48 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel WilkersonThe Warmth Of Other Suns
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Book Club Questions
Tools
BetaPart 3, Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Exodus”
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Appointed Time of Their Coming”
Part 3 of the book shows how the three main characters left the South and relates anecdotes of other Southern migrants.
Many African-Americans simply snuck away with no notice, so as to not arouse the ire of the whites that they worked for, though some, like Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, managed “a few dollars” (184) from their former employers and did not have to abscond. This shows just how significantly whites in the South limited African-Americans’ freedom of movement, seeking to keep them as cheap labor.
Being denied basic rights led a large portion to leave; others fled for safety reasons, like George Swanson Starling, who needed to get out “before the grove owners got to him” (185).
For others, like Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, leaving the South meant being able to completely start over and remake themselves. When Foster arrived in California, he renamed himself “Bob. Bob with a martini and stingy-brim hat. It was modern and hip, and it suited the new version of himself as the leading man in his own motion picture” (189). This power to be whatever one wanted to be led many to leave to more fully actualize.
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Crossing Over”
While some African-Americans, like Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, believed that once they left the South a new world would suddenly open up to them, this was not always the case. For example, Foster was crushed when he was repeatedly turned away from one motel after another in states no longer under the rule of Jim Crow: “Robert was feeling sick now […] nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it James Crow in California” (211).
Moreover, apart from having to deal with the masked racism that was present in the North, the psychological aspect of moving to a place where the weather, culture, and environment was completely different proved to be another massive obstacle that migrants of the Great Migration had to overcome. They needed to learn how to live again in this new world, “like getting unstuck from a magnet” (221) that had overshadowed them and dominated their every move for much of their lives.
Part 3, Chapters 10-11 Analysis
This section of the book explores the psychology of leaving the South and of arriving in the North.
Early generations of migrants fled the South in secret—a strategy reminiscent of enslaved people escaping their bondage. Fear for their physical safety pervades these accounts, concern intense enough to make people leave without preparation. For people in Gladney’s generation, the fear was amorphous and pervasive—simply being a Black person contemplating moving North was enough to trigger white anger and aggression. White oppression of Black residents was still so intense that migrants felt uneasy making any visible signs of being about to leave. Decades later, Starling also went North out of fear—though his fear was more localized. He was in danger specifically because he dared to better the conditions of his fellow fruit pickers, and he knew that the whites who control the agricultural industry in Florida would seek retribution.
The next emotion Wilkerson describes is the disappointment of realizing that North only offered a covert version of the racism migrants had faced in the South. Though Northern states did not have Jim Crow laws on the books, residents there were just as likely to discriminate against Black people.
For people of more means in Foster’s generation, however, moving out of the South was psychologically freeing. In California, Foster could become a more casual, more modern, less historically weighed down version of himself. This was the positive flip side of the rootlessness that such a dramatic change of living environment could create.
