The Warmth of Other Suns (91 page)

“I told my kids, I’m doing pretty good to be seventy-seven years old,” Saint says.

Ida Mae looks at him and smiles.

“That ain’t old,” she tells him.

On a late winter afternoon, Ida Mae is going through some old funeral programs like other people go through family photo albums. She starts to thinking about all the funerals she has been to, and one stands out in her mind. It was of a nephew of her husband. The nephew had been gay, and his companion, who was white, was distraught beyond words.

As she is recounting the story, Betty, the tenant from upstairs, happens to be there for a visit. Ida Mae describes how the companion was so torn up about her nephew’s death that he nearly climbed into the casket.

“It was a white fella he was living with,” she says. “And when they closed the casket, that white boy
fell
out. He said, ‘Don’t close the casket!’ He took care of him to the end. Wouldn’t let him go.

“I guess he musta really loved him,” she says.

“That’s not love,” Betty breaks in. “God didn’t mean for no man to be with no other man. They can’t love. They don’t know what love is.”

“You don’t think they can love each other?” Ida Mae asks her.

“Can’t no man love another man. Only men and women can love each other.”

Ida Mae just looks straight ahead toward the couch. She knows what she saw. There are husbands who don’t show out like that for their wives and wives looking relieved and near-gleeful at their husbands’ funerals.

Ida Mae shakes her head. “Well, I don’t know what it is,” she says. “But it sure is something there.”

Ida Mae is the last of her sisters and brothers still alive. The last one to go was Irene, the sister who urged her to come up north in the first place and whom she and her family stayed with in Milwaukee for a time.

Irene died in 1996, and it fell to Ida Mae to manage her affairs. It meant periodic trips to Milwaukee that Ida Mae took on without a great show of sentiment as just part of her duty as a sister.

It is the middle of October 1997. We are driving north toward Milwaukee on Lake Shore Drive along the curves of Lake Michigan. It is a blue glass sea with white waves like the ocean.

It has been a year since Irene’s death, and still Ida Mae has business she must attend to. I had offered to drive Ida Mae and Eleanor to Milwaukee, and we are on our way on a steel gray morning. A storm gathers as we head north on the Edens Expressway. The rain beats down in sheets. Cars are having to slow to a crawl, and you can barely see ahead of you. The trip is going to take much longer than expected. This will cut into the time she will have to take care of things.

“It’s really coming down,” I say. “Of all days. I hope it won’t be like this all day long.”

This sets off an automatic response in Ida Mae, and she reframes the moment for everyone.

“Now, we ain’t got nothing to do with God’s business,” she says, sitting back in her seat.

She adjusts herself and straightens her scarf, contenting herself with whatever the day has in store.

THERE IS A STIRRING
among the original migrants and their children. The question is whether they should go back south again. Some haven’t been back since they left and see no reason to go back now. Some go back and forth all the time and have already picked out a plot of land. George is somewhere in the middle.

He has diabetes now, and his knees are failing him. People in his circle from back in Florida are dying off or moving away. He’s now under some pressure to move back to Florida from people who see the reconstituted South as the next refuge. People who left decades before, and even more likely their children, can’t help but consider the prospects of a changed South, whether they act on it or not.

“
Two more years, and I’ll be able to retire and I’m gone
,” some of the people who came north have been saying. They say they are weary of the confined spaces, the cost of living, the crime, just the stress of living among so many millions of people.

“
I don’t know why you staying up here
,” some of them have been telling George. “
Better get out from here while you can.
”

It reminds George of how people talked during the Migration. “People saying the same thing they said before, just in the reverse,” he says.

But there are fundamental differences, as he sees it, between those who went north and those who stayed in the South, the people and the place he would be returning to if he chose to do so, and he doesn’t see that changing. “Those who didn’t leave learned to accept it,” he says.

He never did.

“I think about leaving the North,” he says. “But I would be a stranger down there. I’ve lived in New York for fifty-two years. I’ve spent more time here than there. I’m a New Yorker now. Almost all the ones I grew up with are in nursing homes. If I went back, what would I do?”

There is an unspoken fear among some migrants to the North that, no matter how much better you could live in the South on those northern pensions, going home is somehow moving backward, a retreat, an admission of failure or at worst something that, like retirement itself,
could signal the end of the full part of life and perhaps the end of life itself.

It was making George think back to what had happened to his old friend Babe Blye.

Babe was George’s best friend and upstairs tenant who had worked with him in the orange groves when they were young men. Babe had come to New York in 1932 with his brother Reuben, well before George, and had gone back and forth between New York and Florida until George came up. For years, the two of them had lived in George’s brownstone together with their wives, like the Ricardos and the Mertzes on
I Love Lucy
.

Babe so loved New York that he didn’t go back to Florida “unless somebody was sick or died,” Reuben said.

For years he worked at a car-painting factory in New York, caught possum in the Connecticut woods for their barbecues, and ran poker parties with George that almost got them killed. When Babe got sick, he went to George and told him he was going home. He asked George, whom he always called Son, a favor before he left.

“Son,” Babe said. “I ain’t gon’ live long, Son. I’m going back. But I want you to sing ‘Peace in the Valley’ at my funeral.”

“Babe, I ain’t got no guarantee I’m a outlive you.”

“Oh, yeah, you gon’ outlive me.”

“Well, close as we’ve been, I don’t know if I can sing that.”

“Goddammit, I want you to sing ‘Peace in the Valley’ now,” Babe said. “Goddammit, I want you to promise me ’fore I go. You gon’ sing ‘Peace in the Valley’?”

“Okay. Yeah, Babe, I’m a sing ‘Peace in the Valley.’ ”

In his heart he knew he couldn’t. They were too close, like brothers, Babe and his wife, Hallie Q., upstairs from George and Inez all those years.

Babe left New York and went back to Eustis to live out his final years. He didn’t live terribly long after that, a couple of years, as George and Reuben recalled.

He knew he was sick when he left. “He didn’t tell me everything,” George said. “But he knew something was wrong. And all of a sudden, he got it on his mind he wanted to go back home.”

Babe died in 1976. The funeral was at the St. James Methodist Church, where George and Sam and Mud had eaten all those oranges back when they were little boys.

George went back for the funeral but didn’t think he could get
through a song about his friend and onetime crew foreman who had protected him in the orange groves. He figured he wouldn’t have to, what with Babe being gone and no one there to make him do it.

Apparently Babe had told his wife, Hallie Q. She went up to George at the funeral.

“George, you supposed to sing ‘Peace in the Valley,’ ” she said.

“Q., I can’t do it.”

“You promised Babe.”

Somehow George got through the song Babe loved so much. George had to take his handkerchief and wipe his eyes at the end of it. The original Migration people were falling away.

ROBERT’S FRIENDS
and former classmates are getting up in years and facing one ailment or another, which puts Robert in almost as much demand as he was when he had a full-time practice. A friend called to complain about a cough and thought he might need to go to the hospital. Robert calmed him down and told him to give the antibiotics a chance to work.

Today he has gotten word that an old classmate from Morehouse is in the hospital, and Robert wants to go by and see him. We drive to a hospital in South Central. As we walk out of the elevator to get to the man’s room, someone runs toward us.

“Dr. Foster, Dr. Foster!” the man is exclaiming.

It’s an orderly who recognizes Robert from years ago and comes over to him out of breath.

“Don’t you remember me from that appendectomy over on Hoover?”

“Why, of course, I do,” Robert says, not remembering the man exactly but not letting on.

The orderly gets Robert caught up on what he has been doing the past few years, excitedly trying to impress him, and Robert wishes him well.