THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN

We cannot escape our origins,¹¹⁰

however hard we might try,

those origins contain the key

—could we but find it—

to all that we later become.

—JAMES BALDWIN,

Notes of a Native Son

CHICAGO, NOVEMBER 1940

IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

THE CROWDS GATHERED early at the fire station at Thirty-sixth and State on the morning of November 5, 1940. It was election day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in a tighter-than-expected race against a maverick businessman, Wendell Willkie. Europe was at war, the United States was in Depression despite the gains of the New Deal, and Roosevelt was now the first president in history to seek a third term, which his Republican opponent was using against him.

For weeks, precinct captains and ward volunteers had canvassed the tenements and three-flats on the South Side of Chicago. They had passed out palm cards and campaign flyers to the domestics and factory workers and to untutored potential voters like Ida Mae.

Illinois was considered crucial to Roosevelt this election, so much so that the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago that year. He had been elected twice before by landslides against Herbert Hoover and Alf Landon, and he now needed the Midwest and Chicago, in particular, to turn out for him if he were to stay in the White House.

Ida Mae didn’t know what was at stake, but suddenly everyone around her was talking about something she’d never heard of back in Mississippi. The precinct captain for her area, a Mr. Tibbs, had been out in the neighborhood rousing the people to register for the upcoming election. She had seen him and gotten the slip his workers handed out and was curious about all the commotion.

Back home, no one dared talk about such things. She couldn’t vote in Mississippi. She never knew where the polls were in Chickasaw County. And even if she had had the nerve to go, she would have been turned away for failing to pay a poll tax or not being able to answer a question on a literacy test for which there was no answer, such as how many grains of sand there were on the beach or how to interpret an obscure article of the Mississippi constitution to the election registrar’s satisfaction. She and most every other colored person in the South knew better than even to try.

So she never thought about her senator or congressman or state representative or about Theodore Bilbo, an admitted Klansman and a famous Mississippi governor. Bilbo had been one of the most incendiary segregationists of the era, yet she didn’t pay him much mind because she had nothing to do with his getting into office and couldn’t have voted against him even if she knew when and how to do it.

Bilbo made it to the governor’s mansion without citizens like Ida Mae or Miss Theenie having any say as to his getting into or remaining in office. He later ascended without them to the U.S. Senate, where, in 1938, the year Ida Mae finally migrated to Chicago, he helped lead one of the longest filibusters in the history of the Senate, the one to thwart a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime.

At one point in the filibuster, he rose to speak on behalf of his constituents—not the entire state of Mississippi but the white voters there—and in opposition to the interests of half the state. He spoke in defense of the right to kill black citizens as white southerners saw fit.

“If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Bilbo told his Senate colleagues, “you will open the floodgates of hell in the South.¹¹¹ Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousand fold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.”

Ida Mae hadn’t bothered to know what politicians like Bilbo were doing because it wouldn’t have done her any good. Nobody she knew had even tried to vote. Nobody made note of election day whenever it came. It was as if there were an invisible world of voting and elections going on about its business without her.

Now it was 1940, and she was in Chicago. All around her were new arrivals like herself who had never voted before and were just getting the hang of elections after a lifetime of being excluded. Suddenly, the very party and the very apparatus that was ready to kill them if they tried to vote in the South was searching them out and all but carrying them to the polls. To the Democrats in the North, each new arrival from the South was a potential new vote in their column. It was in the Democrats’ best interest to mobilize these people, who, now given the chance to vote, might go Republican. The Republicans, after all, had been the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction. The Republicans had opposed the segregationists who had held the migrants down in the South. But now the migration trains were delivering brand-new voters to the hands of whoever got to them first.

Chicago was a Democratic town, and the Democrats had the means to make the most of this gift to the party. They were counting on the goodwill Roosevelt had engendered among colored people with his New Deal initiatives. Still, the precinct captains took no chances. They went door-to-door to talk up the New Deal and to register the people. They asked them about their kids and jobs and convinced them that the Democrats in the North were different from those in the South. They printed up party slates and passed out palm cards—political crib notes that would fit in the palm of the hand—so the people would know whom to vote for when they got inside the booth.

On election day, Ida Mae walked up to the fire station around the corner from her flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash to vote for the first time in her life. The sidewalks were teeming with volunteers to usher neophytes into the station and to the correct sign-in tables. Inside, election judges, clerks, a policeman or two monitored the proceedings.

Ida Mae was not certain what to do. She had never touched an election ballot. She walked in, and a lady came over and directed her to where she should go. Ida Mae stepped inside a polling booth for the first time in her life and drew the curtain behind her. She unfolded the palm card she had been given and tried to remember what the lady had told her about how to punch in her choices for president of the United States and other political offices. It was the first time she would ever have a say in such things.

“She showed me how to do it,” Ida Mae said.

What was unthinkable in Mississippi would eventually become so much a part of life in Chicago that Mr. Tibbs would ask Ida Mae to volunteer at the polls the next time. She had a pleasant disposition, and Mr. Tibbs put her to work helping other people learn how to vote. She would stand outside the firehouse, directing newcomers who were clutching their palm cards and looking as puzzled as she had been her first time at the polls.

She did not see herself as taking any kind of political stand. But in that simple gesture, she was defying the very heart of the southern caste system, and doing something she could not have dreamed of doing—in fact, had not allowed herself even to contemplate—all those years in Mississippi.

But she had seen for herself the difference it could make the first time she had stepped inside a voting booth. Ida Mae’s first vote and George’s first vote and those of tens of thousands of other colored migrants new to the North were among the 2,149,934 votes cast for President Roosevelt in Illinois that day in 1940. Ida Mae’s new home was a deeply divided swing state that year, and this was among the tightest of races. It turned out for Roosevelt that it was a good thing the migrants had come. The ballots cast by Ida Mae and other colored migrants up from the South were enough to help give Roosevelt the two percent margin of victory he needed to carry the state of Illinois and, by extension, the United States—to return him to the White House.

ON THE SILVER COMET, MID- TO LATE 1940S

GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

THE TRAIN HAD ROLLED OUT OF BIRMINGHAM and was wending its way toward New York. It would stop in Wattsville, Ragland, Ohatchee in Alabama, in Cedartown, Rockmart, Atlanta, Athens, Elberton in Georgia, on its way to the Carolinas and up the East Coast. George was working the train as a railcar attendant and was settling into a twenty-three-hour workday of hauling bags, sweeping and dusting, tending and picking up after the fifty-two passengers in his car.

Somewhere along the route, he looked out of the vestibule door by the draft gears between the railcars. The train leaned into a sharp bend in the track. The railcars spread apart to take the full curve. And suddenly, George could see the figure of a man standing between the railcars, clinging to the edge by the door. The man stood as still as a piece of furniture. With the railcars spread open as they were, the man could no longer hide. He looked into George’s face and did not speak. His eyes begged George not to turn him in.

