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

and a panic whenever he came through. It could happen day or night. There was never much warning, and they had to scramble to escape his ragged gunshots. Then they had to lie perfectly still. “We’d run under the house, and, wherever he hear a bump, he would shoot,” Ida Mae said.
    One day when he came through, Ida Mae was outside and couldn’t get under the house in time. Josie and Talma had scattered already, and she didn’t see where they had gone. The man had wobbled off his horse and was coming through, firing his gun.
    A barrel of cornmeal was right next to her, and she saw it and jumped inside. She sank into the grit cushion of meal with her chin digging into her knees. All the while, the man hollered and grunted around her, and the bullets made the pinging noises of metal against tin. She pulled the top over her head and tried not to breathe. She stayed in the barrel until the shooting and the cussing stopped.
    He was drunk and a bad aim and never actually hit anybody as far as Ida Mae knew. No sheriff or police were ever called in. There would have been no point in calling. And so the drunk farmer could go on shooting and scaring the Brandons and other colored people in the bottoms whenever he felt like it.
    “He call hisself having fun,” Ida Mae said.
    As she grew older, she learned that there was more to the southern caste system than verbal slights and the antics of a crazy white farmer. In the summer of 1926, when she was thirteen, a cloud passed over the grown people, and it showed in their faces. She could overhear them whispering about something that had happened in town, some terrible thing they didn’t want the children to know about. It had to do with two colored boys—the Carter brothers, as she heard it—and a white woman.
    “They said something to the white lady,” she said.
    And, as best as Ida Mae could make out, the white people had taken the boys and hanged them in Okolona that morning. Ida Mae would always remember it because that was the day her cousin was born and they named the baby Thenia after Ida Mae’s mother. The grown people wept in their cabins.
    After the funeral, the surviving Carters packed up and left Mississippi. They went to a place called Milwaukee and never came back.
    In three years’ time, Ida Mae and George would move to the Pearson plantation, and things would unfold in such a way that Ida Mae would eventually follow the Carters up north. Although she didn’t see how it might apply to herself at the time, the Carter migration was a signal to Ida Mae that there was, in fact, a window out of the asylum.

G EORGE S WANSON S TARLING
NEW YORK CITY, 1996

    HIS WORLD IS THE BASEMENT of a brownstone on 132nd Street west of Lenox Avenue, a shaft of light streaking through the burglar bars on a single window. 47 Outside, there is Harlem—Tupac on boom boxes, street preachers on soap crates. Crack addicts scrounging for change. There are middle-aged volunteers planting beds of impatiens in a footprint of earth in the concrete, German tourists pressed against bus windows to see the Apollo Theater and the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
    He has lived here so long that not much of this fazes him anymore. He is a widower now. He walks lean and upright, and he towers over you as he leads you to the one room he keeps for himself out of the whole brownstone he owns. It is the product of all the hustling and saving he had to do when he arrived here a country boy from the South. His apartment is a cluttered storeroom, really, with a single bed, a couple of chairs, a dresser with a picture of his grandmother, Annie the root doctor, on it, and half-open boxes of his accumulated highs and regrets.
    The knees that used to climb suckling tree limbs to pick grapefruit back in Florida and worked the train aisles up and down the East Coastall those years are giving way to arthritis now. He takes a seat by the bed and talks in a monotone without taking a breath, there is so very much to say. He