That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.20
—DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, The Negro Family
NEW YORK, 1997
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
THE HARLEM THAT GEORGE STARLING FLED to in 1945 no longer exists. The Savoy Ballroom closed its doors in 1958. Small’s Paradise closed in 1986, its patrons now frail and the children of the Migration not dressing up and dancing the Lindy Hop late into the night. The Sunday stroll died off with the top hat. The black elites—the surgeons and celebrities who would have made their homes on Sugar Hill in previous generations—can now move wherever they want. Many of them live in Westchester or Connecticut now.
The magnificent brownstones are aging and subdivided. Urban pioneers have only recently begun to turn them around. The streets have been given over to teenagers with boom boxes, to crack dealers and crack addicts, prostitutes and soapbox preachers, wig shops and liquor stores, corner stores selling single cigarettes for a nickel apiece and homeless people pushing their worldly possessions in shopping carts down what is no longer Lenox Avenue but Malcolm X Boulevard.
George Starling has lived in Harlem for half a century and knows and loves it in spite of itself. Many of the people who came up from the South have passed away. There are fewer and fewer old-timers left. Still he makes his way around with a sense of ownership and belonging. He has lived there for longer than most of the people around him have been alive.
It has gotten to the point that his mind is still sharp but he can’t drive anymore on account of his eyesight, and his knees fairly creak as he negotiates the steps to the basement apartment of his brownstone on 132nd Street.
When he returns home in the evening from church or the grocery store, and if someone happens to stop to talk to him, someone who, say, maybe has not been seen on the block before, a voice might holler out from across the street in the dark. It is a neighbor watching out for him.
“You alright, Mr. G.? Everything alright, Mr. George?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.”
“Okay. We just want to be sure.”
Back in 1950, on the occasion of Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary as a black community, the New York Age asked residents why they had moved to Harlem and why they stayed.
An ice vendor was one of the people who responded. “I know everybody in my block,” he said, “and I don’t think I want to go anywhere else to live, until I go to heaven.”21
George Starling knows how the ice vendor felt. As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, he has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.
A neighbor passes and yells, “Hey, Mr. George!” He smiles and nods and lifts his hand in the neighbor’s direction.
Despite all the changes, it is still a neighborhood with its own sense of order and kinship.
“The people around here know more what’s going on over here than I do,” he says of his brownstone.
Anyone coming up to his door might face an inquiry.
“He know you?” somebody might ask on George’s behalf.
When he was still driving, the crack addicts and prostitutes—or, more precisely, the addicts who were prostituting themselves to get more cocaine—would approach him as he pulled up to the curb.
“You need some company tonight?”
“No, darling, I don’t need no company tonight.”
Sometimes they come to him with good news, knowing how upright he carries himself.
“I’m going to school now, Mr. G.,” they’ll say. “Can you give me two dollars for some cigarettes?”
He looks them over and sees that they are only telling him what they think he wants to hear. “They come up, and they look like they just came out a garbage can,” he says, shaking his head.
School is something he takes seriously because he hadn’t been able to complete his own education. He calls them on it.
“Yeah? How long you been in school?”
They might not have an answer, but he gives them a couple dollars anyway.
“I give it to you Tuesday,” they assure him.
“You don’t owe me,” George tells them. “ ’Cause I don’t want to get mad with you when you don’t pay me back.”
Sometimes they come up to him to report their progress, as if he were everybody’s grandfather, and they feel the need to prove themselves to him.
“I just dropped out of rehab, but I’m going right back,” they’ll say, even though George can see full well that they can’t be in rehab if they are running up and down the street as they have been all these months.
From his front stoop George Starling watches a most desperate parade. On these streets, there were once people gliding down the boulevard as if on a Paris runway, the men in overcoats and fedoras, the women in mink-collared swing coats and butterfly hats, all rushing to work for the rich white people or the manufacturers of paint or hats or lampshades. Now there are the hooded and disheveled descendants of the least able of the migrants living out their lives on the streets.
“I’m sitting out front now,” he is saying to me over the telephone, “and I see them ducking down these drug holes. They come here so beautiful, and in a few weeks look like they climbed out of a garbage can. We’re the ones that’s killing ourselves. I don’t see one white person in this block selling drugs. They got the nerve to be mad at the blue-eyed devil. You don’t have to take those drugs and sell ’em. Nobody’s making you sell drugs. We’re the ones that’s killing ourselves. They won’t learn in this century and maybe not in the next one.”
He wishes he could take all of them aside and warn them of the path they are taking. And, to those willing to listen, he does. But he has seen so much, it has begun to affect how he looks at them.
One time, a few years back, his door bell rang at two in the morning. He got up to see who or what it was.
“What do you want? You know what time it is?”
There before him was an addict, probably trying to sell him another trinket out of the trash that he didn’t need.
“You know it’s two in the morning?” George asked the addict.
“Your lights burning,” the addict said. “The lights on your car, Mr. G. I’m sorry, Mr. G., but your lights’re on in your car.”
George thanked him. He rushed out to turn off the lights and promised himself he wouldn’t prejudge these people anymore.
“I just thank the Lord,” he says, “that, by his grace, it’s not me.”
LOS ANGELES, WINTER 1997
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
BY THE CLOSE OF 1996, Robert’s body began to fail him. Everything that happened to him he knew precisely what it was because he had diagnosed it in everyone else, divined it before they or their other doctors even knew they had it. It was a gift to those who turned to him for help, a curse when applied to oneself. He calculated the symptoms and risks of whatever he saw happening to him, second-guessed his doctors, naturally, and then surrendered to whatever they suggested, depending on if he agreed with them.
