I was a Southerner, and I had the map of Dixie on my tongue.93
—ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Dust Tracks on a Road
CHICAGO, LATE 1938
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
THERE WAS A KNOCK on the door at Ida Mae’s tiny flat one afternoon when she was at home alone taking care of the children. It was a neighbor lady who had taken notice of the new family just up from Mississippi, seen that the young mother was by herself with the little ones much of the time, the husband likely off to work somewhere, and the neighbor lady was saying she had come to introduce herself.
Ida Mae thought it was awfully nice of the lady to drop by. She hadn’t been in Chicago long, as the woman likely knew. George had secured the apartment while Ida Mae was in Mississippi giving birth to Eleanor.
On days when there was no work to be had, Ida Mae was cooped up in the kitchenette apartment, far from home, in a big, loud city she didn’t yet know. She was used to wide-open spaces, trees everywhere, being able to see the sun set and rise and the sky stretched out over the field. She was used to killing a chicken if she needed one, not lining up at a butcher and paying for it in pieces with money she didn’t have. As much as she hated picking cotton, she missed her sisters-in-law and the other families on the plantation and her mother and younger sister. She didn’t know too many people in Chicago yet and was isolated with only little James and Eleanor with her during the day, as Velma was off in grade school.
So Ida Mae welcomed the neighbor lady and invited her in to sit a while. The lady had brought something with her. It was a bottle of homemade wine. Ida Mae had never had wine before. George didn’t believe in it, and Ida Mae never had occasion to try it.
The woman opened the bottle and poured some for the two of them to drink while they talked. Ida Mae took a few sips and started feeling woozy as the woman asked her how she’d gotten there. The woman learned all about how Ida Mae’s family first tried Milwaukee and how Ida Mae went back to Mississippi to have the baby when George told her he was going to try Chicago. The woman poured more wine, and Ida Mae got giddy and light-headed. She had never felt this way before.
The woman was from Mississippi but had been in Chicago for some time, had gotten to know the city’s virtues and vices and how a city resident, which Ida Mae now was, should comport oneself. She told Ida Mae that now that she was in the North, she shouldn’t wear her head scarf out in public—that was for back when she was in the field; that she shouldn’t hang her wet laundry out the front window, even though there was no place else to let the linens dry out in the open sun like back home; that she should make sure the kids had shoes on when they went out, even though the kids hated shoes and shoes cost money they didn’t have.
Ida Mae told the lady she appreciated that advice, but soon she wasn’t comprehending much of anything the neighbor lady was saying. When the bottle of wine was finished, the lady said she’d better be heading back home.
George came home soon after the neighbor lady left. He found Ida Mae giggling and slurring her words, talking gibberish, and the children needing to eat and get their diapers changed. She told him that a nice neighbor lady had stopped by and that she had tried some of the wine the lady brought.
George was furious. The devilment of the city had come right into his home, as hard as he tried to protect his family from it. Ida Mae was too sweet-natured to recognize when someone might be taking advantage and wasn’t wise to the machinations of the people who had preceded them to Chicago. She wouldn’t have noticed if they made fun of them, looked down on them, or took pleasure in seeing the simple country people fall under the city’s spell. He had to make it clear to Ida Mae that she was not to just let anybody in—this was Chicago, after all. He told her he didn’t want that lady coming around anymore and that Ida Mae wasn’t to drink any more wine, which was a sin in his estimation anyway.
When Ida Mae came to her senses, she was shamefaced about what had happened. She was waking up to the ways and the people of the North. She soon learned that the colored people who had gotten there before her and had assimilated to the city didn’t look too kindly upon her innocent country ways.
In the receiving cities of the North and West, the newcomers like Ida Mae had to worry about acceptance or rejection not only from whites they encountered but from the colored people who arrived ahead of them, who could at times be the most sneeringly judgmental of all.
The northern-born colored people and the long-standing migrants, who were still trying to keep their footing in the New World, often resented the arrival of the unwashed masses pouring in from the very places some of the old-timers had left. As often happens with immigrant groups, some of the old-timers would have preferred to shut the door after they got there to protect their own uncertain standing.
