Friday Open Thread ~ "What are you reading?" edition. Volume 5

The Coronavirus has nothing on Antebellum and Jim Crow south.

This was America: Thousands of white families, including men, women, and children, standing for hours to watch Black Americans be dismembered or burned alive for such crimes as “acting white” and stealing .75 cents. In this environment, Black citizens are not allowed to walk too tall, speak too confidently, create art uninhibitedly, or say who cannot speak abuses at their children.

Over the course of 6 decades, more than 6 million people fled the insanity of Jim Crow for their lives and their sanity during a period known as The Great Migration. This week’s book follows the story of three strangers, all making their way North, searching for the warmth of other suns.

Published in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping ethnography of the Great Migration—the mass exodus of African-Americans from the South to Northern and Western US cities dating from approximately 1914-1970. The book traces the history of racism in the Jim Crow South as well as the reasons, successes, and failures of those African-Americans who left the place of their birth in order to seek better economic and social opportunities elsewhere in the United States.

warmth.jpg

In The Warmth of Other Suns, author Isabel Wilkerson moves between the stories of three individuals—Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster—discussing the historical background, statistics, and ultimate social influences the Great Migration had on the South and on the Northern ports of refuge that received nearly six million African-American migrants. Today, these black migrants appear as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both groups determined to roll the dice for a better future. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that Black Americans who left the South had far more schooling than those who stayed, and that Black migrants had higher employment numbers and more stable family lives than Northern-born Black people, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage. The traditional migrant advantage has worked historically for Americans of all colors.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was a sharecropper’s wife who moved from Mississippi to Chicago. George Swanson Starling fled Florida and the clutches of the notorious Sheriff Willis McCall for refuge in Harlem, New York. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a former Army Captain and doctor, struck out for Los Angeles from Louisiana to achieve the American Dream. Despite differences in circumstance and location, Ida, George, and Robert left the American South to seek freedom and the rights bestowed upon them as American citizens. In recounting their stories, along with hundreds of others, The Warmth of Other Suns offers insight into the fear and humiliations African-Americans suffered under segregation and Jim Crow.

However, Wilkerson’s work is not an overly romanticized account of how people fled oppression in one region to receive full freedom in another. The Warmth of Other Suns masterfully explores the dual nature of life in the North, where segregation was illegal, but still intruded on the lives of many African-Americans in indirect ways.

Wilkerson speaks to the challenges, failures, and successes that shifted and evolved over different eras of the Great Migration through the different perspectives of her three historical figures. She highlights two often-overlooked issues: first, that the exodus was a continuous phenomenon spanning six decades of American life; second, that it consisted of not one, but rather three geographical streams, the patterns determined by the train routes available to those bold enough to leave.

Other suns.jpg

In particular, Wilkerson’s accounts of Starling and Foster represent the contradictions of the Great Migration. Starling took a porter’s job on the same Silver Meteor train line that had once brought him north. The life he led in Harlem was richer than anything he could have imagined. But he also knew that the migrants now riding his train would reap the blessings of a civil rights movement that were unavailable to him: History had come too late for the once promising student. Foster, meanwhile, matured into one of Los Angeles’s finest surgeons. But his rejection of his Southern roots left him adrift, nursing ancient wounds and unable to enjoy his new life.

The Warmth of Other Suns details a period in American history, whose importance cannot be understated. The effects of the Great Migration not only affected the lives of millions of African-Americans, but also shaped much of modern-day American popular culture and identity.

podcast.jpg
We are inspired by this work of nonfiction to learn why our own families fled the south and under what conditions, for this week’s themed discussion. We also give a brief overview of the path from slavery to reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement.

It’s like the LITTIEST history lesson ever!

Listen in on the literary conversation

In the Land of the Forefathers

Our mattresses were made
of corn shucks
and soft gray Spanish moss
that hung from the trees. . . .
From the swamps
we got soup turtles
and baby alligators
and from the woods
we got raccoon,
rabbit and possum.