His biggest frustration was not the natural breakdown of his body but not being able to reach his doctors when he wanted. He had always coddled his patients, brought a southern courtliness to his practice. He checked on them when they didn’t expect it, went over impending procedures four or five times to make sure they understood because he felt they would come out of the procedure better if they went into it in the right state of mind. Now, aging and ill in an anonymous city out west, he can go days or weeks without hearing from a doctor. Test results come not with the reassuring words or stroke on the shoulder from his physician but in a form letter from some laboratory out in Riverside.
He has already had a heart attack and bypass surgery. Now his kidneys have succumbed, and he has to endure dialysis several times a week. He is growing frailer but is still sound of mind. He has a live-in nurse now, a sweet woman of good humor named Barbara Lemmons, who is from the South like most everybody else in his life and who indulges his idiosyncrasies.
He has taken care of everyone else, outlived his brothers Madison and Leland and his sister, Gold, the only one he had managed to lure out to California and then only after her marriage broke up. He misses them terribly, but especially Gold, whom he had tried to protect as a young boy back in Monroe and couldn’t. Even when he had grown up, his money and status couldn’t protect her from herself. She had taken to drinking, a Foster weakness, as their nephew Madison would put it. “She liked the parties, liquor, men,” Madison said, “and broke up many a marriage.” Robert couldn’t protect her from her Billie Holiday of a life. And now she was gone.
His mentor, Dr. Beck, who took him in when he first got to Los Angeles, and Dr. Beck’s son, William, who was almost like a brother to him, have passed away, along with so many others, Alice first among them. He has four grandchildren whom Alice did not live to see—Bunny’s son and Robin’s son, who are practically grown up and far away besides, and Joy’s two little ones, who are growing up in Long Beach but whom he sees mainly at birthdays and holidays.
His world has grown smaller, and he is losing control, bit by bit, over his physical self. He seems to savor all the more the little joys in life—a perfectly broiled porterhouse steak, geraniums planted just so in the backyard, a call from a beloved patient.
There is a long list of things he is not supposed to have anymore—fatback and ham hocks, watermelon and barbecue sauce, biscuits, corn bread, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes—just torture to a southerner. But Barbara and his friends manage to slip him some corn bread with the collards anyway because it makes him so happy, and what is the point of living if you can’t have a bit of joy in your life?
Every morning she gets up at eight, opens the drapes, and turns on the sprinklers. She invariably finds him at the side of his bed on the telephone. He comes into the kitchen. She gives him grits, which are on the approved list, but with a little salt, which is not. No matter what the list says, he refuses to give up his bacon.
He loves fried catfish, which is not approved, and he could eat that every day. “I know it’s not on the list,” he says. “But I don’t care. Let’s cook it.”
She puts a chopping board onto the Formica-top island by the Thermador oven near the avocado green Frigidaire. She positions a chair so that he can watch her dust the fish in cornmeal and fry it.
When it is time to get dressed, she pulls some things from the closet for him to wear even if he is not expecting to see anyone that day.
“Yeah, that’s fine, but run the iron over those pants,” he’ll say.
He has nothing but time on his hands, and he frets over the garden with its camellias and hollyhocks that he can no longer manage to his liking. He gets Barbara out there planting the annuals and worries over the placement and composition. They’ll be watching the news and he’ll be thinking about where he is going to put the begonias. They’ll be having their grits and bacon at breakfast, and all of a sudden Robert will blurt out an idea.
“How do you think the geraniums would look over there in that corner?” he asks her. “I’m going to need some impatiens.” And the two of them tramp out to the backyard to position them just so.
Robert has just gotten out of the hospital again, and the phone is ringing like mad. One time, Barbara picked up the phone and heard a gravel voice that sounded familiar.
“This is Ray Charles,” the man said. “Let’s speak to the old man. I’m calling to see if he wants some steaks.”
Barbara was holding the receiver to her ear and the cradle to her hip. She whispered to Robert, “Ray Charles is on the phone!”
Robert took the receiver, and Ray got straight to the point.
“You gon’ be at home?” Ray asked him. “You want these steaks? I’ll be over there with them.”
Barbara was in a panic. Ray Charles was on his way. She had just cleaned the living room, but she hadn’t gotten to the kitchen or vacuumed the orange carpet in the den where Robert spent most of his day, when it occurred to her, what was the point of rushing?
He can’t see anyway, she said to herself. He won’t know what room he’s in.
She calmed herself down. When the doorbell rang and Ray Charles arrived, she sent him through the kitchen. “You just say step up or step down,” she later recounted. “Why should I let him trample through the living room I just finished vacuuming? He wasn’t dressed up, and he don’t know the difference.”
Ray Charles came bearing ten or twelve steaks that Robert was not supposed to have but that no one in the world could stop Ray Charles from giving him—all New York cut and porterhouse, no T-bone, just as Robert liked it.
Ray chided Robert for not letting him know what hospital he had been in.
“Now, I had to call all over town, every hospital, looking for you,” Ray said. “Where in the hell did you go? Why did you go way out there? I’m a shoot you if you go off again and don’t let me know where you are.”
The cancer diagnosis came in a form letter. He turned to Barbara and said, “Look at this.” He would never have allowed a patient of his to discover such news this way.
“All he would do is look at it,” Barbara remembered.
Now that he needed her more than ever, she would not be with him much longer. She already had high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. Now a blood clot had formed in her chest. It broke apart and traveled to her leg. “My leg felt like jelly,” she said. “It felt like it wasn’t there.”
Barbara would no longer be able to work for Robert. By the late spring, a succession of nursing aides would come and go, but nothing would be the same after Barbara left.
