Book Clubbing

a review by Diane Adkins The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns, one of the books in The Zora Canon, is the story of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North starting in World War I and continuing into the 1970s. Six million made the journey. Wilkerson interviewed 1200 people before settling on the lives of three of them to tell this story: Ida Brandon Gladney, a Mississippi sharecropper’s wife who moved to Chicago during the Depression; George Swanson Sterling, a Florida fruit picker who moved to New York City in the 1940s and found work as an attendant on the railroad; and Robert Pershing Foster, a surgeon who moved to California from Louisiana in the 1950s. Although in the South they faced injustices in the workplace and humiliations both petty and large every day, the primary reason driving them North was racial terrorism. Beatings and lynchings inflicted on their families and friends made them leave everything they knew to find something better for themselves and their children. Wilkerson portrays this as an immigration within our own borders, calling the South, the Old Country, and the North, the New World.

They faced racism in that New World as well. Nonetheless, in a survey of those who took part in the Great Migration, the question, “What do you like about the North?” evoked answers that always mentioned freedom---freedom to pursue dreams, to speak, to act, to work, to live a normal life.

Wilkerson’s epilogue and methodology are important statements of how this book came to be and shouldn’t be missed. Her genius is that she makes sure we hear the stories, not just the statistics and the sociological claims and theories, when we consider the Great Migration. She weaves numbers and vignettes and academic studies into the narrative, but what is remembered when the book is closed is the people. We feel their fear and horror and rejoice in their freedom. We find hope in their resistance, persistence, overcoming, and humanity.

• Diane’s Note: Zora, an online space for women of color, has compiled a list of one hundred masterworks by AfricanAmerican women and calls it The Zora Canon named for the great writer Zora Neale Hurston. The list is divided into time periods. It contains fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and anthologies. The sheer range of genres and the time span in which the works were written demonstrate that the extraordinary writing by African-American women has been available for over 160 years—even before Emancipation. Awareness of this fact should lead us to plumb the depths of this list and be intentional in adding them to our 2020 reading lists. How might we as Americans be changed if we did?