The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

  Jessie is Ida Mae’s sister-in-law twice over, in the small, insular circles of rural Mississippi. She was married to Ida Mae’s husband’s brother Ardee, and she is the sister of the man Ida Mae’s sister Talma married. Jessie moved up to Chicago in 1946 but recently returned to Mississippi, where her brother Aubrey lives. She went back south with her husband, but he was ill and not particular about moving back to Mississippi and did not live long after they had arrived. That left Jessie widowed and alone in the isolated double-wide with her sweet nature and bad knees.

  Ida Mae and Jessie greet and hug each other like sisters, and Ida Mae rests herself in Jessie’s recliner with a throw over it and starts talking about the cotton she and I picked by the side of the road.

  “Ooh, it was so much cotton,” she says. “Cotton everywhere.”

  “The highest I ever picked was one hundred eighty-seven pounds,” Jessie says.

  “I just couldn’t do it,” Ida Mae says. “I’d pick and cry. I ain’t never liked the field.”

  The two of them catch up on the latest with the kids and nieces and nephews, and then Ida Mae starts talking about life back up in the North.

  “You see everything up there, Jessie,” she says. “Seem like they choose this block to do all they dirt. They sell drugs there. They open their mouths and put it down their throat. That’s where they keep it. One lady died from swallowing it. It must have got hung up in her lung. I missed her and asked about her. She used to sit under the tree out there. She was in her fifties, and she died from it.”

  Ida Mae pauses and looks away. “I reckon people who’ve passed on wouldn’t want to come back if they could. They couldn’t take what’s going on now days.”

  Jessie mostly listens. She’s having trouble with her legs, and her husband’s death is still weighing on her heart.

  Which reminds Ida Mae of her husband. “I waited on George forty-seven years,” she says. “And I mean I waited on him. When he come home from work, and when he wanted his breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I give it to him. I served him. They expect too much. When he passed, I wasn’t thinking about no other husband. I laugh and talk with them, but that’s as far as it go.”

  The next day we are riding through the curving hills of Chickasaw County, rising and sinking along the red dirt road. We are retracing the corners Ida Mae and her family lived and sharecropped and looking for anyone she might know who is still around. We drive through pine woods draped in kudzu and through tumbling fields down a gravel road that kicks up dirt as we pass.

  Every now and then, the hills are broken by a cabin with a chicken-wire fence around it and a pickup truck at the side. The land is quiet, at peace, as if the bloodshed of the twentieth century never happened. There appears a black man riding high up on a tractor as it inches down a gravel road in a cloud of gravel dust, and he tips his hat as he passes us, a courtly gesture from another century that one would never see in Chicago.

  Ida Mae’s brother-in-law Aubrey, who was married to her late sister Talma, is leading her from place to place. He knows the land because he returned to Mississippi decades ago after trying Chicago and not liking it.

  Aubrey tries to find Miss Theenie’s house, the one where the men came courting Ida Mae on the front porch. They spot a weathered shack leaning on its side. They stop to inspect it and conclude that it might have been Miss Theenie’s but they couldn’t say for sure. Falling-down shacks look pretty much the same.

  “Been so long,” Ida Mae says.

  In the car, Ida Mae looks out at all the cotton, the cotton that ruled her days and that she’s free from now.

  Aubrey points to a machine off in the distance.

  “That machine can pick fifteen to twenty bales of cotton in a day,” Aubrey says proudly of the advancements made since Ida Mae left.

  “Sho’ ’nough?” Ida Mae says blankly. She looks out with vague interest at the blur of field. Then she turns the conversation to the old friends she wants to see and how different things look to her now.

  She is getting a little disoriented, one hill indistinguishable from another, nothing but trees or cabins as guideposts and the terrain seeming wilder than before. “I don’t remember so many crooks and turns,” she says of the land and the gravel road we are on.

  She is having trouble with the heat after being in Chicago so long. “It’s a different kind of hot down here,” she says. And she’s feeling a little sick, as people do when they drink the water they are warned about when they visit developing countries. Later in the day she will put some nutmeg in the palm of her hand and lick it to settle her stomach, and not draw the least attention to herself among the people in Mississippi, which is, after all, where she learned it.

  In and around the settlements of Chickasaw County, Ida Mae visits with a succession of people who knew her. They greet her like a loved one they just discovered happens to be alive after all. She visits Isolena Harris, Marcelle Barr, Doretta Boston, a lady named Azaline.

  Aubrey has taken charge and takes great pride in being the one to ask bewildered home folks, “You know who this is?”

  The people inspect Ida Mae’s face. She was a young mother in her twenties the last time some of them saw her. Now she’s a great-grandmother. They look hard and see the pointed nose of her sister Talma or the nut butter coloring of Miss Theenie. Some catch on right away and startle themselves in the recognition.

