The Warmth of Other Suns (66 page)

LOS ANGELES, 1967
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

RUFUS CLEMENT AND HIS SON-IN-LAW
, Robert Foster, were at opposite ends of the Great Migration. They represented the two roads that stood before the majority of black people at the start of the century. One man had stayed in the South. One had left it behind. Both had worked long and hard and had all the material comforts most any American could dream of. Yet both men wanted to prove to the other and to everyone else that his was the wiser choice, his life the more meaningful one.

President Clement was the tight-buttoned scion of the southern black bourgeoisie. Robert was a brilliant but tortured free spirit who had run from the very strictures Clement stood for. Clement was a distinguished accommodationist in the Jim Crow South—a beneficiary of it, in fact. He was not unlike the colored university president in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, whose allegiance was, above all, to the institution he ran, which had become an extension of himself. He was a pragmatist who had learned the fine art of extracting whatever he needed from guilt-ridden northerners or poorly credentialed but powerful segregationists who wouldn’t want him living next to them but might grant him a concession or donate to his cause, the colored graduate school Atlanta University. He was so vigilant as to his place in the colored hierarchy that he kept a card file near his desk,
Time
magazine reported, on every black person in the United States that he considered “worthy of a high position in Government and education” in case he got a query from Washington.
²⁰²

Without trying, Rufus Clement had become an unwitting rival of Robert, not only for the affections of Robert’s wife and children but in both men’s unspoken effort to prove that where each man had ended up was the better place for colored people.

Robert had made out well as a noted surgeon in Los Angeles. But it did not rate with his father-in-law, Rufus Clement, who had staked his claim in the South and prospered. President Clement had avoided the messy confrontations of the civil rights era, saying at one point that he had been disturbed, as any right-thinking southerner might be, by the sit-ins but recognized that “this is the way in which they have tried to dramatize the way in which the American Negro has to live in his own country.” He reassured white southerners that “we don’t want to sit beside you, we just want to sit when we eat, like other people sit. We don’t want to intermarry with your people. We simply want to get a drink of water where there is a drinking fountain available.”

His patient and deferential ambitions paid off in 1953, when, against the longest of odds, he was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education—a first for a colored person there, while Robert, by contrast, was doing physicals and collecting urine samples for Golden State Insurance in what then seemed an unpromising start in California.

The Clements hovered over Robert and pulled at his wife and daughters from afar. And as they did, Robert retreated further into the world of his patients, his bookies, and the B-list musicians he liked to hang around with. He was drinking more and coming in late. He had fallen hard for Vegas and now had discovered horse racing. He joined the club room at Santa Anita, since now he could well afford it, and liked to catch the trifectas at Hollywood Park racetrack down in Inglewood.

He would go to Vegas whenever the spirit hit him and could play long and well. “I don’t need to eat and rarely need to go to the bathroom,” Robert would say. “I can go thirty-six hours.” He liked the Sands Hotel and the Las Vegas Hilton. He went so often and bet so much that the hotels started comping him rooms and meals. Some trips, he brought back tens of thousands of dollars. Some trips, he lost that much. But he was hooked.

While he was out betting heavy and looking for something that did not exist and that nobody could give him, Alice set about establishing herself as a proper surgeon’s wife. She joined the Links and the auxiliary of doctors’ wives and hosted teas and bridge parties for the same kind of social set she had grown accustomed to back in Atlanta. The girls took piano and voice lessons and came out at their cotillions in white princess gowns. They were living parallel lives, and Alice and the girls tried not to notice that Robert, whose long hours helped finance their ball gowns and socials, was trying to fill some hole that could not be filled and was hardly ever around.

At one point, Alice had had enough. She packed up the girls and moved back to Atlanta with the Clements, who surely had not approved of how their daughter and granddaughters were faring with Robert. Somehow Alice and Robert made up, and she came back to Los Angeles. But nothing really had changed. They had both come into their own and seemed less suited in some ways than before. Perhaps they had always been ill suited for each other but were just beginning to realize it, now that they had a life and a family and reputations to protect.

