The Other Madisons Page 7

  Years later, my father loved to recount the moment that changed his life. It wasn’t the day he and his family fled Louisiana; it was the day he first saw my mother.

  During his medical internship, he was in a hospital elevator and had just pressed the button to go to the fifth floor—obstetrics—when “a young woman, a real looker,” stepped on. She pressed the button to go to the third floor, but the elevator carried its two occupants nonstop to the fifth. Obstetrics had priority. On the ride up, peripheral vision served Dr. Clay Wilson well. When he got off the elevator, he sought out a few nurses and doctors, described the woman on the elevator, right down to the pearls clipped to her delicate earlobes, and asked if anyone knew her. Everyone laughed, but within ten minutes, he learned that the fashionable young woman was the niece of Estelle Massey and the sister of Dr. John Madison, one of his own colleagues. She was a nutritionist and home economics teacher visiting from Texas, and, most important, the lady was single. And when he heard her name, he recalled the color of her lips and smiled at how well it suited her. Ruby.

  My father used a substantial portion of his meager intern’s salary to buy a 1940 maroon-colored Pontiac. Now he was ready to court the poised, elegant, and intelligent graduate of Prairie View College. Little more than three months later, on August 16, 1942, Ruby and Clay were married. At the civil ceremony that summer afternoon, Ruby was serene in a pale blue suit, but the groom, who had hoped to look regal on his wedding day, sweated in a heavy woolen army uniform. He had received an “invitation” to join the armed services. Failure to comply meant he would be drafted as a private. If he accepted, he could serve as an officer in the medical corps, and that service would be considered equivalent to a residency. A few weeks after the wedding, the newlyweds departed for Fort Huachuca, Arizona, an army base for black soldiers. Except for an occasional visit, Ruby was away from Jim Crow for good.

  Ruby had learned about racism early. From their childhood backyard, John Jr., the eldest and most serious-minded of the siblings, was the first to notice that the train engineers and caboose men were white and that the men who pumped handcars up and down the tracks were brown-skinned Mexicans. Not a single black man rode past. By the time she was four, Ruby, the shy one, realized they had not seen a black man on the railroad. Mack, the youngest and most energetic, was not far behind. When the siblings asked Gramps why there were no colored men on the trains, he explained, “Jim Crow—Ol’ Jim—makes the rules. But,” he added cryptically, “wait to see what you see when you go for a train ride.”

  Mom told me about her first train ride in such detail that I can recount it myself.

  In 1923, when Mom was five, her mother—“Grandmuddy,” as I later called her—loaded a basket with fried chicken, potato salad, and biscuits, then she and her three children dressed carefully for the trip and headed to the train station for a day-and-a-half ride to visit relatives in El Paso, Texas. Aware that the colored car was near the front of the train and that their clothes would become blackened with soot from the engine, all the colored passengers put on dark clothes—a brown cotton dress for Grandmuddy, a dark blue dress with white plastic buttons down the front for Ruby, and brown wool jackets and knickers for the boys. Everyone—whites in their colorful outfits on one side of the station, blacks in their somber-hued garments on the other—waited, perched on wooden benches, luggage all around.

  The moment the train came into view, the travelers on either side of the station jumped up and smoothed out their clothing. Men collected the luggage. Women collected the children. As the train chugged to a stop, my mother and her brothers saw porters in handsome blue uniforms suddenly appear, as if from nowhere, and throng the station. They were colored! Colored men did work on the railroad! The porters rushed around, calling out to each other, assisting one passenger and then the next—all the whites before any blacks—to board the train, throwing sacks of letters into the mail car, and heaving suitcases and trunks into the baggage car. The three children stood and stared.

  On board, Ruby, John, and Mack caught sight of the dining-car waiters. They were colored too! The grace of the waiters—polished gentlemen who rang hand chimes from car to car, announcing each meal—filled them with awe. Dressed in white jackets and slacks, the waiters glided, straight-backed and effortlessly, in rhythm with the music of the chimes and the hypnotic chug-hum sound and sway of the train.