  “You know I know Miss Ida Mae! I declare! How you doing!” one lady says, after figuring it out, grabbing Ida Mae, and smothering her in hugs.

  She stops by to see an old classmate named Castoria.

  “You know who this is?” Aubrey asks again.

  Castoria says she can’t place her, doesn’t know her.

  “Yes, you do,” Aubrey insists. “This is Ida Mae.”

  Castoria’s face brightens. The two of them embrace each other and let out gap-toothed smiles.

  “Girl, I ought to whoop you good!” Castoria says. “Lord have mercy on me. When have I seen Ida Mae?”

  “It’s been years and years and years,” Ida Mae says. “I went to school with you. Just a few of us living now.”

  “Lord have mercy on my soul!” Castoria says, still staring at Ida Mae.

  Aubrey takes her to the church cemetery where many of the black people of Chickasaw County are buried. She finds her mother, Miss Theenie, and some cousins and aunts, but not the father she loved so dearly.

  One of the headstones appears to be testimony to the hard times the people faced under Jim Crow.

  It reads simply: THY TRIAL’S ENDED.

  Aubrey scans the headstones of all the people they once knew.

  “Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?” Aubrey asks her.

  “No, I’m gonna be in Chicago,” she tells him.

  We pull up to a frame house with a pickup truck and farm implements in the yard. It’s where David McIntosh lives. He was the suitor who rode on horseback to court Ida Mae had when she was a young girl and who lost out to the man who married Ida Mae and carried her off to Chicago.

  Had things turned out differently, had she not married George, this might be where Ida Mae would be living: on a Chickasaw County farm with chickens and pole beans in walking distance from where she grew up. She would never have lived in Chicago, might never have seen it. She wouldn’t have been able to vote all those years or work in a big city hospital, to ride the elevated train and taste Polish sausage and be surrounded by family and friends most everywhere she went because most everyone she knew moved north like she did. Her children—James, Eleanor, Velma—not to mention the grandchildren, might not have existed or would surely have been different from what they were if they had. It’s almost incomprehensible now.

  David comes out of the house in his baseball cap. He has not seen her in half a lifetime. He recognizes her instantly. He breaks into a smile.

  “How you, Ida Mae?”

  “I’m blessed,” she says, smiling back.

  He is a compact man in soiled
denim and bifocals, not much taller than Ida Mae. He stayed in Mississippi and lived his life close to the land, the opposite of how Ida Mae ended up. He studies her face across the decades and reaches out and grabs her hand.

  Just then, David’s wife, in white braids, comes out to see who is visiting, and Ida Mae and David keep it to a warm hug and a few words.

  Ida Mae climbs into the car, still looking back at David, and he still looking at her.

  “Bless his heart,” Ida Mae says, as the car backs out of his dirt yard. “I knew him the minute I saw him.”

  That turned out to be the last time they would see each other. He died the next year, and she would not mourn so much as contemplate the meaning of what might have been and what their lives had turned out to be.

  CHICAGO, MARCH 5, 1999

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  IDA MAE’S LIVING ROOM had a pink glow to it. The new venetian blinds she dreamed of had finally arrived. Their pink slats cast a rose-colored light in the room. It was just how she liked to see the world, and she was happier for it. She was all dressed up, her hair in cotton white Shirley Temple curls, pink lipstick on, smiling and free. It was her eighty-sixth birthday.

  A thick snow was falling outside and coated the trees. Betty, who lived upstairs, waited with her for the guests to arrive.

  The news was on. There was a report about a white man who had gotten the death penalty for dragging a black man to death in Jasper, Texas. But this was Ida Mae’s birthday, and no one wanted to think about black men being dragged to death. They had lived it, and it hadn’t gone away, and there was nothing they could do about it. Plus, that was Texas, not Mississippi. They were from Mississippi.

  Outside, a man was parking his truck in front of the empty lot next to Ida Mae’s house. She heard the screeching of the brakes and turned toward the window to see what was going on.

  “He needs to move that truck,” Ida Mae said. “That rusted-back truck is blocking my view.”

  Eleanor’s daughter Karen arrived with a new boyfriend named Mike. He had a square jaw and specks of gray in his hair, looked to be late forties to midfifties. When Mike came in, Ida Mae noticed him right away. “I don’t know who that is,” she said, “but he sho’ ain’t bad on the eyes.”

  Their old friend Wilks Battle walked in and took a seat next to Ida Mae. He had just come from the hospital. His mother had been diagnosed with liver cancer. The doctor said there was no more they could do. He said it could be two months or two days, they just didn’t know. He bent his head down, eyes cast to the carpet.

  Ida Mae looked wide-eyed into his face with wonder and sympathy. All the people she had lost and buried, and still she listened as if this were the first she had heard of death and the first she had seen of grief.

  “Well,” she said in a low and gentle voice, “God don’t make no mistakes.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know,” he said, looking away.