The small colony of colored people already in the New World had made a place for themselves as an almost invisible minority by the time the Migration began. Many were the descendants of slaves the North had kept before Abolition or of slaves who fled the South on the Underground Railroad or were among the trickle of pioneers who had migrated from the South in the decades after the Civil War.
A good portion were in the servant class—waiters, janitors, elevator operators, maids, and butlers to the wealthiest white families in the city. But some had managed to create a solid though tenuous middle class of Pullman porters, postal workers, ministers, and businessmen who were anxious to keep the status and gains they had won. The color line restricted them to the oldest housing in the least desirable section of town no matter what their class, but they had tried to make the best of it and had created a world within a world for themselves.
From this group came the letters and newspaper stories about the freedoms of the North that helped inspire blacks to leave the South in the first place. The Great Migration brought in many a northerner’s sweetheart, aunts, uncles, siblings, nieces, nephews, parents, and children. It also delivered hundreds of thousands of new customers, voters, readers, patients, and parishioners to the black institutions that stood to profit and be forever changed by the influx.
“They have been our best patrons,” a colored physician in Chicago told researchers studying the Migration in the 1930s.94 “We have increased from five to two hundred and fifty doctors. We are living in better homes, and have more teachers in the schools; and nearly every colored church has benefitted.”
Businessmen jumped at the opportunity.95 They opened restaurants serving hog maws and turnip greens. A man named Robert Horton opened Hattiesburg Shaving Parlor in a five-block stretch along Rhodes Avenue where some 150 families from that Gulf Coast town were huddled together. A few blocks away, there sat the Mississippi Coal and Wood Company, the Florida East Coast Shine Parlor to pull in the Floridians, and the Carolina Sea Island Candy Store for those who’d made it from there.
The Migration made giddy landlords of some of the old-timers. It gave them the chance to get extra money and bragging rights, too, by renting their spare rooms and garages to the new people. In Los Angeles and Oakland, it became a status symbol to have the wherewithal to take in roomers.
“I got a sharecropper,” a woman in Los Angeles was heard boasting.96
“Honey, I got me three sharecroppers!” another one said.
The churches stood to gain the most, and did. They ran notices in the Defender proclaiming, “Strangers welcome.”97 Walters African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago tripled in membership. The city’s Olivet Baptist Church got five thousand new members in the first three years of the Migration, making it one of the largest Baptist churches and one of the first megachurches in the country. A migrant from Alabama said she couldn’t get in the first time she went. “We’d have to stand up,” she said. “I don’t care how early we’d go, you wouldn’t get in.”
But soon the cultural and class divisions between the newcomers and the old-timers began to surface. Many of the migrants, seeking the status and security they could not get back home, filled the stained-glass sanctuaries of the mainline churches. Others were overwhelmed by the size of the congregations and the austerity of their services. One migrant said she “couldn’t understand the pastor and the words he used” at Olivet and couldn’t get used to the singing. “The songs was proud-like,” she said.
A migrant from Louisiana felt out of place at Pilgrim Baptist, another big, old-line church. “Nobody said nothing,” the migrant said. “But there were whispers all over the place.”
The migrants did as much moving around from church to church as they did from flat to flat. They tended to favor smaller storefront churches opened up by ministers fresh from the South, where they could sing the spirituals, catch the spirit, and fan themselves like they were used to. The reason one woman left a mainline church was because it was “too large—it don’t see the small people.”
The migrants brought new life to the old receiving stations. But by their sheer numbers, they pressed down upon the colored people already there. Slumlords made the most of it by subdividing what housing there was into smaller and smaller units and investing as little as possible in the way of upkeep to cash in on the bonanza. It left well-suited lawyers and teachers living next to sharecroppers in head scarves just off the Illinois Central. The middle-class and professional people searched for a way out.
“They tried to insulate themselves by moving further south along the narrow strip that defined the gradually expanding South Side Black Belt,” wrote the historian James Grossman.98 “But the migrants inevitably followed.”
Unlike their white counterparts, the old settlers had few places to go and were met with hostility and violence if they ventured into white neighborhoods. The color line hemmed them in—newcomers and old-timers alike—as they all struggled to move up. “The same class of Negroes who ran us away from Thirty-seventh Street are moving out there,” a colored professional man said after moving further south to Fifty-first Street ahead of the migrants.99 “They creep along slowly like a disease.”
