☰

Top

The Warmth Of Other Suns

by Isabel Wilkerson, 2010

Published: 2021.05.17

Home > Book Reviews > Isabel Wilkerson > The Warmth Of Other Suns

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (of 5)

(* not including Notes On Methodology, Acknowledgements, Afterword, Notes, and Index; final numbered page is 622)

 

Summary

The first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism (for feature stories in The New York Times), author Isabel Wilkerson is the daughter of two Black Americans who left the South during the Great Migration — the subject of this book. (Her father was one of World War 2’s Tuskegee Airmen.) She spent fifteen years researching and writing The Warmth Of Other Suns, interviewing more than 1,200 subjects, dozens of them extensively.

The book, which gets its title from a line in a Richard Wright poem, primarily follows the lives of three Black people — Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster — who left the South in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, respectively, migrating from Mississippi to Chicago, Florida to Harlem, and Louisiana to California (again, respectively). The Migration itself, once thought to be purely a World War 1 phenomenon, began around 1915 and lasted until at least 1970. About six million Black people left the primarily rural South to make new lives for themselves in urban cities in the North and West. Wilkerson uses the biographies of Gladney, Starling, and Foster, interspersed with other research and shorter stories of other migrants, to put human faces to the statistics. Each of the three primary subjects of the book represents a different facet of the migration — differing origins, destinations, personalities, and viewpoints.

 

The Good

The book was wildly informative — especially for someone like me, whose previous knowledge of the Great Migration consisted of a single sentence in eleventh-grade U.S. History (something like: “During this period, many African Americans left the South.”) The sheer depth and breadth of Wilkerson’s research is more than evident. Not only did she conduct the numerous interviews mentioned above and study tons of relevant source material from more than a century of research, but she went there, traveling to the home towns of her subjects and retracing the paths of their migration — including a reenactment of Robert Foster’s solo drive from Louisiana to California. (Unlike Foster, Wilkerson was easily able to obtain motel rooms during her trip.)

In multiple places, Wilkerson counters myths and misunderstandings about the migrants and the migration. For example, it was once thought the migration was due to a boll weavil infestation that threatened cotton crops in the South or because white landowners began using machinery to harvest cotton instead of poorly compensated Black labor, but Wilkerson shows how the migration began before either of those threats to cotton and includes statistics proving that only a limited number of the migrants were leaving cotton fields. (Foster, for example, was a surgeon, and Starling had been picking oranges in Florida.) Mostly white researchers in the middle of the 20th Century claimed that the migrants were illiterate hayseeds who brought their backward ways to the existing Black communities in the North, lowering the average education level and earnings of Black northerners. Wilkerson cites more modern research, based on decades of U.S. Census data, showing that the migrants (very much like immigrants from other countries) actually tended to work more, have a higher education level, produce fewer children, and experience a lower divorce rate than the averages of people already living in the northern cities where they arrived — and that these rates persisted over generations.

There are plenty of memorable phrases, both from the subjects themselves and from Wilkerson, including one that stood out to me early in the book (page 11): “It [the Great Migration] was the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”

For me, the interludes of historical facts and incidents, as well as the mini-biographies of other subjects, were just as interesting as — if not more than — the three main subjects. Some of the mini-biographies refer to well-known names whose own biographies have long been available, like Ray Charles and Jesse Owens.

 

The Disappointing

Despite my enjoyment of the book and its wealth of information, it wasn’t perfect. Below I list a few irritations, ranked in order of importance from major distraction to minor irritant.

The entire structure of the narrative was poorly done, at least for my purposes. Before introducing the facts and facets of the Great Migration, Wilkerson dives right into the personal histories that will frame the book, beginning with the moment each person was about to leave the South — Gladney in 1937 Mississippi, Starling in 1945 Florida, and Foster in 1953 Louisiana. Then she introduces the Great Migration, then we meet Gladney as an old woman in Chicago but quickly go back to her childhood. More facts follow, then we meet Starling as an old man in New York City but quickly go back to his childhood. Then we meet Foster as an old man in Los Angeles and quickly go back to his childhood. It isn’t until about page 95 that the stories settle into a semblance of chronological retelling, but even then she keeps jumping from Gladney to Starling to Foster — and remember their migrations were in different decades, from different places to different places, so we keep jumping decades back and forth in time, every few pages. This results in a lot of forced repetitions — because the reader has to be reminded of which place and time we’re talking about. Just as one example, there’s a paragraph about Dr. Foster on page 158 that’s nearly identical to a paragraph on page 172, because the author has skipped so rapidly between the three biographies that we’re still in the same time period of Foster’s life.

