The Warmth of Other Suns (5*)

 

Road trips from Texas to Florida with my parents in the 1950s and 60s exposed me to the Jim Crow south from the back seat of a car.  Although I don't recall encountering any actual segregation, the barefoot children playing outside of wooden shacks as we drove through Mississippi and Alabama frightened me with their obvious poverty. "Some of those families don't even have indoor plumbing," my father observed, shaking his head sadly.  As a high school student, I watched  northern "ghettos" explode in riots on the television news without really understanding the residents' anger or how they got there in the first place.

Isabel Wilkerson has connected the dots in The Warmth of Other Suns, an extraordinarily empathetic account of a sociological phenomenon that lasted decades but had been hiding in plain sight until she published this revelatory book in 2010.  A former New York Times journalist, Wilkerson traces the lives of three representative Black Americans who migrated north or west from Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida. Her first-rate reporting chops are front-and-center from the outset with this introductory sketch of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a retired nurse's aide.  Ida ends her long life watching crime as if it were television from the window of house she and her hardworking husband bought from an Italian family whose decision to sell changed a neighborhood from white to black in a matter of months:

She has an endearing gap in her teeth, which go just about any which way they please, and her hair is now as soft and white as the cotton she used to pick not particularly well back in Mississippi. She is the color of sand on a beach, which she had heard of growing up but had never seen for herself until she arrived in Chicago half a lifetime ago. She has big searching eyes that see the good in people despite the evil she has seen, and she has a comforting kind of eternal beauty, her skin like the folds of a velvet shawl.

Wilkerson also fleshes out the Jim Crow era through interviews with hundreds of other Black migrants who left the South for a better and safer life.  Most Americans likely are familiar with segregated schools, buses, lunch counters and water fountains, but her research illustrates other humiliations they experienced,  a kind of death by a thousand cuts.  Separate parking spaces? Separate Bibles to swear the truth?  A housewife who orders a domestic to eat her lunch out of a pet bowl to protect the family dishes from contamination?  It's a wonder anyone stayed put south of the Mason Dixon line.  Wilkerson's mother and father certainly didn't.  Nor did the parents of a lengthy roll call of famous African Americans that includes politicians, artists, athletes and entertainers.

Here's how Robert Pershing John Foster, an Army surgeon from Louisiana, experiences his arrival in California, the promised land where through charm, grit and skill he became a highly successful doctor who numbered Ray Charles (a migrant himself from Georgia) among his patients and who loved to gamble:

The farther he went, the better it got. The trees were not trees anymore but Popsicles and corncobs. The lawns spread out like pool tables, and you could cut yourself on the hedgerows. Everything was looking like a villa or a compound now, statues and gumdrop trees marching down overdone driveways and Grecian urns set out on the porticoes. The whole effect was like a diva with too much lipstick, and he loved it. The too-muchness of it all.

But the migrants experience their share of discrimination, heartbreak and homesickness, too, once they begin their new lives.  George Swanson Starling, a man who was forced to flee to Harlem from Florida after he successfully organized orange pickers, ends up as a porter on the Silver Meteor, the same train that took me from West Palm Beach to New York City last year.  Although Starling never regrets the move, he can't quite quit the marriage that denied him an education or the south, either, if only because his job frequently takes him to his hometown and the funerals of old friends as he grows older.

George stands before the congregation of mostly new faces, the descendants of those he knew, and looks around at a church that was as much a part of him as the South itself.

“Needless to say, I am grateful to be in your midst,” he says. “I look over and see my father and my mother and my daughter. And it always makes me a little full. So if I become emotional, I hope you will understand.”

He then sings a hymn, “Without God I could do nothing … without him, I would fail.…”

The congregation claps after he finishes, and he takes his glasses off and wipes the tears with his handkerchief before walking back to his seat at the side of the church. He takes his place and sits upright in a pew next to the pulpit with a silver cane beside him and tears escaping from his eyes.

Wilkerson got to know Ida Mae, Bob and George as well as a stranger ever can and by the time her occasionally repetitive book ends, you will feel that you have had the honor of knowing them, too.  Despite everything that America threw at them--from epithets to nooses--they and millions like them prevailed and maintained a kind of under sung dignity overlooked not only by those who couldn't even see them as human beings.  The Warmth of Other Suns--a title taken from an early edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright's autobiography--is as much about individual triumph as it is a national tragedy that still hasn't abated.