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Part Two: A Burdensome Labor
Themes
and Colors
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, Late September-Early October 1937. Addie B., Ida Mae’s neighbor on the Pearson plantation, awakens to find that her turkeys have disappeared. Late that night, Edd Pearson brings a group of heavily armed white men to Ida Mae’s cabin to look for Joe Lee, George Gladney’s cousin and a notorious thief. Unbeknownst to Ida Mae, who has been sleeping, Joe Lee is hiding out in the kitchen. The white men take him away. But Ida Mae and George still don’t know why.
Even though Edd Pearson is generally about as honest and humane as plantation owners get, he’s still willing to use extrajudicial mob violence—the classic tactic of Southern white supremacy—to enforce his power. Indeed, Pearson’s nonchalance about kidnapping Joe Lee again shows how utterly normal this kind of violence was in the South, and how deeply white Southerners were invested in perpetuating it. After all, for centuries, the Southern legal system was designed by and for slaveholders, for the exclusive purpose of protecting their power—and the Jim Crow system was designed to keep this arrangement the same, to whatever extent possible.
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Eustis, Florida, December 1941. After the U.S. enters World War II, the Army rejects George Starling over heart problems. But he learns that there are plenty of factory jobs up in Detroit, where he’d earn several times what he’s making now. Inez wants to quit her job as a maid and go to beauty school in Tampa, so George is saving for her tuition by working weekends, selling insurance and using his car as a taxi. Inez resents that she almost never sees George, but by 1943, he’s nearly saved enough for her school. He decides to earn the rest by spending the summer working in Detroit—but the neighbors spread rumors that he’s actually going to D.C. to be with another woman. Inez is bitter when he leaves.
Just like World War I, World War II opens opportunities for Black Americans by increasing their power as workers. George’s summer in Detroit shows that migrants didn’t always make a single, definitive decision to leave the South. Unlike Ida Mae, but similar to Robert (Pershing), George lived in many different places and went back and forth between the North and South several times before finally choosing to settle in New York. Despite his rocky marriage and conflicts with his neighbors, his financial wisdom promises to help him secure a stable, middle-class life for his family.
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In Detroit, George works in a cargo plane factory. His job is dangerous: he works with highly flammable chemicals and his paranoid managers are on the hunt for Communist spies. In late June, an enormous week-long riot breaks out between the city’s white and Black communities, but George tries to ignore it and keep going to work, as usual. But on Monday, a mob attacks the trolley he takes to work, and on Tuesday, he has to outrun the mob to get back to his apartment. That night, he watches the National Guard send tanks down his street while his neighbors loot nearby stores. Many of his coworkers get killed and arrested.
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George decides to quit his job, leave Detroit, and go home to Florida, where he spends the rest of the summer picking citrus. But now, all the able-bodied men have gone off to war or factory jobs, so the only people left to work in the groves are women, children, and the elderly. George is one of the strongest pickers now, and after his summer in the North, he can’t stand it when white people demand deference from him. He organizes the pickers and negotiates a significant raise—from 15 cents per box of oranges to 22 cents. With their savings, Inez goes to beauty school, and George and Inez rent a house of their own and buy all new furniture—in cash.
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Atlanta, 1941. Pershing Foster marries Alice Clement shortly after she graduates college in 1941. Their elaborate wedding is “the social event of the season” for the Black elite. After they marry, Pershing goes to medical school in Nashville. Alice spends a year at Juilliard in New York, then returns to Atlanta to teach. They have two daughters in 1943 and 1945. After medical school, Pershing’s residency takes him to St. Louis, North Carolina, and New York, but his mother dies of cancer before he finishes.
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Pershing’s brother Madison is the only Black doctor in Monroe. He spends most of his time treating patients in the backwoods because he’s not even allowed inside the hospital. By helping his brother out, Pershing quickly realizes that he doesn’t want to be a country doctor. But he also has many invaluable experiences. One day, he delivers a baby in a rural cabin without medical equipment and realizes that the mother knows far more about childbirth than he does.
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After residency, Pershing becomes a medical officer in Austria for the U.S. Army. For the first time, he and Alice get to live together with their daughters. Thousands of Black soldiers had helped liberate Europe in World War II, only to face violence and discrimination back at home. For instance, a white mob murdered Wilbur Little in Georgia for daring to wear his army uniform around town. But Pershing doesn’t escape Jim Crow in Europe. His commanding officer, a white man from Mississippi, doesn’t let him treat white women, and the other white doctors constantly overrule his judgment. But when he makes a crucial call that saves a white lieutenant’s wife from a C-section, the base warms up to him.
Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Fall 1937. The white mob ties Joe Lee up in the woods, beats him bloody with a chain, and takes him to jail. But he never even stole Addie B.’s turkeys, which wander back home in the morning. George Gladney complains to Mr. Edd, but he has to be very careful not to offend him. George goes to the jail to get Joe Lee, who has barely survived, and then he decides it’s time to move north.
Eustis, Florida, 1944. “Lil George’s roving union” makes waves in town. Babe and Reuben Blye, some of the only Black foremen, help George negotiate reasonable prices for each grove. Usually, they succeed, but occasionally, the packinghouses reject their offers and leave George stranded in the groves, dozens of miles from town. He knows that, as a Black man in the Jim Crow South, he could face far worse. The Florida police have started arresting Black men, assessing them huge fines for vagrancy (not working), and forcing them to work for weeks to pay off the fines. After Eustis’s local sheriff, Willis V. McCall, arrests a citrus picker and beats him unconscious, the picker’s whole family escapes to New York.
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One day, a tangerine grove owner threatens George when he insists on negotiating prices. The pickers are more and more worried every day. Soon, a young yard cleaner overhears a grove owner planning to lynch George and his partners, Sam and Mud. He tells George, who realizes that he has to leave Florida. George explains the news to his father.
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Fort Polk, Louisiana, Early 1953. Pershing stands out in the army, but when he’s discharged to Louisiana, he doesn’t know what to do. He can join his brother Madison in Monroe, but his mother is dead and his father is a pariah, having been pushed out of his job. He can join Alice’s family at the Clement mansion in Atlanta, but only at the price of his independence. He settles on California, where lots of people from Monroe have already gone, and where he’ll finally be treated like an equal. Alice agrees—he’ll go first, and she and the kids will follow him later.
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America, 1915-1970. Like the millions of others who join the Great Migration, Ida Mae, George, and Pershing all leave the South for different personal reasons related to the violence of Jim Crow. Limited numbers of Black people had been migrating north for centuries, but the World War I labor crisis set off a much larger wave. Southern elites panicked about losing their workers: they passed laws to ban labor recruitment, confiscated northern newspapers, and even shut down trains and arrested migrants. But all of this only made people even more eager to leave. Southern businessmen and politicians even visited the North and begged former sharecroppers to move back. Virtually none did. Suddenly, labor was scarce in the South, too, and planters had to increase wages and improve conditions for those who stayed.
