Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – In honor of my beloved and unshakeable mother, who inspired The Warmth of Other Suns.
I found this photo as a young girl and was captivated from the moment I laid eyes on it, beguiled by who she was before she had me and how and why she had made it out of small-town Georgia to Washington, DC. There she is on the left, with a grade school friend from back home who would settle in Baltimore.
It planted a seed of wonderment that would abide within me and emerge decades later in my devotion to understanding the Great Migration. Warmth is an ode to her and to the six million souls who journeyed out of the Jim Crow South. The idea started, unbeknownst to me in the moment, with this:
“The picture is sepia, 2 by 3 inches, from the forties. Two young women sit on the front steps of a rowhouse on R Street, looking very Bette Davis. Stacked heels and padded shoulders, wool coats brushing their knees. They are new in town. Childhood friends from Georgia meeting up now in the big city. Their faces give no hint of whatever indignities the South had visited upon them. That was over now. Their faces are all smiles and optimism. The one in the pearls would become a teacher and, years later, my mother….
“As a girl, I found the picture in a drawer in the living room, where many of those artifacts of migration likely ended up. I stared into the faces, searched the light in their eyes, the width of their smiles for clues as to how they got there.
“Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they gather the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will be more than the South said they had a right to be? What would have happened had all those people raised under Jim Crow not spilled out of the South looking for something better?….”
— From The Warmth of Other Suns
#thewarmthofothersuns #thegreatmigration | Posted on 12/May/2024 22:34:26
