be alive.”

IDA MAE SETS HONEY
on the window screen in her yellow-tiled kitchen to feed the bees. She gives away tiny seeds of four-o’-clocks and morning glories. They are a wonder to her, waking up as they do at the same time every day, more reliable than the best-intentioned people.

In her kitchen, she cooks no differently than if she were in Mississippi, folding the eggs and sugar, butter and nutmeg into softened sweet potatoes to make sweet potato pie, boiling her collards and mustard greens with ham hocks until they are rich and satiny and then making the corn bread to go with them. She has no use for recipes. It’s all in her memory from what Miss Theenie taught her and her sisters-in-law back in Mississippi. She sifts cornmeal, white flour, a little baking powder, and a palmful of salt into a tin pan. She stirs in six eggs, sprinkles in a little sugar, and spreads a pool of vegetable oil in the baking pan before pouring in the batter.

Not too long ago, Eleanor went down south with a friend and came
back reporting that the people were using self-rising meal for their corn bread in Mississippi now. Ida Mae didn’t know what to make of it. She would have to rethink what she was doing. It was a revolutionary break from how they did things when she was there. For generations, they had used plain old cornmeal, back to slavery days, when that was all that they had. Everything in the recipes in their heads called for it. For years, they’d had self-rising meal in the North, but Ida Mae never tried it because that’s not what they used down south when she was coming up. It wouldn’t be authentic. But Ida Mae thought she might as well try it if that was the way they were doing things now. So she and Eleanor went out and bought some self-rising meal, and Ida Mae tried it. But the corn bread rose up like a pound cake. She wasn’t sure if it was this newfangled meal or how she used it, but she never did try it again.

On this day, she puts the corn bread, made the way it was when she was coming up, into the oven and waits for it to bake. The corn bread grows plump and golden, and Ida Mae pulls it out when it is ready.

“Now you put you some butter and some buttermilk on it,” she says, “and it make you want to hurt yourself.”

At this stage of her life, the kitchen, where she whips up from memory the staples of the South, and the living room, where she monitors the streets of the North, are the center of her everyday world. Lately the invitations she gets are not to the weddings and baby showers of the young but to the funerals and wakes of her dwindling generation. It seems as though every week someone is admitted to the hospital or being eulogized. As she’s the healthiest one in her circle of friends and the oldest member of her extended family, everyone expects to see her in their moments of grief.

She has just heard that another sister-in-law, Dessie, has died, and Ida Mae is getting ready to go to her funeral. The news hurls her back to the Pearson plantation in Mississippi, she and Dessie stopping to pick blackberries and Dessie teaching her how to make blackberry cobbler and tomato pie. She remembers being a young bride in a strange world, of all her husband’s people on the plantation, all the brothers and their wives, the sisters and their kids, and how they took to her and brought her into their family.

“All them dead now,” she says of her husband’s generation of brothers and sisters.

The descendants want her to speak at the funeral since she is the oldest
one left. Ida Mae doesn’t like to dwell on the past or get mired in sadness. She doesn’t want to do it.

“It’s nothing I can say,” she says. “Nothing I can say can bring her back.”

She’s beginning to dread funerals altogether but will go to this one and do what is expected of her. She will console the living, but it’s getting harder and harder.

“I don’t like going to funerals anymore,” she says. “If it’s sad, it just tears me to pieces.”

One day she gets word that her beloved nephew Robert, whom they call Saint and who helped her and her family get out of Mississippi sixty years ago, has suffered a stroke. What is worse, his wife, Catherine, had a stroke just before he did. He had gone to the hospital every day to check on his wife before being stricken himself and each time was heartbroken over her blank stares and unmovable limbs. Now the two of them are separated for the first time in their marriage, she in the hospital, he in rehab. Ida Mae has to visit them both.

Today she is going to see Saint at a rehabilitation center at Ninety-fifth and Cicero. Saint had helped Ida Mae and her husband sell the things they didn’t have time to dispense with or that, had they tried, would have attracted unwanted attention as they plotted their escape. He ended up following them up to Chicago with his wife and family in 1943, and they stayed with Ida Mae and George, as was the tradition among people migrating from the South, until they could get on their feet.

“I decided to come up because I had people up here,” he is saying, sitting in his wheelchair. “People were coming up. I got in the crowd.”

Saint and Ida Mae start reminiscing about the people they know from back home, how they are faring, who’s a deacon now, who’s moved into a nursing home, who’s moved in with their grown kids out in the suburbs.

“It’s a shame we all here and don’t see each other,” Robert says.

Then it hits him that he can’t see his wife either. He starts to look down, and his eyes get moist. It’s been the saddest of years, his wife taking sick and now him in a wheelchair from a stroke just like she had. His eyes well up.

Ida Mae looks at him, sorrowful and sad, too. This is her nephew by marriage. She is not much older than he is. She has known him for some
sixty-five years. She owes him in part for her safe passage out of the South. His wife, Catherine, is one of the sweetest people she has ever known. And they call the man before her Saint for a reason. He wants to be with his wife, but he can’t. The whole thing is breaking Ida Mae’s heart too. But then she catches herself, stiffens her back, and makes up her mind to have none of that pity.

“Now, we not going to do that,” she says staring at the floor, not able to look Saint in the face. “God don’t make no mistakes. Either you gon’ get better or you not. He’s gon’ see about you and do what he want. Now, you be thankful you did all you could. You didn’t miss a day.”

She’s older than all of them but fit and modern in her mint green pantsuit and black pumps and copper mesh hat with her white curls peeking from beneath it, while the younger nephew is bound for the moment to a wheelchair.

She changes the subject, tries to lighten the heaviness in the air. “The kids fuss at me,” she tells him about how she eats everything put before her. “They say, ‘She don’t let no food pass her mouth.’ I say, ‘Be a time you won’t have to worry about me eatin’.’ They say, ‘There she go again.’ ”