Without her to keep him company and indulge his whims as his body grew weaker, he was finding fewer reasons to keep going.
Earlier in the year, he had received the most wonderful news about one of his grandchildren. Robin’s son, Daniel Moss, a brilliant boy who took after all of his ambitious forebears, had been in the enviable position of having turned down early admission to Harvard and an offer from Princeton. He had chosen Yale, where he would be a goalie on the soccer team. He had been spared the pain of Jim Crow and the second-class schooling in the South because his mother had been spared it when Robert had moved the family to California.
Robert was too ill to fully enjoy the news about his grandson but could not help but contemplate how over the moon his mother, Ottie, would be if she were alive. All those years of scraping to send her four children to segregated colleges and never seeing her youngest son become the surgeon she so dreamed of. The idea of her great-grandson turning down Harvard and Princeton would have been beyond her comprehension.
His daughters were preparing a trip back east for Daniel’s high school graduation. It was around the time of Father’s Day. Robert had hoped to go but was not well enough to make the trip. And that made him all the sadder. While everyone else was at Daniel’s graduation, a triumphant moment for the family and for Robert as the patriarch, he felt more alone than perhaps ever before. He started refusing to go to dialysis, knowing full well the consequences.
I visited him and found him inconsolable. I asked him if he wanted to go for a drive and get some sunshine. He shook his head no. I told him I had brought him some mangos and angel food cake. He looked away. “I hate to see you like this,” I told him. “What can I do to cheer you up?” He stared out the patio door at the begonias growing unattended and a lawn that was not as it should be or would have been if he had been well.
It got to the point that the only way he would go to dialysis was if someone insisted upon it. He was up and ready when I arrived to take him one day. His dark pants hung like draperies from his disappearing frame, and he took slow, labored steps as if he were walking in mud. He walked toward the stairs leading up to the landing above the den where the current aide, Renee, and I were setting up the wheelchair. As he neared the stairs, the hem of his pants got caught under his shoe and he teetered forward, reaching for my arm but missing it as he stumbled in a half-second fall on the top step. We rushed toward him and grabbed him at the waist and arm to lift him to an upright sitting position on the edge of the stairs. He sat flustered and defeated, his eyes lowered and looking at the floor in disbelief at his lot.
The dialysis center was at San Vicente and Third Street. He sat sinking into the passenger’s seat, pointing to direct me to the center, his finger wagging becoming more rapid and insistent when I took a turn he did not think right. He shook his head to show his disapproval and struggled to clear his throat to say no, make a right at this corner. His mind was sharp. He knew exactly where we were going and how best to get there.
It was getting to be late June. “I’m getting weaker and weaker,” he told me. “As soon as I put the walker on the landing to the den, it slid beneath me. I hit the landing hard. I called the nurse. She didn’t hear me. I tried three times. I took a hammer and banged on the coffee table to get her to help me.”
He turned his thoughts to more pleasant things, the visitors who had stopped by to see him that day. “I just know so many beautiful people,” Robert said.
Just the other day, he had told some friends, “I would give anything for a piece of watermelon,” which he conveniently did not say he was not supposed to have.
Sylvester Brooks, the president of the Monroe Club and a faithful admirer, came by and brought Robert the watermelon he so craved. He sat on a bar stool and told Robert what folks in the club were up to.
Robert’s old friend from back home Beckwith, who helped him set up his first office and even built furniture for it, stopped by to check on him. Robert was happy to see him. But it was a painful visit and did not last long.
“As well as I know him,” Robert said, “we had so little to say. He was not completely comfortable. But that doesn’t matter. No, it doesn’t matter.”
Then a man from back in Monroe, a man named Charles Spillers, dropped by. He had caught the bus from Slauson and Normandie in the center of South Central to see his old physician from the VA hospital.
He had heard of Dr. Foster before he’d ever gone to see him at the VA. He remembered Ray Charles’s song about him. “Dr. Foster got medicine and money too,” the man sang to himself. “I said, that must be some doctor, that Dr. Foster.”
Robert had been concerned about this new patient before him.
“You losing too much weight,” Robert had told him. “You’re sick. You need help.”
The man had been a deckhand on a dredge and done ground maintenance at the VA hospital. He had dug up old graves, the graves of people who had died of tuberculosis, and he had dug them without a mask. He had worked in fields that leaked uranium, where some of his co-workers had died within weeks of exposure.
He was from the Old Country of Louisiana, believed in root doctors, and was suspicious after all he had seen in the South and West. He had pulled for Robert back at the VA, and he worried about what would happen to him after his trouble at the hospital.
“I’m not sure his kidneys went out on their own,” Spillers confided to me. “You have to watch a rattlesnake if you get in the bed with him.”
Charles Spillers felt he owed a debt to Robert as his physician even though he was too religious and superstitious to do some of what Robert told him. It was more that he felt inspired by him and appreciated Robert’s forewarnings, which Spillers promptly used as a cue to go see his root doctor.
“If it wasn’t for him, I would have been gone,” Spillers said.
He remembered the first time he went to see Robert in his office. “You’re just fading away right before me,” Robert had told him during the exam. “I’m going to admit you to the hospital.”
Spillers trusted the doctor but not the hospital and did not go. “The Holy Spirit came and told me don’t go to the hospital,” he said.
The man went to a root doctor instead, a woman from back south who was now in L.A. She plied him with root tea and Epsom salts in water. She made a fire in the house, even though it was August, and covered him with quilts until he sweated out the virus she believed to be in him. The fever broke, and he began to eat again and put weight back on.
Robert didn’t take it personally or prejudge the man. He had grown up in the South and knew and accepted its ways. And that endeared Robert to the man all the more. He felt he had Robert to thank for alerting him to the problem and for saving his life.
