The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns is narrative nonfiction at its finest. Like The Son, I discovered Isabel Wilkerson's Warmth in The Atlantic's 2015 best books guide. It is a masterful history of the Great Migration, that movement of six million mostly rural and often sharecropping blacks from the South to cities across America.

Wilkerson tells the broader history through the personal narratives of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who migrated from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1930s; George Starling, who left the citrus groves of central Florida for New York City in the middle of World War II; and Robert Foster, who left small town Louisiana for Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Their lives post-migration held little in common with one another. Ida Mae and her husband worked a succession of unskilled and poorly paid jobs while laying down roots on Chicago's South Side. George Starling took a job with the railroad that saw him traverse his own route time and again; in his absence his children fell victim to the drugs and gangs of Harlem. Robert Foster was perhaps the most successful but least fulfilled. A surgeon of no small renown (he was the personal physician of Ray Charles, for example), he constantly searched for acceptance and approval that were never quite enough.

Against this background, Wilkerson tells the larger story of demographics and discrimination in America, supporting a central argument that the members of the Great Migration were, in ways both large and small, no different from the immigrants who crossed an ocean to reach what they believed would be a land of milk and honey. (She also notes that virtually every individual who was part of the Great Migration steadfastly disagreed, although this reader was certainly convinced, and I believe Wilkerson still is, as well.) Wilkerson conducted interviews with 1,200 individuals, no small feat of anthropology, and delved into a history of Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement, and urban life in America.

I was reminded repeated of Barbara Myerhoff's outstanding work, Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto, which is certainly among the seminal works on the immigrant experience in America. Wilkerson has accomplished no less. In a different vein, I could not help but think of The Warmth of Other Suns as the second act of After Appomattox; Wilkerson provides more than enough examples - many, sadly, a half-century or more after the Civil War ended - that certainly lend credence to Stetson Kennedy's assertion that, "The nation had evidently made up its mind that, so long as the South remained inside the Union and did not go back into the business of buying and selling blacks, it could do what it damned well pleased with them."

The Warmth of Other Suns is a phenomenal work of narrative non-fiction. It should be required reading for every high school student in the country. I'm with The Atlantic: it will be hard to top this, certainly in the category of nonfiction.