The fate of the city people was linked to that of the migrants, whether they liked it or not, and the city people feared that the migrants could jeopardize the status of them all. A colored newspaper called Searchlight chastised them for boarding the streetcars in soiled work clothes after a day at the stockyards and accused them of threatening the freedoms colored people had in the North.100 “Don’t you know that you are forcing on us here in Chicago a condition similar to the one down South?”
A survey of new migrants during World War II found that an overwhelming majority of them looked up to the people who were there before them, admired them, and wanted to be as assured and sophisticated as they were.101 But a majority of the colored people already in the New World viewed the newcomers in a negative light and saw them as hindering opportunities for all of them.
The anxious old settlers were “like German Jews who in the late nineteenth century feared that the influx of their coreligionists from eastern Europe would endanger their marginal but substantial foothold in gentile Chicago,” wrote the historian James R.102 Grossman.
“Those who have long been established in the North have a problem,” the Chicago Defender acknowledged.103 “That problem is the caring for the stranger within their gates.”
It turned out that the old-timers were harder on the new people than most anyone else. “Well, their English was pretty bad,” a colored businessman said of the migrants who flooded Oakland and San Francisco in the forties, as if from a foreign country.104 To his way of looking at it, they needed eight or nine years “before they seemed to get Americanized.”
As the migrants arrived in the receiving stations of the North and West, the old-timers wrestled with what the influx meant for them, how it would affect the way others saw colored people, and how the flood of black southerners was a reminder of the Jim Crow world they all sought to escape. In the days before Emancipation, as long as slavery existed, no freed black was truly free. Now, as long as Jim Crow and the supremacy behind it existed, no blacks could ever be sure they were beyond its reach.
One day a white friend went up to a longtime Oakland resident named Eleanor Watkins to ask her what she thought about all the newcomers.
“Eleanor,” the woman said, “you colored people must be very disgusted with some of the people who have come here from the South and the way they act.”105
“Well, Mrs. S.,” Eleanor Watkins replied. “Yes, some colored people are very disgusted, but as far as I’m concerned, the first thing I give them credit for is getting out of the situation they were in.… Maybe they don’t know how to dress or comb their hair or anything, but their children will and their children will.”
In the early years of the Migration, the Chicago Defender took it upon itself to help correct the country people it had helped lure to the North to better fit the city people’s standard of refinement. “It is our duty,” the Defender wrote, “to guide the hand of a less experienced one, especially when one misstep weakens our chance for climbing.”106
The Defender ran periodic lists of “do’s and don’ts” that recirculated over time and were repeated to newcomers like Ida Mae:
DON’T HANG OUT THE WINDOWS.107
DON’T SIT AROUND IN THE YARD AND ON THE PORCH BAREFOOT AND UNKEMPT.
DON’T WEAR HANDKERCHIEFS ON YOUR HEAD.
DON’T USE VILE LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC PLACES.108
DON’T ALLOW CHILDREN TO BEG ON THE STREETS.
DON’T APPEAR ON THE STREET WITH OLD DUST CAPS, DIRTY APRONS AND RAGGED CLOTHES.
DON’T THROW GARBAGE IN THE BACKYARD OR ALLEY OR KEEP DIRTY FRONT YARDS.
The Chicago Urban League, which helped direct migrants to temporary shelter, rental options, and jobs, was the closest the migrants got to Customs in the North. It held what it called “Strangers Meetings” to help acclimate the newcomers, and its members went door-to-door, passing out leaflets advising the migrants as to their behavior and comportment. To the Defender’s do’s and don’ts, the Urban League distributed cards adding the following admonishments:
1. DO NOT LOAF. GET A JOB AT ONCE.109
2. DO NOT LIVE IN CROWDED ROOMS. OTHERS CAN BE OBTAINED.
3. DO NOT CARRY ON LOUD CONVERSATIONS IN STREET CARS AND PUBLIC PLACES.
4. DO NOT KEEP YOUR CHILDREN OUT OF SCHOOL.
5. DO NOT SEND FOR YOUR FAMILY UNTIL YOU GET A JOB.
Ida Mae didn’t take it personally when people pointed these things out to her, like the neighbor lady who had brought the wine. Ida Mae wouldn’t likely have seen her again because the family moved so much in those early months in Chicago. But she thanked people like her and a lady who mentioned her head scarf on the bus one day. She was grateful for the advice and, in fact, took most of it.