It is not known how many migrants made it out of the South by hopping a freight or passenger train as this man did. They called what this man was doing “hoboing.” It was one of the ways some men and boys, often the most desperate, the poorest, the most adventurous, or those who got on the wrong side of a planter or a sheriff, got out.

Years before, in 1931, a boy by the name of Johnson plotted his way out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, with three of his friends. They were hoping to make it to Los Angeles. All over the South, there were colored boys like him dreaming of hopping a train. They practiced how to jump on and off the freight cars when the trains passed through Yazoo City, Mississippi, or Bessemer, Alabama, or any number of small towns. They would ride a couple hundred feet and jump off until they got the hang of it.

Johnson and his friends talked about escaping Lake Charles, Louisiana, for months. They planned the day of departure, only to put it off because one boy’s mother got sick or another lost his nerve. Finally they set a date and met at the rail yard one night in 1931. They had nothing but the clothes they were wearing and a couple dollars in their pockets. The four of them grabbed the side of a car and hopped aboard as the train wound along the tracks.

The passenger trains would have been a surer way to get out. The freights were not marked and did not announce their destinations like the passenger trains did. Anyone riding them couldn’t be certain where he was headed. But scheduled trains were riskier because the passengers, the conductors, the porters, and attendants like George might see them and turn them in. So most stowaways hopped a freight train, lonely with its grain and cotton bins. If they found a car open, they hid inside. Sometimes they had no choice but to ride on top of the car, holding tight against the wind kicked up by a train going seventy miles an hour.

Johnson and his friends made it onto the freight train and were headed out of Louisiana and into Texas. But what they hadn’t realized was that the freight trains had police, men who patrolled the freight cars and were on the lookout for stowaways like them. The patrolmen were called railroad bulls, and they were hired to do whatever it took to get stowaways off the train. They were known to beat or shoot anyone they caught or to send stowaways to a chain gang, where they might never be seen again. The bulls had names like “Denver Bob” and “Texas Slim.”

Johnson and his friends were positioning themselves on a freight car and dreaming of California when a bull caught sight of them. It was harder to go undetected when there were four people rather than one. The bulls started hurling rocks and the boys had no choice. They jumped sixteen or seventeen feet from a moving freight train, not knowing where they were or when the next freight was coming or if whatever came through was going to California.

Now they were lost somewhere in Texas. They had to wait for hours before another train rumbled through. They hopped on it, not knowing where it was headed. Suddenly it stopped on a trestle bridge suspended two stories above a ravine. The bulls liked to stop on high bridges to force stowaways off the train. It left the boys with nowhere to hide. They could stay and face a beating from the bulls or risk injuring themselves in yet another jump.

They jumped. They tumbled downhill in the darkness. They were still in Texas, crawling through weeds, the bulls’ flashlights searching the scrub brush.

In all the commotion, Johnson got separated from the other three as they rolled down the ravine. He was alone in the brush as he heard the train rattle away from him. He crawled in the brambles, hungry, lost, and jarred by the escape. He crawled toward the light of a settlement in search of food.

He came to a fire where real hoboes, men who rode trains for the thrill of it, were gathered near the tracks of the freight train. The hoboes were sitting around a pot over a fire, one man with a potato, another with a skinned rabbit over the flame. The men were covered in soot. This was what they called the hobo jungle, where they slept and cooked their food, which was whatever the group of them had managed to rustle up, before taking to the trains again.

“What’d you bring to put in the pot?” they asked the boy

He didn’t have anything. He was not of their world.

“You better go and look for something,” they told him.

The boy walked further toward the light of the settlement in search of food to bring back to the strangers by the fire.

He approached a house. A white woman answered. She didn’t seem surprised. The people in the settlement had seen a lot of boys and men hopping trains like him.

“Madame,” he said, “I’m hoboing.” He asked if she had food she could spare. “Anything you have.”

She gave him bread and chicken. With that, he returned to the hobo jungle, handed over what he had gotten, and was finally able to eat. At daybreak, he hopped the first train that came through. He rode not knowing where he was headed and not, of course, able to ask.

The train was not going west to California. It was going north toward Chicago. There, the next morning, he hopped a train going west with the sun. The boy would make it to California and become an extra in the movies, an officeholder in the Lake Charles, Louisiana, Club, and a respectable accountant in South Central Los Angeles.

George had heard about these boys and men hoboing out of the South but had never seen one for himself until that day on the northbound train. He was as startled as the disheveled, soot-covered man in front of him.

“I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” George thought to himself. “I can’t believe I’m seeing what I see.”

The man must have sneaked onto the train as it sat boarding passengers or run alongside it and jumped up as the train either slowed to a stop or pulled out of a station.

And now he was clinging to the sides of the railcar as it rocked at top speed, the wind rushing between the cars as they rumbled and turned.

George never knew what became of the man or the others he saw hoboing on the trains. They never spoke. He himself had stared death in the face in Florida and felt sadness and awe at whatever drove them to steal onto a train this way.

“They were standing there like statues,” George said. “Like they were part of the equipment. I couldn’t tell whether they were living or dead there for a while.”

Sometimes he would see the same few coming back and forth, as if that were the only way they could manage to go north or south. It was nerve-jangling to George to see them because he was supposed to turn them in. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“I would never give them up,” he said. “I’d pretend I didn’t see them. One or two occasions, I’d sneak a sandwich or something out of the diner.”

And after he did that, they would always disappear.

LOS ANGELES, SUMMER 1955

ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

AFTER TWO YEARS OF HARD WORK, Robert managed to attract enough patients needing some sort of surgery that he was finally able to secure admitting privileges at a hospital in Los Angeles. It was nowhere near Cedars Sinai or UCLA Medical Center but was a little place called Metropolitan Hospital over at Twenty-first and Hoover Street, near his office. It had a mostly colored patient load and a mostly white staff of doctors. There were only a few colored doctors, and Robert was one of them.

They did most of their surgeries in the morning, and around noon they broke for lunch. They sat in the lounge to eat or read the newspapers and waited for their next cases to come up.

But Mondays were different. Monday was the day when the white doctors came back from the weekend, regaling one another with their exploits at the casinos and their triumphs on the golf courses in Palm Springs or Las Vegas. Robert dreaded Mondays.

One Monday, they turned and looked at him.

“Bob, have you been to Caesars?”

“No, I haven’t seen it,” Robert said, looking down. “I’ve never been there.”

Robert hated to admit that. He wanted more than anything to be able to go to Vegas. He was born for Vegas. By now he had the money to go. That was what he came out here for—to be a full citizen, do whatever people of his station did, regardless of what color they were.

He began avoiding the other doctors on Mondays. He made himself busy, buried himself in his newspaper, and avoided eye contact so they wouldn’t engage him in conversation during their animated recaps. But he couldn’t escape hearing their tales from the casinos.

