More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 6 - November 16, 2024
leaving the South was not always a direct path but one of testing and checking of facts with those who had left ahead of them, before making the great leap themselves.
They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.
“May the Lord be the first one in the car,” Miss Theenie had whispered about the train they were hoping to catch, “and the last out.”
He had not asked Ida Mae what she thought about leaving or whether she wanted to go. He had merely announced his decision as the head of the family, as was his way, and Ida Mae had gone along with it, as was hers. She had not wanted to leave Miss Theenie and her sister Talma and all the people she had ever known, but her lot was with her husband, and she would go where he thought it best.
He had nothing but time, time to think, and, as he drove, he knew this was the time to shed his southern self for good, starting with the name.
A name was a serious undertaking. It was the first and maybe only thing colored parents could give a child, and they were often sentimental about it.
Sometimes parents tried to superimpose glory on their offspring with the grandest title they could think of, or, if they were feeling especially militant, the name of a senator or president from the North. It was a way of affixing acceptability if not greatness. It forced everyone, colored and white, to call their janitor sons Admiral or General or John Quincy Adams, whether anybody, including the recipient, liked it or not. White southerners who would not call colored people Mr. or Mrs. were made to sputter out Colonel or Queen instead.
For a time, Mark Twain piloted the railroad’s steamboats up and down the Mississippi, and Abraham Lincoln was a rising attorney on retainer to the railroad before his election to the White House.
The Civil War brought an end to regular passenger use, and the railroad was pressed into the service of the Union Army, funneling troops and supplies from the North to the South for the war effort. At war’s end, the railroad laid or acquired tracks into the more isolated precincts of Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana and unwittingly made the North a more accessible prospect for black southerners desperate to escape.
a copy of the 121st Psalm: I raise my eyes toward the mountains. From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. God will not allow your foot to slip; your guardian does not sleep…. By day the sun cannot harm you, nor the moon by night. The Lord will guard you from all evil, will always guard your life. The Lord will guard your coming and going both now and forevermore.
whether he knew it or not, he would come to need its reassurance and protection for the long, lonely journey into the desert.
Under the circumstances, borders could be deceptive. They are a blend of the two lands they straddle, not fully one or the other, ripe for ambiguity and premature assumptions.
Heading back from California, the South officially began in El Paso.
But even a border’s borders are not always clear. Where is it safe to assume you are out of one country and well into another? When can you sigh a sigh of relief that you have passed from the rituals of one place into those of the other side?
“I’m sorry,” the man said, polite and businesslike. “We just rented our last room.” Robert looked into the face, tried to read it. He noticed that “the face was awkward, trying to be loose and matter of fact. All calm and uncomfortable.”
Maybe he should let them know he saw through them, after all those years in the South. He always prepared a script when he spoke to a white person.
He didn’t like being where he wasn’t wanted. And yet here he was, needing something he couldn’t have.
“I’m looking for a room,” he began. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.” A white woman in her fifties stood on the other side of the front desk. She had a kind face, and he found it reassuring. And so he continued. “It’s a shame that they would do a person like this,” he said. “I’m no robber. I’ve got no weapons. I’m not a thief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m a captain that just left Austria, which was Salzburg. And the German Army was just outside of Vienna. If there had been a conflict, I would have been protecting you. I
...more
before. “I have money to pay for my services,” he said. “Now, if you don’t rent to colored people, let me know so I can go on to California. This is inhuman. I’m a menace to anybody driving. I’m a menace to myself and to the public, driving as tired as I am.”
She listened, and she let him make his case. She didn’t talk about mistaken vacancy signs or just-rented rooms. She didn’t cut him off. She listened, and that gave him hope.
Something in the voice, in the way the man looked into his eyes and touched his shoulder and tried in the middle of a cool desert night to console him, made Robert feel all the sadder. It confirmed he wasn’t crazy, and that made him feel utterly alone. Yes, there was an evil in the air and this man knew it and the woman at the motel knew it, but here he was without a room and nobody of a mind to do anything had done a single thing to change that fact.
He had driven more than fifteen hundred miles, and things were no different. In fact, it felt worse because this wasn’t the South. It wasn’t even close to the South. He sat unable to speak for longer than is comfortable in front of a total stranger. His voice cracked as the story tumbled out of him. “I came all this way running from Jim Crow, and it slaps me straight in the face,” Robert said. “And just think, I told my friends, why did they stay in the South and take the crumbs? ‘Come to California.’”
Before it hadn’t mattered much that this was a two-lane road with no reflector lights and no guardrails to catch him. Now it did. Interstate highways didn’t exist yet. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president who would go on to build them, had only recently taken office. Of course, Robert didn’t know that, and knowing it wouldn’t have helped him.
