The Warmth of Other Suns (103 page)

The seeds of this project were sown within me years ago, growing up with parents who had migrated from the South and who sent me to an affluent white grade school that they themselves could never have
dreamed of attending. There, classmates told of ancestors coming from Ireland or Scandinavia with little in their pockets and making something of themselves in the New World. Over time, I came to realize that the same could be said of my family and of millions of other black Americans who had journeyed north during the Great Migration.

I gravitated to the children of recent immigrants from Argentina, Nepal, Ecuador, El Salvador, with whom I had so much in common as the children of newcomers: the accents and folkways of overprotective parents suspicious of the libertine mores of the New World and our childish embarrassment at their nervous hovering; the exotic, out-of-step delicacies from the Old Country that our mothers lovingly prepared for our lunchboxes; the visits to my parents’ fellow “immigrant” friends—all just happening to be from the South and exchanging the latest about the people from back home; the gentle attempts at instilling Old World values from their homelands, my father going so far as to nudge me away from city boys and toward potential suitors whose parents he knew from back home in Petersburg, Virginia, who were, to him, upstanding boys by definition and who would make a fine match in his view, which all but guaranteed that I’d have little interest in them.

Thus I grew up the daughter of immigrants, “a southerner once removed,” as the Mississippi-born poet Natasha Trethewey once called me. My parents bore the subtle hallmarks of the immigrant psyche, except they were Americans who had taken part in an internal migration whose reach and nuances are still little understood.

The research into the world of the Great Migration required wading through dozens of scholarly works of the era, which were a revealing commentary on the attitudes and conditions the migrants lived under before and after their departures. Some of the works were benignly patronizing. Many betrayed such unquestioning bigotry as to be nearly unreadable. All were useful in some way or another. Yet, throughout my research, I was at times struck by the wisdom and compassion of otherwise detached social scientists, many of them white, privileged, and exhibiting unavoidable prejudices of the day but still often rendering prescient and even-handed conclusions. At the start of its 672-page report on the 1919 Chicago Riots, the sober, white-led Chicago Commission on Race Relations, presaging the sentiments of a yet-to-be-born African-American president, whose rise would have been beyond imagination at the time, admonished in 1922:

It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded and maintained by the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation.
¹

Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.…  Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are identical.…  There is no help or healing in appraising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem—a magnanimous understanding by both races—is the first step toward its solution.

Ida Mae Gladney died peacefully in her sleep after a brief onset of leukemia in September 2004. Her family was so distraught that her children and grandchildren kept her room precisely as it was for years. The door remained closed in memoriam to her, and no one had the heart or strength to touch it.

This book is the culmination of many years of research and distillation and could not have come to be without the faith and encouragement of critical people and institutions at crucial moments in its gestation.

I wish first to express gratitude for my parents—my mother and my late father, who gave me my earliest understanding of the Great Migration through their lives and experiences and through what they passed on to me, and who were the inspiration for what I did not know was possible when I first began pursuing the idea.

Thank you to the people who helped to create the groundwork necessary for my intuitions to become a reality: Denise Stinson, who believed in the book from the start, and Michael Winston, for his wise counsel.

I wish to thank my editors at Random House—Ann Godoff, who acquired it, Jonathan Karp, who cheered it on, and, most of all, Kate Medina, who embraced it, championed it, and brought it into the world. I also benefited from the support and insights of Lindsey Schwoeri, Millicent Bennett, Jonathan Jao, Amelia Zalcman, Sally Marvin, Carol Schneider, London King, Ashley Gratz-Collier, and Steve Messina and his team, among many others at Random House. Thank you ever so much.

During the course of the research, I was fortunate to have been able to rely on support from a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; an Edith Kreeger Wolf endowed lectureship at Northwestern University; a semester as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University; and various lectures and seminars I delivered at such places as Brown University, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, the narrative journalism conference in Aarhus, Denmark, the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and, for three years, as the James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University. I am grateful to Boston University, where I now am on faculty, for its role in promoting narrative nonfiction such as this book and for the support of David Campbell, Thomas Fiedler, Louis Ureneck, Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Manoff, Richard Lehr, Robert Zelnik, Caryl Rivers, Safoura Rafeizadeh, and James Brann.

I was on leave from
The New York Times
for much of the time I was researching the book with the good wishes of three executive editors, Bill Keller, Joseph Lelyveld, and Howell Raines, who showed patience and understanding as I pursued this calling, as well as the good cheer of Soma Golden Behr.

This has been a personal journey that, due to the nature of the work and the loss of the primary subjects, transformed me out of necessity from journalist to unintended historian. I am grateful for the insights of historians who have made rigorous examination of the American past, particularly of the Jim Crow era, their life’s work. In particular, I wish to thank Leon Litwack, who shared with me his wisdom and made sure I left Berkeley with the books I needed from his favorite used book store, the old Cody’s near campus.

Beyond these, I thank God for the will and fortitude to make it through this journey. But also for their encouragement at critical moments, I am grateful to Alex Reid, Jonathan Schwartz, Rick Jones, Gwendolyn Whitt, Fannye Jolly, Michael Elliston, D. J. Page, D. M. Page, Laleh Khadivi, Pat Harris, Marcia Lythcott, Debora Ott, and, for their belief in me over the years, Frances Ball, Gladys Pemberton, Beatrice Judge, Lawrence Kaggwa, Ronald Richardson, and the Taylor family of Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia. Thank you to Eva Harvey, Robert K. Watts, and Joseph Beck for sharing their memories of the Jim Crow South; and my sincerest gratitude to those who assisted in the research: Christine Savage in the final throes of production, Christine Li, Emily Truax, Sarah Stanton, and, especially, Kathryn Wilson for her hard work in the early years of the project.

I am deeply grateful for the time and contributions of the more than twelve hundred people who shared their stories in preliminary interviews in the first year and a half of the research and whose experiences, while not explicitly cited in the text, helped shape its direction. They were my initial teachers in the world of Jim Crow and the unseen chorus that validated the final narrative. For going out of their way to help identify people who had migrated from the South as they had done, I am grateful for the kindness shown me by Wilks Battle, Bennie Lee Ford, Aline Heisser-Ovid, and, especially, Almeta Washington.

I wish to thank the subjects’ families for allowing me into their lives and entrusting me with their loved ones on trips both long and short that we made to the places they worked and lived and, for two of them, back to the Old Country. In particular, I want to thank Eleanor Smiley, James and Mary Ann Gladney, Karen Smiley, Kevin Smiley, Madison James Foster II, Bunny Fisher, Joy Foster, and Patricia George for their warmth and encouragement, and Amjad “Kenny” Mujaahid for his inspiring letters of support.

Finally, I reserve the greatest measure of gratitude for Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster, the people who gave so much of themselves to a book they would never see. They believed in me and in this project perhaps more than anyone else, perhaps, at times, even more than I did. Their unfailing faith in this work carried me through when I doubted what was possible. Meeting and sharing with them their final years on this earth has been one of the great joys and honors of my life, and I have been inspired and made better for having known them.

I
SABEL
W
ILKERSON
June 2010

S
ELECTED
I
NTERVIEWS AND
S
OURCES

C
ALIFORNIA

F
LORIDA

G
EORGIA

I
LLINOIS