The Warmth of Other Suns (99 page)

One of the headstones appears to be testimony to the hard times the people faced under Jim Crow.

It reads simply:
THY TRIAL’S ENDED
.

Aubrey scans the headstones of all the people they once knew.

“Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?” Aubrey asks her.

“No, I’m gonna be in Chicago,” she tells him.

We pull up to a frame house with a pickup truck and farm implements in the yard. It’s where David McIntosh lives. He was the suitor who rode on horseback to court Ida Mae had when she was a young girl and who lost out to the man who married Ida Mae and carried her off to Chicago.

Had things turned out differently, had she not married George, this might be where Ida Mae would be living: on a Chickasaw County farm with chickens and pole beans in walking distance from where she grew up. She would never have lived in Chicago, might never have seen it. She wouldn’t have been able to vote all those years or work in a big city hospital, to ride the elevated train and taste Polish sausage and be surrounded by family and friends most everywhere she went because most everyone she knew moved north like she did. Her children—James, Eleanor, Velma—not to mention the grandchildren, might not have existed or would surely have been different from what they were if they had. It’s almost incomprehensible now.

David comes out of the house in his baseball cap. He has not seen
her in half a lifetime. He recognizes her instantly. He breaks into a smile.

“How you, Ida Mae?”

“I’m blessed,” she says, smiling back.

He is a compact man in soiled denim and bifocals, not much taller than Ida Mae. He stayed in Mississippi and lived his life close to the land, the opposite of how Ida Mae ended up. He studies her face across the decades and reaches out and grabs her hand.

Just then, David’s wife, in white braids, comes out to see who is visiting, and Ida Mae and David keep it to a warm hug and a few words.

Ida Mae climbs into the car, still looking back at David, and he still looking at her.

“Bless his heart,” Ida Mae says, as the car backs out of his dirt yard. “I knew him the minute I saw him.”

That turned out to be the last time they would see each other. He died the next year, and she would not mourn so much as contemplate the meaning of what might have been and what their lives had turned out to be.

IDA MAE’S LIVING ROOM
had a pink glow to it. The new venetian blinds she dreamed of had finally arrived. Their pink slats cast a rose-colored light in the room. It was just how she liked to see the world, and she was happier for it. She was all dressed up, her hair in cotton white Shirley Temple curls, pink lipstick on, smiling and free. It was her eighty-sixth birthday.

A thick snow was falling outside and coated the trees. Betty, who lived upstairs, waited with her for the guests to arrive.

The news was on. There was a report about a white man who had gotten the death penalty for dragging a black man to death in Jasper, Texas. But this was Ida Mae’s birthday, and no one wanted to think about black men being dragged to death. They had lived it, and it hadn’t
gone away, and there was nothing they could do about it. Plus, that was Texas, not Mississippi. They were from Mississippi.

Outside, a man was parking his truck in front of the empty lot next to Ida Mae’s house. She heard the screeching of the brakes and turned toward the window to see what was going on.

“He needs to move that truck,” Ida Mae said. “That rusted-back truck is blocking my view.”

Eleanor’s daughter Karen arrived with a new boyfriend named Mike. He had a square jaw and specks of gray in his hair, looked to be late forties to midfifties. When Mike came in, Ida Mae noticed him right away. “I don’t know who that is,” she said, “but he sho’ ain’t bad on the eyes.”

Their old friend Wilks Battle walked in and took a seat next to Ida Mae. He had just come from the hospital. His mother had been diagnosed with liver cancer. The doctor said there was no more they could do. He said it could be two months or two days, they just didn’t know. He bent his head down, eyes cast to the carpet.

Ida Mae looked wide-eyed into his face with wonder and sympathy. All the people she had lost and buried, and still she listened as if this were the first she had heard of death and the first she had seen of grief.

“Well,” she said in a low and gentle voice, “God don’t make no mistakes.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know,” he said, looking away.

“No, God don’t make no mistakes.”

The meal was fish—“cat” and “buffalo” that Eleanor fried—coleslaw, and hush puppies. Mary Ann made the tuna macaroni salad and apple muffins. Karen brought a yellow layer cake with strawberries on top and the potato salad she was still refusing to divulge the recipe for no matter how much people begged.

The ten or so people gathered for Ida Mae’s birthday that night stood in a circle around the dining room table as Mary Ann prayed, “Dear God, thank you for Grandmother …”

Ida Mae made sure to sit across the dining room table from Mike, her granddaughter notwithstanding, and proceeded to tell her story.

“I been in Chicago sixty-two years,” she began. “I came here in 1937. Well, I came to Milwaukee first. I came when Eleanor was three month old and James was three year old. In them days on the train, everybody had shoe boxes full of food.”

“The ways we got here …,” Mike said, shaking his head.

He had come up late, in 1969.

“I came up as a young man from Macomb, Mississippi,” he said. “I guess it was coming to an end then. People stopped coming when things got better in the South.”

A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.

It was a new century now. Ida Mae had never expected to see it. But here she was about to celebrate another birthday. She didn’t know how many more she might live to see, and she didn’t worry about it. It was March 2002. She was in a new chair by the window now. It was a gold velveteen recliner that could swivel and pivot, and she could watch the world play out beneath her from whatever angle she chose. She had replaced the baby blue carpet and the baby blue plastic-covered furniture she inherited from the nice Italian people when she bought the three-flat some thirty-five years ago. She had hung new draperies and kept the new blinds at half-mast to frame her view of the mayhem below. It was better than a movie.

“The police,” she’d say, “they riding tonight. When it’s a shooting, they ride for a good week. They been riding hard lately.”

That meant the street might be quiet for a change. She lived with the daughter she had carried in her belly to the New World, the daughter who was now a grandmother herself, and with the daughter’s son, whose quick mind and good nature couldn’t protect him from the will of the streets. Just about every evening, James, the son who had balked at the shoes she had tried to put on him for the migration north and who was now a grandfather, his hair flecked with gray, would come up from the first floor to watch
Wheel of Fortune
with her on the Magnavox.

She had outlived her proud and stoic husband; her two oldest daughters; the suitor she might have married who would have kept her in the South; the hot-headed Willie Jim, who raised his chains up to her that night in Mississippi; old Mr. Edd, who was a decent boss man but still made life harder than it had to be down south; Miss Julie McClenna,
blind and sweet though she was; and even the more tortured souls like Robert Foster and George Starling, whom she never knew but who, along with several million others, were on the train out of the South with her in spirit if not in fact.

Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true.

There had been sickness, disappointment, premature and unexpected losses, and, among their children, more divorces than enduring marriages, but at least the children had tried. The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

Ida Mae outlasted them all. Here she was, well into a new millennium no one ever thought she would live to see, eighty-nine going on ninety, and dancing some old version of the black bottom that the old people wouldn’t let her dance eight decades before. She was snapping her fingers to B. B. King, who had come north from Mississippi like her, from a place called Itta Bena. She was singing along with the words: “
To know you is to love you, is to see you being free as the wind …
”