Just past Felicity came the warnings of the desert: check your radiator. last chance for water. last chance for gas stations. strong winds possible. What was this place he was going to? What was he doing behind the wheel in the middle of the pitch-black desert by himself? Could it be worth all this? It had seemed so clear back in Monroe. Now he fought with himself over the fear and the doubt. He couldn’t bear to hear the I-told-you-so’s. If he turned back now, if he changed his mind or lost his nerve, the I-knew-its would ring in his ear. Dr. Clement would be the first to say it.
The sun was on his back as he pulled away for good from the South and the center of gravity.
In the dark hours of the morning, Ida Mae and her family crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, at the Ohio River, the border between Kentucky and Illinois, between the provincial South and the modern North, between servitude and freedom, without comment.
From the railcar window, the land looked to be indistinguishable, one state from another, just one big flat plain, and there was nothing in nature that one could see that said colored people should be treated one way on one side of the river and a different way on the other.
Crossing the line was a thing of spiritual and political significance to the guardians of southern law and to colored people escaping it who knew they were crossing over. But going north, most migrants would have been asleep or unable to see whatever the line looked like if they even knew where it was.
It was confusing to have their intended destination preceded directly by a city with such a similar name and with an identically named station. And as they had been riding for as many as twenty-four hours and were nervous about missing their stop, some got off prematurely, and, it is said, that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those arriving in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.
In South Carolina, colored people had to apply for a permit to do any work other than agriculture after Reconstruction.
At the time it was misunderstood as a temporary consequence of war and declared over when the war ended. But the people who before had been cut off from the North now had the names of neighbors and relatives actually living there. Instead of the weakening stream that observers predicted, the Great Migration actually gathered steam after World War I.
It continued into the twenties with the departure of some 903,000 black southerners, nearly double the World War I wave.
World War II brought the fastest flow of black people out of the South in history—nearly 1.6 million left during the 1940s, more than in any decade before.
Earvin’s story is evidence of just how long the Great Migration stretched across a hard century, how universal were the impulses of those who left, and how treacherous it could be to try to leave certain remote and Victorian pockets of the American South throughout the sixty-odd years the Great Migration lasted.
Eddie Earvin was twenty in the spring of 1963. He was a day picker at a plantation in Scotts, Mississippi, walking with pieces of cardboard tied to his one pair of shoes to cover the bottoms of his feet. “We were still in slavery, like,” he would say years later.
They sat in the back and kept their mouths shut. “The white folks could talk,” he would say years later. “You sit and be quiet. Where we came from, we didn’t move from the back.
He was out for sure now and on his way to Illinois, and at that moment he could feel the sacks of cotton dropping from his back. Years later, he would still tremble at the memory and put into words the sentiments of generations who went in search of a kinder mistress. “It was like getting unstuck from a magnet,” he said.
The lazy, laughing South With blood on its mouth…. Passionate, cruel, Honey-lipped, syphilitic— That is the South. And I, who am black, would love her But she spits in my face…. So now I seek the North— The cold-faced North, For she, they say, is a kinder mistress. —Langston Hughes, “The South”
We have been told that we can sit where we please, but we are still scared. We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours. —Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices
“What did it look like at that time, Chicago?” I asked her, half a life later. “It looked like Heaven to me then,” she said.
He would have to get accustomed to a concrete world with the horizon cut off by a stand of brownstones, to a land with no trees and where you couldn’t see the sun. Somehow, he would have to get used to the press of people who never seemed to sleep, the tight, dark cells they called tenements. He would quicken his steps, learn to walk faster, hold his head up and his back stiff and straight, not waving to everyone whose eyes he met but instead acting like he, too, had already seen and heard it all, because in a way, in a life-and-death sort of way, he had.
He didn’t see himself as part of any great tidal wave. “No,” he said years later. “I just knew that I was getting away from Florida. I didn’t consider it like it was a general movement on and I was a part of it. No, I never considered that.”
“I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”
was like a diva with too much lipstick, and he loved it. The too-muchness of it all.
flood of colored Louisianans that was turning Los Angeles into New Orleans west.
During the early testing of limits that presaged the white flight from northern and western cities in the 1960s, realtors found ways around the covenants by buying properties themselves and selling them at a higher price to colored people, by arranging third-party transfers that hid the identity of the true purchasers, or by matching defiant or desperate white sellers with equally anxious colored buyers, which together were just about the only way colored people could get into certain neighborhoods.
That night, as they began unpacking, an orange light danced in front of the picture window. The palm tree on their manicured lawn was on fire. It was not unlike the crosses that burned in the South, except this was California.
covenant and defend the means by which they had acquired the house; and, when it was over, they had won the right to stay. The white people emptied out of the block within months.
There was already an abundance of unskilled labor from China, Japan, and Mexico, which gave California industries little need to recruit cheap black labor from the South, had they been so inclined.
California, like other states outside the South, strongly discouraged the migration of freed slaves across its border. The state constitutional convention seriously considered prohibiting colored people from living in California. The measure did not pass but was a reflection of the fear and intolerance directed toward them.