But there were some things she was not ever going to do. She was never going to change her name to something citified and highfalutin. She was never going to take on northern airs and name-drop about the pastor she knew from this or that church or the alderman who stopped to greet her at the polls, even though she would come to know famous people who made good up in the North because she had known their kin people back in Mississippi. She was never going to forget the folks back home and how she loved them so. She was never going to change her Mississippi drawl, not in the least, not even after she had spent more of her life in the North than in the South, not even when some northerners still had trouble understanding her decades after she’d been there; though she wasn’t trying to be difficult and was just being herself, she simply didn’t care what anybody thought. It didn’t matter, because people seemed to love her for it.
She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself, where nobody could judge her, and inside the walls of their kitchenette apartment where she made turnip greens and peach cobbler and sweet potato pie flecked with nutmeg and sang spirituals like in Mississippi as often as she liked.
NEW YORK, JANUARY 1947
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
IT TOOK EIGHT YEARS OF MARRIAGE, broken by fearsome silences and fitful separations due to George’s work on the railroad and the circumstances under which he had to migrate north. But finally George and Inez had a baby. It was a boy. He was born in January 1947, and they named him Gerard. There were already enough Georges in the family, and Gerard was close enough.
“I was the happiest man in the world when this boy came,” George said. “I thought we weren’t gonna never have no children.”
George couldn’t stop taking pictures of the baby. And the arrival of their son gave Inez a new purpose. She threw herself into motherhood. That was a good thing, because, soon after the baby was born, George had to take to the road again to care for his growing family.
In no time George was back on the rails, working the legendary trains that followed the East Coast route of the Great Migration. His job put him in the middle of one of the biggest population shifts in the country’s history. He saw firsthand the continuing stream of people pouring out in front of him. He helped them carry their cardboard boxes tied with string, the hand-me-down suitcases, the hatboxes and steamer trunks. Some came north with only a cotton sack or a paper bag with all they owned or were able to get out with.
“Time they get their seat and their bags up, here come the shoe boxes,” he said. Fried chicken, boiled eggs, crackers, and cakes.
He was working the Silver Comet from New York to Birmingham, the Silver Spur from New York to Tampa, and the other Great Migration trains. His job was to help people load their bags, direct them to their seats, warm their babies’ milk, and generally attend to their needs and clean up after them. The ride could last as long as twenty-eight hours from the southernmost stop to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.
George walked up and down the train aisles, helping people board or disembark at every stop along the way. He rarely got a chance to sit down, much less sleep. The pay was lower than it might otherwise have been because he was expected to get tips to compensate for it. But when he was working the Jim Crow car, he was mostly servicing the lowliest, poorest-paid workers in the South—or in the country, for that matter. Many of them had never been on the train before and knew nothing about the protocol of gratuities.
They gave him food instead. “Want some fried chicken?” the colored passengers would ask him. “I give you some fried chicken. You already gettin’ paid.”
He had come from the place they were leaving and knew not to expect a tip or hold it against them. He knew the fear and uncertainty in their hearts because he had felt it himself. He had ridden the night train north just as they had and spoke their language and could read the worried optimism in the faces.
When the train approached Washington, D.C., the dividing line between the Jim Crow South and the free North, and rode deeper into the Promised Land, his role took on an unexpected significance.
As they neared the final stops, it became necessary for George to become more than a baggage handler, but tutor and chaperone to nervous charges arriving in the New World. At the moment of the migrants’ greatest fear and anxiety, it fell to him to ease them into the Promised Land, tell them whatever he knew about this new place, which bus or subway to take, how far the station was from their cousin’s apartment, to watch out for panhandlers and hustlers who might take what little change they had left, and usher them and their luggage off to whatever the future held for them.
It was his tap on the shoulder that awakened them as the train neared their stop and alerted them to their new receiving city. He and other colored porters were men in red caps and white uniforms, but they functioned as the midwives of the Great Migration, helping the migrants gather themselves and disembark at the station and thus delivering to the world a new wave of newcomers with each arriving train.