“He meant so much to so many people,” Spillers said. “I owe him so much.”
He had ridden the bus to see his doctor, who was now sick himself. He sat with him for a while and then prepared to leave. As he headed toward the door to catch the bus back home—not knowing how long the wait would be; this was, after all, L.A.—he turned to his old doctor and friend from the VA hospital with a mixture of worry and gratitude, and the sweet folk spirit of the ancestral South.
“Dr. Foster,” he said with heavy eyes, “I’m lighting seven candles for you.”
By the summer of 1997, Robert Foster was finding his world constricted and fewer reasons to wake up in the morning. The things he loved to do, he could no longer do. He couldn’t make it to the racetrack. Vegas was out of the question. His mansion on Victoria had become a glorious prison. The things he loved to eat, he could no longer get. His beloved nurse was ailing herself and no longer there to sneak him a half strip of bacon or a spoonful of peach cobbler. Then there were the twice-weekly trips to dialysis, which made him dread the start of every new week.
In late July, he went into the hospital for repair of a vein damaged by dialysis. He returned home weaker than before. Then, a few days later, on Sunday morning, August 3, he did not respond when called for breakfast. His left arm was motionless. He had suffered a massive stroke. He fell into a coma.
Word spread rapidly through the dwindling corps of original migrants from Monroe who had come out to California all those decades before.
Reatha Beck Smith, the widow of his old mentor Dr. Beck, who put Robert up when he first arrived in Los Angeles and who helped him get on his feet and open his office, rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard the news. She herself was in her nineties now and had her family and old friends from Louisiana with her. She saw him there lying motionless, the central and unforgettable figure of so many parallel worlds, who had saved so many lives but could not save his own.
“We went to see him at the hospital,” she remembered. “He wouldn’t open his eyes. We called out our names, each one. And we could feel him squeezing our hand, each one.”
He never came out of the coma. He took his last breath on Wednesday, August 6, 1997. He was seventy-eight years old.
The memorial was the following Monday at the church where he had walked his three daughters down the aisle at their weddings but where he was rarely seen after Alice died.
Along the front pews sat the fruits of his labors and the embodiments of whatever dreams he carried with him while driving through the desert decades before: his eldest daughter, Bunny, now an artist’s agent in Chicago, trim and regal in a black sculpted suit and with an upright bearing being consoled by her son Woodie White; his middle daughter, Robin, now a city manager in San Jose, sitting with her husband, Alan Christianson, and son, Daniel Moss, the pride of the family, who, having turned down Harvard and Princeton, would start at Yale a few weeks from now. Robert had lived long enough to know that. Then came Robert’s youngest daughter, Joy, a radiologist, seated with her husband, Lee, a day trader, and their two small children, Lia and Adam.
The pews were filled with people from back in Monroe, old classmates from Morehouse, the people he knew from the racetrack, the people he had worked with at the VA hospital, the people whose gallbladders and appendixes he had removed and whose babies he had delivered and the babies that he had brought into the world and who were now grown men and women with gray hair and children of their own.
All of them showed up, their faces glazed and empty, to pay their respects. The daughters had had Robert cremated, which caused some grumbling among those who had wished to see him once more or who were grieving that they had not made it by to see him in time or who knew that it had simply not been the way southerners put away their dead.
The service was a tightly scripted affair.
“We gather in the faith and hope of Jesus Christ,” the minister, who had not known Robert, intoned. “We come to comfort and support each other in our common loss—Robert Joseph Parish Foster.”
Nobody remarked on the mispronunciation of “Pershing” in his final hour. Few people in California likely knew the name anyway. He had dispensed with it on his way to California for that very reason.
His nephew, Madison, read a scripture assigned to him from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a time, a time to be born and a time to die …”
Robert’s gambling buddy Romie Banks rose and addressed his friend and those assembled: “Robert, you have fought so many battles, been a champion for so many people. He was a perfectionist at everything he did except winning at the racetrack.”
Robert’s son-in-law Lee went to the altar. “He let you know which way the wind was blowing,” the son-in-law said, “whether you liked it or not.”
The Morehouse alumni stood when asked to make themselves known.
Easter Butler, who had met Robert at the racetrack, declared simply, “Dr. Foster was one of the greatest men I ever knew.”
Afterward, the people assembled back at the house on Victoria. Now, the street, unlike the last few weeks of his life when he was in his weakest, loneliest state, was crowded, overcome by cars—Mercedes, Cadillacs, sport utility vehicles, German and Japanese cars.
The people gathered around the crushed-velvet armchairs and the orange shag rug and the Zenith television console in the den, the room where Robert had thrown so many parties and had lived out the last months of his life.
A copy of Life magazine with Coretta Scott King in mourning sat in the bookcase, along with Roots by Alex Haley, surgery and gynecology textbooks, a book entitled Difficult Diagnosis, and, sitting alone, the brown desk plate that read, ROBERT P. FOSTER, MD.
The mourners partook of the honeydew and cantaloupe, cheesecake, lemon cake, and ham spread out on the dining room table. The testimonials continued all afternoon.
Della Bea Robinson, Ray Charles’s ex-wife, showed up to pay her respects because “Bob delivered my son,” she said. “My husband named our son after him.”
The moment made Della Bea think about what a perfectionist Robert had been, which was a good thing to have in a surgeon. “We were going to a concert,” she remembered, “and Alice came down the steps and couldn’t find the right gloves. She put on a pair of gloves she found. Bob saw her when she came out. ‘Something is wrong. The gloves are off,’ he said. He noticed everything.”
