The Warmth of Other Suns is journalist Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Great Migration. Wilkerson looks to have a broader and longer view of this historical phenomenon. Using historical documents and extensive interviews with those who undertook this migration, Wilkerson argues that the Great Migration has been both under reported and, to an extent, misunderstood. Her take on the Great Migration is that more than the result of economics, the economics were in part a function of the social structure of entrenched racism and segregation in the South. The reason for the length and breadth of the exodus north and west were to escape violence, degradation and rigid codification that were the Jim Crow laws. Wilkerson builds this case convincingly (if one needs convincing) by overwhelming the reader with historical and personal accounts of blatant racism. They are too numerous to count, and each one is as compelling in its horror as the last.
Forming the structure of the book are three people and three separate decades of the migration. This reliance on the narration of a life's trajectory make for entertaining reading. The reader wants to know what happens next and what happens to, specifically, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and as each of them makes their way from the south in the 1930's, 40s and 50s, respectively. These people are also geographically representative, as Ida Mae Gladney heads to the Midwest, Starling to the northeast, and Foster to California. The idea here, as Wilkerson states, is that the stories of individuals are "the least replaceable sources of any understanding of this great movement of people out of the South to the American North and West."
However, Wilkerson's structuring of these stories is a bit problematic as a book, for Wilkerson chooses to jump back and forth between each narrative, sometimes within just a few pages. I had trouble, at time, keeping the decades, and occasionally, the cast of characters, straight in my head. Further, these episodes were often interlaced with bits of history, and that history wasn't necessarily from the same time period, though it typically related geographically. This also created what was at times a jarring repetition of detail. At times, Wilkerson repeats some piece of information or anecdote that had been recounted some twenty pages (or less) earlier. I kept thinking that the book could have been a hundred pages shorter with some careful editing.
Despite these flaws, The Warmth of Other Suns is well worth reading. Wilkerson's writing is often beautiful, poetic even:
In the half light of morning, when the mist hung low and the dew was thick on the bolls, the pickers set out to the field as their slave foreparents had done year in and year out for two centuries...Each one looked out across the field to infinity. The quarry was spread over acres and rows far from the starting plant, and they could not see the end of what they were expected to pick.
On large fields during the height of the season---which began in August in south Texas and moved eastward, reaching the Carolinas by early fall---the star pickers sped like fan blades through the cotton, a blur of fingers and bolls, arms and torsos switching from the left row to the right, picking on both sides of them and tossing the cotton like feathers into their sack...
It is in these early sections of the book that Wilkerson's writing is at its best. There are countless of these beautiful, descriptive passages and these are, indeed, most essential to Wilkerson's thesis: the Great Migration was an escape from the untenable living situation of the South. Contrary to a hazy misconception enjoyed by much of the country, slavery did not end with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Any move by African-Americans to improve their situation, socially or economically, was met with resistance and violence. Repeatedly in the book, we read of blacks having to move off the sidewalk to avoid sharing it with a white person; repeatedly we read of insults and injuries perpetuated without cause. The level of entrenched racism may be surprising for many Americans, particularly the younger generations. Wilkerson wants the reader to know that "their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making." Wilkerson is also interested in correcting the common misconception that the migration caused social problems and unrest in the urban centers of the North. Her careful documentation reflects what we now know about those migrants: they were more likely to work continuously, have lower poverty rates and have stabler family structures than many of their counterparts who stayed in the south AND the European immigrants who shared those urban centers. All these revelations makes this book an important source for understanding a historical migration that altered the fate and face of this nation.
See more at isabelwilkerson.com