He sat there having to listen to them talk about Vegas for months, seething and saying nothing. They seemed to have caught on that he didn’t want to join in and left him alone as they compared notes among themselves.

“Then, every now and then,” Robert remembered, “somebody would make a mistake and ask to confirm or give your feeling about a club or gambling in Las Vegas.”

One day, he spoke up.

“Listen, I’m tired of you guys asking me about Las Vegas,” he said. “You know colored people can’t go to the hotels there or the casinos. It’s a thorn in my side, so don’t ask me about that.”

The doctors fell silent. “That embarrassed all those who heard it,” Robert remembered years later. “They had a guilt feeling that they were a part of that. This is the way I perceived it anyway. Maybe they didn’t give a nickel. I don’t know.”

The doctors stopped asking him about Vegas, but that didn’t mean he stopped thinking about it, wishing for it.

Over time, Robert began hearing rumors about blacks protesting their exclusion from Las Vegas and that the city might be opening up. He went to two doctor friends of his, one a brother of his classmate Dr. Beale back in Houston, and another, Dr. Jackson, who had both gotten into hospital management and seemed always to know the latest.

He asked them what they’d heard about Vegas.

“Is it true that blacks can go there now?”

“I ain’t heard that, Bob,” Dr. Jackson said.

They had, however, heard that there was a colored man in Vegas who people said was helping get colored people into a few of the hotels and casinos.

“I tell you what you do,” Dr. Jackson said. “Why don’t you call Jimmy Gay?”

“Who’s Jimmy Gay?”

James Arthur Gay was perhaps the most influential colored man in the still-segregated world of Las Vegas.¹¹² He had migrated there from Fordyce, Arkansas, after World War II and found himself locked out of both the mortuary trade, for which he had been trained, and the resort industry, to which he aspired. College degree in hand, he worked his way up from a cook at a drive-in to become one of the first colored executives at a casino, the Sands, at a time when stars like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., were not permitted to stay in hotels on the Strip. Knowing how hard it had been for him to cross the color line in Vegas, he took it upon himself to help spirit other colored people in wherever he could, risking his own tenuous standing to do so.

Over time, he became the contact person, a secret agent of sorts, the one connection in an almost underground network in Las Vegas, where a colored visitor could not otherwise be assured of getting a room at a mainline hotel. Jimmy knew who to talk to in order to secure rooms for colored people at the Vegas hotels and knew how to do it discreetly, and he was in a position to screen, through word of mouth in that insular circle of colored people for whom he would perform such a service.

So Robert called him.

“This is Bob Foster, Jimmy,” Robert said. “Jackson and Beale told me to call you and find out if this was true. Have they opened Las Vegas up?”

“You planning to come up?”

“If we can go. Can we go? Could we come?”

“Well, how many in your party? When are you planning to come? Get your party together and call me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Robert couldn’t wait to tell his friends about it. It took them some time to get it together. A total of thirteen people signed up to go in what would be an early foray past the color line in Vegas: doctors, doctors’ wives, a school principal. They started planning right away. They made their plane and train reservations. They read up on the casinos and the shows they wanted to see. The women shopped for what seemed like weeks.

“They had three different outfits for every day,” Robert said. “Three completely different outfits.”

Jimmy had arranged for them to stay at the Riviera Hotel. Robert couldn’t wait. It was the first high-rise in Vegas. It had cost ten million dollars to build and had just opened that spring to worries that it was so big that the desert sand might sink under its weight. It was right on the Strip, its name in big letters on a V-shaped marquee above the sign for the Starlight Lounge. Dean Martin was part owner. Liberace played there. It would become the set for Ocean’s Eleven. It was so very Rat Pack, and Robert could just picture himself at a dinner show in the Clover Room. All summer, a jingle was running on the radio stations in Los Angeles about “The Riv,” as it came to be called, like it was the hottest thing going in Vegas. There’s a new high in the Las Vegas sky, the Riviera Hotel. Robert used to sing along with the jingle and only got more excited.

“You heard it a million times a day,” Robert said. “And, oh, I’d just be thinking about the trip we were going to have.”

The people who flew in piled into several taxicabs at the Vegas airport and pulled up to the canopied driveway of the Riviera with enough luggage for a celebrity road tour. They walked into the marble lobby, chatting and giddy.

“Now, we all dressed to the fingertips,” Robert said, “sharp as sharp could be. Everybody.”

Robert saw bellmen all around but noticed that no one stepped forward to get the luggage. Someone in the group asked for help. At last a bellman came and brought their luggage in, loads of it, to the front desk.

In the lobby, Robert’s group met up with the couple who had caught the train and had arrived ahead of them. The wife was named Thurma Adams. She jumped up and ran toward Robert and the others and began acting out of sorts. She was humming under her breath as if to warn them of something, but it was in a childlike code that Robert had trouble deciphering.

She was skipping as she sang, “La de, da, de, da, la de da, de da!”

“Thurma, Thurma, Thurma,” Robert said. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Just go on over to that desk,” she told him. “You’ll see.”

Robert understood instantly. “And chills went through me,” he remembered. “A wave of nausea.”

Phoenix again.

“Oh hell, we ain’t gonna get this room,” he thought to himself. “The same story, ‘There’s no room in here.’ ”

Here they were, thirteen travelers just arrived in a place they thought had opened up to people like them. They couldn’t have been sure of it but wanted so much to believe that they had taken the chance anyway, and now they were being told there were no accommodations for them, and they’re standing there in the gilded lobby like refugees, homeless in their tailored suits and sequins and with enough luggage for a European holiday.

Robert tried to calm himself and salvage the situation. He went over to the front desk just as he had in Phoenix, but more assured this time because he had been through this before and besides, he was a Californian now.

“This is Dr. Robert Foster,” he began. “We have a party of thirteen people from Los Angeles. We are supposed to have room reservations.”

“Who made them?” the clerk asked.

“Mr. Jimmy Gay made them,” Robert answered.

“Who’s Jimmy Gay?”

“Jimmy Gay knows somebody here. I didn’t get the name of the person who made them for me.”

The front-desk clerk called the reservations supervisor, and he came out.

“And they looked, and they looked and they looked and they looked,” Robert remembered.

“They looked for what they knew wasn’t there. And I know that one, too.”

The front desk said it could find no reservation for any of them, made no offer to accommodate them, and made no suggestions nor showed any interest in where else they might possibly go.

“So I’m standing there fuming,” Robert said many years later. “How do I get out of this? How we gonna get out this hotel with all this luggage? Humiliation galore. I felt everybody in the place looking at us. I felt as if the shower door had fallen, and I looked up and saw I had an audience of fifty people. I just felt that they could see clear through me that we had been rejected. And that was what I felt at that desk.”

He decided to call Jimmy Gay from a phone booth in the hotel. Maybe that would clear things up. Fortunately, Jimmy was home.

