Isabel Wilkerson Read online

  Praise for Isabel Wilkerson’s

  THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS

  Winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Nonfiction

  Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize

  Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize for Nonfiction

  Winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize for Book Journalism

  Winner of the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award

  Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut

  The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction

  “The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half century of the Great Migration.… Wilkerson combines impressive research … with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Not since Alex Haley’s Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writer’s voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkner’s southern cantatas.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “The Warmth of Other Suns is epic in its reach and in its structure. Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston’s collected oral histories, Wilkerson’s book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sports—in the nation and the world. Wilkerson has logged not just the dates and figures that make these stories fact and thus formal history, she’s made indelible the fading music of these voices, the dance of their speech patterns, the intricate chemistry of folk cures and cornbread rendered from scratch. Beyond the family china or a great-grandmother’s wedding ring, there was always the ambient fear that these stories were actually the most fragile pieces in the hope chest—the easiest to go missing. What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “In a book that, quite amazingly, is her first, Ms. Wilkerson … has pulled off an all but impossible feat. She has documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans across their own country. She has challenged the dismissive assumptions that are sometimes made about that migration.… [Ms. Wilkerson’s] hard work, keen insight and passionate personal commitment make The Warmth of Other Suns a landmark piece of nonfiction.… Her closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection.… A book sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience.”

  —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

  “One of the most lyrical and important books of the season. The Warmth of Other Suns, written by the daughter of participants in this great wave, is a monument to deep research and even deeper reflection.… These stories, case studies written as novellas, humanize this movement and place it squarely within the most American of experiences, for whether in the front of the train or at the back of the bus, these migrants did what so many others in American history did, move from a place of oppression to someplace else in search of something better.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book.… Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century—a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar—and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky; it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd. In The Warmth of Other Suns, three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million? Do they have to? Your answers probably depend, mostly, on your intellectual proclivities. You’re reading this magazine; chances are you lean toward thinking that stories, good stories, explain.… This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen.”

  —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

  “[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration.… Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “There have been many books written on the migration of Southern blacks to the North, but Wilkerson’s might surpass them all in ambition, scope, breadth and storytelling.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Mesmerizing.… What makes [The Warmth of Other Suns] compelling is the remarkable intimacy of the stories she tells; her ability to re-create, in wonderfully lyrical prose, the private struggles of particular men and women caught in a system designed to denigrate them.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “An indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A captivating tale of hardship and perseverance that is at once epic, and strikingly intimate.”

  —The Daily Beast

  “[The Warmth of Other Suns’s] power arises from its close attention to intimate details in the lives of regular people.… If you want to learn about what being a migrant felt like, read Wilkerson. Her intimate portraits convey—as no book prior ever has—what the migration meant to those who were a part of it.… The Warmth of Other Suns stands as a vital contribution to our understanding of the black American experience and of the unstoppable social movement that shaped modern America.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “An astonishing work. With the precision of a surgeon, Wilkerson illuminates the stories of bold, faceless African Americans who transformed cities and industries with their hard work and determination to provide their children with better lives.”

  —Essence

  “Isabel Wilkerson’s majestic The Warmth of Other Suns shows that not everyone bloomed, but the migrants—Wilkerson prefers to think of them as domestic immigrants—remade the entire country, North and South. It’s a monumental job of writing and reporting that lives up to its subtitle: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

  —USA Today

  “[A] sweeping history of the Great Migration.… The Warmth of Other Suns builds upon such purely academic works to make the migrant experience both accessible and emotionally compelling.”

  —NPR.org

  “The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written, in-depth analysis of what Wilkerson calls ‘one of the most underreported stories of the 20th century’.… A masterpiece that sheds light on a significant development in our nation’s history.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written book that, once begun, is nearly impossible to put aside. It is an unforgettable combination of tragedy and inspiration, and gripping subject matter and characters in a writing style that grabs the reader on Page 1 and never lets go.… Woven into the tapestry of [three individual] lives, in prose that is sweet to savor, Wilkerson tells the larger story, the general situation of life in the South for blacks.… If you read only one book about history this year, read this. If you read only one book about African Americans this year, read this
. If you read only one book this year, read this.”

  —The Free Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

  “Each narrative becomes a rich novella thanks to Wilkerson’s instinct for pacing and for her subjects’ idiosyncrasies.… This book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America’s hidden 20th-century history—the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.”