“His mother, Ottie, had passed away. His father, Professor Foster, had been edged out of his position as principal of Monroe Colored High School, to which he had devoted most of his adult life and identity. He had been forced into retirement and had to watch as a younger rival from his own faculty, Henry Carroll, not only ascended to the principal’s desk but also, through carefully tended connections to a former governor of Louisiana, James A. Noe, managed to get a new colored high school built and named after himself.”

—page 158

“His mother had died. His widowed father, Professor Foster, had been forced out as principal of the school to which he had devoted his life, by one of his own teachers. The coup left Professor Foster in exile. He watched the new colored high school he had always dreamed of rise up under the name of his rival.”

—page 172

This alone kept me from giving the book a five-star rating, and at times was so distracting that it nearly led me to knock my rating down to three stars. (I kept it at four due to the worthwhile parts and the drastic historical significance of the subject matter.)

There are several ways this issue could have been handled during either writing or editing. The easiest would be to simply delete the repetitious parts, but that could leave many readers lost when reentering each biography, perhaps not remembering exactly at what point in the person’s life we left them. Next easiest might be skipping less frequently — sticking with each biography longer. Another way would be to not skip at all — just tell each of the three biographies as an entire story. That would have significantly shortened the book overall and negated the need for any of the repetitions.

Personally, I liked the mini-introductions of the three people on the brink of leaving behind all they’d ever known, about to embark on their respective journeys. But following that and the introduction to the migration itself, I would have preferred an almost entirely chronological retelling. Start with Gladney and don’t introduce Starling until we’ve come to his time. A little back-and-forth between those two would be fine, and then don’t introduce Foster until his time. We would still be jumping locations and stories, but at least we wouldn’t also be jumping decades too.

A second thing that began to bug me the farther I got into the book was the verb tense gymnastics that Wilkerson put herself through. As a self-identified writer, I do understand that she needs to switch from simple past tense to past perfect sometimes (“By the time he graduated high school, he had already fathered a child”, for example.) But she used all the past and present tenses, and sometimes without rhyme or reason, and very often mixing them into the same paragraphs. This definitely should have been caught during editing. Just one example:

“It was making George think back to what had happened to his old friend Babe Blye.”

—page 487

This would have been entirely easier to read (and, I think, more correct) if changed to: “It made George think back to what happened to his old friend Babe Blye.”

While I appreciated the mentions of food — a huge part of a person’s culture, obviously — and how some migrants kept their “Old Country” Southern recipes while others adapted to the eating modes of their new home cities, I did not need the same exact list of foods repeated a hundred times. Each time a meal was mentioned, we’re told they had collard greens, corn brean, and so on. Even for those readers previously unaware of stereotypical southern Black foods, I think once or twice would have been enough.

And finally, a very minor point: I kept reading about “two-flats” and “three-flats”. At first, I assumed this was a typical gap in my knowledge because I have never lived in a large American city. From watching British shows, I do know that “a flat” is an apartment, and I’ve heard people in California call apartments “flats” too, so I assumed a “two-flat” was a duplex or something. But then I asked my big-city raised wife, and she hadn’t heard of them either, so I looked them up. It turns out this is a Chicago term (almost all the search results I found mentioned Chicago) for a house that’s been subdivided by floor, in which a different family lives on each floor and has separate entrances. These terms were used a lot in these books, especially the parts about Chicago.

 

Conclusion

Parts of this book were heart-breaking — like when a Southern shopkeeper had trained his dog to play dead any time someone asked it the question: “Would you rather be a [N-word] or be dead?” Parts were the opposite. All of it was educational and necessary for understanding how the United States changed in the 20th Century.

 





comments powered by Disqus