The Warmth of Other Suns (38 page)

Maybe we can start again,
in the new rich land
—in California,
where the fruit grows.
⁴
We’ll start over
.

—J
OHN
S
TEINBECK
,
The Grapes of Wrath

LOS ANGELES, APRIL 1953
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

ROBERT DROVE UNDER A GRAY GAUZE SKY
through the thicket of shark-fin taillights, up Crenshaw and Slauson and Century, the stickpin palms arched high above him. He went screeching and lurching with the distracted urgency of a man meeting a blind date, picturing the first glance and dreading the faint chance of disappointment.

He drove into the white sun. Everything was wide open and new. The city unfurled itself, low and broad, the boulevards singing Spanish descriptions,
La Cienega, La Brea, La Tijera
. There were orange trapezoid signs staked high above the diners and auto dealerships and neon lights at the coin-op laundries.

The farther he went, the better it got. The trees were not trees anymore but Popsicles and corncobs. The lawns spread out like pool tables, and you could cut yourself on the hedgerows. Everything was looking like a villa or a compound now, statues and gumdrop trees marching down overdone driveways and Grecian urns set out on the porticoes. The whole effect was like a diva with too much lipstick, and he loved it. The too-muchness of it all.

He was drawing near the Wilshire district and was looking for St. Andrews Place, where a Dr. William Beck, an old professor from medical school, now lived.

Dr. Beck started practicing medicine when Robert was just learning to crawl. However hard Robert thought he had it, Dr. Beck had had it rougher. It began with why Dr. Beck had become a doctor in the first place. Decades before, his father had tuberculosis. There were no colored doctors around, and no white doctors would come out to the farm. The father died, and so the son decided he would be the doctor that didn’t exist when they needed one. He specialized in tuberculosis and diseases of the lung and would spend the rest of his life fighting what took his father away.

No colored man out on a farm was going to die abandoned if he could help it. He took a job teaching at Meharry and on the weekends went out into the country making house calls on colored families who couldn’t make it into Nashville. Every Sunday he drove the back roads to the sharecropper shacks and the shotgun houses in his crisp suits and late-model car. Some of the white people accused him of being uppity and not knowing his place. Threats and shots were fired. One afternoon, some roughnecks pulled him from his car and beat him. From then on, his wife, Reatha, and their two young children, William, Jr., and Vivian, rode with him whenever he went.

“They would drive out as a family, figuring that they wouldn’t kill him in front of them,” his granddaughter, Reatha Gray Simon, said years later.

Mrs. Beck was prominent in her own right in the South’s distorted world of colored privilege. Her father, a dentist, was said to have been an outside child of an Alabama governor, a condition that afforded the family land and means when the son decided to set up house outside Monroe, Louisiana. The son had thirteen children, and all of them went to college in the days when most colored people did not make it to high school.

Dr. and Mrs. Beck were in their fifties now, Robert’s parents’ generation. They themselves had arrived in Los Angeles only six years before. They were part of the postwar flood of colored Louisianans that was turning Los Angeles into New Orleans west. Dr. Beck arrived as an elder statesman who had taught many of the colored doctors practicing there, and Mrs. Beck arrived the very picture of a doctor’s wife. She was a beauty of the Lena Horne variety, who had never spent a day at work and was accustomed to maids and cooks and would thus not know what to do with either a typewriter or a mop. When they first arrived, they noticed to their dismay that most colored people were living on the more congested east side of town, east of Main Street and far from the circular driveways of Beverly Hills.

They looked further west and found a house more in keeping with their vision of themselves. It was a four-bedroom peach stucco mansion set back from the road on St. Andrews between Pico and Country Club. The address was 1215 St. Andrews. It had a wide portico with balustrades like the bridges of Paris. It was surrounded by houses that were equally grand. And they wanted it.

