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
New York City, 1996. George Swanson Starling lives in the cluttered basement of the Harlem brownstone that he owns, thanks to decades of “hustling and saving.” He is a widower and suffers from arthritis, but when he sits to tell Wilkerson his story, he remembers every detail vividly.
Like with Ida Mae Gladney, Wilkerson begins George Starling’s story with a snapshot of him at the end of his life, living out the consequences of his decision to migrate in the city that he chose as his new home.
Themes
Eustis, Florida, 1931. George Starling grows up in the orange groves of north-central Florida, where he and his friends climb local churches’ orange trees at night and pick them clean of fruit. One evening, the Black community’s unofficial policeman catches them, accuses them of stealing wood off his porch, and threatens to tell their parents. Black Southern parents punish their children harshly to help prepare them for the arbitrary cruelty and violence they will face from white people, so George and his friends beg the man not to say anything.
George’s childhood is similar to Ida Mae’s in many ways: he lives in a small Black agricultural community in the South. Yet there’s one key difference: Ida Mae lives on an isolated rural plantation, while George lives in a town. As a result, he grows up with a higher standard of living but also experiences racism, segregation, and violence to a greater degree. Wilkerson points out how Jim Crow even shapes social norms among Black people, who go out of their way to avoid conflicts because they know that they will always lose out in any dispute resolution.
Themes
George Starling hasn’t lived in Eustis for long; he has grown up following his parents from city to city, as they move around for work. His grandfather John is a grumpy sharecropper who, as a young man, killed his abusive plantation owner in the Carolinas before moving to Florida. George is his grandfather’s favorite, and his other cousins resent him for it. But his family is full of conflict: one of his earliest memories is his abusive uncle murdering his aunt.
Like virtually all other Black Southerners, George’s family can trace their roots directly back to plantation slavery. In fact, his family is only slightly removed from the conditions in which Ida Mae lived. It also shows how the violence of enslavement and Jim Crow ultimately compounds itself, fostering further conflict among the Black families and communities who experience it. The rest of George’s story will show whether or not he manages to break this cycle of intergenerational trauma.
Themes
Every year, Mr. Reshard, the owner of the plantation where John Starling sharecrops in Florida, declares that their accounts “broke even” and that neither man owes the other anything. But this makes him better than most plantation owners, who cook their books to drive sharecroppers deeper and deeper into debt every year, effectively returning them to slavery. The legal system always supports planters, so sharecroppers usually have to accept this dishonesty. But some try to resist—for instance, George’s uncle Budross learns to read, checks Mr. Reshard’s books, and then confronts him about his lies. Reshard’s family attacks Budross, who disappears to escape being lynched.
Reshard’s business model makes it clear that Jim Crow was designed to maintain the economic structure created under slavery, in which white landowners profited handsomely from Black laborers. It also shows how the South upholds a racial caste system by combining neutral-sounding laws with unequal enforcement strategies. The law may technically permit sharecroppers to enter into fair contracts, but in practice, this never happens. Plantation owners never treat them fairly and never face legal consequences no matter what they do—up to and including lynching. This system rewards corruption and abuse, which leads such practices to become the norm.
Themes
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George’s parents leave, too: they move to St. Petersburg, where his father works in construction. But during the Great Depression, his father starts drinking and beating his mother, and his parents split up. George goes to live with his grandmother, a traditional healer, who puts him to work digging up roots and makes him take an endless succession of disgusting home remedies. He lives with his cousins, whose mother is working up in New York. She and George’s father send money whenever they can, but often, it isn’t enough. After two years, George goes to Eustis to live with his father, who does manual labor and owns a small convenience store.
It’s significant that George’s family freed itself from the abuses of plantation life through migration—the same tool that George later uses to improve his own life and that was long Black Americans’ only option for achieving freedom from slavery. Wilkerson situates the Great Migration within this broader historical context. Yet, at the same time, George’s attempts to avoid his problems through migration at the beginning of his life backfire. Leaving home doesn’t make his life much better, and this shows that migration isn’t always a silver bullet to life’s problems.
Themes
Eustis, Florida is far more like the rest of the South than glitzy Miami. In fact, Florida was one of the cruelest slave states, one of the quickest to secede during the Civil War, and one of the first to pass severe Jim Crow laws after it ended. Lynching and mob violence are common there—in fact, the highest-profile lynching in the nation’s history occurs there in 1934. A mob abducts, tortures, and murders a Black farmhand, allegedly for raping and killing his white neighbor, then invites a crowd of families and children to mutilate his dead body. They hang him from a tree, take his severed body parts as souvenirs, and riot when police take him down. Later, investigations show that he was innocent.
Wilkerson again points her readers toward important but neglected aspects of history—like Florida’s long tradition of white supremacist violence—by emphasizing the difference between contemporary stereotypes and historical realities. The horrific 1934 case underlines not only the magnitude of the terror that Black Southerners faced under Jim Crow, but also how ordinary this system seemed to the white Southerners who upheld it. In particular, the fact that lynching was a family celebration shows that white Southern parents went to great lengths to inculcate white supremacist values in their children, so that they would uphold the racial caste system.
Themes
Like every young Black man growing up in Florida, George Starling fully understands the threat of lynching and reluctantly learns to follow the absurd rules of Jim Crow. The racial caste system turns cruelty into a social norm. For instance, the preacher who runs the local Black grocery store charges unreasonable prices, so George and his friends decide to start stealing from the store when the owner leaves his absentminded wife in charge in the afternoons. George spends his free time stealing oranges, shooting pool with bootleggers, and playing basketball.
George’s childhood shows how deeply the caste system shaped Southern society, especially as Black people internalized the violence it did to them. Beyond merely limiting Black people’s rights and economic opportunities, Jim Crow also sought to limit their sense of possibility and self-worth by convincing them that they could never escape the system and their lives could never improve. Fortunately, as the rest of the book will show, migration offered George an alternative to merely accepting this subordinate status.
Themes
George is also a brilliant student. He graduates high school as valedictorian and then goes to study at Florida A&M University. But his father orders him to drop out after two years and start working, as he claims that the family needs the money. When George learns that his father has been secretly saving money in the post office, he hatches a plan to get revenge.
George views education as a way out of his provincial Southern town, both because it literally allows him to leave and because it will allow him to become a middle-class professional (instead of a manual laborer, like the other men in his family). It’s easy to see why he finds his father’s mindset so frustrating: his father does not seem to understand his desire for a better life.
Themes
George suddenly marries his girlfriend, Inez Cunningham, whom his father hates because she grew up in the backwoods. Then, he spends the summer working in New York. When his father writes saying that he can’t afford the next year of tuition, George writes back revealing that he has married Inez. But when George returns to Eustis, he learns that his father really was saving up for tuition—and he definitely won’t send him back to college now that he is married. So, George reluctantly settles into married life instead.
Marriage closes off the only pathway that George sees to a better life—he will have to make peace with the trappings of small-town life in Eustis instead. Ironically, in his attempt to spite his father, he actually follows in his troubled family’s footsteps: he makes an impulsive, angry decision that ultimately backfires. As the rest of the book will show, this mistake marks him forever. It also teaches him a crucial lesson about living with the consequences of his decisions.
Themes
