The Warmth of Other Suns
This book is fantastic. It was one of those books where I finished, and then I just lay in bed for half an hour, looking up at the ceiling and letting it soak in. I couldn’t read anything else yesterday because I was still just thinking.
I knew little about the Great Migration before reading it. And reading about changes to the landscape of the US throughout the time period—from World War 1 (1914) through the Civil Rights Movement (around 1970)—there are so many connections to today’s world. This is an important book.
Isabel Wilkerson makes this engaging. It’s a history book that reads like a novel: narrative nonfiction. She tells the story of three individuals and their families who moved to the North, escaping the Jim Crow South, in three consecutive decades: Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi to go to Chicago in 1937; George Starling left Florida to go to New York (Harlem); and Robert Foster moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles. The narrative rotates between these three stories, their lives in the South, the terrifyingly uncertain journey North (or West), and their struggles to make a life. Wilkerson also zooms out throughout the book to give big picture analysis and details.
Heart-wrenching. Emotional. Enlightening. Striking.
It’s long—600+ pages (book length is always obscured on the Kindle. Why is that?). But if you get a chapter or two into the lives of each of the main characters, you won’t want to put it down.
This tweet by Nikole Hannah-Jones—not about the book but still related—captures my thinking throughout:
You ever stop to think what you might have done with your life if you didn’t have to spend it fighting against racism or trying to overcome it?
The suppression of human flourishing because of racist human oppression is devastating. To fight against its effects is the work of a lifetime.
Here are some of my highlights to give you a taste of the book. Big picture:
It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out. Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was under way. Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.
And:
Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects as well as the rise of a well-scrubbed black middle class, along with the alternating waves of white flight and suburbanization—all of these grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration.
The three protagonists:
Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true. There had been sickness, disappointment, premature and unexpected losses, and, among their children, more divorces than enduring marriages, but at least the children had tried. The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.
Each section opens with poetry or excerpts from other Black authors. Here are two that stuck with me:
The lazy, laughing South
With blood on its mouth.…
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic—
That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her
But she spits in my face.…
So now I seek the North—
The cold-faced North,
For she, they say, is a kinder mistress.
— Langston Hughes, “The South”
And:
That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family
If you aren’t ready to dive in yet, start by listening to Krista Tippett interview Isabel Wilkerson for On Being (Overcast):
Go to the doctor and they won’t begin to treat you without taking your history — and not just yours, but that of your parents and grandparents before you. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson points this out as she reflects on her epic work of narrative nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns. She’s immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans to northern U.S. cities in the 20th century. The book is a carrier of histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges at the heart of our life together now.