The Warmth of Other Suns (61 page)

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.

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.