  The colored car was crowded. Day or night, men slept in nearly every row, their heads propped against the windows or hanging back over the seats, newspapers shielding their faces from the glare of naked light bulbs on the ceiling. As the men slept, Grandmuddy and the other women tried to control the children, many of whom, including Mack, were climbing over the seats and running, laughing and shouting, up and down the aisle.

  When Ruby and her brothers peered into the coach car for white passengers, located just behind theirs, they discovered it was less crowded; the windows and floors were less sooty, and the upholstery was less shabby. But here, too, the siblings observed, most of the men were asleep, newspapers shielding their faces, and the women were trying to control raucous children.

  While the train sped along, the adventurous trio explored the other passenger sections. The dining car had white linens and a lamp on each table, a mysterious curtain at one corner of the room, near the kitchen. In the club car, there was an ashtray on a stand beside each lounge chair and card table. And, finally, for well-to-do white passengers, there were the Pullman cars, each had a bright corridor with windows along one side, a row of steel doors on the other.

  These fortresses far from the pandemonium of common folks were the domain of the Pullman porters. Wearing meticulous white cotton jackets and dark blue pants, the porters went from one private compartment to another, taking away shoes to be shined, delivering newspapers and magazines, bringing a glass of water, turning down bedding. Being a porter was a coveted job. They remained stoic and dignified when white passengers or supervisors called them “boy.” Their voices were clear, their diction perfect, but softened by the southern cadence. “Ma’am, may I please assist you?”

  As night approached, Ruby, John, and Mack entered the last Pullman and peeked through the open door of a stateroom. Later, my mother would remember every detail of what she saw: A white man sat on a high-backed, red mohair sofa; he wore a beige suit and a matching Homburg hat. A tall woman stood in the compartment, her back to the door. From one side of her close-fitting gray hat, an iridescent blue feather curved high over her head. She wore a pale blue suit and soft-looking gray gloves. Ruby noticed that the seams of the woman’s sheer stockings were centered perfectly down her legs. Not even on Sunday mornings at the colored church in Elgin—where each woman in the congregation had spent at least an hour the night before washing and ironing her best outfit and adjusting the artificial flowers on her straw hat—had Ruby seen anyone so elegantly dressed.

  Two blond children sat on either side of the man. The little girl, about five years old, wore a frilly pink dress prettier than any Ruby had ever seen. Black patent-leather Mary Jane shoes glittered when the girl joyfully kicked her feet up and down. Ruby looked at her own ankle-high boots, which, until this moment, she had loved. The brown leather was dull and had creased and cracked across her toes.

  The girl’s younger brother wore a cream-colored suit with short pants. His black shoes were smooth and polished, the laces tied just right. The white calf-high socks on his stubby legs were straight and even, but his exposed knees gave away his secret—he was no different from any other child. Covered with scrapes and bruises, his knees were just like those of the children in the colored car. The porter, unaware of the observers at the door, ignored the blemished knees and treated the scuffed-up little boy with the protocol and esteem set aside for all first-class passengers. He held a silver tray while the child ate vanilla ice cream from a crystal bowl.

  The boy was the first one in the stateroom to see the spectators. He looked up from the ice cream, stuck his fingers
into it, and slowly licked each finger, taunting Ruby and her brothers. Then he stuck out his tongue at them. Following the boy’s gaze, the porter stiffened, scowled, and rapidly flicked his wrist, shooing the three trespassers away. John turned his back. Mack stuck out his tongue at the boy. Ruby—stunned that the porter, unlike the adults who had watched out for her in Elgin, had not come to their defense—cried.

  When they returned home after the trip, the children told Gramps how the porter had treated them.

  “I think,” Gramps said, “he was just trying to hold on to his job. Porters can get fired for any reason or no reason whatsoever. They work from the crack of dawn until all hours of the night, and they don’t get to see their families for days, even weeks, at a time, not until the run is over. But a job on a train is a good job, especially for a Negro. And keep this in mind: no matter what might happen to a colored man working on a train, he is much safer there than in any southern town, where Ol’ Jim runs the show.”

