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
Chickasaw County, Mississippi, 1929. At age 16, Ida Mae moves to Edd Pearson’s plantation with her new husband, George Gladney. They live in a ramshackle wooden cabin and work Pearson’s cotton from sunrise to after dark. Like most sharecroppers, George and Ida Mae keep half of what they produce, minus the cost of materials. Edd Pearson is unusually honest for a plantation owner, but he still criticizes Ida Mae for not working as hard as he wants.
George and Ida Mae’s lives closely resemble those of enslaved Black people who worked on plantations in the South for centuries before them. While Edd Pearson may be honest, the unfair legal system enables other sharecroppers to effectively enslave their sharecroppers by inventing debts that prevent them from leaving their jobs. And the mere fact that Edd Pearson honestly follows the rules of Jim Crow does not make these rules fair or legitimate. Indeed, this again highlights the true purpose of Jim Crow: to maintain the social and economic structure of slavery, which allowed a small group of elite white property owners to profit from the labor of the oppressed Black masses.
Themes
The benchmark for cotton pickers is 100 pounds a day—or 7,000 cotton buds. The work is backbreaking and monotonous. It’s also a key foundation to the U.S. economy—but a long series of middlemen keeps most of the profits. While everyone admires the fastest pickers, who can harvest as much as 400 pounds a day, many quietly rebel against the system. For instance, to increase the weight, some pickers add rocks to their sack, and one young man famously urinates in it at the end of the day.
Wilkerson depicts the daily life of a cotton picker in vivid detail so that her readers can fully appreciate the brutality of the conditions that Ida Mae and George escaped by migrating to the North. She also emphasizes its role in the U.S.’s broader economic life—including Northern industry as well as Southern agriculture. Moreover, just as they face the dilemma of whether to stay in the South or leave it, Black sharecroppers also face the dilemma of whether to try to succeed within the essentially unjust sharecropping system or to get ahead by undermining it.
Themes
Ida Mae wears burlap dresses because she can’t afford clothes made of the same cotton she picks. George’s family sharecrops on the Pearson plantation, too, and his niece teaches Ida Mae to cook, clean, and do laundry. She also tends the vegetable garden and the chickens. She’s fearless: when a snake slithers into the kitchen, she beats it to death without a second thought. During the Great Depression, cotton prices plummet, and she has to go without shoes.
Ida Mae’s clothes and lack of shoes underlines how impoverished the rural South is in the early 20th century. But this poverty doesn’t mean that Ida Mae and George are passive or helpless—the anecdote with the snake proves as much. They’re the victims of a deeply exploitative social system, but they also actively look for ways to improve their situation.
Themes
Soon, Ida Mae gets pregnant. The first time, she miscarries, but the second time, she has a baby girl and names her Velma. About a year later, she has another girl, Elma. But as a toddler, Elma gets sick and dies after eating plums from a tree. Finally, in 1935, Ida Mae has a son, James. When James starts to have seizures as a toddler, a neighbor advises Ida Mae to take off his clothes next time it happens. She does, and she burns them, for good measure. James never has a seizure again.
Much like her father, who died of a mysterious infection after wading into floodwater, Ida Mae has virtually no access to medical attention in the rural Jim Crow South. As Robert Pershing Foster’s story will soon show, there were very few Black doctors in the South, and fewer still who were willing to treat patients in the backcountry. Of course, Pershing’s story also makes it clear why so many doctors chose to join the Great Migration instead of practicing under the constraints of Jim Crow.
Themes
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Life gets even harder during the Depression. Many pickers lose their jobs, and George’s sister moves in with him and Ida Mae. But Ida Mae trusts that God will set everything right. When their turkey has chicks, instead of watching them carefully (like the other sharecroppers), Ida Mae lets them run free.
Ida Mae’s faith and resilience eventually prove to be her greatest strength, because they enable her to adapt to the unpredictable, changing conditions that she encounters in the North. By highlighting these traits, Wilkerson again emphasizes that every migration story is unique because every individual confronts the challenges of migrating with a different mix of strengths, weaknesses, and decisions.
Themes
Eustis, Florida, 1939. George Starling should be in college, but instead, he’s riding in the back of a truck, heading to pick citrus in the local groves. This is the only real job opportunity in his part of Florida, but he’s not very good at it. Every morning, foremen come through town and pick up the best workers. When he can, George joins Babe and Reuben Blye, the only Black foremen. Like with cotton, fruit pickers are paid by weight, so they have all kinds of tricks to improve their take.
