Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Warmth of Other Suns, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Migration and Freedom
History, Memory, and Identity
The Legacy of the Migration
The Economics of Racism
Love and Family
Decision, Consequence, and Regret
Summary
Analysis
Chicago, 1997. In her kitchen, Ida Mae sticks to tradition, cooking the same Southern dishes that she has eaten all her life. When she tries new things, like replacing ordinary cornmeal with self-rising cornmeal in her cornbread, it just doesn’t turn out the same. As the oldest person left in her family, she’s a regular at every funeral. But each feels more tragic than the last. Ida Mae’s nephew Robert and his wife Catherine both have serious strokes, so she goes to visit them in the hospital. She feels deeply indebted to Robert, who originally helped her and George move to Chicago. She comforts him and tells him to trust in God.
By keeping Southern traditions alive in the North, Ida Mae acts as a kind of cultural bridge for her community. She always remembers where she came from in terms of her family, too. Her enduring connections with the relatives who helped her move north show how the Great Migration was fundamentally a collective endeavor, a way for entire families to lift themselves up—as well as to help out their relatives who remained in the South, too.
Themes
One day, Ida Mae shows Wilkerson photos of her nephew’s funeral. Her nephew’s partner was so distraught that he wanted to get in the casket. Ida Mae says that this is what real love means. After her sister Irene dies in 1996, Ida Mae periodically goes to Milwaukee to manage her estate. Wilkerson accompanies her on one of her trips. On the way, it starts raining, and Wilkerson says she hopes it clears up. But Ida Mae calmly replies, “Now, we ain’t got nothing to do with God’s business.”
Ida Mae’s musings on love point to one of the central messages that Wilkerson gleans from her protagonists’ stories. Namely, while economic and social factors are no doubt the Great Migration’s direct cause, beneath these factors, migrants are really motivated above all by love—and specifically their desire to give their children a better life than they were able to live. This explains, for instance, why Ida Mae is so content with the course of her life, but George Starling is so regretful. Meanwhile, Ida Mae’s comment about “God’s business” shows how her faith has enabled her to cope with adverse circumstances throughout her life by helping her make peace with things she can’t control while doing her best with the things she can.
Themes
New York, 1997. Like many of his fellow migrants, George Starling considers moving back to the South for retirement. Many of his friends encourage him to go, but he decides that New York is his real home. Other migrants feel that returning to the South would mean “a retreat, an admission of failure or […] the end of life itself.” For instance, Babe Blye never wanted to go back to Florida. But when Babe realized he was terminally ill, he finally went. He wanted George to sing the song “Peace in the Valley” at his funeral, and George struggled to finish it through his tears.
George’s trip home makes a serious impression on him: a generation ago, Jim Crow made returning to the South unthinkable, but now, social progress has made it a serious option. Of course, this also shows that life in the South is far more hospitable for young people today than it was in George’s time. Finally, George’s song for Babe Blye is a tribute to the nationwide migrant networks that connect the North to the South, making it possible for people like George to escape the violence of Jim Crow and pursue happiness elsewhere.
Themes
Los Angeles, Autumn 1996. For Robert Foster, giving medical advice to aging friends and family members is practically a full-time job. When he visits an old college classmate at the hospital, an orderly runs up to him and reminisces about their time working together. But he also has regrets. He still dwells on the time he was rejected by the motels outside Phoenix, although he has never returned to that stretch of highway. He regrets putting unfair expectations on his daughters and teaching them so little about his childhood in the South. And he regrets idealizing California: it’s not perfect, but it’s much better than Monroe. He takes Wilkerson out for soul food and then asks her to drop him at the racetrack. In casinos, he feels confident and powerful. He still loves being the center of attention.
Even though Robert once proudly told Wilkerson that he “wouldn’t have any regrets” if he died tomorrow, he now admits that his life often fell short of his high expectations. (Still, even this admission is progress: it shows that he’s accepting his fate.) He never doubts that going to California was worth it, but he does wonder if he overreacted by completely severing his and his family’s connections to Monroe. He did so above all because his early run-ins with racism affected him so deeply. This attests to a basic but often underappreciated truth about the Great Migration: perhaps even more than poverty and violence, migrants were fleeing a system that asked them to view themselves as subhuman.
Themes
Get the entire The Warmth of Other Suns LitChart as a printable PDF.