  Gramps wanted to say more, but his children were too young. A few years later, Mom recalled, Gramps explained that a porter could glance briefly at a white woman while serving her on a train, but on or off a train, any colored man in any position would almost certainly be murdered by a mob if his glance lingered. As a child, Ruby was confounded and terrified. As an adult, she understood but was no less horrified. Then, riding in a car one stifling summer day in Texas, she saw a dark-skinned man hanging from a tree, the edge of a cotton field glaring below his feet like a knife. Ruby did not know if he was there because he had dared to look at a white woman a moment too long, but it was impossible to forget the harsh angle of his neck, the branch, the rope.

  When my father left Fort Huachuca to serve as a lieutenant in the medical corps stationed in the Philippines, my mother and I traveled to Pasadena and stayed there for a few weeks with his mother and sister. We then settled in Oakland, where my father had grown up and where he and my mother had decided to raise their children. In California, there were no filthy public toilets or rusty drinking fountains under signs that said COLORED. The schools were integrated, and no one picked cotton to get by. By the 1940s, California was home to a large number of black transplants from the South determined to make a better life for their children. The Negro citizens of Oakland, like those of Elgin, felt a strong sense of community. The adults kept a watchful eye and pooled their energy, resources, and talents to support and guide the youth. Whenever racial slurs were thrown our way, adults told us that the slurs showed ignorance and that we should not pay any attention. After local grocery stores refused to hire colored students for the summer, proprietors of Negro-owned shops created positions for us. And any youth unjustly arrested was bailed out of jail with funds collected in the black churches.

  From the moment she got there, my mother thrived in California. She was a southern girl who felt safer and more fulfilled in the North, which for her was anywhere that was not the South, a place that haunted her with its shameless racism, demeaning segregation, and sanctioned murder.

  My mother, Ruby Laura Madison Wilson, and me, circa 1948

  But we had roots in the South, roots we would not turn away from no matter how painful the memories or how cruel the history. It was where the stories about our ancestors had taken shape, and perhaps she wanted to share with me the indelible images of her first train ride, when she, too, was five years old. My first train ride would become, like Mom’s had for her, the most vivid memory of my childhood. And it would reveal that escaping from the mores of the South was not easy.

  My first train ride was on the Southern Pacific Railroad. I had just turned five years old when my mother and I rode from Berkeley, California, to Navasota, Texas. My grandparents had lived there since 1940, when Gramps reluctantly left Elgin to become the principal of a much larger school.

  When Mom and I arrived at the station in Berkeley, I noticed that the porters were colored, just like me. I was not surprised. One of my grandmother’s brothers and several of my parents’ friends were porters. I enjoyed watching a large group of them working together. They were strong, full of energy, very good-looking, and had huge smiles. They all wore snazzy dark blue uniforms embellished with gold braid and shiny brass buttons, and blue caps with SPR on the front. But each man used his hat—tilting it to one side or low on his brow or way on the back of his head—to make himself one of a kind. The caps never fell off, not even when the porters hurried around swinging luggage and hoisting boxes like they were dancing, the big showoffs.

  Before the train arrived, the porters talked and laughed together, their suits converging to form patches of blue on the gray concrete platform. Then the train came into view, its whistle louder and louder as it approached. Billows of black smoke drifted upward and disappeared into the sky. The engine got so close that all I could see was the gigantic grate on the front. When the wheels screeched to a stop, I covered my ears. The blue suits swarmed.

  My father had never worked at a station, but each summer during his college years, he was fifth chef—the dishwasher, really—on a train. The waiters and other chefs treated him like a son. Later, when he became a physician, he had a special fondness for black railroad workers and gave free care to those in need, so Mom and I received special treatment. The porters picked up our bags first and then escorted us to the train. Mom was dressed to the nines in a chic black hat, soft black gloves, shiny black high-heeled pumps, and a wide-shouldered sage-green suit. I had grown impatient as I watched her take forever to make sure the seams of her stockings were perfect.