Leah Peterson, who had worked at the VA hospital with him, remembered turning to him for advice. “I used to go up and talk to him,” she said. “I told him what I wanted to do with my years. Bob started buying me books.”
A realtor named Nick White said simply, “He delivered me.”
Madison, his nephew, left the memorial repast early and brooded over a glass of ice water at a restaurant over in Santa Monica. He was feeling alone as the only Foster left from that era and isolated from what he saw as the bourgeois pretensions of the day’s proceedings, which, to him, did not reflect his uncle’s southern joie de vivre. “He didn’t get as good as he gave,” Madison said after the funeral, “and he gave the best.”
Madison was the self-described country cousin and one of Robert’s biggest champions, a living reminder of the South that Robert had put behind him. Madison thought about all the things Robert had been through in the South and out west, the rejections despite the triumphs and never feeling good enough. These things made him an exacting, infuriating, insecure perfectionist who left a mark on everyone he met. The people around him knew to smooth their tie, check their hem, reach a little higher, do a little more because Robert Foster demanded it of them. He made everybody crazy and better for the sky-high expectations he had of them for even the smallest of things.
“If you bought him a melon,” Madison said, “you couldn’t just buy a melon. You had to stop and think about that melon. That’s how he was with everything.”
Madison thought back to how Robert had tried to get all of Monroe to come to Los Angeles. “Bob would say, ‘You want some Monroe? Plenty Monroe out here. You can have Monroe in California.’ ”
Then Madison remembered the trips he had made to Los Angeles, his feeling tentative and unsure, being from small-town Louisiana as he was but exhilarated to be out in California with his uncle.
“Come on, chief,” Bob would say. “Let’s go to Beverly Hills and have breakfast on the veranda. Put your chain out. Put that gold chain out. You ain’t on no college campus now. Put your chain out. That’s why I gave you that damn chain.”
This was Robert’s Promised Land. He walked around as if he had been born to it. “You didn’t have a care in the world,” Madison remembered. “All your problems were gone. Nothing could happen to you. You were with Uncle Bob. He lightened a room. He created another world for you. The man had a certain magic to him.”
The story of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster of Monroe, Louisiana, and Los Angeles, California, did not end with his death. Years later, people were still trying to decipher the meaning of his life. Some people were too distraught to speak of him with anyone outside their circle. Others could not stop referring to him in the present tense.
For some of his patients, Robert was the only doctor they had ever been to. They remember him making hospital rounds at midnight, stepping in with free medical advice upon hearing that an acquaintance of somebody’s co-worker was in the least bit of trouble.
Perhaps it could be said that gambling was his mistress, medicine his beloved. Another migrant named Malissa Briley did not fully grasp it until she had to go into surgery herself. She was in her midforties at the time, a social worker in L.A. who had gone to Spelman with Alice. She was anxious about going into the hospital.
Robert did the surgery, and the surgery went well. But later that night, her blood pressure shot out of control. She was on the verge of having a stroke, which could have killed her or left her paralyzed. The hospital tried to get her blood pressure down but had no success. At midnight, the hospital called Robert to report the turn of events. He rushed over right away. He tried to lower her blood pressure, but he couldn’t get it down either.
The next morning, Briley awoke to see Robert in a chair by her bed. She was stunned to see him there. It was early winter, the quiet time of the morning, so early that the hospital hadn’t brought the breakfast tray yet. He was in his street clothes and uncharacteristically wrinkled. He hadn’t shaved, had bags under his eyes.
“What are you doing here this early?” she asked him.
He told her she had gone through a crisis the night before and that neither he nor the hospital could get her blood pressure down.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Well, I got to the point I couldn’t do nothing but pray,” he said.
He had stayed by her hospital bed all night. He had sat upright in a chair in his street clothes. Any patient he lost, he took it personally and especially hard. He took it as a sign of his own failure. So he had fought back sleep watching over this patient and praying for her to live.
By morning, her blood pressure had returned to a safe range. He made sure her vital signs were stable, gave instructions to the nurse to call him immediately should there be any change. Then he left to see about the rest of his patients.
“He had stayed through the night,” she said forty years later, still almost in disbelief. “I woke up, and there he was. That I’ll never forget, as long as I live.”
Robert Foster did not want to return to Louisiana, in life or in death. Nor did he choose to be interred with the Clements in Kentucky. He paid down on a place for himself at a cemetery in Los Angeles.
His body was cremated and placed in an urn in a granite mausoleum with rows of bronze plaques lining the wall like identical file cabinets. His sits in a corner high on the wall with a vase of purple silk roses. IN LOVING MEMORY OF ROBERT P. FOSTER, M.D., 1918–1997, the plaque reads.
The mausoleum is high on a hill at Inglewood Park Cemetery. The urns face a picture window with a view of the cemetery’s manicured gardens and, beyond that, Hollywood Park racetrack. It is the closest Robert could get to the track he so loved. Every so often one can see, settled along a curb of the cemetery road, a crumpled copy of the Daily Racing Form blown over from the track, and, if listening closely, hear the clomping roar of a horse race in progress over at Hollywood Park. Beloved California.
CHICAGO, AUGUST 1997
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
THE TRANSFORMATION of the South Shore section of Chicago from an all-white neighborhood to a near totally black one was complete by the time the Great Migration ended in the mid-1970s. But there was a less visible change that made life more difficult still for people like Ida Mae.
Had a study, like the 1968 Kerner Report on the state of race in America, been conducted of Ida Mae’s adopted neighborhood, it might have concluded that there were, in fact, two neighborhoods—one, hard-working and striving to be middle class, the other, transient, jobless, and underclass; one, owners of property, the other, tenants and squatters; one, churchgoing and law-abiding, the other, drug-dealing and criminal—both coexisting on the same streets, one at odds with the other.