Jimmy told him that he would check on it and that Robert should stay by the phone booth.

“Don’t let anybody use the phone you on,” Jimmy said. “Block it. Leave the line open. I want to make a phone call, and I’ll call you right back. Stay by the phone.”

Jimmy couldn’t locate the reservations clerk he had talked to at the Riviera, late as it was. So he came up with an alternative.

“Go to the Sands Hotel,” he instructed. He told them who to ask for when they got there. “He’ll take care of you and the party.”

So Robert and the twelve others once again loaded into several cabs and went to the Sands Hotel. Because Jimmy had made reservations at the Riviera and not the Sands, the Sands didn’t have enough rooms for the entire party that night. The Sands made arrangements for them to stay at yet another hotel, the Flamingo Capri, further down on the Strip.

“We’ll come and get you tomorrow,” the front-desk clerk said. The Sands kept its word, and the next morning they were, at last, all unpacking their things at the Sands.

“I got a warm spot with Sands for what they did for us,” Robert would say years later.

Jimmy Gay and his wife, Hazel, puddle-hopped them from nightclub to nightclub where Jimmy knew they would be accepted. They heard Pearl Bailey in the lounge. They made three shows a night. And Robert got to go inside the casinos he had heard his fellow physicians brag and goad him about for months and that he dreaded hearing mention of. But now he didn’t have to dread it anymore.

“We lived the part,” Robert said.

He remembered one night in particular. He was wearing a black mohair suit he ordered specifically for the occasion from the tailor who dressed Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra. He wore a black tie with a burgundy stripe, a white tab-collar shirt, gold cuff links, black shoes, black silk socks, and a white handkerchief with his initials, RPF, embroidered in silver.

All the humiliation melted away, the white doctors’ idle chatter, the rejection at the Riviera.

He was finally in the world he belonged in, living out a dream like an honorary member of the Rat Pack. Jim Crow, the South, Louisiana, Monroe, Phoenix, the downside of L.A.—all gone for now. He was in a casino out of a movie. Dean Martin could have walked in any minute, or so it seemed, and here was Robert, right in the middle of it, acting as if he’d been to it.

“And I am playing the roulette. And I’m enjoying myself, and I’m having a good time, and I’m standing up betting over some other people there, and I hit my number, and I eased the buttons loose on the coat, and I hit number eleven, and I reached over like this to pick up my chips and open my coat and show my blood red silk lining.

“People said, ‘Oh, look at that!’ A white woman said that. She had never seen a red lining in a suit. That was very avant-garde. All this conservative stuff outside. And this red satin lining inside.”

For once he would not be dreading lunchtime at the hospital that Monday

CHICAGO, EARLY 1939

IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

GEORGE AND IDA MAE had been in the North for close to two years. They had three little ones to feed and were still having trouble finding work. They had arrived in the depths of the Great Depression with the fewest skills any migrant could have but with the most modest of expectations and the strongest of backs. They had taken their chances and found even the most menial jobs hard to come by.

Anything with the least amount of status or job security seemed reserved for people who did not look like them and often spoke with an accent from a small eastern European country they had never heard of. They were running into the same sentiment, albeit on a humbler level, that a colored man in Philadelphia faced when he answered an ad for a position as a store clerk. “What do you suppose we’d want of a Negro?” the storekeeper asked the applicant.¹¹³

George had been struggling since he arrived. He had worked on a coal truck, dug ditches for the Works Progress Administration, delivered ice to the tenements on the South Side, and been turned away from places that said they weren’t hiring or just had nothing for him. He would just keep looking until he found something.

Finally, he landed a job that suited his temperament on the soup-making line at the Campbell Soup plant, a place so big there was bound to be some work for him if the people were open to hiring him, which, fortunately for him, they were.¹¹⁴ The plant was on twenty-two acres at Thirty-fifth and Western by the panhandle tracks, where they mixed several thousand tomatoes and oxtails at a time to make soup for customers west of the Mississippi. He had been working all his life, but this was the first indoor job he had ever had.

His days would now turn on the directions of foremen and the spinning of machinery, the orderly and finite ticking of the company punch clock instead of the rhythms of the field, where he and Ida Mae used to work according to what an anthropologist once called “the great clocks of the sky.”¹¹⁵

The plant turned out six thousand cans of soup a minute along three miles of tracks and switches.¹¹⁶ He was entering the world of assembly-line factory culture, the final destination of many unskilled black southerners once they got established in the North. Whatever reception he got, good or bad, he kept it to himself, as was his way, and he carried out whatever duties he was to perform without complaint, whatever kind of soup was coming down the vats in his direction.

Like so many others, he had gone from the mind-numbing sameness of picking cotton to the mind-numbing sameness of turning a lever or twisting a widget or stoking a flame for one tiny piece of a much larger thing he had no control over. He had moved to a different part of the country but was on the same rung of the ladder. It was, in some ways, not all that different from picking cotton. The raw bolls went off to some mill in Atlanta or Massachusetts to be made into something refined and unrecognizable from what he saw of it, from the poorly remunerated kernel of the thing that represented George’s and other sharecroppers’ contribution to the final product intended for someone far better off than he. Except now, in Chicago, he would get paid.

Just by being able to keep his job, which he would for many years, George would be spared the contentious relations at so many plants in the North, where the migrants were scorned if they were hired at all, or outright turned away. Most migrants like George were hired into either menial labor—janitors or window cleaners or assembly-line workers—or hard labor—longshoremen, coal miners, stokers of foundries and diggers of ditches, which is what he had done before landing the assembly-line job at Campbell Soup.

Many companies simply didn’t hire colored workers at all but for altogether different reasons from the South. It wasn’t because of an explicit Berlin Wall of exclusion, written into law and so engrained as to not need to be spelled out for people on either side, as in the South. Instead, in the North, companies and unions said that, however much they might want to hire colored people, their white workers just wouldn’t stand for it. And, for the sake of morale, the companies and unions weren’t going to force the issue.

A glass plant in Pittsburgh tried to hire colored workers, but the white workers ran them out, the researcher Abraham Epstein reported, by cursing them and “making conditions so unpleasant they were forced to quit.”¹¹⁷ At a steel mill there, the white bargemen threatened to walk out “because black workers were introduced among them.” The white workers at the mill were appeased only “by the provision of separate quarters” for the colored workers.

A factory in Chicago reported that after it hired colored workers, there was “friction in the washrooms” and that “for every colored girl employed, we lost five white girls.”¹¹⁸

“I find a great resentment among all our white people,” the manager of a wholesale millinery in Chicago reported.¹¹⁹ “I couldn’t overcome the prejudice enough to bring the people in the same building, and had to engage outside quarters for the blacks.…  We thought it would be nice if we would start a school for machine operators.…  I received a delegation from our sewing hall who said they resented the idea. They wouldn’t listen to it at all, and I had to abandon the project. Their argument was: ‘If you let them in it won’t be long until we are out entirely.’ The attitude against the colored is only the same as it was against the Slavs or the foreign races when they first intruded the field.”

