'Other Suns' tells story of Great Migration

After she won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing 16 years ago, it seemed everyone had advice for Isabel Wilkerson.

You can be a columnist now.

You can be an editor, a foreign correspondent.

But Wilkerson, then the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, did none of those things. Instead, she promptly took a leave of absence.

“I chose to do this,” Wilkerson said last week as she gestured to a book placed on a coffee table at her Atlanta home.

The book is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” (Random House, $30). It is the result of the past 15 years of her effort to tell the story of one of this nation’s most dramatic population shifts: the migration of 6 million African-Americans out of the South and into cities throughout the North and West. Released today, “Other Suns” is being called a “landmark” and “heroic” by some critics. It has already been optioned for film adaptation, Wilkerson said.

On Friday, Wilkerson, who is also a former journalism professor at Princeton and Emory universities, will read from the book and speak about her research at the Atlanta History Center. She is now a journalism professor and director of narrative nonfiction at Boston University but lives half the year in Atlanta.

Certainly other books have explored the Great Migration, which went on from 1915 to about 1970, with African-Americans leaving the segregated South in a seemingly endless stream. They went person by person, family by family, hamlet by hamlet, to points north and west.

Like immigrants, Wilkerson said, they were searching for opportunity and freedom. And, like immigrants, they found success and heartache often in equal measure. That the African-American migrants had to leave their homes in search of the liberty that should have been their birthright as Americans is what sets them apart, Wilkerson said.

The child of the migration herself, Wilkerson’s family settled in Washington. Her mother is originally from Rome. Her father, one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, was originally from southern Virginia.

Two narratives surrounded Wilkerson growing up. One was from the children of Irish, Italian and Russian immigrants she went to school with. The other was from her own family. To her ears, both had a familiar ring.

“I was living with the heart and mind of an immigrant, but that story was already owned,” by those from other continents, Wilkerson said. “That is our story, too, but it has never been framed that way.”

Rather than tell the story as an academic treatise, Wilkerson focused on the lives of three people: Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling and Dr. Robert Foster. Each represented a different stage and destination city of the migration.

Though it’s a work of nonfiction, Wilkerson relays their stories as a novelist would, letting the reader feel the way the sun seared Gladney’s skin in Mississippi cotton fields; the belch of gravel dust in Starling’s face as he and other laborers set out for grueling days in central Florida’s citrus groves; the spirit-breaking exhaustion Foster, a Morehouse graduate, felt as he fled Louisiana to a new, uncertain life in California.

Wilkerson lets these otherwise ordinary people speak for themselves, and in doing so they tell the story of millions of their fellow travelers.

Finding the three was itself an odyssey. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people, then narrowed that lot to 30 before deciding on the final three. Gladney, Starling and Foster were natural storytellers, and she spent years recording each word they said to her in their living rooms, on trips and on return visits to the fields of their youth.

Wilkerson’s work began before Google existed. At one point, she was reading nearly a reference book a day to learn more about the circumstances the migrants left and what they faced once they arrived.

Inspiration also came from unlikely places, such as cinema. “The Joy Luck Club,” “Avalon” and “The Gods Must Be Crazy” all played a role in helping her interpret the material she was gathering, validating that what she was hearing from these citizens was indeed an immigrant’s tale.

She knew it would be a journey of years but not one that ultimately stretched more than a decade.

“But once I started, I knew there would be no way I could not finish the book,” Wilkerson said.

One thing Wilkerson wanted to dispel is what she said is a common myth about the millions who fled. In poring over hundreds of documents, Wilkerson found, for instance, that among post-World War II migrants, their secondary education levels were in many cases the same as or greater than native-born Northern whites.

Yet through telling the life stories of a Mississippi sharecropper, a Florida citrus grove worker and an ambitious but stymied Louisiana doctor, Wilkerson is hopeful that people will see that there is more commonality in the American experience than many people actually believe.