It seemed to George that the moment they stepped on the train going north, they became different people, started acting like what they imagined the people up north to be. Some started talking their version of a northern accent, sitting up straighter, eating their chicken wings with their pinkie out, becoming more like the place they were heading to. “A lot of them pretending to be always northerners,” George said, knowing full well the difference.
Heading south, it was a quiet and sober train, filled with the people of the North returning home, in their finest suits and hats, and southern visitors having just seen the big city for themselves.
Heading north, the trains were more festive and anxious, filled with people migrating out with all their worldly goods and the people from the North returning to their adopted cities with all they could manage to take with them that they missed from back home in the South.
George could tell the people from the North. The bags that were empty heading south were now heavy with ham and hog head cheese and turnip roots and sweet potatoes and any little thing they cherished from back home and had a hard time getting in the North or that, if they could get it in the North, just didn’t taste the same.
One day at a little station somewhere in South Carolina, George helped his passengers get their bags up onto the luggage rack above the seats on the Silver Comet as he always did. The train then left the station, and George was in the back of the colored railcar. He always liked to stand in the back so he could observe the passengers and see who might need his help.
“They wanted to assign us seats in the front,” George said of the bulkhead crew seats, “but I never liked sitting in front of my people. I couldn’t see how I could be helpful in the car, sitting in front of everybody. I like to sit behind them so I can see what’s happening.”
That day after the train left the station in South Carolina, he began to notice the sound of a slow drip hitting the floor of the railcar and the seats below. He looked up and saw that it was coming from a bag up on the luggage rack. Whatever the liquid was, it was red and looked to be blood, and as he got closer he discovered that it was in fact blood dripping out of the bag.
“They must have just killed a hog or something, cut him up and put him in the bag,” George said. “I keep hearing something dripping, and I look up, and here’s this bag with blood just drippin’ all out of this bag. They done butchered up somebody’s chicken or hog and had him in the bag. They must have done it on the way to the train, and they didn’t get rid of all the blood, they were still draining in the bag rack.”
George was used to people bringing all kinds of things, live chickens and rabbits, a whole side of a pig. But this was the first time someone brought something they hadn’t even finished butchering. George took the bag and sat it on the floor. He wiped it down and mopped up the blood that had dripped from it. He never did see whose bag it was or what kind of animal was inside it, given all that he had to do tending to the train and the other customers. And no passenger claimed the bloody bag for the duration of the trip. In the commotion of arrival at one of the stations up north, the bag just disappeared into the disembarking crowd, its owner having claimed it in anonymity.
After a while, nothing surprised George, but he dreaded the work he was in for on the rides north. The bags were so heavy he could barely lift them from the ground. His knees were bad from all the basketball he used to play in high school, and the people, having morphed into northerners just by stepping onto the Silver Comet, were expecting the full rights of citizenship, to begin with George picking up their overloaded bags.
They carried jars of fig preserves, pole beans, snap peas, and peaches, whole hams, whatever the folks back home were growing on the farm and other treasured pieces of the South they could carry back with them.
One passenger came on with a big hatbox that looked innocent enough, but when George tried to pick it up, the front end flew up and he could feel something moving inside. When he tried to steady the hatbox, the other side flew up.
“I could feel it going to the front,” he said. “She had a big old watermelon in there rolling down in the bag. That’s why it was flopping back and forth.”
A man with a trunk boarded at a tiny station somewhere near Abbeville, South Carolina, bound for New York. George saw him and jumped down from the train.
“I need some help with my bag,” the man said.
George reached down to grab the trunk and fell trying to lift it.
“Hey, man,” George said. “What do you have in this bag?”
“Clothes, daddy, clothes,” the man said. “You know I been down here for two weeks. I had to have something to change in.”
“Yeah,” George said. “Okay, then, if you want your clothes up on this train, you better give me a hand with this bag. ’Cause I can’t lift it off the ground.”
Together they pushed it up the steps and shoved it onto the train. The train rocked from side to side as George struggled to drag the trunk down the aisle.
It was dark by now, and George managed to push the trunk to the back. He held up one end by the handle to position it in a corner away from the other passengers. Then he dropped it.
