Trains represent the Great Migration itself, the human quest for freedom, and migration’s power to reshape society. Like most Black migrants in the 20th century, two of Wilkerson’s protagonists—Ida Mae Gladney and George Starling—moved from the South to the North on trains. Even if the trip is daunting and the cabins are still segregated, the train journey north is the best way to escape Jim Crow, and so even seeing a train is exciting to many Black Southerners—like Wilkerson’s mother, who dreams of moving north when she watches the train pass through town as a young girl.
After he moves to New York, George Starling finds work as a porter on the Silver Meteor, the same train that took him there, and he stays in this job for more than 30 years. He becomes one of “the midwives of the Great Migration,” helping other Black migrants load their luggage, make their way to their family members in the North, and ultimately find freedom. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes, George even helps his passengers integrate the trains (which were previously segregated as soon as they crossed into the South). He sees how the migrant population changes over time, until the original migrants age and their children start taking journeys South. Indeed, many of these migrants are from the same part of Florida as him, so he sees how the availability of train routes deeply shapes who migrates where. Indeed, rail lines can help researchers today understand why, for instance, so many Black Chicago residents have roots in Mississippi or so many Black New Yorkers’ parents and grandparents came from Florida.
Trains Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns
In the end, it would take multiple trains, three separate railroads, hours of fitful upright sleep, whatever food they managed to carry, the better part of two days, absolute will, near-blind determination, and some necessary measure of faith and just plain grit for people unaccustomed to the rigors of travel to make it out of the land of their birth to the foreign region of essentially another world.
The great belching city she passed through that day was the first city Ida Mae had ever laid eyes on. That first glimpse of Chicago would stay with her for as long as she lived.
“What did it look like at that time, Chicago?” I asked her, half a life later.
“It looked like Heaven to me then,” she said.
It was his tap on the shoulder that awakened them as the train neared their stop and alerted them to their new receiving city. He and other colored porters were men in red caps and white uniforms, but they functioned as the midwives of the Great Migration, helping the migrants gather themselves and disembark at the station and thus delivering to the world a new wave of newcomers with each arriving train.
Trains Symbol Timeline in The Warmth of Other Suns