Somehow the migrants persisted, partly because they had little choice and could only hope that open-minded whites might see past the preconceptions. A Chicago laundry, for instance, reported that when it hired its first colored girl, “the white girls threatened to quit. The manager asked them to wait a week and, if they still objected, he would let her go.” As it turned out, the white girls grew to like the colored girl, and she was permitted to stay.

Overall, however, what was becoming clear was that, north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.

The dynamic was not lost on northern industrialists, who hired colored workers as strikebreakers and resorted to them to keep their labor costs down just as companies at the end of the twentieth century would turn to the cheap labor of developing nations like Malaysia and Vietnam. The introduction of colored workers, who had long been poorly paid and ill treated, served as a restraint on what anyone around them could demand.

“Their presence and availability for some of the work being performed by whites, whether they are actually employed or not,” wrote the sociologist Charles S.¹²⁰ Johnson, “acts as a control on wages.”

By the time George managed to find steady work, he was joining the forty percent of black men doing unskilled or semiskilled work in Chicago in the 1940s. Another thirty-four percent of black men were working as servants, meaning that, for three out of four black men, the only work they could get was work that nobody else wanted—lowly and menial or hard, dangerous, and dirty. Nearly the inverse was true for white men, the majority of whom—some sixty percent—were doing skilled, clerical, business, or professional work, clean indoor jobs.

The ceiling was even lower and the options fewer for colored women, a situation that was making it even harder for Ida Mae to find work. By 1940, two out of every three colored women in Chicago were servants, as against seventeen percent of white women (most of those newly arrived immigrants).¹²¹ Only a fraction of colored women—a mere seven percent—were hired to do clerical work—common and upstanding positions for women of the day—compared to forty-three percent of white women.

Under these conditions, Ida Mae and George found themselves at the bottom looking up at the layers of immigrants, native-born white people, and even northern-born black people who were stacked above them in the economic hierarchy of the North. It was all well and good that George now had a job at Campbell Soup. But they would never be able to get settled in Chicago until Ida Mae found reliable work. So Ida set out to look whenever George wasn’t at work and, the rest of the time, took care of the children.

By now it was winter in Chicago, and the cold was beginning to get to her. She had never felt anything like it before. It was a supernatural kind of cold that burned the tips of her fingers and hunted her down through the layers of sweaters to the half inch of skin that happened to have been left unprotected.

On the streets, there were perils at every turn. The sidewalks were glazed with ice, and she had to climb over hills of unmelted snow. She looked up and saw spears of icicles hanging from the gutters and soffits of the buildings. The icicles were as big as a human leg and pointed toward the sidewalk like swords. She heard that sometimes the icicles broke from the buildings and killed people. It was like being on a different planet.

“You spit, and it would be froze,” she said.

She didn’t complain about it. She just did what she had to do. She trudged through the snow to take baby Eleanor to the clinic at Forty-third and State for the immunizations the city said the baby had to have She wrapped Eleanor in so much swaddling you couldn’t tell there was a baby inside.

At the clinic, the nurse gave her instructions.

“Mother,” the nurse said, “take the baby’s clothes off.”

Ida Mae thought that was the craziest thing in the world, cold as it was outside. She didn’t want Eleanor exposed like that.

“All that snow out there,” Ida Mae said. “I ain’t takin’ my baby’s clothes off.”

“The doctor has to see her,” the nurse told her.

Ida Mae balked but soon learned there was no point in protesting. This was the way they did things here on this new planet she was on.

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 1951

GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

NO MATTER HOW SETTLED the migrants got or how far away they ran, the South had a way of insinuating itself, reaching out across rivers and highways to pull them back when it chose. The South was a telegram away, the other end of a telephone call, a newspaper headline that others might skim over but that hurtled them back to a world they could never fully leave.

George had been in New York for six years when the South came back to haunt him. Sometime in late December 1951, he got word that something terrible had happened to an old acquaintance back in Florida.

It was someone he knew from his days as a substitute teacher at the colored school in Eustis during the lulls in the picking season. George had only a couple years of college, but it was more education than most colored people in town, which was why they called him Schoolboy with his proper-sounding talk. So George was a welcome and natural fill-in for the regular teachers when they took sick or went away.

He loved imparting whatever wisdom he had acquired in his twenty-odd years. But he soon came to realize that colored teachers were making only a fraction of what the white teachers were making in Florida He was always alert to any hint of injustice, and here was yet another example of the double-sided world he was living in. He would later lead a series of strikes in the groves, which would force him out of Florida for good, but before that time, while he was substitute teaching, he got pulled into a different crusade.

Harry T. Moore, a churchly schoolteacher from an old place called Mims over on the Atlantic Coast, was the NAACP’s chief organizer for all of Florida back in the 1930s and 1940s. He wore out three cars crisscrossing the state in his stiff suit and tie, teaching colored people how to vote before Florida granted them the right to, investigating lynchings, and protesting segregated schools and unequal pay for colored teachers. He did much of this work as a volunteer, driving alone in the backwoods and small towns of Florida, “where no restaurant would serve him, no motel would house him, and some gas stations wouldn’t let him fill his tank, empty his bladder or even use the phone,” his biographer Ben Green wrote.¹²²

These were the dark early days of the civil rights movement, before it even had a name: Martin Luther King, Jr., was still in grade school, Rosa Parks was a young bride, and the NAACP was an underground organization in the South.¹²³ It was still building a base there among its fearful constituents, and segregationists were viewing it as an uppity troublemaker meddling in the private affairs of the southern order of things. It took courage even to be associated with it in those days, let alone be its field secretary in one of the most violent states in the South. Between 1882 and 1930, vigilantes in Florida lynched 266 black people, more than any other state, so many, in fact, that, after white men killed a black man with a hatchet one day, a newspaper could smugly and correctly report, “It is safe to predict that nothing would be done about it.”¹²⁴ The same could be said for the hundreds of blacks driven out of town in that same era, their homes shot up and set afire in the all-black settlements of Rosewood and Ocoee. “We are in the hands of the devil,” a black Floridian said.¹²⁵

It was here that Harry T. Moore began his quiet crusade. He wore out typewriter ribbons and worked a hand-cranked ditto machine to produce his measured entreaties to governors and legislators in cases of brutality or injustice in the courts, often facing ridicule or outright rejection. One case in particular spurred him to action. A young colored boy sent a Christmas card to a white girl, who showed the card to her father. A posse of white men captured the boy, hogtied him, and forced the boy’s father to watch as they tortured the boy and drowned him in the river. The posse would later say the boy jumped into the water on his own.