  —Tom Brokaw

  “With compelling prose and considered analysis, Isabel Wilkerson has given us a landmark portrait of one of the most significant yet little-noted shifts in American history: the migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West. It is a complicated tale, with an infinity of implications for questions of race, power, politics, religion, and class—implications that are unfolding even now. This book will be long remembered, and savored.”

  —Jon Meacham

  “Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people’s reinvention of itself and of a nation—the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west.”

  —David Levering Lewis

  “A seminal work of narrative nonfiction.… You will never forget these people.”

  —Gay Talese

  ISABEL WILKERSON

  THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS

  Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book.

  www.isabelwilkerson.com

  Isabel Wilkerson is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at [email protected]

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2011

  Copyright © 2010 by Isabel Wilkerson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York, in 2010.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Our title The Warmth of Other Suns is taken from the final pages of the unrestored edition of Black Boy by Richard Wright. Used by permission.

  Permissions acknowledgments for previously published material can be found beginning on this page.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60407-5

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design: Daniel Rembert

  Cover photograph: “Spectators Watching Negro Elks Parade from Building and Street,” 1939 © Bettman/Corbis

  v3.1

  To my mother and

  to the memory of my father,

  whose migration made me possible,

  and to the millions of others like them

  who dared to act upon their dreams

  I was leaving the South

  To fling myself into the unknown.…

  I was taking a part of the South

  To transplant in alien soil,

  To see if it could grow differently,

  If it could drink of new and cool rains,

  Bend in strange winds,

  Respond to the warmth of other suns

  And, perhaps, to bloom.

  — RICHARD WRIGHT

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  IN THE LAND OF THE FOREFATHERS

  Leaving

  The Great Migration, 1915–1970

  PART TWO

  BEGINNINGS

  Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

  The Stirrings of Discontent

  George Swanson Starling

  Robert Joseph Pershing Foster

  A Burdensome Labor

  The Awakening

  Breaking Away

  PART THREE

  EXODUS

  The Appointed Time of Their Coming

  Crossing Over

  PART FOUR

  THE KINDER MISTRESS

  Chicago

  New York

  Los Angeles

  The Things They Left Behind

  Transplanted in Alien Soil

  Divisions

  To Bend in Strange Winds

  The Other Side of Jordan

  Complications

  The River Keeps Running

  The Prodigals

  Disillusionment

  Revolutions

  The Fullness of the Migration

  PART FIVE

  AFTERMATH

  In the Places They Left

  Losses

  More North and West Than South

  Redemption

  And, Perhaps, to Bloom

  The Winter of Their Lives

  The Emancipation of Ida Mae

  Epilogue

  Notes on Methodology

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  PART ONE

  IN THE LAND OF THE FOREFATHERS

  Our mattresses were made

  of corn shucks

  and soft gray Spanish moss

  that hung from the trees.…

  From the swamps

  we got soup turtles

  and baby alligators

  and from the woods

  we got raccoon,

  rabbit and possum.

  — MAHALIA JACKSON, Movin’ On Up

  LEAVING

  This land is first and foremost

  his handiwork.

  It was he who brought order

  out of primeval wilderness …

  Wherever one looks in this land,

  whatever one sees that is the work of man,

  was erected by the toiling

  straining bodies of blacks.

  — DAVID L. COHN, God Shakes Creation

  They fly from the land that bore them.

  — W. H. STILLWELL

  1

  CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, LATE OCTOBER 1937

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THE NIGHT CLOUDS were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year’s labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before—not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, “by the time yo
u sit down, you there,” as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter.

  There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with.

  Velma was six. She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did what she was told. James was too little to understand. He was three. He was upset at the commotion. Hold still now, James. Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him. James wriggled and kicked. He did not like shoes. He ran free in the field. What were these things? He did not like them on his feet. So Ida Mae let him go barefoot.

  Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.

  “May the Lord be the first one in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”

  When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law’s truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae’s husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.

  2

  WILDWOOD, FLORIDA, APRIL 14, 1945

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  A MAN NAMED ROSCOE COLDEN gave Lil George Starling a ride in his pickup truck to the train station in Wildwood through the fruit-bearing scrubland of central Florida. And Schoolboy, as the toothless orange pickers mockingly called him, boarded the Silver Meteor pointing north.

  A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair. He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.