“And when it hit the floor, the latches flew off,” George said.
And out came the contents.
“The potatoes rolled out that bag, and the engineer is hitting these curves,” George said, “and you could hear ’em rolling all over the floor.”
The man whose trunk it was got alarmed.
“Hey, daddy, you gotta flashlight?” he asked.
“I don’t have no flashlight that’s gonna last long enough for you to find all your clothes,” George said. “ ’Cause they rolling all over the train. And I need my flashlight. I’m sorry, man.”
The train lurched from side to side and from one curve into the next and with each curve came the rumbling sound of mud-caked Carolina sweet potatoes. The colored car was in an uproar, the man’s trunk flung open, its latch broken, the man running down the aisle in the dark after the contents, and the fifty-one other passengers rolling with laughter and very likely helping themselves to sweet potatoes they hadn’t managed to bring aboard themselves but that would make a nice sweet potato pie once they got back to Harlem.
LOS ANGELES, 1954
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
ALICE BEGAN SETTING UP HOUSE in the walk-up apartment Robert had scrambled to secure for his family after the apartment he wanted mysteriously fell through. It was nowhere near the space Alice was accustomed to and had few of the amenities and not a whiff of the grandeur of her parents’ brick Georgian estate back in Atlanta.
As she began to arrange what furniture they had, shop for groceries, dust, and clean, which she had never in her life really had to do before, and direct their two little girls, it soon hit Alice and Robert: they had been married for twelve years but had never lived together as husband and wife, other than their short tour of duty in Austria, where they had not so much kept house as camped out. Such was the life of ambitious black southerners trying to find a place for themselves in a not altogether welcoming world. Robert had been in medical training for much of those twelve years of marriage, and the Clements had thought it best that Alice stay with them while Robert pursued his internships and residencies and tried to figure out and save up for where he wanted to migrate.
Over the years, they had seen each other when they could. But they had both settled into their own ways of doing things, essentially living out their lives on their own. Now that they were finally all together in Los Angeles, it hit them that they didn’t really know each other.
Alice didn’t know how Robert liked his food cooked or that he was prone to work late hours. Robert had to learn how to be a father to two daughters who had been raised by socialite grandparents and who were missing the only world they had ever known.
He came to that realization when he was out with his older daughter, Bunny, one day. She saw a toy she wanted and was insisting that her father buy it for her. Robert had just opened his practice and was watching every nickel. Bunny had been raised like a princess back in Atlanta, and Robert thought she had more than enough toys and dolls as it was.
“Why, you don’t need that,” Robert told her.
“Well, if you don’t give it to me, Granddaddy will.”
Robert discovered that his whole family was really the Clements’ and not his, and he had to figure out how to reclaim his status in the household. He and Alice began fighting over her cooking, which had become a symbol of their class differences and the variation in southern culture, depending upon which state you happened to be from.
Robert wanted oxtails and turnip greens and red-peppered gumbo like he grew up with in Louisiana. Alice had never really cooked for him before. And what she cooked was what any well-born 1950s homemaker would prepare for her family—the soufflés and casseroles of the upper classes of the day. She went to a great deal of trouble to make these Betty Crocker–era meals. But Robert didn’t like them, and he took her style of cooking as a repudiation of his tastes.
“It needs some more seasoning in it,” he said.
“The children don’t like it that way,” Alice told him.
“Children eat what their mama give ’em,” Robert said. “And you give ’em the food the way I like it to be cooked.”
But it was already too late. The children had become set in their expectations, the family system already established. Robert and Alice fought and fought over it. They were paying a price for the sacrifices they had made to get established outside the South. Every day, they were confronted with a difference they hadn’t noticed before, something so basic as a meal suddenly becoming a metaphor of the different worlds they came from. The dinner table became a testing of wills over which culture would prevail, the high-toned world of black elites in Atlanta or the hardscrabble but no less proud black middle class of small-town Louisiana, and, more important, who was going to run the family—the Clements from afar or Robert, who was working long hours to take care of them now.
It exposed a chasm between the two of them that would never be fully resolved but that both would have to live with. “That was a big hurdle,” Robert said.
As it was, they were living in a cramped apartment with temporary furniture and tacked-down rugs and trying to make the best of it.
