The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Read Free Book Online Page B

Baby) and Lavata (who actually was the baby but whom they called Date), were up in New York. Baby couldn’t keep little James and Brother in New York with her, so she left them with her mother to raise, like a lot of migrants did when they went up north.
    Young people like them weren’t tied to a place like their slave grandparents had been forced to, and they weren’t content to move from plantation to plantation like their parents. Ever since World War I had broken out and all those jobs had opened up in the North, there had been an agitation for something better, some fast, new kind of life where they could almost imagine themselves equal to the white people. And so they had gone off to wherever the money seemed to be raining down—to the Gulf Coast rising up in a construction boom or the orange groves at picking season or the turpentine camps if they couldn’t manage anything else; or, if they had nerve in the early days of the Migration, they’d hop a train to the edge of the world, straight up the coast, past Georgia and both Carolinas and straight through Virginia and up to New York, where people said you could get rich just mopping floors.
    To the old folks who stayed, the young people looked to be going in circles, chasing a wish. Some went crossways to someplace in Alabama or Georgia, where they heard things were better, only to find the South to be the South wherever they went. Some went north, high and mighty, and came back south, low and broke. Some people’s pride wouldn’t let them come back at all. So they shoehorned themselves into tenements and made like they were rich or just plain made do and dazzled the folks back home with all the money they wired back.
    Some people back home came to depend on that money, to half expect it, and they got agitated when it didn’t come. They figured the people who left were making all that money up north and just about owed it to them, especially if they left children behind. Baby and Date kept up fairly regular payments to their mother to cover Baby’s two little boys. George’s father sent money for George, too. At first. But after a while, it got to the place where he wouldn’t send any money, and the grandmother had to stretch what her daughters sent for two into enough to take care of all three of them.
    Sometimes George heard his grandmother fretting about how she was running out of money and hadn’t heard from Big George. It was the Depression, and sometimes even the daughters got slow sending money for the two which had stretched to three, and the grandmother had a problem on her hands. The daughters had gotten themselves out in that big world way up north—who knew what kind of fix they were in?—and here she was left with the little ones.
    When the money got low, Annie Taylor got in her rocking chair on the porch and rocked back and forth. She hummed and sang as she rocked. Guide me o’er, thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim to this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy loving hand .
    George and James and Brother heard her humming.
    “Grandma humming that song again,” George told James. “Somethin’ gonna happen soon.”
    The palm of her hand started to itch, or so she said. And before long, a Western Union man came rolling up the street, announcing a telegram for Miss Annie Taylor.
    “Somebody would be done wired us some money,” George would say years later. “Yes, sirree.”
    The waiting and hoping went on for two years, and then it was decided that it was best for George to be with his father, and he joined his father in Eustis.

    Big George worked at the loading dock of a packinghouse and ran a one-room convenience store over on Bates Avenue. He sold baked goods and castor oil to the fruit pickers and day workers and the children on their lunch break from the colored high school across the street in a citrus farming town in the underdeveloped midsection of a still-isolated state.
    Lake County and the rest of central