Ida Mae lived in the former world but had to negotiate the latter. The transformation had been so rapid that the city had not had a chance to catch up with it. Politicians came and went, but the problems were bigger than one local official could solve. The problems were social, economic, geographic, perhaps even moral. A succession of mayors had appeased or looked away from the troubles of South Shore, it was but one of some fifty identifiable neighborhoods in the city and not anywhere close to the worst. In fact, it had had a storied past as the home of the South Shore Country Club, a columned and grand clubhouse with its own golf course and riding stables that in its heyday had drawn celebrities like Jean Harlow and Amelia Earhart. By the time the neighborhood turned black in the mid-1970s, its membership had dwindled, and it was taken over by the Chicago Park District.
Mayors Richard J. Daley, Michael Bilandic, and Jane Byrne all relied on the votes of solidly Democratic South Shore to be elected, but life grew no better for Ida Mae. Ida Mae and other black residents had the highest hopes that their concerns might be heard when Harold Washington was elected mayor in 1983, but his election was so fraught with racial tension and his tenure so embattled that they could not look to him for much more than historic symbolism, which had a certain value but did not make their streets safer. Then Washington died unexpectedly at the start of his second term.
Thus the stalwart property owners of South Shore learned to rely on themselves to monitor the crime and mayhem around them. They formed block clubs and neighborhood watch groups, and, on the second Thursday of every month, the most dedicated believers turn out for police beat meetings to report what they are seeing, hear what the police are doing, and make their voices heard. The meetings are part of a community policing plan known as the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.
These days, Ida Mae goes to the beat meetings with the regularity and sense of obligation with which some people go to church. She never misses one because there is always so much to report. She and James and their friend and tenant Betty put on their coats and gather themselves for each meeting regardless of whether the problems are solved, which they frequently are not.
The four of us are in the car heading to a beat meeting one November when we see teenagers on the corner north of their three-flat.
“They’re out there again,” James says.
I ask him what they’re doing.
“Drugs,” he says matter-of-factly. “They’re selling drugs.”
Night is falling as a handful of people gathers for the meeting of Police Beat 421 at the South Shore Presbyterian Church. The people descend the steps to the church basement, where a man sits at a table in the back with a stack of flyers and neighborhood crime lists, called hot sheets, laid out in neat piles.
The hot sheets are like a neighborhood report card and are the first things the people reach for. They rifle through them, scanning for their street and block number to see the details of whatever crimes have been reported, if the knifing or carjacking they saw was ever called in, what the police say they are doing about it, and whether there have been any arrests.
About twenty people, including Ida Mae, James, and Betty, are still going over their hot sheets as they take their seats in the gray metal folding chairs in a basement with yellow cinder-block walls and a red-painted concrete floor, when the meeting is called to order.
The moderator asks what new problems there are. James and several others reach for the index cards being distributed to write out the things they have witnessed. The residents often do not put their names on the cards for fear of reprisal. Ida Mae rarely speaks up because she is convinced the gangs send moles to the meetings, which are public after all, to see who is snitching.
In the meeting, the people learn that Beat 422 held a march against gangs and crime, but they are not certain if they can muster such a march.
“We’re at the last stand here,” the moderator says. “We don’t have any other alternative. If we don’t do something, they will take us over.”
Everyone knew who she meant by “they.”
Someone brings up a worrisome but low-end priority: prostitution is getting worse over at Seventy-ninth and Exchange.
“We know that, okay,” the moderator says. “That’s a hot spot,” she admits and quickly moves on to the robberies, shootings, and drug dealing.
After the meeting adjourns, Ida Mae pulls a policeman over to report one of the more benign sightings, but a measure of the general unruliness around them. “They pull up a truck and take the stoves out,” Ida Mae says of theft going on in the building next door.
The police officer stares straight ahead. It’s barely worth his time. He walks away to another conversation.
“They don’t know nothing,” Ida Mae says.
She buttons her coat and walks over to her son. “We ain’t done nothing here,” she says.
“The important thing is to keep coming,” James says.
It is mid-May, the start of the crazy season in South Shore. The weather will be warm soon, and the kids will be out of school, roaming the streets with nothing to do. This time, a gang officer, a big, bearded man in a blue Nike sweatshirt and jeans, is there to brief the beat meeting.
“You have two gangs operating in 421,” the officer is telling residents. “The Black Stones and the Mickey Cobras.”
The residents listen, but they know they have a gang problem. They start to rattle off street names they want the police to check.
The officer jumps in. “We been hitting that area hard,” the officer says. “Every day we’ve been locking someone up new. We’re hitting Colfax, Kingston, Phillips real hard. They know our cars. They got so many guys out there doing lookout, hypes who work for them. They whistle when we get close.”
He tells the residents to report whatever they see. “I call the police enough, they should know my name,” a middle-aged woman in a brown beret says. “We got some terrible kids over where we are. It be raining and sleeting and they coming and going. And the girls are worse than the boys.”
“Amen,” Ida Mae chimes in.
The next meeting begins with a sober announcement: “We had a shooting of one of our CAPS members at Seventy-eighth and Coles.”
“Did they catch the offender?” a resident asks.
“No, not as of yet.” The people look down at their hot sheets.
The beat meetings attract all kinds of visitors—city hall bureaucrats, politicians running for reelection, people heading rape crisis centers or collecting names for this or that petition. This time, the visitor is a legal advocate in a beard and corduroy pants who doesn’t live in the neighborhood. He rises to speak and tries to get the group to join him in opposing a city ordinance that would clamp down on loitering.
