Florsheims and Freedom

Two weeks ago, I flagged a taxi to DC's Union Station from my office near Eastern Market. The past few months, I have made a point of talking with my taxi drivers about Uber, the increasingly popular ride-sharing service that is outlawed in some states and celebrated in others. Since this cab was uber-free, I asked the driver about himself and his day and DC. Luckily, he was eager to share.

As we drove from Eastern Market to Union Station, he explained that driving the cab was mostly his hobby. After working a few decades in a blue collar job, he retired. According to him, as long as he was working, his health prevailed. Half-a-bottle of Crown Royal in the evenings and a bottle of wine with dinner, he drank that daily. His doctors, though they never condoned it, couldn't find much wrong with him.

After he stopped working, that was when time caught up and age started to set-in. Without work, the joints began to hurt and the headaches would rumble and the colds were reluctant to leave. The doctors, finally, could tell him something about his health. They gave him a cane to help him walk and advised him to stay away from the Crown; the wine, of course, was good for digestion.

He told me, however, that he didn't start to recover until he began to work again. The taxi, four hours a day for five days each week, was all he needed to reclaim some of his vitality and to let him drink whiskey on occasion.

When I asked where he was from, he said, "Down there in North Carolina, you know, ways outside of DC."

"Raleigh?" I asked instinctively.

"No, no. Raleigh was the city for us, same with Charlotte. I'm from out in farm country, my family been owning a farm down there for years."

I asked him why he headed up North, up to DC. He said that he didn't at first. Initially content to work in North Carolina, to inherit the family's treasure, he was persuaded by the sharp suits and clean shaves of Yankee-influenced friends. He remembered being sweaty, warm, dirty in his work, and seeing friends return for a short visit -- remembered thinking to himself that he had to head up past Virginia and get him shoes and a suit like that.

He did just that, arrived in DC, laid down roots, and began to work -- eventually buying the suit and kicks he wanted.

Thinking about this taxi driver, his journey from North Carolina to DC, his belief in the power of spirits in recreation and responsibility, comparisons with Wilkerson's Warmth of Other Suns were obvious. These individuals, like this taxi driver whose name regrettably escapes me, didn't know they were making history. They didn't have any awareness of a movement, a mass migration, a shift in the anthropological tectonics of the United States.

They were simple, humble, with a penchant for good times and laughter. They wanted to have something more and that "something" was often more particular than it was abstract. At moments, the Great Migration was more about Florsheims than it was about freedom. As my driver said, moving North was worth it just so he, "wouldn't smell like hog shit."

Underscoring that point, I mentioned to the driver that I was reading Wilkerson's text and talked for a few seconds about the stories it remembers. He was unfazed, unmoved. "Great Migration," as a term, a concept, a huge alteration to the American landscape, wasn't something he knew.

"Migration, huh? Interesting," he paused.

And after a second looked in the rear view mirror and said, "Imma let you out here, son. If we get in the cab line it will only run the meter on you."