But the neighborhood was all white, and there was a covenant on the house that forbade the owners from selling to colored people. Still a real estate agent managed to secure the house for them in spite of the restriction. 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. In any case, Dr. and Mrs. Beck, bourgeois though they were, waited until after dark to move into 1215 St. Andrews Place. But someone must have seen them. 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.

They were not new to this kind of hostility, and they decided not to run from it. They had survived the South during far uglier days. And they considered themselves upstanding people that anyone should be proud to live next to. They went to court to challenge the covenant and defend the means by which they had acquired the house; and, when it was over, they had won the right to stay.
⁵
The white people emptied out of the block within months.

On a spring afternoon six years later, Robert Pershing Foster drew near the vicinity of the peach stucco house that his mentor had to sue to live in, to begin his own life in California.

Robert had arrived in one of the last receiving stations of the twentieth-century migration out of the South. For most of the state’s history, the distance between California and the old Confederacy had discouraged all but the most determined of black pioneers. The people were of so little means that they could scarcely take a chance on someplace so far away in the decades before the Great Migration. 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.

Still, a small contingent of blacks had lived in California since the eighteenth century.
⁶
There were two blacks among the forty-four settlers who founded Los Angeles on September 4, 1781. Some arrived over the ensuing decades, when slaveholders who moved west brought their slaves with them. Others worked as fur traders, scouts, cowboys, and miners. But even before the end of the Civil War, California, like other states outside the South, strongly discouraged the migration of freed slaves across its border.
⁷
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.

By 1900, there were only 2,131 black people in the city of Los Angeles out of a total population of 102,479, and only 11,045 in the entire state of California.
⁸
The numbers rose slowly but steadily over the years but did not take off during the labor shortage of World War I as in the North. California had not been as dependent on European labor as had other parts of the country, and Los Angeles, the state’s largest city, did not then have an industrial base as did the cities of the North.

But even in the low-status laborer and domestic positions that were the caste-ordered preserve of colored people in the South, colored migrants to California faced stiff competition from the many immigrants already there, the Mexicans and Filipinos working the loading docks, the Europeans in personal service to the glamorous and the wealthy.

“Even the seeming inapproachable shoe-shining field was competed for by the Greeks,” observed a report by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s on the challenges facing black workers in Los Angeles.
⁹
“Trained English servants succeeded them as valets and butlers.”

The polyglot nature of Los Angeles made it harder for colored migrants to figure out this new terrain, where competition was coming from every direction and each minority was pitted against the others. “In certain plants, Mexicans and whites worked together,” the Works Progress Administration reported.
¹⁰
“In some others, white workers accepted Negroes and objected to Mexicans. In others, white workers accepted Mexicans and objected to Japanese. White women worked with Mexican and Italian women, but refused to work with Negroes.…  In the General Hospital, Negro nurses attended white patients, but were segregated from white nurses in dining halls: in a manufacturing plant white workers refused to work with Negroes, but worked under a Negro foreman.”

Into this world arrived the migrants from the South, looking for a place for themselves far from home, not knowing what to expect in a city with a whimsical caste system and no rules that anyone could see.

The Becks were expecting him. Word had reached them that he was heading to California, although Robert did not alert them himself or assume he could stay with them. Driving in the middle of a foreign city, it hit him that he had arrived in Los Angeles without any assurance of anything. It was not clear who would take him in or for how long. The nearest relative was two thousand miles away. And he suddenly started to feel alone and uncertain again. “I knew I could find a place to sleep in any hotel I knew would take me in,” he would say years later, “but I didn’t know what my future was.”

He decided to look up Dr. Beck’s office and go by there first. He didn’t want to give the impression that he expected to live off the Becks. “These were not relatives I was going to see,” Robert said. “I didn’t know the Becks would take me in.”

He found the address in the phone book. It was an office building on South Figueroa, number 4240. It turned out Dr. Beck was delighted to see him.

“Come here, boy,” Dr. Beck said greeting him. “Of course you’ll be staying with us. We’ve got a big house, plenty of room.”