“It will make open season on all black youth,” the man says of what he believes will happen if the ordinance were to pass.
The residents want the ordinance anyway, anything to bring them relief.
A man in his sixties stands up as if to speak for them all.
“We live in this neighborhood,” the man says. “We own houses and pay taxes. We’re scared to go outside. Practically every evening there’s a shooting. I don’t care about their rights. Maybe you have to get the good ones to get the bad.”
This being Chicago, famously local in its politics, the residents of South Shore have learned where to get their immediate needs met—a broken hydrant fixed, a pothole patched, a house condemned. The alderman is the closest politician to turn to. Most Chicagoans know their alderman by sight or even personally and will call upon him without hesitation if they think he can help.
When Ida Mae’s alderman, William Beavers, shows up at her beat meeting, there is great anticipation because he is one of the most powerful black politicians in the city and everyone knows him. He has been the Seventh Ward alderman for fourteen years. He arrives in a brown double-breasted suit and has cameras and lights and a television crew with him, which only adds to the sense of the drama of his visit.
“The area is coming back,” he announces to the residents. He then lists what he’s doing for the ward: “We got a new field house. We’re building a senior home at Seventy-fourth and Kingston. We have a new shopping center at Ninety-fifth and Stoney.”
Then he gets to what matters to them most, the crime, says he’s seen it himself, especially the prostitutes over on Exchange Street. “They’re on Exchange all day and all night,” he says. “They be waving, ‘Hey, Alderman Beavers!’ ”
A woman raises her hand with a complaint that is right up his alley. “There’s no curb across the street for us,” she says.
“I put them on the other side,” he says without apology. “I put them where the people vote.”
He then leaves them with a hotline number to call to report crime: the number, he says, is 1-800-CRACK-44.
South Shore is in Police Beat 421, Ward Seven, State Representative District 25, and State Senate District 13. The officeholders of the latter two districts rarely figure into the daily concerns of most people in Chicago. The state legislators are just low enough on the political food chain to go unrecognized, focused as they are on approving budgets and legislation. They are just lofty enough, however, to be seen as of little help in an immediate crisis as when, say, a drug dealer sets up shop in front of your house. It could be argued that many people could not name their state legislators off the top of their heads. As for state senators, there are fifty-nine of them, they meet in Springfield, and they are not usually household names, as would be the mayor or even one’s alderman.
So when, in 1996, a young constitutional lawyer and community activist from Hyde Park ran for the Illinois State Senate seat in District 13, Ida Mae, voting her usual straight Democratic ticket, would become among the first people ever to have voted for the man. She would not have to give it much thought. He did not have Chicago roots and the name was unusual—Barack Obama. But he was running unopposed, having edged out the woman who had asked him to run in her place before changing her mind. His wife, Michelle, had grown up in South Shore, in the more stable section of bungalows further to the west. So Ida Mae and an overwhelming majority of the Democratic stronghold of predominantly black South Shore voted him into office as their state senator.
On August 14, 1997, exactly one month before Alderman Beavers shows up with cameras and lights at Ida Mae’s beat meeting, Barack Obama makes an appearance. He is introduced as the state senator for the district, which not everyone in the room could be expected to know, as he has only been in office since January. He is tall, slight of build, formal in speech and attire, looks like a college student, and he arrives without lights, cameras, or entourage.
He stands before them and gives a minilecture to these bus drivers, secretaries, nurse’s aides, and pensioners about what state legislators do. He says that while the state legislature is not responsible for the police department, it passes laws that the police have to enforce. He describes the role of the legislature in education policy and in health care. And he invites those assembled to call his office anytime.
“Sometimes a call from the senator’s office,” he says like the professor he once was, “may be helpful in facilitating some issues that you have concerns about. Sometimes a call from my office will be answered much more quickly so we can move through some of the bureaucracy a little bit faster.”
Ida Mae and the rest of the people listen politely and with appreciation. But, as this is just another meeting, they sit in anticipation of the reason they are here tonight: the discussion with police about the latest shootings, stabbings, and drug deals, the immediate dangers they will face just getting back home.
The thirty-six-year-old freshman state senator finishes his presentation to Beat 421. The people clap with gratitude as they always do and then turn back to their hot sheets.
That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States.
NEW YORK, SPRING 1998
THE TROUBLE BEGAN with a mysterious dark spot on the back of George Starling’s foot. One of his grandsons had been the first to notice it. George was a diabetic and knew not to take chances with such things. He made an appointment to see his doctor right away.
The doctor admitted him to the hospital for tests. There was fear the foot might need to be amputated. “All these tests,” Pat, the niece who used to live with him and Inez, said.
Pat came in from Washington, where she was now living, and her brother came in from New Jersey to see about their uncle. There was relief when it turned out that the foot would not need to be amputated. But George was now requiring dialysis. The knees that had always given him trouble could not be relied upon now to hold him up, and he was having a harder time keeping his balance.
Pat and her brother helped George get up when they were there. But after they and his other visitors left, George slipped and fell in the hospital. In time, he appeared to be recovering and was looking to go home.
“Well, they not gonna keep me no longer,” he told Pat.
“Okay, now,” Pat said. “I’ll be up there to see about you.”
But he was instead transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation. While there, he lost his balance and fell again. This time he hit his head.
By now, Gerard, his firstborn, had been alerted in Florida as to his father’s condition. The two had long been at odds. Gerard’s lifestyle was counter to everything George had worked for. Gerard had been a drug hustler operating out of Miami and Gainesville. He had had money, homes, cars, women. Wherever he showed up, he gave everybody a hundred dollars just because he could. But in recent years, he had been down on his luck. He had diabetes, like his father, and was on dialysis and insulin.
