The Warmth of Other Sons
By Isabel Wilkerson
The Warm of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a work of monumental significance. Wilkerson combines the talents of a great writer, a tenacious historian, and a quintessential journalist in portraying the Great Migration of black citizens escaping the Jim Crow South during the period roughly between 1915 and 1970. After conducting more than 1,000 interviews, she weaves historical data of the migration with the lives of three black citizens and their families who migrated to northern cities and portrays their lives from beginning to end as they struggle with the brutality they confronted in their early days in the South, their efforts to forge a family in a culture isolated from mainstream America, and their settling in northern cities, and finally their deaths.
The lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Foster and others reflect the struggles and lives of millions of African Americans who migrated, with different backgrounds, for different reasons, forging new lives in a new land and culture.
The chapter called “The Beginnings” recaps the horrors of racial south with the segregation, lynchings, torture that each character sought to escape, the young boys learning to behave by hearing the crack of the whip, the screams of the tortured, the chilly silence of death in a nearby woods. It is a historical reality conservative America in general and Ron DeSantis is trying to bury.
George Starling—Little George, as he was known—was valedictorian of his class in a segregated school in Eustis, Florida. Florida was the lynch capital of America at the time, and George and other blacks exhibited great caution not to violate the protocol of Jim Crow South and find themselves in custody of a lynch mob. George’s hope of completing college was stymied when his father denied him financial support. After learning that his father had some savings, apparently set aside for his new family and George’s half siblings, George borrowed his father’s car, picked up his girlfriend, Inez, and headed for the courthouse to marry her. It was in part revenge on his father for forbidding the relationship. To make money for the next semester, he went to New York and worked in a dry cleaner, informing his father of the marriage by letter. On his return he learned that his father had planned to send him to school until he learned of the marriage.
In Florida, George lived in fear of the grove owners and infamous racist Sheriff Willis McCall of Lake County was only too happy to kill any black person who got out of line; among his notorious deeds was shooting black people in custody in his sheriff’s car. George and a couple other pickers stirred up trouble in the orange groves where he worked for pennies, often denied the money he earned.
“All three of the men who had stirred up the commotion in the groves were heading out quick: George to New York, Charlie to Rochester, Sam to Washington, D.C. They each had to figure out where they knew somebody up north and the most direct route to wherever the people they knew were located. They did not so much choose the place as the place presented itself as the most viable option in the time they had to think about it. They did not dare to travel to the train station together or allow themselves to be seen together once it was clear they had to get out.” (185)
George took the Silver Meteor up the East Coast and landed in New York, where he took a job as a porter and sometimes watched images of the home he left.
“He had been watching the nightly news, the grainy black-and-white images of colored teenagers standing up to southern sheriffs, and he could see himself as a young man again, pressing against the barbed wire wall of the caste system in Florida. Sheriff’s deputies were pounding the young people with fire hoses and beating them with batons. This was the South he left. He wondered if it would ever change.” (p.379)
As a Pullman porter and an activist, Starling continued his dangerous activism by smuggling black newspapers into the South.
Others, such as Gilbert and Percy Elie, were too young to escape Grenada, Mississippi. But as they sat on cabin porch one night, the June bugs flitting about, they could hear the screams in the woods as a black man endured torture and tried to pray as some anonymous white men took his life with impunity.
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney picked cotton as a teenager in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, along with her husband. They worked under Eddie, a white foreman who was not a bad fellow. They lived in a cabin on the plantation and surrendered half of whatever was produced and subtracted their debts from the final payment. Ida Mae was a poor picker who rarely picked enough to make any money and suffered under the heat of the sun on long, exhausting days.
“Ida Mae Gladney and the children rumbled over curled ribbon of dirt road in the brother-in-law’s truck from Miss Theenie’s house to the train depot in Okolona. Piled high around them were all the worldly possessions they could manage to carry—the overalls and Sunday clothes, the cook pots and kerosene lamps, a Bible and the quilts that Ida Mae and Miss Theenie had sewn out of used up remnants of the clothes they had worn out tilling the Mississippi soil.” (p. 183)
Ida Mae Gladney and her husband made their escape from Mississippi. “Ida Mae sat up and watched Mississippi blur past her through the film of soot on the train window. By some miracle, she and her husband had managed to keep their secret from most of the plantation throughout the picking season. And left whole branches of the family and people they had known since childhood in the dark as to what they were up to. They couldn’t chance it and had no choice.” (189-190)
Robert Joseph Pershing Foster aspired to affluence and professionalism. His father was ambitious but poorly paid principal at Monroe Colored High School in Monroe, Louisiana, where his mother taught seventh grade. Education was in his blood. He was named for John J. Pershing, the World War I general who was credited with pushing the Germans toward defeat. As a black surgeon, the only obstacle to affluence was Jim Crow South and the military, where he served as an Army surgeon.
When he decided to escape Jim Crow, he headed west, on the way learning that being an educated surgeon and military veteran did not guarantee him a place to spend the night.
Wilkerson describes meeting Foster, who became a prominent physician in California after his successful escape. “The door opens and there stands a one-time bourbon-swilling Army captain and deft-handed Army surgeon who, now in his later years, is a regular at the blackjack tables and the trifectas at Santa Anita. But he is, at the heart of it all and perhaps most important, a longstanding, still bitter, and somewhat obsessive expatriate from the twentieth-century South, the heartbreak Jim Crow land he chose to reject before it could reject him again.” (23)
While living in the North—Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles—the escapees often found incidences of discrimination, they worked, raised their families and lived their lives without the fear they left behind in the South.
Wilkerson’s work is a must read for anyone aspiring to understand the horrors of Jim Crow South and the immigration that left black immigrants scattered in cities throughout the North and California. The Warmth of Other Suns is so well documented and so detailed in its portrayal of racist America that it may be on the banned books list of the far-right history rewriters.
The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
Vintage Books, October 2011
640 pages
ISBN 978-0-697-76388-8