“We were not defined by where we lived,” Robert said. “We felt we’d make it in time. And we lived that way.”
So long as they were in a walk-up apartment, Alice put off her socialite yearnings. She wanted to wait to make her presence known to the colored elite in Los Angeles. She wanted to wait until they could secure a house more befitting her station. She took a position teaching third grade in the Los Angeles public school system to help them save up for the house they would need before she could announce herself to L.A. society.
Robert didn’t see the point of waiting. She was the same person now as she would be when they got a house. But Alice knew the value of a proper entrance when one was coming in as an outsider, as any southerner new to California would be. Robert kept asking anyway. It would be good for business to start making connections, and she was all but assured of acceptance to those patrician circles by birth alone.
“Well, when you gonna join?” he’d ask her.
“It’s too expensive for us out here now,” she’d say. “The time’s not right.”
From Atlanta, her mother had signed her up with the Links, perhaps the most elite of the invitation-only, class- and color-conscious colored women’s societies of the era.
But Alice wouldn’t activate her membership until they got a house. “We’re not ready, Robert,” she said. “No, we’re not ready.”
It was a reminder to Robert that he had not yet lived up to her and her family’s expectations. The shadow of Rufus Clement loomed over him from across the continent. The family he was just now getting to know was used to living on an estate with formal gardens and servants, and here they were, cramped together with him in a walk-up apartment like waitstaff.
Robert was not in a position to duplicate what they had back in Atlanta. So he set out to prove himself in other ways. If Alice wasn’t ready to go Hollywood, Robert was. His practice was just beginning to take off, and he had an idea of what he needed to cap off the image he was trying to create. He went to Dr. Beck for advice.
“Doctor, I wanna buy a Cadillac,” Robert said, announcing his desire for the most coveted car on the market in those days. “Do you think I’d hurt myself if I bought a Cadillac?”
“Can you meet the notes, boy?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Go buy it, then.”
Alice was against it and said so. “How’d you like a Cadillac parked in front of an upstairs apartment? Don’t you think you’re a little premature?”
“Yes, but I want one.”
“You don’t wanna buy a Cadillac, and you live in a walk-up apartment,” Alice said. “You don’t have a garage to put it in.”
But Robert had made up his mind. He thought he could attract more patients with it. Patients half expected their doctor to be driving a Cadillac. It would make them respect him more, give them something to brag about. And if they were bragging about him, more patients might come his way. Besides, there was something deep inside him that had to prove to the world and to himself that he had made it.
So he went downtown to Thomas Cadillac to buy himself one. But the salesclerk took him past the showroom of new Cadillacs to the dealership’s used car lot.
“I told him I wanted a new car, and he kept showing me used cars,” Robert said, exasperated but by now picking up on the subtleties of his interactions in the New World.
“I thanked him and went home,” Robert said.
Then he wrote a letter to General Motors, Cadillac division, in Detroit: “I’m a young black physician, just getting started,” he wrote. “All my life I dreamed Cadillac, and when I had enough money to go down and get one, the man insults me by showing me used cars.”
Soon after he wrote the letter, he got a call from the dealership. “We have instructions,” Robert remembered the man saying, “to deliver to you a Cadillac to your liking. What day would you like to come down and select it?”
It was 1955, so he headed right over to pick out a 1955 model. “A white Cadillac,” he said years later, a smile forming on his face, “with blue interior and whitewall tires. Yes, indeedy. See what you can get when you step on the right feet?”
Some of the people from Monroe thought the car pretentious and over the top. They were still having a hard time even picturing him a doctor. But just putting the key in the ignition made him feel like he had moved up in the world.
“And I learned that lesson from Dr. Beck’s advice,” Robert said years later. “To hell with what people think of me. Go on and do what you wanna do. They gonna do what they wanna do anyhow, say what they wanna say anyway.”
He mulled over his words. “That’s right,” he said. “And you get more if they feel you ain’t suffering.”
He was already plotting new ways to prove himself to the naysayers, black and white, in Louisiana and in L.A. “My lifestyle’ll blow ’em outta the water,” Robert would say. “Just blow ’em outta the water, ’cause I’ll go on and do what I wanna do.”