Hearing that his father was in the hospital, he made plans to come up to New York. “We were all waiting on Gerard with great anticipation,” Pat remembered.
It was while Gerard was trying to figure out what day to come to New York that George fell and hit his head. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and slipped into a coma. By the time Gerard made it to New York, George was unconscious and hooked up to machines to sustain him on the chance he might come out of the coma.
Pat took Gerard to the hospital to see his father. “The moment he walked in and saw him, he broke down crying,” Pat said.
Gerard had to leave the room. He said he couldn’t stand to see his father that way. They didn’t stay much longer.
Gerard had not realized how grave his father’s condition was. He decided to head back to Florida, seeing as how there was nothing he could do to change things.
“Do you want to go and see him one more time before you get ready to go?” Pat asked him.
No, he said, he couldn’t bear it.
Gerard drove back to Florida weak and in despair. He had missed several rounds of dialysis and had used cocaine in the interim, Pat discovered. When he got back to Gainesville, he still did not go to dialysis.
“He had already given up,” Pat said.
Within days of seeing his father, Gerard suffered a massive seizure and died. He was fifty-one years old. His father was not conscious enough to know that he had lost his firstborn son. George, barely alive himself, was now the last one left of the nuclear family that had begun with him and Inez some sixty years before in Eustis.
There was no one in the hospital room when I went to see George Starling. The monitors attached to him beeped and flashed the minutest change in his vital signs. The robust onetime porter who could regale people for hours with his stories of the South and of the Great Migration was silent and motionless. He looked to be asleep, whatever wisdom or stories left now locked up inside of him. As much living as he had done, his seemed a life of missed chances and incompletion. Here was someone who had been born too early and in the wrong place to reach his true potential, had left to make a better way for himself, but had seemed to carry the sorrows of the South with him, without complaint.
I reached for his hand and squeezed it lightly and told him I had come from Chicago to see him. His face showed no reaction. His hand managed to press back into mine.
George Swanson Starling never came out of the coma. He died on September 3, 1998, a Thursday. Because he had migrated out of the South, lived most of his life in the North but remained connected to both, two funeral services were required. One was in New York, at the Baptist House of Prayer on 126th Street in Harlem, on September 17; the other in Florida, at Gethsemane Baptist Church in Eustis, two days later.
In the North, in Harlem, where he had found refuge from the South, the people turned out to see him one last time. The Deacon Board, the Pastor’s Aide Club, the 132nd Street Block Association, the neighbors who had looked out for him from across the street all packed into the church. The choir sang for him and shook the floor from the choir box as the fans whirred and oscillated around them.
One by one, people came forward to say they would miss his opening the church doors Sunday mornings, miss the sight of him reading the dictionary, and would remember him as “a gentleman of the first order.”
A man, tentative in his steps and taking in the measure of the sanctuary, had arrived an hour early. He had a shaved head and full beard. He sat alone in the third pew as the church began to fill. His eyes were red. He stared at the silver casket, then leaned onto the pew in front of him and buried his face in his arms. When Pat arrived, she went over and sat beside him. It was Kenny, George’s younger son, whose conception had broken Inez’s heart. And that heartbreak kept him from feeling part of the family or ever truly knowing his father.
Before George took ill, Kenny went to George and let him know how he was doing. Kenny was married, had kids, was living in the Bronx. He told him he had converted to Islam, had changed his name to Amjad Mujaahid, which means, he said, “One who is noble, a warrior in the cause of God.”
“Daddy,” Kenny told George, “that name is in memory of you.”
“That’s real nice, son,” Kenny remembers George saying. “I’m still calling you Kenny.”
Now the man he wished he’d had more time to get to know was dead. The service was a blur of song and testimonials. He took off his glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes, as his father had done whenever he sang.
It was hurricane season at the time of George Starling’s death. Hurricane Bonnie and Hurricane Danielle had gathered east of the Leeward Islands that August. By mid-September, when George Starling was transported back to the state of Florida for the last time, a new hurricane had formed and was nearing the Florida coast. The National Weather Service had named it Hurricane Georges.
Back in Eustis, the southern funeral commenced at Gethsemane Baptist Church. But Viola Dunham, the sister-in-law he used to stay with whenever he visited, could not bring herself to go. “It’s killing me,” she said. “I want to remember him sitting in my kitchen eating breakfast and running his mouth.”
A cousin named Lila Mae went and spoke for the people who had stayed in the South, remembering him as the hometown boy who made good in the North with his railroad job and dignified bearing.
“As he journeyed to New York and became a porter,” she began, “nothing was finer than to see this good-looking cousin come into Wildwood station and to bring him some sausage. All of his splendor and grace. It was something to see. Little George never forgot where he came from.”
Reuben Blye, who’d known George most of his life, sat staring out into the sanctuary in a gray suit and tie in a front pew. Sam Gaskin, who had stood up with him against the grove owners back in the forties, was there, too. A processional of eight or ten cars led by a white hearse passed through town near the corner where George had stood and waited for the open-bed truck to take pickers to the citrus groves some sixty years before.
The cortege turned off a main thoroughfare and crept down a dirt path to a clearing of wild grass scattered with the headstones of nearly all the black people who had ever lived and died in Eustis. The cars crossed a pebbled, pitted clearing and came to a stop at a green tent pitched before two juniper bushes in the middle of Mount Olive Cemetery. A dozen people took their places before the casket. The pastor stood and said his last words: “From dust thou art …”
That evening, the sun fell behind the horizon and made what looked like streaks of fire across the sky after George Starling was returned for the last time to the Florida earth he had fled.