They reached a kind of understanding and came together on the shining occasions when their mutual love of hosting and socializing happened to intersect at the grand parties they threw and the costumes they wore.

It was a ritual, and they had an understanding. Robert dressed Alice. Robert bought the clothes. Robert chose the clothes. Dressing Alice was his personal project. He studied her as a surveyor would study an isthmus, knew her assets and liabilities as far as tailoring went, and accompanied her not so much as an advocate for her tastes but as a guardian of his own reputation.

When Alice started moving up in the Links and had more cotillions to go to, he was happy for her and wanted her to look good. But it was a defensive kind of happiness. He wanted Alice to outdress the other women. “I didn’t want those women to say my wife had anything less than the best,” Robert said.

In the early days, he would prep her before a big formal. “
You got to go out there first, baby
,” he would tell her. “
You represent me.
”

Every entrance was a production. They would approach the doorway of a ballroom. Robert would adjust himself and pause to let his wife go before him. “I’d walk two paces to the right and the rear and just watch her make that entrance,” he said. “And she could walk.”

Before every big occasion, the ritual was the same: the two heading to the store’s back room, the salesclerk bringing in dresses that Robert knew were all wrong for Alice, and Robert saying, “Pick what you like.” Alice would try on a dress. Robert inspected her and directed her movements.

“
Walk
,” he told her. And she would begin.

“
Come to me.
” She moved toward him.

“
Sit.
” She would find an ottoman and position herself.

“
Stand.
” She lifted herself up.

“
Turn.
” And she would do so.

“If the dress didn’t talk to me, it wasn’t her dress,” he said. “The salespeople go crazy. ‘Who is this man? Who
is
he?’ ”

Over time, he began to sort the big moments of his life by whatever Alice was wearing. It seemed as if he remembered the gown if he remembered nothing else. Those gowns got people talking, and it was exactly what he wanted to hear:
Foster, you dress your women well
. “I couldn’t be betting a hundred dollars on a horse and skimping on my wife,” he told me many years later. “I know I’m bragging, and I’m enjoying it.”

Sometimes the Clements would come out to visit them in Los Angeles, and Robert would put on his most charming performance to prove how well he had made out in the Promised Land. He invited the colored men of importance in the city to meet with his father-in-law and alerted the
Los Angeles Sentinel
so that the visit could be captured for posterity, as the Clements would have expected. The two men would never be close, but Robert knew how to put on a show when he had to.

By 1966, President Clement had risen to such a level of esteem at Atlanta University that a building was named in his honor. Clement Hall, an august red brick classroom building on the campus promenade, had its formal dedication on October 16, 1966. Alice and Robert’s youngest daughter, Joy, in bangs and a white headband, cut the ribbon with her grandfather right behind her. Alice stood watching in a pillbox hat and tailored dark suit and corsage. Bunny was there in a tweed peacoat and gloves, with her Jackie-Kennedy-in-the-White-House bob and beautifully chiseled sixties cover-girl face, in a show of support for her grandfather. Robert did not attend.

The man who had managed to oust W. E. B. Du Bois from Atlanta University by lobbying the university’s board of trustees all those years ago was in New York in early November 1967 for the regular meeting of that same board of trustees.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 7, during a break in the board’s proceedings, Clement collapsed in his suite at the Roosevelt Hotel. He died of an apparent heart attack. He was sixty-seven years old.

He and his wife, Pearl, had planned to embark on a round-the-world tour after the board meeting. Instead, plans for interment were made. Pearl would have to move out of the president’s mansion at Atlanta University, which had been her home and decorated to her liking for most of her adult life. She would have to move in with her next of kin, her beloved only daughter, Alice, in Los Angeles. Robert would have a wing with a bedroom and sitting area built for his mother-in-law and would try to make the best of it.

News reports of Rufus Clement’s death appeared in the
Atlanta Daily

World, the New York Amsterdam News
, the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, and elsewhere. The
New York Amsterdam News
wrote that, “in addition to his widow, he is survived by a daughter, Mrs.
²⁰³
Robert Foster of Los Angeles.” Robert himself went unmentioned.

CHICAGO, FEBRUARY 1968
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY