Free The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

wore plaits and plain dresses and didn’t have the pomaded hair some other girls had or the stockings and jewelry that made certain girls look more refined. But she had a way of smiling and tilting her head to the side and some kind of simpatico, outsider way of looking at the world that appealed to a young man like George who felt life had never cut him a fair deal.
    She had graduated from high school and was doing the common and necessary job of cleaning white people’s homes. But with George up in Tallahassee around those well-turned-out coeds training to be teachers, she fixated on her deficiencies. She imagined her competition in high heels and straight hair, their dignified talk turning George’s head. She convinced herself he would choose one of them over her and told him as much.
    Big George didn’t want Inez around his son either. She was from the backwoods and, in the pecking order that emerged even on the lowest rung—people with house notes versus people who paid rent, factory workers versus servants—Big George saw Inez as lower than the Starlings.
    During spring break of his sophomore year, the subject of school came up again. George asked his father if he would send him back, and again the answer was no. George was incensed and decided to do something about it. It was April 19, 1939. He took his father’s car and drove up to the house where Inez lived.
    “Come on, let’s take a ride,” he said.
    “What you doing?”
    “Come on, let’s ride.”
    “Well, where you going?”
    “Oh, just a ride.”
    She hopped in, and he drove south for five miles to Tavares, the county seat. He drove around to the back of the courthouse, where the jail was, and slowed to a stop.
    “Where you going?” Inez asked, alarmed now.
    He grabbed her hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
    He led her upstairs and into the magistrate’s office.
    “Well, what can I do for ya, boy?” the magistrate said.
    “We come to get married,” George said.
    Inez nearly fainted. She looked to George to explain himself.
    “Well, you been pressuring me about gettin’ married. You’re telling me that I’m gonna end up marrying one of those college girls that’s getting a schoolteacher’s education. And you’re not gonna be good enough for me. And I keep telling you that that wouldn’t make any difference. But you can’t seem to believe that, and you don’t want to wait. I wanted to show you that you the only one that I wanted. So we just gonna get married now.”
    Inez stood there with her mouth open. “I—I didn’t know” was all she could manage.
    She was wearing whatever dress she happened to put on that morning, and he had on whatever he’d thrown on, too.
    “Now, you know that’ll cost you a dollar fifty, boy,” the county judge, A. S. Herlong, said. “A dollar for the license. Fifty cent for a witness.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The judge went through the vows and declared them man and wife. She was twenty-one. He was twenty and not legally old enough to marry.
    “I told the man I was twenty-one,” George later said. “They didn’t care. If you black, they don’t care nothin’ about Negroes. They didn’t check it out. I would be twenty-one in a couple of months. But anyway, we got married.”
    As they drove back to Eustis, George told Inez his plan.
    “You gon’ have to continue to stay with your people. We got to keep this secret until I find out whether I’m going back to school or not.”
    George left out a crucial bit of information in what he told Inez, although it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. “I didn’t tell her my ulterior motive,” he said years later. Now, in all fairness, he said, “I was in love with her. But I didn’t have no intention of getting married, not at that stage, until I got mad with my daddy. He didn’t even want me to be courting this girl, much less talking about marrying her.
    “So I figured that would fix him up good ’cause he won’t send me