Moore then stepped up his letters, circulars, and broadsides and threw himself into more dangerous terrain, the fight against lynching and police brutality. He began conducting his own one-man investigations into every lynching in Florida, interviewing the victims’ families and writing to the government on their behalf.

When he wasn’t working to hold officials to their oaths of duty, he was going door-to-door, town to town, trying to recruit people to join his cause. It was in this way that George Starling met Harry T. Moore.

The men were not friends. They only met once. But both he and George shared an outrage over the treatment of colored people when it came to the schools. Florida school boards, each its own little fiefdom, had a habit of shutting down the colored schools weeks or months before the school year was supposed to end, blaming the closures on budget shortfalls that for some reason did not affect class time at the white schools.¹²⁶ It was a way for county school boards to save on both the cost of running colored schools and having to pay colored teachers for the already foreshortened school year colored schools had.

Even when the teachers got to work a full year under the colored school schedule, they were paid a salary of $542 a year, compared to $1,146 per year for white teachers in the late 1930s, forty-seven percent of what the white teachers were making. There was nothing the colored teachers or parents could do about it until Harry T. Moore, himself the principal at a grade school in Brevard County, started a petition to protest it.

George Starling met Moore sometime in the early 1940s when the civil rights worker arrived in Eustis to enlist colored teachers in the effort. Moore had been making his way around an unwelcoming state and was now seeking to make inroads in Lake County in the state’s central interior. Moore wanted to start a local chapter in Eustis to build up state membership and widen support for the cause. He needed people on the ground to help him discreetly canvass the colored district of Eustis, allay people’s fears, and take on the forbidding task of convincing them to join the NAACP.

Moore gathered the colored people of Eustis together at Gethsemane Baptist Church one Sunday after service. Moore, along with his wife, Harriette, laid out his plan to petition the state to raise colored teachers’ pay and said he needed someone to lead the NAACP registration drive in Eustis. The principal of the colored school, a Mr. J. S. Pinckney, expressed support for the cause; after all, he was being cheated by the pay gap too. Everyone in town knew how vocal George could be, and the principal nominated him to lead the registration effort.

“I didn’t want to do it,” George said years later. But the principal assured him that he wouldn’t be going it alone.

“I’ll help you,” the principal said. “We need somebody that knows how to organize people, how to approach people.”

“So I let him talk me into doing it,” George said years later. “And I started first working with the teachers.”

Sunday evenings after church, George went door-to-door to try to persuade them in private to join the NAACP. Membership dues were a dollar. Sometimes the principal went with him. But George was having little success.

“I couldn’t get one single teacher to join,” he said years later. “And I was tight with most all the teachers out there.”

The teachers were making all kinds of excuses and were flat-out saying they just couldn’t do it. George thought something wasn’t adding up. These were intelligent, reasonable people, people he had known all his life and worked with at school when he was a substitute. They were the ones who would benefit most from the changes the NAACP was seeking.

So one day, he cornered one of the teachers he was closest to and asked her what was going on.

“Look, now,” he said. “Something is not right. Why is it that I can’t get any teacher to join the NAACP? We all tight together, but I can’t get none of y’all to sign up.”

The teacher didn’t want to talk about it. But George persisted.

“I’m not gonna take ‘no’ for no answer today,” he said. “I wanna know what’s happening.”

So she told him.

“Well, the principal held a faculty meeting,” she began, “and he told all the teachers that any teacher that joins the NAACP, he would personally see that they don’t ever teach in this county no more.”

The principal had given the impression to the colored people in town and to Harry Moore himself that he was all for progress and the NAACP. But he was undercutting the effort in private, knowing George’s every move and every person George was talking to and in the perfect position to manipulate the results.

When George approached the principal, he discovered the nature of the contradictions and the compromising position the principal was in, not that George thought it was right. First, to George’s surprise, the principal joined the NAACP for himself and his wife.

But he gave George a warning.

“Now, don’t put my name on there,” the principal said. “We’ll pay our membership fee, but you don’t have to put our names on the list.”

Then George discovered the real problem. Word had gotten back to the county school board that Harry T. Moore, who was by then known and despised by white officials all over the state, was stirring up trouble among the colored teachers in Lake County. If the principal didn’t get the situation under control and the NAACP out of the schools, he could lose his job or worse. The principal assured the board that he would take care of it, and he did.

“I told my teachers if they join that fight, I’ll fire ’em all,” the colored principal reported to white school board officials. “I said, not near one a y’all better not join the NAACP.”

“Yeah, Pinckney, you a good man,” a white school board official said, as the story was told among the colored people in Eustis. “You a good man.”

Any teacher caught working with the NAACP could face retaliation in Florida. Firing teachers was a common tool of the authorities to undercut efforts to equalize their pay. In due course, the authorities fired NAACP leader Harry T.¹²⁷ Moore from his principal’s position and banned him from ever teaching in Florida again. Without work and with two young daughters to support, Moore struck a deal to work full-time for the NAACP, but he had to raise some of the money for his salary himself.

He did not let that stop him, and his biggest fight was only beginning. It involved the sheriff in the county where George grew up and would make national headlines.

It started on the morning of Saturday, July 16, 1949, when a seventeen-year-old white woman accused four black men of raping her and attacking her husband on an isolated road in Lake County, near the town of Groveland. A manhunt led to the arrests of three young black men, one of whom had been in police custody at the time the girl said the rape occurred, but was still considered a suspect. The authorities shot and killed a fourth suspect before he could be taken to jail.

Tensions ran so high that the 350 colored residents of Groveland had to be evacuated to Orlando, where the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and colored and white churches put them up.

The three young men were reportedly beaten with rubber hoses while in police custody, with Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, an imposing figure in a Stetson hat, announcing that a confession had been extracted from them.¹²⁸ By then the case had become so emotionally charged that the court had a hard time finding a lawyer to represent the defendants. The one who finally agreed, Alex Akerman, said he “had no desire to handle the case,” and said to himself, as he drove toward Lake County for the trial, that he knew this would be “the end” of his career.

The three suspects were luckier than many other black men accused of raping a white woman. They actually lived long enough to hear the jury’s conviction. Two were sentenced to death. The one who had been in police custody at the time of the rape was shown mercy and sentenced to life in prison.

The trial had been so tense that the judge took it upon himself to show the defense team—Akerman and the NAACP lawyers, along with two northern reporters covering the case—the safest door from which to exit after the verdict was read.¹²⁹ They would all have to get out of town quick. They hoped the verdict would be handed down before nightfall. It wasn’t. They followed the judge’s warning and headed out the side door into the Florida night after the verdict, convicting the men, was read. As they drove out of town, they could see the headlights of two unidentified cars tailing them. The NAACP lawyer floored the accelerator, barely able to keep ahead of the menacing headlights bearing down on them through hairpin country roads. The two cars hunted them into the darkness. The defense team finally made it to the county line and crossed over into another jurisdiction. Only then did the cars tailing them back away.