George Starling faces the consequences of his rash decision to marry Inez—which led his father to stop paying his college tuition. His job may not be quite as backbreaking or unfree as Ida Mae’s—at least he can choose whom to work with—but it’s still precarious, exploitative, and poorly paid. Like Pershing, George clearly sees that his circumstances in the South are preventing him from reaching his full potential, and he yearns for the chance to do so.
Themes
Citrus picking is dangerous. Pickers have to climb tall ladders up into the trees, and they frequently fall and break limbs. One day, the foreman makes George climb all the way down his ladder and go back to an earlier tree, because he left a single orange at the top. That afternoon, in the back of the truck, the ladders come untied and knock all the pickers off. George is seriously injured, but the company only sends him $12.48 as compensation. In fact, farmers constantly cheat the pickers out of their pay—prices for different kinds of fruit change every day, and workers struggle to keep track of how much they’re owed. They don’t even consider fighting the company over it, because there are dozens more workers eager to replace each and every one of them.
The dangers of citrus picking underline how Southern society is built on exploitation: the citrus companies can only underpay and mistreat their pickers because they know that the law won’t stop them and that they will never run out of workers. Locals like George have no option but to accept this system, which is extremely profitable for the grove owners. Again, this shows that Jim Crow is essentially an economic system: it represses Black people’s political rights so that they can be exploited economically. While this may be more severe than in the North, it’s not inherently different. After all, the Great Migration began during World War I precisely because white employers needed to fill a labor shortage.
Themes
Monroe, Louisiana, 1935. At age 16, Pershing Foster takes the bus to visit his brother Madison up in St. Louis. It’s the first time he has ever left Monroe; the ticket is his graduation present, and he’s wearing his finest tweed suit. He sits in a seat with a “COLORED” sign, but whenever white passengers board the bus, they move the sign, take his seat, and make him move toward the back. There’s no toilet, and the bumps and jerks on the road make him pee his pants. He feels humiliated.
Pershing’s bus ride represents the contrast between his high aspirations and the humiliating limitations that segregation places on him. As his tweed suit suggests, he knows that he deserves far better than the second-class status the South is willing to give him, and this is why he will leave it. This anecdote also foreshadows his fateful road trip to California in the next section of the book.
Themes
Pershing enjoys his trip to St. Louis, but when he returns home to Monroe, he decides that he doesn’t want to go to college. His parents refuse. He can’t go to the nearby Northeast Louisiana College, which is whites-only, so he goes to Leland College, where his parents went. They save up money so that he can eventually transfer to the more prestigious Morehouse College. When he returns home in the summer, a local store won’t hire him as a janitor because of his education, so he ends up working in a sawmill.
Pershing’s college choice exemplifies how segregation systematically limits Black people’s opportunities. No Black people in Monroe can get a college education without moving elsewhere, and once they do, they’re far less likely to ever move back. This explains why there are virtually no educated professionals in town (besides Pershing’s parents).
Themes
To Pershing, Morehouse College—home of the well-dressed, ambitious Black elite—is “too perfect for words.” Atlanta is full of successful Black professionals, who have built a thriving community. For the first time, Pershing feels free from Jim Crow. He joins the choir and becomes well-known around campus for his exquisite voice.
Pershing finally gets the dignity and opulent lifestyle that he has always felt he deserved, and he will refuse to ever go back to the humiliation of living under Jim Crow. Morehouse represents freedom to him because, even though he’s still in the segregated South, he can do everything he likes and no longer has to accept inferior status to the people around him.
Themes
During Pershing’s senior year, a professor introduces him to Alice Clement, the daughter of Dr. Rufus Clement, Atlanta University’s president and one of the nation’s most powerful Black leaders. He is perhaps most famous for his feud with W. E. B. DuBois, the country’s most prominent Black scholar, whom he summarily forced into retirement. Pershing is sharp, well-reputed, and extremely polite, but Dr. Clement doesn’t know if he’s good enough for his daughter. After graduating from Morehouse, Pershing starts graduate school at Atlanta University and then medical school in Nashville.
Morehouse opens significant doors for Pershing, both personally and professionally. Most importantly, his relationship with Alice catapults him directly into the nation’s Black elite. Yet, whereas Northern Black elites like DuBois believed in fighting for political equality, Southern ones like Dr. Clement believed in working hard to create strong, independent Black institutions at home in the South. This conflict resembles the dilemma that faced migrants: whether to seek new opportunities in the North or make the best of their limited ones at home in the South.
Themes
A Thin Light Far Away. In 1919, when Ida Mae, George, and Pershing are children, Edwin Hubble discovers a sun outside our galaxy for the first time.
Wilkerson uses Hubble’s discovery as a metaphor for the Great Migration: it expanded humanity’s sense of what is possible in the universe, just as the Migration expanded Black Southerners’ sense of what could be possible for them.
Themes
