The Warmth of Other Suns (17 page)

“Everything you wanted was white and the best,” he said.

Pershing had started to notice the girls, and they started to notice him. They were getting to an age where they would walk home from school together, meet at the Paramount for the picture show, and eventually
end up in a park or a field somewhere. Somebody would get a car from an uncle or someone or other, and they would drive up to where the new Neville High was, shiny new and perched high on a hill. It was lush and secluded, and when they had finished with the girls, they whirred past the grounds and flung their spent condoms on the green.

“That’s how we showed our resentment,” he said years later. “Don’t think we were blind.”

Just before dark, when the sky is neither blue nor black but purple, Pershing stepped out of the tin tub to get ready for a Saturday night. He put on long pants and cheap cologne and walked in the direction of the Miller and Roy Building on the colored side of Five Points, about a mile from the center of town.

It was in the shadow of downtown in a world of its own. The axis was Eighteenth and Desiard. Across from the office building was the drugstore. Behind the drugstore was a café. Behind the café was a liquor store. Across from the liquor store was the pool hall.

He had his shirt buttoned low and open as he strutted down Desiard. He was two blocks from the Miller and Roy Building when a car pulled up to the curb. The exhaust spit and coughed. A white man leaned out of the window.

“Hey, boy.”

Pershing kept walking. He hated being called boy even though he was one. They barked it at the sawmill hands and at bent-over, old colored men and even upstanding men like his father. He was fourteen, and it was already beginning to grate on him.

“Hey, boy!”

Pershing stopped and consoled himself:
You can answer him because you are a boy. You’re not twenty-one yet. Technically you’re still a boy. That makes it okay for him to address you as boy
.

He turned toward the car and kept it to “Yes,” instead of “Yes, sir.”

“Boy, I’ll pay you if you get me a nice, clean colored girl.”

Pershing breathed deep. Ever since his sister, Gold, had hit puberty, he could hardly walk down the street with her without white men with snuff in their mouth yelling out what they would do to her. It made him want to vomit. She kept her head up and held his hand tight and walked through it. He could never defend her, never stand up to a gang of them on a street corner. “That was death,” he would say years later.

Pershing knew it from the sheer insanity all around him. When he
was eleven years old, a white mob burned down the courthouse across the border in Sherman, Texas.
⁷⁵

It started with a colored man accused of raping a white woman, a confession extracted, a trial hastily set. But just as the trial opened, a mob stormed the courtroom and torched the building to get to the defendant, George Hughes. Court officials fled through a second-story window and left Hughes in a steel vault with a bucket of water.

Firefighters tried to save the courthouse, but the mob slashed the water hoses to keep the blaze going. The mob then dynamited the vault where Hughes had been left. The mob found him dead, crushed by the explosion, the water bucket almost empty. The courthouse then burned to the ground.

Disappointed that they had not gotten to Hughes before he died, the people in the mob hanged his body from a cottonwood tree and set it on fire with furniture they looted from a nearby colored hotel. Then they torched the colored district, as the colored people of Sherman fled to the homes of white friends or left town. A half-dozen colored homes escaped the torching only because a white man told the mob the houses belonged to him.

This was the world Pershing was growing up in. He had learned the rules early in life. Now he was standing at a vacant curb, just him and a white man out prowling. He had never seen the man before, imagined he must have come in from the country and made a beeline for the colored section with one thing in mind, as was his prerogative. Not just any colored girl.
A nice, clean colored girl
.

The man waited, and Pershing assessed the situation. He was on the colored side of town, a block from the rooming house. He knew every turn and alley. He was in the majority around here.

He looked at the man. “A nice, clean colored girl,” he said, calculating the risks of what he might say next. “Let me see. I tell you what. You get your mama for me, and I’ll get you one.”

He didn’t wait for the man’s reaction. Pershing vanished into the colored alleys of Five Points. He couldn’t believe what had come out of his mouth. His face was flushed, and his hands shook. He could get hanged for that. Nothing more needed to happen to remind him who had the power over him and what they could do if they wanted.

“You lived with it,” Pershing said years later. “But it wasn’t that you liked the taste of it.”

AT EASTER AND AROUND THE FOURTH OF JULY
, the people from the North came. They looked like extras out of a movie at the Saturday matinee. They wore peplums and bergamot waves. Even the wind moved aside as they walked.