  “No, God don’t make no mistakes.”

  The meal was fish—“cat” and “buffalo” that Eleanor fried—coleslaw, and hush puppies. Mary Ann made the tuna macaroni salad and apple muffins. Karen brought a yellow layer cake with strawberries on top and the potato salad she was still refusing to divulge the recipe for no matter how much people begged.

  The ten or so people gathered for Ida Mae’s birthday that night stood in a circle around the dining room table as Mary Ann prayed, “Dear God, thank you for Grandmother …”

  Ida Mae made sure to sit across the dining room table from Mike, her granddaughter notwithstanding, and proceeded to tell her story.

  “I been in Chicago sixty-two years,” she began. “I came here in 1937. Well, I came to Milwaukee first. I came when Eleanor was three month old and James was three year old. In them days on the train, everybody had shoe boxes full of food.”

  “The ways we got here …,” Mike said, shaking his head.

  He had come up late, in 1969.

  “I came up as a young man from Macomb, Mississippi,” he said. “I guess it was coming to an end then. People stopped coming when things got better in the South.”

  A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.

  It was a new century now. Ida Mae had never expected to see it. But here she was about to celebrate another birthday. She didn’t know how many more she might live to see, and she didn’t worry about it. It was March 2002. She was in a new chair by the window now. It was a gold velveteen recliner that could swivel and pivot, and she could watch the world play out beneath her from whatever angle she chose. She had replaced the baby blue carpet and the baby blue plastic-covered furniture she inherited from the nice Italian people when she bought the three-flat some thirty-five years ago. She had hung new draperies and kept the new blinds at half-mast to frame her view of the mayhem below. It was better than a movie.

  “The police,” she’d say, “they riding tonight. When it’s a shooting, they ride for a good week. They been riding hard lately.”

  That meant the street might be quiet for a change. She lived with the daughter she had carried in her belly to the New World, the daughter who was now a grandmother herself, and with the daughter’s son, whose quick mind and good nature couldn’t protect him from the will of the streets. Just about every evening, James, the son who had balked at the shoes she had tried to put on him for the migration north and who was now a grandfather, his hair flecked with gray, would come up from the first floor to watch Wheel of Fortune with her on the Magnavox.

  She had outlived her proud and stoic husband; her two oldest daughters; the suitor she might have married who would have kept her in the South; the hot-headed Willie Jim, who raised his chains up to her that night in Mississippi; old Mr. Edd, who was a decent boss man but still made life harder than it had to be down south; Miss Julie McClenna, blind and sweet though she was; and even the more tortured souls like Robert Foster and George Starling, whom she never knew but who, along with several million others, were on the train out of the South with her in spirit if not in fact.

  Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true.

  There had been sickness, disappointment, premature and unexpected losses, and, among their children, more divorces than enduring marriages, but at least the children had tried. The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

  Ida Mae outlasted them all. Here she was, well into a new millennium no one ever thought she would live to see, eighty-nine going on ninety, and dancing some old version of the black bottom that the old people wouldn’t let her dance eight decades before. She was snapping her fingers to B. B. King, who had come north from Mississippi like her, from a place called Itta Bena. She was singing along with the words: “To know you is to love you, is to see you being free as the wind …”

  Mississippi was deep inside her, but she gave no thought to ever living there again. Home was wherever she planted herself, and that happened to be Chicago. She had been there for sixty-six years, longe
r than some people get to live.

  There were several dozen people in Chicago, Milwaukee, Beloit, and Toledo, descended from the original sharecroppers who had left the clay hills of northeastern Mississippi back in the 1930s and 1940s, including, among the descendants, Ida Mae’s two surviving children, six grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and assorted nieces and nephews. Of those descendants, there were bus drivers, secretaries, teachers, administrators, a bank teller, a lawyer, a customer service representative, government workers.

  Ida Mae was the only original migrant left in the family. She was held in high esteem in her white suit and with her cottony white hair combed into a French twist at annual reunion dinners at, say, a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of one of the arrival cities. She had a niece and a brother- and sister-in-law back in Mississippi. And that was pretty much all that was left back home.

  She was a Chicagoan now but had seen and heard so much, so many wondrous, sad, and unspeakable things in her life, that there still wasn’t time enough to tell all that she had witnessed.

  “The half ain’t been told,” she said.

  She put the disappointments in a lockbox in the back of her mind and lived in the moment, which is all anybody has for sure. She had learned long ago, when things were so much harder in the Old Country she left behind, that, after all she had been through, every day to her was a blessing and every breath she took a gift.

  EPILOGUE

  Because we have tasted

  the bitter swill

  of civil war and segregation,

  and emerged from that dark chapter

  stronger and more united,

  we cannot help but believe

  that the old hatreds shall someday pass;

  that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve;