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

daddy.”
    The boys scrambled out of the tree and got on their knees because the worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child was acting up. There would be no appeals, the punishment swift and physical. The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which iswhy parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.
    For a young colored boy in the South, “the caste barrier is an ever-present, solid fact,” John Dollard, an anthropologist studying the region’s caste system, wrote at the time. 48 “His education is incomplete until he has learned to make some adjustment to it.…  The Negro must haul down his social expectations and resign himself to a relative immobility.”
    Indeed, breaking from protocol could get people like George killed. Under Jim Crow, only white people could sit in judgment of a colored person on trial. White hearsay had more weight than a colored eyewitness. Colored people had to put on a show of cheerful subservience and unquestioning obedience in the presence of white people or face the consequences of being out of line. If children didn’t learn their place, they could get on the wrong side of a white person, and the parents could do nothing to save them.
    “The question of the child’s future is a serious dilemma for Negro parents,” wrote J. 49 W. Johnson around the time George and his friends got caught picking those oranges. “Awaiting each colored boy and girl are cramping limitations …; and this dilemma approaches suffering in proportion to the parents’ knowledge of and the child’s innocence of those conditions.”
    There was no time for childish ideals of fair play and equality.
Oh, you calling them grown folks a lie?
George remembered parents saying.
Them grown folks wouldn’t a said it if they didn’t see you doing it
.
    So the boys pleaded with Mr. McClendon that night. “We make a promise. You don’t tell our daddies. We won’t come back here to get no more fruit. We won’t bother the oranges no more.”
    George didn’t actually believe this as he said it. He knew they were wrong, but he didn’t like how the grown people wouldn’t believe him no matter what he said, and he didn’t see the punishment as fitting the crime. He was getting to be a teenager now. He was learning that you didn’t have a right to stand up for yourself if you were in his position, and he wasn’t liking it.

    George Starling was a fairly new boy in town. He had spent most of his short life circling north-central Florida as his parents hunted for work.He was born on a tobacco farm out by the scrub oaks and wire grass near Alachua, Florida, halfway between Jacksonville and the Gulf of Mexico, on June 1, 1918. Lil George and his father—called Big George to distinguish him from the son—his mother, Napolean, and his half brother, William, all lived with a cast of uncles, aunts, and cousins headed by a hard-bitten curmudgeon of a grandfather, a man named John Starling.
    John Starling was a sharecropper who smoked a corncob pipe and had few good words for anybody. Once he kicked the cat into the fire when it tried to rub his leg. He was from the Carolinas, where the plantation owner he worked for used to come down to the field and flog the workers with a horsewhip if they weren’t going fast enough, as a rider might snap a whip at his mule. One day, the owner came down with the horsewhip, and the sharecroppers killed him. They swam across the river and never went back. That’s all the grandfather would say.
    It was before the turn of the twentieth century, and instead of going north, where there would have been no place for a colored farmer like him, John Starling went south to the warm, rich