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November 6 - November 16, 2024
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney left first, in the 1930s, George Swanson Starling in the 1940s, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster in the 1950s, in a current that swept up millions of others like them.
It is the product of all the scuffling and saving he had to do when he arrived here a country boy from the South. His apartment is a cluttered storeroom, really, with a single bed, a couple of chairs, a dresser with a picture of his grandmother, Annie the root doctor, on it, and half-open boxes of his accumulated highs and regrets.
He takes a seat by the bed and talks in a monotone without taking a breath, there is so very much to say. He has catalogued in his mind every character who ever passed his way, can mimic their toothless drawl with wicked precision, recall every good and bad thing he has ever done or that has ever been done to him, every laughable contrivance of Jim Crow, every grievance and kind turn, all the people who made a way out of no way in that world growing up.
It comes back to him, one image after another, how Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.
George Starling left all he knew because he would have died if he had stayed.
A smile lifts his face at the absurdities of the world he left, and which, in some ridiculous way, he still loves. Then his eyes well up over all that they have seen.
And so it went, George Starling and others in his impatient generation outwitting the old folks they saw as too content in their spirituals and their place in that world.
The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.
“We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.” The grandfather had nothing to show for a year’s hard toiling in the field.
Reshard was considered “a good share, a good boss, a good master,” in George’s words, “ ’cause he let us break even.” Most other sharecroppers ended deeper in debt than before. “They could never leave as long as they owed the master,” George said. “That made the planter as much master as any master during slavery, because the sharecropper was bound to him, belonged to him, almost like a slave.”
the sharecropping system back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money.
She would stir the roots into foul-smelling potions that people bought to thin their blood, cut a fever, shush a hacking cough. She knew all the roots and could identify them, and she knew what they were good for.
Baby couldn’t keep little James and Brother in New York with her, so she left them with her mother to raise, like a lot of migrants did when they went up north.
To the old folks who stayed, the young people looked to be going in circles, chasing a wish. Some went crossways to someplace in Alabama or Georgia, where they heard things were better, only to find the South to be the South wherever they went. Some went north, high and mighty, and came back south, low and broke. Some people’s pride wouldn’t let them come back at all.
When the money got low, Annie Taylor got in her rocking chair on the porch and rocked back and forth. She hummed and sang as she rocked. Guide me o’er, thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim to this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy loving hand.
Florida, in the early winter of 1861, became one of the first to secede from the Union in the months leading up to the Civil War.
the single worst act of torture and execution in twentieth-century America occurred in the panhandle town of Marianna, Florida, a farm settlement halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee. That October, a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy.
“It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable torture for such a long period,” wrote the white undercover investigator retained by the NAACP.
The committee of six decided finally to just kill him in the woods. His nude body was then tied to the back of a car and dragged to the Cannidy house, where men, women, and children stabbed the corpse with sticks and knives.
The committee hanged the body “from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn.” People reportedly displayed Neal’s fingers and toes as souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for fifty cents each.
No one was ever charged in Neal’s death or spent a day in jail for it.
Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South.
it would be nearly impossible for George or any other colored boy in that era to grow up without the fear of being lynched,
Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price whichever they chose.
No one sat George down and told him the rules. His father was quiet and kept his wounds to himself. George’s teachers were fear and instinct. The caste system trained him to see absurdity as normal.
It always happened that the young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth.
George had made valedictorian at Curtwright and, just as significant to him, was the only one from his high school to finish the first year of college without failing any subject. He thought he deserved better.
She wore plaits and plain dresses and didn’t have the pomaded hair some other girls had or the stockings and jewelry that made certain girls look more refined. But she had a way of smiling and tilting her head to the side and some kind of simpatico, outsider way of looking at the world that appealed to a young man like George who felt life had never cut him a fair deal.
He is a Californian now, this Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. He is the color of strong coffee and has waves in his hair, which he lets grow as untamed as Einstein’s but then brushes back like the boys in the band.
The whole effect is as starched and formal as the tuxedos he used to wear to the parties he threw for himself back when his wife, Alice, was alive and the money was raining down like confetti.
The table seemed set before Pershing was even born, and he couldn’t see how to stand out on his own or figure out how he fit in as the youngest.
Those dirt roads were the reason he never learned to skate, and he could never forget that. “We could buy skates,” Pershing would remember even as an old man. “But we couldn’t buy sidewalks.”
At last, the place went dark, and Pershing left Monroe. He was on a bright veranda with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power out in California. It was a perfect world, and he could see himself in it.
The only way that someone as proud and particular as Pershing could survive in the time and place he was in was to put his mind somewhere else.
They had big plans for themselves just as Jim Crow was closing doors on them.
To the north was the tenant-farming Ozark land of warm springs and hard living in Arkansas, where an attempt by sharecroppers to unionize in the town of Elaine would be crushed with bloody efficiency in 1919.
In 1928, a businessman named C. E. Woolman purchased what was then known as Huff Daland Dusters. He switched from crop dusting and began running the first passenger flights between Mississippi and Texas, via Monroe and Shreveport, in 1929. The company would later come to be known as Delta Air Lines, named after the region it originally served.
Delta would remain headquartered in Monroe until 1941, when it relocated to Atlanta with the United States’s entry into World War II.
The striving colored people in town, stooped and trodden the rest of the week, invested their very beings into the church and quarreled over how things should be run and who should be in charge of the one thing they had total control over.
But he carried the sense of betrayal and insecurity with him and in some ways would spend the rest of his life both running from those who rejected his family and craving their acceptance.
it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library.
The disparity in pay, reported without apology in the local papers for all to see, would have far-reaching effects. It would mean that even the most promising of colored people, having received next to nothing in material assets from their slave foreparents, had to labor with the knowledge that they were now being underpaid by more than half, that they were so behind it would be all but impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and that they would, by definition, have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families.
the chasm would continue, as it did for blacks as a group even into the succeeding century. The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.
“The money allocated to the colored children is spent on the education of the white children,” a local school superintendent in Louisiana
The unfairness started to eat at Pershing. It was a curse to be able to see it. Better not to know. But the older he got, the more he was starting to want. And the more he wanted, the harder it was to accept
all because of a chemical in his skin that some people resented and felt superior to and that no one on this earth could change.
They were received like visiting dignitaries. They had once been just like the people who stayed.
They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.
unimaginable things like sitting in the front of a trolley car and saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, sir” to a white person and living to tell it.
Ida mae’s new husband took her to live in a little wood cabin on Edd Pearson’s plantation on a clearing past the Natchez Trace. Ida Mae was sixteen.