—Mahalia Jackson, Movin’ On Up

Leaving

This land is first and foremost
his handiwork.
It was he who brought order
out of primeval wilderness . . .
Wherever one looks in this land,
whatever one sees that is the work of man,
was erected by the toiling
straining bodies of blacks.

—David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation

They fly from the land that bore them.

—W. H. Stillwell

1

Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Late October 1937

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

The night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year’s labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before—not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, “by the time you sit down, you there,” as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter.

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with.

Velma was six. She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did what she was told. James was too little to understand. He was three. He was upset at the commotion. Hold still now, James. Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him. James wriggled and kicked. He did not like shoes. He ran free in the field. What were these things? He did not like them on his feet. So Ida Mae let him go barefoot.

Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.

“May the Lord be the first in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”

When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law’s truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae’s husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.

2

Wildwood, Florida, April 14, 1945

George Swanson Starling

A man named Roscoe Colton gave Lil George Starling a ride in his pickup truck to the train station in Wildwood through the fruit-bearing scrubland of central Florida. And Schoolboy, as the toothless orange pickers mockingly called him, boarded the Silver Meteor pointing north.

A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair. He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.

He was getting out alive. So he didn’t let it bother him. “I got on the car where they told me to get on,” he said years later.

He hadn’t had time to bid farewell to everyone he wanted to. He stopped to say good-bye to Rachel Jackson, who owned a little café up on what they called the Avenue and the few others he could safely get to in the little time he had. He figured everybody in Egypt town, the colored section of Eustis, probably knew he was leaving before he had climbed onto the train, small as the town was and as much as people talked.

It was a clear afternoon in the middle of April. He folded his tall frame into the hard surface of the seat, his knees knocking against the seat back in front of him. He was packed into the Jim Crow car, where the railroad stored the luggage, when the train pulled away at last. He was on the run, and he wouldn’t rest easy until he was out of range of Lake County, beyond the reach of the grove owners whose invisible laws he had broken.

The train rumbled past the forest of citrus trees that he had climbed since he was a boy and that he had tried to wrestle some dignity out of and, for a time, had. They could have their trees. He wasn’t going to lose his life over them. He had come close enough as it was.

He had lived up to his family’s accidental surname. Starling. Distant cousin to the mockingbird. He had spoken up about what he had seen in the world he was born into, like the starling that sang Mozart’s own music back to him or the starling out of Shakespeare that tormented the king by speaking the name of Mortimer. Only, George was paying the price for tormenting the ruling class that owned the citrus groves. There was no place in the Jim Crow South for a colored starling like him.

He didn’t know what he would do once he got to New York or what his life would be. He didn’t know how long it would take before he could send for Inez. His wife was mad right now, but she’d get over it once he got her there. At least that’s what he told himself. He turned his face to the North and sat with his back to Florida.

Leaving as he did, he figured he would never set foot in Eustis again for as long as he lived. And as he settled in for the twenty-three-hour train ride up the coast of the Atlantic, he had no desire to have anything to do with the town he grew up in, the state of Florida, or the South as a whole, for that matter.

3

Monroe, Louisiana, Easter Monday, April 6, 1953

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster

In the dark hours of the morning, Pershing Foster packed his surgery books, his medical bag, and his suit and sport coats in the trunk, along with a map, an address book, and Ivorye Covington’s fried chicken left over from Saturday night.

He said good-bye to his father, who had told him to follow his dreams. His father’s dreams had fallen apart, but there was still hope for the son, the father knew. He had a reluctant embrace with his older brother, Madison, who had tried in vain to get him to stay. Then Pershing pointed his 1949 Buick Roadmaster, a burgundy one with whitewall tires and a shark-tooth grille, in the direction of Five Points, the crossroads of town.

He drove down the narrow dirt roads with the ditches on either side that, when he was a boy, had left his freshly pressed Sunday suit caked with mud when it rained. He passed the shotgun houses perched on cinder blocks and hurtled over the railroad tracks away from where people who looked like him were consigned to live and into the section where the roads were not dirt ditches anymore but suddenly level and paved.