This was the world Harry T. Moore operated in and that George knew all too well.

The Groveland case, as it came to be known, roused Moore to action. He fired off letters of protest to the governor, to the FBI, to the U.S. attorney general. The pressure he and the NAACP headquarters put on the courts won the men a second trial. (The one who had been shown mercy because he had been in police custody at the time of the rape was advised to be grateful for his life sentence and not seek further redress through a second trial.)

The night before the trial was to begin, for reasons that remain unclear and known only to him, Sheriff McCall decided to move the prisoners to another jail. He handcuffed them together and drove them himself in his patrol car. At one point, he moved the two men to the front seat with him. Minutes later, he was calling for backup. He said the handcuffed men had attacked him and tried to escape. He said he had defended himself by shooting them, emptying his .38 Smith and Wesson in the process.

The shootings and the photographs of the two black men, their bodies splayed on the ground still handcuffed together, attracted national headlines and criticism of the sheriff, the governor, and the Florida legal system from all over the country. The heat ratcheted up further when it turned out that one of the two men had actually survived the shooting by pretending to be dead so the sheriff would stop shooting him.

Harry Moore began calling for an investigation of the shootings and for Sheriff McCall’s ouster. Either the sheriff had shot two shackled men without cause or he had shown recklessness and lack of forethought in transporting the men alone, as Moore saw it. Moore was doing what no colored men dared to do in those days of southern apartheid: he was standing up to the most powerful man in all of Lake County. He was attracting more attention from white supremacists, who had resented him in the past but were incensed at him now. He began getting death threats and for the first time started carrying a gun with him on those lonely drives into the country.

At the same time, unbeknownst to the local whites who deplored him, Moore was losing the support of NAACP headquarters in New York, an organization Moore had worked hard for but which had its own national ambitions and was at that very moment seeking changes in the Florida operation Moore had built. Now that Florida was on the map, in civil rights terms, headquarters wanted to capitalize on the publicity of the Groveland case for its broader goals. It pushed for greater membership and for centralized county chapters rather than the small colonies Moore had nurtured in places like Eustis. Headquarters could not have known the tensions on the ground in those isolated hamlets or the fear in the people George tried to sign up in Eustis all those years ago, or recognize that country people couldn’t risk being seen outside their homes at a countywide NAACP meeting that would attract life-threatening attention. Not then anyway.

Moore and the NAACP remained at odds through the fall and into Thanksgiving of 1951. At a statewide meeting in early December, national officers finally managed enough votes to oust Moore, who had virtually given his life to the cause. His very strength was his undoing that night. The chapters in the small hamlets that were so loyal to him, because they knew more than anyone the dangers he faced just getting there to see them, did not have the resources to send delegates to that meeting. Thus the meeting was dominated by the delegates from Miami, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, big-city groups that had their own politics and looked down upon the country teacher from a small town on the Mosquito Coast none of them had been to.

Now, despite his hard work, Moore was no longer the head of the Florida NAACP. But the white supremacists he had challenged all those years wouldn’t have known that. To them he was still the NAACP’s man on the ground and a target of their anger. Soon white men from outside his county started asking people in town where that colored NAACP fellow lived. There was a mysterious break-in at the Moores’ house, which sat isolated on a country road surrounded by orange groves.

And then on Christmas night 1951, the Moores’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a bomb exploded under the floorboards beneath their bed as they slept. It hurled furniture into the air and crushed the bed into a crater in the earth. The force of the blast could be heard the next town over. Harry and Harriette Moore suffered grave internal injuries. Relatives rushed them to the nearest hospital, some thirty-five miles away. But, as was the common dilemma for colored patients in the South, they had to wait for the only colored doctor in town to get there to attend them. Harry T. Moore was dead by the time the colored doctor arrived. Harriette, saying she did not want to live without her husband, survived for eight days before succumbing herself.

The county, the state, and the FBI conducted a months-long investigation. It was determined that the Klan, specifically the Orlando Klavern, was behind the bombing. But as the investigation narrowed its focus, the Klansmen closed rank. At their meetings, they now began requiring everyone to recite the Klan oath of secrecy as the investigation closed in on them. The chief suspects all said they had been at a barbecue with twenty or thirty other members at the time of the attack, a convenient alibi for most anyone who would come under suspicion. Ultimately, no one was ever charged or spent a day in jail for the murder of Harry and Harriette Moore, considered by some the first casualties of the modern civil rights movement.

News of the bombing reached George up in Harlem, and he found it both shocking and half expected, knowing what he did about that land of raccoon woods and cypress swamps thick with fear and secrets.

When he spoke of Harry T. Moore, he spoke matter-of-factly, without emotion, flat and to the point. It was as if nothing in the world could surprise him. He had just about heard and seen it all.

Years later, when George was an old man, he would find God, become a deacon, and join the choir at a Baptist church in Harlem. People always said he had a beautiful voice. He was a tenor baritone. He knew all the words to just about any Baptist hymn. Whenever he stood up and sang, there he was, towering over all the sopranos and tenors, his voice rising up above the others but his eyes welling up and tears falling in droplets down the sides of his cheeks. It happened whenever he sang.

LOS ANGELES, MID- TO LATE 1950S

ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

ROBERT WAS MAKING a bigger name for himself now. He was getting a reputation not just for making a show of his every arrival but for being the kind of doctor who could just look at somebody and tell that the problem was with the spleen.

The people from Monroe began taking notice. They started coming around, tentative and curious at first. Robert never knew what to expect when they showed up. Jimmy Marshall’s mother had tried to make herself go and see Robert, but for the longest time she just couldn’t get used to his being a doctor. She still hadn’t adjusted to the idea of calling him Robert. She kept slipping and couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“I can’t believe little Pershing Foster is a doctor!” she once exclaimed.

He was becoming so popular that she finally went to see him. But she was appalled at what he asked of her at her first appointment. “How dare you tell me to take my clothes off!” she told Robert as he prepared for the examination.

“Bob got so tickled,” Jimmy remembered. “Then, after he treated her, she had to admit, ‘He’s a good little doctor.’ ”

Robert’s office was well situated on West Jefferson, a fashionable black business district closer to Beverly Hills than South Central, and he now had admitting privileges at several hospitals. He was getting to know other doctors but, oddly enough and just as important, was popular with the orderlies and charge nurses and even the people in the cafeteria, the kind of people other doctors ignored. And they started showing up at his office, too.

“My patients loved me,” he said matter-of-factly years later. “They could tell me anything. They’d tell you in a minute, ‘I can talk to you.’ ”

They waited for hours to see him. Many were people who back in Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas might have only rarely seen a physician, who were used to midwives and root doctors and home remedies they handed down and concocted for themselves. Here was a doctor who was as science-minded and proficient as any other but who didn’t make fun of their down-home superstitions and knew how to comfort them and translate modern medicine into a language they could understand.