They flashed thick rolls of cash from their pockets—the biggest bills on the outside covering the ones and fives. They said they were making all kinds of money. But they didn’t have to say it because the cars and the clothes did the talking. They had been wiring more money to their families back home than they truly could spare and had been saving up all year for those gloves and matching purse. But they weren’t telling the people in the South that.

They made sure to show up at their mother-churches, where everyone would see them: at Gethsemane Baptist Church in Eustis, Florida, where Lil George went; at Thankful Baptist Church in Rome, Georgia, where my mother saw the people visiting from the North; at New Hope Baptist Church in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, where Ida Mae lived.

Even at Zion Traveler Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana, where Pershing grew up, the partisans set aside their rivalries and sat upright in the pews when the people from the North came. The pastor would
ask the visitors to rise, and it was then that the people from up north or out west stood up in their butterfly hats and angel dresses and in suits upholstered to the tall men’s frames. People who hadn’t seen them in ages now craned their necks to see how Willie and Thelma looked and if they had changed any. And the pastor went on about how this one was building cars in Detroit and that one was doing us proud in Oakland.

They were received like visiting dignitaries. They had once been just like the people who stayed. Now they were doing important-sounding work for the government in Washington, in the hotels on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, in the garment district in New York or in the apartments of the rich people on Riverside Drive. They wore the protective coating of the North. 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.

At night when the junebugs came out, the children sat at the knees of the people from the North and heard stories of doing 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.

In Grenada, Mississippi, two little boys couldn’t wait for their big sister Francie to come visit from Ohio. Gilbert and Percy Elie would crouch at her feet and listen to her.
⁷⁷

“We would sit on the porch in the moonlight,” Gilbert remembered, “and she would tell us about the North.”

Then she went back to Ohio. And life returned to the way it was for Gilbert and Percy, living as they were in the altogether different country of the Mississippi Delta.

They and Ida Mae and George and Pershing and children all over the South were growing up, trying to comprehend the caste they were born into, adjusting or resisting, lying in bed at night and imagining a world that was different and free, and knowing it was out there because they had seen it in the casual airs, the haughtiness even, and the clothes and the stories of the people from the North. Now nothing around them made sense, and everything that happened to them imprinted itself into their psyches and loomed larger because they had glimpsed what was possible outside the bars of their own existence.

Yet they were too young to escape. So they had to endure their peculiar station in the feudal world they were consigned to and the madness that could intrude at any given moment.

Like the night back in the 1940s, “a moon-shining night, bright, like it’s almost day,” when little Gibert and Percy were sitting on the front porch steps of their family’s cabin.

The boys could hear voices coming from the woods. The voices echoed through the trees in the night. The boys got quiet and still and tried to make out what was happening. They could hear the crackle of a whip and a hollow wailing coming from the woods. A colored man was being lashed in the pine scrub beyond their cabin.

The boys heard the man cry out with each blow.

“Alright, we gonna take a break,” some voices finally said.

There was silence. Then the men took up the task again.

“We gonna kill you,” the voices said from the woods.

“Please,
please
, don’t,” the colored voice said. “Before y’all do, will you let me pray?”

The man began to pray. “The man prayed a prayer like a Baptist preacher,” Gilbert remembered decades later. “I ain’t never heard a man pray like that man.”

“
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they doing,” Gilbert remembered the man praying. “I lived a good life for you, if you never done nothing for me, Lord, please …
”

“Alright, that’s enough,” the other voices said.

The man continued to pray. The beating and wailing commenced again. Then the wailing stopped.

“The sonabitch dead,” came a voice from the woods.

Gilbert could never get the man’s cries out of his head. “We don’t know who he was,” Gilbert said some fifty years later, “or what he was supposed to have done.”

The seeds of Gilbert’s departure from Mississippi were sown that night. More seeds were planted another day, when he and his father and brother were walking home from the movie theater in town.

The street was little more than an alley, barely wide enough for two people to walk astride. Gilbert was about twelve. He was reading a comic book and not paying attention. Three white boys not much older than Gilbert came in their direction. Gilbert’s father and brother instinctively jumped out of the way. Gilbert was looking at his comic book and bumped into one of the boys.

The boy grabbed Gilbert by the collar.