He headed in the direction of Desiard Street, the main thorough- fare, and, without a whiff of sentimentality, sped away from the small-town bank buildings and bail bondsmen, the Paramount Theater with its urine-scented steps, and away from St. Francis Hospital, which wouldn’t let doctors who looked like him perform a simple tonsillectomy.

Perhaps he might have stayed had they let him practice surgery like he was trained to do or let him walk into the Palace and try on a suit like anyone else of his station. The resentments had grown heavy over the years. He knew he was as smart as anybody else—smarter, to his mind—but he wasn’t allowed to do anything with it, the caste system being what it was. Now he was going about as far away as you could get from Monroe, Louisiana. The rope lines that had hemmed in his life seemed to loosen with each plodding mile on the odometer.

Like many of the men in the Great Migration and like many emigrant men in general, he was setting out alone. He would scout out the New World on his own and get situated before sending for anyone else. He drove west into the morning stillness and onto the Endom Bridge, a tight crossing with one lane acting like two that spans the Ouachita River into West Monroe. He would soon pass the mossback flatland of central Louisiana and the Red River toward Texas, where he was planning to see an old friend from medical school, a Dr. Anthony Beale, en route to California.

Pershing had no idea where he would end up in California or how he would make a go of it or when he would be able to wrest his wife and daughters from the in-laws who had tried to talk him out of going to California in the first place. He would contemplate these uncertainties in the unbroken days ahead.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do. Alone in the car, he had close to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, farther than farmworker emigrants leaving Guatemala for Texas, not to mention Tijuana for California, where a northerly wind could blow a Mexican clothesline over the border.

Share
up
14 users have voted.

Comments

Raggedy Ann's picture

That book looks so very interesting. Thanks for bringing it to us. I recently obtained a copy of The New Jim Crow by Alexander. I can't wait to begin reading it. Yours would be a good one to follow.

Think of what is possible and act on it. Live presently.

Happy Friday! Pleasantry

up
10 users have voted.

"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

Good stuff on the history of racism since Jim Crow.

Some local good news...

In a decision one journalist hailed as "the first good news on voting rights from SCOTUS in ages," the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday blocked an effort by the Rhode Island GOP and the Republican National Committee to restore onerous mail-in ballot witness requirements that were suspended by the state's Democratic governor due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/13/victory-democracy-supreme-c...

Would be curious what the dissenting opinion of Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch reads like.

seize the day

up
8 users have voted.
mimi's picture

of what I have read lately and I sincerely hope that I can answer honestly: "The Warmth of Other Suns".

I will have to migrate to another place of warmth to finally find my peace and read.

Thank You.

up
8 users have voted.
Granma's picture

I have to get this book to read.

up
4 users have voted.
Granma's picture

@Granma but I'll have to buy it. There are 41 holds for the hardback, a bunch of holds for the audio version, and unknown # of holds for the e-book version.

up
5 users have voted.
Bob In Portland's picture

I read THE OTHER OSWALD, about Robert Webster, another false defector to the Soviet Union with Oswald. He also met Oswald's eventual wife, Marina, in the USSR. Very good, and it fills in a lot of information around the planned Chicago assassination at the beginning of the Nov. '63. A piece of trivia: a car used to haul ammo, busted on the way to Chicago, was registered back east in the name of "Lee Harvey Oswald", which dovetails with what intelligence agent Richard Case Nagell said, that the LHO identification was used by a number of agents.

Then there was a recent book about James Angleton, I think that Morley was the author, which was like ice-skating. There were lots of stories about him, but his part in the JFK assassination was assiduously avoided. Not recommended.

I'm reading the Mary Trump book about her uncle. Thoroughly depressing. Unfortunately, many of the family dynamics of the Trump family remind me of some of the unpleasantries of my youth, although thankfully I managed to avoid the downfalls that ruined Trump as a human being. Almost ruined me, but it didn't.

A book I've been waiting for, KINDRED, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, has been pushed back for a few years now. Sykes has been investigating Neanderthal life in what is now France. She's a good writer and I look forward to it if it ever is release, now scheduled for October.