“It was twenty people deep on Saturdays,” Malissa Briley, a patient of his, remembered. “They would come early, sign up, then leave, go shopping and run errands, come back three or four hours later and still have to wait.”

Any number of times he’d ask, “How long you been waiting?”

“Don’t even ask me,” she’d say. “You know how long I been waiting.”

People would complain among themselves. “They would sit up in the office and fuss and carry on about how he’s never on time,” Briley said. “And the very next time you go, you see the same people waiting.”

And after hours of sitting and passing the time, when they finally made it into his office, he would light a cigarette and throw his feet up on his desk and ask them what was going on in their lives.

“Tell me about it,” he would say.

Husbands shared suspicions about their wives. Mothers brought their children in.

“Doctor, I believe she’s pregnant,” a mother told Robert. “Make her tell you whose baby it is.”

He loved it so much, he practically gave his life over to the worries and fixes his patients got themselves into.

“If you got sick and had a complication,” he said, “I didn’t leave your bed until you showed signs of improvement, if it took all night long. If you had tubes down your nose and through your stomach and intravenous going, I’d stay there and be sure that they worked. Then I’d get up and go home, shave, dress, get as sharp as I could get, and come back at visiting hours. And walk over to the bed, feel the pulse.”

“Miss Brown, you feel any better?” he’d say.

“Baby, this is my doctor,” the patient would tell her husband.

Sometimes the discussion was with the relative in the room.

“Hey, Doc. He’s sick as he can be,” a patient’s relative might say.

It got to the point that it seemed people could tell when he stepped out of the elevator and onto the floor, and it reassured people and they almost started feeling better at the sight of him. This spread to the friends and relatives visiting the patient and to the people who weren’t his patients, seeing him dote on someone else.

“You know some other doctor’s patient,” he said, “and they call me in to do the surgery or whatever it was. And then I wouldn’t go back until the man is better. When I know he looks better. And I’m sharp, got on the latest fashions. I put the show on so you wouldn’t forget. They called me ‘the Jitterbug Doctor.’ Think I’m kidding, don’t you? Straight, straight just like it is. But the point was that they would not forget me. And others would see you in the room with them. And they would remember you outside the room. They’d get your card and call you.”

Sometimes he’d hear from patients’ relatives, people coming in from out of town or just new to California who were feeling under the weather and worried what it might be. Someone would hand them Robert’s number with no more explanation than this: “If you just call this number, and tell him ‘I’m sick,’ he’ll tell you what to do.”

One of the people who called him one day was a cook from east Texas working the cafeteria line at the old hospital on Hoover Street. She had seen the jitterbug doctor, liked him, and told him she had a cousin she thought could use his help. The cook sent her cousin to see Robert for a physical and an assessment of her medical problems.

The cook’s cousin was a woman named Della Beatrice Robinson. People called her Della Bea. She was a singer who had not long since migrated from Texas. Della Bea took her cousin’s suggestion and made an appointment.

Della Bea was so pleased with the treatment and with the southern, down-home way about this doctor, something comforting and familiar about him, that she kept coming back. She also had another idea.

“My husband needs to come in to see you,” she said after a few visits.

She said her husband would need the last appointment of the day and that his name was Ray Charles Robinson—Ray Charles to most of the world.

“So there I got Ray Charles,” Robert would say years later. “The rest was up to me and Ray, and it flew.”

Both men were from the South and had come to Los Angeles chasing a dream, Ray having migrated in 1950, three years before Robert.¹³⁰ Both were more ambitious, controlling, and meticulous than the gaudy, juke-joint side of them might suggest. Both moved in highfalutin circles but were most at ease with plainspoken common folk, which is what they really were deep inside. They were both on the verge of making it big in their respective worlds. And neither could truly put behind them the hurts each had endured in the South or overcome the excesses of those fixations. The two would be friends from that day on.

With all these new patients, Robert’s practice was taking off. He was now ready to move his family into a house more befitting their station. From his in-laws’ perspective, it was about time. The Clements were living in the president’s mansion, pretty much an estate, back at Atlanta University, and they felt their daughter and granddaughters had been holed up long enough in that walk-up apartment off Jefferson. It was enough that Robert had taken the three of them away from Atlanta and the Clements as it was. When was he ever going to make good on his potential, all his talk, and give Alice and the girls the luxuries to which the Clements had made them accustomed? It had been eighteen months already.

Robert found a way out. He located a house on an exclusive block of Georgians and avant-garde contemporaries with putting-green lawns and bougainvillea draping the sides of vanilla stucco walls. The block was in a neighborhood known as West Adams, just south of Pico, a few minutes’ drive from Wilshire, and on the western side of Crenshaw. It already had a few colored people living there—the fights over restrictive covenants had occurred a decade before, so he wouldn’t have to make a political statement just to move into a house, which, apolitical as he was, would not have interested him. He chose not to try to integrate a new neighborhood, although, by then, he could have afforded most any he wanted. Two court rulings—Shelley v. and Barrows v.—had struck down restrictive covenants by the time he arrived, but whites were still resisting black incursions into the strongholds of Glendale, Canoga Park, Hawthorne, South Gate, and through most of the San Fernando Valley. There was a bombing near Culver City and cross burning in Leimert Park.

Some neighborhood groups went so far as to buy up properties themselves, “even at a financial loss, to prevent blacks from moving in,” wrote the historian Josh Sides.¹³¹

But the San Fernando Valley suburb of Pacoima got especially creative when a black government worker named Emory Holmes moved in with his family in 1959. The neighbors put their heads together and decided to make calls to every business in town posing as Holmes or his wife. The first week in the neighborhood, the Holmeses were flooded at odd times of the day with visits from “a life insurance sales representative, a milk delivery service, a drinking water company, three repair services, several taxis, an undertaker, a Los Angeles Times newspaper carrier, a veterinarian, a sink repair service, a termite exterminator, a pool installer,” Sides wrote. Finally, the neighbors threw rocks through their windows and spray-painted their garage: BLACK CANCER IS HERE. DON’T LET IT SPREAD!

Robert wasn’t going to put himself through that. He found a safe place that suited him. Not only were black people there already, but they were among the finest and most socially connected in all of old Los Angeles. The house was a white Spanish Revival at 1680 Victoria Avenue, right next door to the most prominent colored architect in Los Angeles and maybe the country, Paul Williams. The street had physicians and dentists and socialites on it, people who regularly made the society pages of The Los Angeles Sentinel.

The family moved in on Palm Sunday 1956, three years after Robert’s lonely drive through the desert. The girls each chose a room. The sofas and cocktail tables and dining room suite arrived. Now Alice could finally join the Links and host her bridge parties and socials, and they could all take up their rightful place, wherever it might lead them, in this bright new city of theirs. In the meantime, shortly before moving into their new home, Robert and Alice got a welcome surprise: a third daughter arrived in December 1955. They named her Joy.