The Warmth of Other Suns (89 page)

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

Dr. Robert P. Foster

Cathryn Covington Baker

Lee Ballard

Romie Banks

Mrs. J. M. Beard

Howard and Isabelle Beckwith

Pat Botchekan

Malissa Briley

Sylvester Brooks

Claire Collins

John Collins

Joseph Cooper

Ivorye Covington

Leo DeJohn

John Dunlap

Dallas Evans

Sherman Ferguson

Bennie Lee Ford

Joy Foster

Warren Hollingsworth

Jessie Holmes

Charles Honore

Marilyn Hudson

Robert Johnson

Carrie Jones

Limuary and Adeline Jordan

Barbara Lemmons

Marguerite Lewis

Nellie Lutcher

Carl Kendall

James Marshall

Leola McMearn

Cleo Pierre

John Rachal, Sr.

Vera Roberts

Della B. Robinson

De Willow Sherman

Reatha Gray Simon

Reatha Beck Smith

Ida Bryant Spigener

Barbara Starks

Ruby Thomas

Melba Thompson

Almeta Washington

Inette Weasel

Betty S. White

F
LORIDA

Reuben Blye

Viola Dunham

Watson Dunham

Cleave Frink

Patricia George

Reverend William Hawkins

Andrew “Jack” Johnson

Carla Mitchell

Virginia Sallet

G
EORGIA

Joseph Beck

Sharon Seay

James C. Washington

I
LLINOIS

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

Laura Addison

Ruby Barnes

Wilks Battle

Bessie Baugard

Homer Betts

Erma Bien-Aimee

Marie Billingsley

Barbara Bowman

Isiah Bracy

Albert Brooks

George Brown

Joe L. Brown

Herbert Bruce

Albert Sidney Burchett

Tony Burroughs

Florine Burton

Betty Caldwell

Orlando Campbell

Joseph Chapman

James Clark

Elwood Crowder

Austin Cunningham

Grady Davis

Henrietta Dawson

John Harold Earl

Arthur Ellis

Lisa Ely

Mildred Elzie

Eddie Ervin

Robert David Fields

Bunny Fisher

Myrtis Francis

Lasalle Frelix

Phlenoid Gaiter

James and Mary Ann Gladney

Walter Goudy

Ruth Hamilton

Aaron Henderson

Leon “Jack” Hillman

James Hobbs

Spurgeon Holland

Karyne Islam

Urelle Jackson, Sr.

Isabel Joseph Johnson

Willie Johnson

Lola Jones

Spencer Leak

Emma Leonard

Clinton Lewis

Hollis Lewis

Carl Little

Ruth McClendon

Doris McMurray

Charles Mingo

Irene Nelson

Clara Piper

Raymar Pitchfork

Robena Porter

Robert Pulliam

Edna Robertson

William G. Samuels

James Seahorn

Eleanor Smiley

Karen Smiley

Kevin Smiley

Coy F. Smith

Ruby W. McGowan Mays Smith

Laura Starks

Howard Stephenson

Roma Stewart

Bennie Therrell

Riley Tubbs

John Valson

Mamie Westley

Mary Louise Wiley

Delores Woodtor

L
OUISIANA

Joella Burton

Madison James Foster II

Faroker Johnson

Clara Poe

B. D. Robinson

Rosalie Taylor

Florence Todd

Clyde Walker

M
ISSISSIPPI

Marcelle Barr

Doretta Boston

Gilbert Elie

Aubrey Enochs

Gloria Enochs

Jessie Gladney

Isolena Harris

David McIntosh

N
EW
Y
ORK