How Books Can Change Your Life
Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns" is one of the five books that have fundamentally changed my understanding of the world in which I live. I've been thinking about history and how very close we are to sharecropping, Jim Crow, slavery, and how legacy is what we inherit but also what we make, how we frame an experience, and how we move on.
The book is about the great migration of African American people out of the violence and hate of the South into the North, which was somewhat less violent and hateful, but arduous and complicated nonetheless.
My father was one of those migrants in the 1930s. He moved from Bessemer, Alabama (just outside of Birmingham) to Detroit in order to work for Detroit's burgeoning car industry. Dad was born in 1907. And I was born when he was in his 60s. So my connection to the entirety of the 20th century was, until I was eleven when he died, very real. But even with that history so real and warm and loving in my life, I never fully understood what an extraordinary endeavor it was for any black southerner to leave the south with nothing more than hope, faith, determination, and some food wrapped in towels and stored in shoe boxes for the long train ride out of the South. I never fully "got" how exceptional it was for black southerners born into sharecropping or servitude to leave one state of being, enter into another, and raise children who would go to achieve successes their parents could never have imagined. In the book, Wilkerson suggests that the black migrant experience and profile is much like migrants from any other nation: they are among the bravest, smartest, most entrepreneurial, and determined individuals of their particular country, or in this case, group.
I've read a lot of history and have watched countless Civil Rights videos. I admit to being guilty of eye-rolling and the occasional dramatic sigh. Somehow the proximity of it all--however brutal it seemed in those black and white images--escaped me. I imagine this is also true for many of my students who must think the Civil Rights era was "forever" ago. I certainly did, hence the eye-rolling and dramatic sighing.
But we are so close to that history--to the lynchings, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination. We are so close we are not done with it, no matter how much we try to be, want to be, or say we are. What I hadn't fully put together with this awareness is that my friends who are in their 70s lived that history. And when I talk with them over dinner at restaurants in Portland, for example, and we chat about Robert Downey, Jr. or Jennifer Hudson's weight loss on Jenny Craig or Anthony Hamilton's latest album, it now dawns on me that these conversations are somewhat miraculous given that I am talking to people who were born in a time when they were not allowed to sit next to white folks, eat next to white folks, marry or love or laugh or learn with white folks. That is how close we are to history. And that is how quickly things can change--not completely--but enough that all of those "can't dos" are now taken for granted. Things have changed enough for a fairly well educated black woman to have lost sight of how close history is, even when surrounded, still, by its ramifications.
This is how the book changed my life: Until reading the book, it did not fully occur to me that in just three generations my family went from servitude (my paternal grandparents) to migrant/musician (my father) to poet and dean (me). Unbelievable.
Wilkerson is visiting Reed College on Feb. 25th as part of Black History Month and I am overjoyed. I'm talking really, really excited!!!
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
titsay
gummygunk
stormborns