Read BITTEN, about US biological programs and Lyme Disease. Read OPERATION PAPERCLIP, the newer one by Annie Jacobsen, about the importation of Nazi scientists to the US at the end of WWII.

I've got a new book of poetry too.

up
8 users have voted.
janis b's picture

@Bob In Portland

Look through shadows, listen beyond echoes; they have much to tell. Not only of other ways to be human, but new eyes to see ourselves. The most glorious thing about the Neanderthals is that they belong to all of us, and they're no dead-end, past-tense phenomenon. They are right here. In my hands typing and your brain understanding my words. Read on, and meet your kindred.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37941599-kindred

up
2 users have voted.

You have given enough background and some of the passages that make this a book I feel I will look into reading this. Did grow up in the south during the 50's and having to have it explained why I could not go and sit up in the balcony of the movie theatre because it was reserved for "the coloreds".

up
10 users have voted.

Life is what you make it, so make it something worthwhile.

This ain't no dress rehearsal!

snoopydawg's picture

I am listening to Gone with the Wind and yes I am aware of the limitations of the book and how it dealt with racism. However as a devout listener of over 1,000 audio books I find the way Mitchell wrote was absolutely fabulous. She goes into great detail without people griping about too much detail in her story. Anyone who has griped about that understands what I am saying. And I love that there is no 'he said, she said, Paul said, Sally said' after every damn time someone says something. Robert Jordan and the guy who writes the Dresden files put that in their books. Listening to Jordan's book drove me nuts and made me irritated. The narrator got into a sing song rythym when she had to say that after every person spoke. "Elaaaaiiiinnnee said". Raaaannnndddd said". Over and over..........and over!!!

One thing that has run through my mind is how the way of life for plantation owners changed during the war and especially after it ended. I can't help thinking of the countries that we have destroyed that were once prosperous for its citizens. Libya comes to mind the being one of the most recent. I had lots of other thoughts about the book as I was listening to it, but they have fled my mind. But I am enjoying listening to it and took a break to watch the movie just so I could picture it properly. I was most upset that Ashley was in his 40's as were the Tarleton twins though. But that was Hollywood back then. 50 year old Jimmy Stewart being a 17 year old in It's a Wonderful Life?

I am open to suggestions of good books of that era that are more fact focused, however it has to be fiction. My brain goes away when I listen to non fiction books.

up
5 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

TheOtherMaven's picture

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg

are almost more interesting than the movie! Every actress in Hollywood wanted to play Scarlett - except Olivia De Havilland, who knew she should play Melanie and fought like hell to get that part. Neither Gable nor Howard wanted the roles they wound up playing, and both had to be bribed into it - Gable overtly, with money he needed to buy off his estranged then-wife, and Howard more subtly with more opportunities to direct and produce. And then there's the whole Hattie McDaniel story....

up
4 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

snoopydawg's picture

@TheOtherMaven

I have heard that there were lots of problems with getting it made but not the details.

up
2 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Shahryar's picture

And regretting that I never met Ursula LeGuin, despite living in the same town for so many years.

up
4 users have voted.
janis b's picture

I read some of this book a few years ago at my mom’s. I never finished it and didn’t want to carry it home, but your essay motivates me to pick it up again.

Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.

“May the Lord be the first in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”

When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law’s truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae’s husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.

The solarised photo you included, of the man packing, is haunting and such a powerful image.

up
1 user has voted.
lotlizard's picture

an autobiographical sketch in the New Yorker about growing up as a thirteen-year old haole surfer and immigrant to Hawaii from da Mainlan’:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/off-diamond-head-finnegan

up
1 user has voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

for the next several days is magazines and jorals plus some really old stuff on e-book and non-branded, non-proprietary audio books.

be well and have a good one

up
1 user has voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

for the next several days is magazines and jorals plus some really old stuff on e-book and non-branded, non-proprietary audio books.

be well and have a good one

up
0 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --