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, October 1937. Ida Mae and George Gladney decide to leave Mississippi after the harvest. They sell everything they own, but they don’t tell anyone, lest Mr. Edd Pearson find out and invent new debts to keep them indentured. At the end of the season, they take their remaining possessions to Miss Theenie’s house, and then George settles his accounts with Mr. Edd, who actually owes him a little bit of money, enough for four train tickets north. He weighs the risks and decides to tell Mr. Edd the truth. Mr. Edd is astonished. Meanwhile, Ida Mae is pregnant, but she hasn’t told George or Miss Theenie because they would want her to stay home in Mississippi.
Like millions of others, Ida Mae and George make the difficult choice to leave behind their lives, families, and community in the South. Yet leaving can be even more dangerous than staying—indebted sharecroppers are not allowed to leave plantations, so landowners can effectively use debt to re-enslave them. And as Joe Lee’s fate has shown George and Ida Mae, Edd Pearson’s honesty only goes so far. Indeed, Pearson’s astonishment at Ida Mae and George’s decision to leave shows that he simply doesn’t understand his sharecroppers’ lives, perspectives, or economic situation. In other words, because he lives in a society where racial exploitation is the norm, he does not realize that he is exploiting his sharecroppers.
Themes
Eustis, Florida, April 1945. George Starling tells Inez that his life is in danger and he has to leave Florida. He packs up his things in secret—the grove owners can’t know he’s going, and he knows they’d pay off anyone who informed on him. Inez is furious with him, but he promises that she’ll be able to follow him as soon as he gets settled in with his aunts in New York, and she agrees to let him go.
What Ida Mae and George Gladney most feared—that the violence of Jim Crow would eventually target them personally—comes to pass for George Starling. So he has to leave urgently, and he’s even more secretive and careful about his plans than they were. Fortunately, he also has the resources to leave on the turn of a dime.
Themes
Monroe, Louisiana, March 1953. Pershing keeps working in Louisiana, but only to save up for his move to California. His brother Madison wants him to stay and work in Monroe, but he has already made up his mind. A white storekeeper he’s known all his life asks him to stay but doesn’t even realize that he isn’t allowed to work at the Monroe hospital. Madison insists on making do in Monroe, which means doing medicine with limited resources and foregoing certain luxuries to comply with Jim Crow. For instance, he just doesn’t go to stores and theaters because they’re segregated. But Pershing won’t do the same. The brothers agree to part ways. Neighbors throw Pershing a going-away party, and at the party, Pershing tells everyone to follow him to California.
Pershing and Madison reach opposite conclusions about how to best build their careers and support their families. It’s easy to view Pershing’s decision as selfish and Madison’s as selfless, but the reality is more complicated. While Madison wants to serve the local community that raised him, Pershing is chasing a higher ideal. Pershing thinks that the greater resources he can access in California will not only help him succeed as a doctor, but also help him help the Black community to a far greater extent than he would be able to at home in Monroe.
Themes
America, 1915-1975. Nobody expected the Great Migration to continue after the end of World War I, but mass migrations are never “seasonal, contained, or singular.” Migrants usually take the quickest path to freedom, which means their routes are usually orderly and predictable. In the Great Migration, there were three main routes, which followed train lines. First, migrants from coastal states in the South (like George) generally migrated north along the eastern seaboard to cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Second, migrants from inland states (like Ida Mae) traveled up the Mississippi River to industrial centers like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. And third and finally, migrants from Texas and Louisiana (like Pershing) went to the West.
In one sense, migration is unpredictable because it depends on millions of smaller decisions, which people make of their own free will. This is why the Great Migration continued after social scientists expected it to end. It’s also why Wilkerson views migration as both a pathway to achieving freedom and a basic expression of it. Yet, in another sense, migration is perfectly predictable—it’s easy to understand where people chose to migrate and why. They went where trains could take them, and where their family and friends had already gone. After all, the fact that people make free decisions to migrate doesn’t mean that there are no constraints on those decisions—to the contrary, migration was often their best option in an unfavorable situation.
Themes
Get the entire The Warmth of Other Suns LitChart as a printable PDF.
Many migrants only decided to leave the South for good after making other, shorter trips to fight overseas or visit family and friends. And many traveled much farther than was strictly necessary to find jobs—which, according to migration scholars, makes them more like refugees than ordinary economic migrants.
Wilkerson highlights the scholarly comparison between Black migrants and refugees in order to point out how the Great Migration blurs the distinction between voluntary and forced migration. Whereas economic migrants usually set out in search of new jobs and return home once they’re able, refugees plan to permanently leave their homeplaces because they are no longer hospitable. Jim Crow may not have been the same kind of acute crisis as the wars, famines, and natural disasters that are usually associated with refugees, but it still made the South inhospitable for many Black people. So they set out in search of new homes, with little intention of ever returning.
Themes