  Suddenly, I was high in the air, squealing, pigtails flying, skinny brown legs dangling below my new pink dress. Then, feet first, I landed softly at the doorway to a Pullman car. The porter who had lifted me bowed. Mom smiled. Other black passengers laughed, but several white passengers scowled. I now know that for them, it was insult enough that the cars were not segregated in California but nearly intolerable to see such a fuss over a brown-skinned child.

  The entrance opened onto a long hallway that had a row of windows on one side. On the opposite side, one of the doors led to our compartment, where everything was gray and smelled of wheel grease and recently cleaned carpet. The door remained open, and as I stood on tiptoe to try out our very own stainless-steel water fountain, I glimpsed a tall colored man in the hallway. I knew he was a Pullman porter because he wore a starched white jacket with a high, tight collar and a bow tie. His pants were dark blue, the creases razor-sharp. His shoes and socks were black. The brass plate on his cap, Mom had told me, said PULLMAN PORTER. She had described his outfit perfectly.

  “He remembers when your father worked in the kitchen,” Mom informed me.

  “Ma’am and little lady,” he said as he stepped in and handed me a glass of apple juice from a silver tray, “you can call me Harold.” I thought I saw a smile, but he did not say another word.

  A whistle blew. The train groaned forward. The engine picked up speed. I ran back and forth, faster and faster, between the window in our compartment and the ones along the hall, a row of frames through which changing pictures zipped by as the train raced past towns and farms, through valleys, over rivers, and around hills. When the heavy steel door at each end of the car slammed shut, the metal-to-metal roar of wheels on tracks hushed down to a hum. Meanwhile, Pullman porters disappeared into and reappeared out of the compartments, ignoring the kaleidoscope of scenes beyond the windows.

  Mom told me to close the door and sit down. I obeyed, the silent man observing from his post in the hallway. Harold’s face was serious but kind. I could tell he was there to watch over me. I had no idea why.

  That night, our train stopped in the middle of a desert. The sun had set but left behind a shimmering orange glow. The wide shadow of purple mountains vanished into the magenta sky that grew darker and darker. Except for a small, lit-up train station, the endless desert floor looked black and empty. Only two passengers boarded the train, a woman and her daughter, a girl about my age. Both had blue eyes
and curly blond hair. The mother had on a neat white blouse and a gray pencil skirt. The child wore a blue dress with puffy sleeves and fancy stitches across the bodice. I noticed her outfit and thought that both our dresses were pretty. The lady spoke pleasantly to the porter, and the little girl looked up at him, grinned, and shouted, “Hey!”

  The woman nodded to my mother, and her daughter gave me a big smile. I smiled back, hoping we would play together. Harold moved a little closer to our cabin doorway. Stepping into the corridor, I watched him escort the newcomers past our cabin and hold open the heavy steel door at the end of the narrow passage. He did not lose his dignified deportment as he looked back at me.

  The next morning, I heard a light tap on our door. I took my time responding because I thought it was a waiter who had come to announce breakfast. And I was a picky eater. Mom urged me to hurry up and open the door. When I opened it, I saw the little girl hugging a doll with blue eyes and Shirley Temple curls like her own. Her mother looked at mine, seeking approval. My mother motioned for them to come in. Behind the woman, Harold watched.

  “I’m Susan,” the lady said.

  “I’m Ruby,” my mother replied

  “My name is Mary,” the girl said.

  “Mine is Bettye,” I said.

  For the next two days, Mary and I were inseparable. Giggling nonstop, we played with dolls in our compartments and shared crayons and paper in hallways. Once, we sneaked behind my mother when she went to play canasta in the club car. The oblong space, where both black and white passengers laughed and mingled, was hazy with smoke, the air thick with the sharp, sweet smell of burning tobacco. The room was noisy. Ice tinkled in glasses; red or blue playing cards slapped down onto aluminum tabletops; voices murmured in conversations about destinations: “Out west,” “Back east,” “Up north,” “Down south” . . .