"The Warmth of Other Suns"

Exodus and what lies in waiting:

• He wouldn't sleep in another bed until he got out of the state of Texas.
• He didn't like being where he wasn't wanted. And ye there he was, needing something he couldn't have. He debated whether he should speak his mind, protect himself from rejection, say it before they could say it. He approached the next exchange as if it were a job interview. . He rehearsed his delivery and tightened his lines.
• Robert Pershing Foster drew near the vicinity of the peach stucco house that his mentor had to sue to live in.
• "I told you I wasn't going to let no nigger doctor examine me." A by-product of integration that would affect nearly every black business and institution when the doors of segregation flung open - rejection by a black customer base for the wide-open new world.
• They carried with them the scents of the South, of lye soap and earthen field. They had emerged from a cave of restrictions into wide-open, anonymous hives that viewed them with bemusement and contempt.
• Like so many others, he had gone from the mind-numbing sameness of picking cotton to the mind-numbing sameness of turning a lever.. for one tiny piece  of a much larger thing he had no control over.
• (It) was becoming clear that.. wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there.. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them.
• That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free... And so the glass he drank from went crashing under a counter in Manhattan.
• Mayor Hubbard told the southerners. "Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire."
• "It is the culmination of all these personal discriminations which creates the color bar in the North."

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