In May of 1939, Ralph Ellison, who was twenty-six at the time, asked an old man hanging out in Eddie's Bar, on St. Nicholas Avenue near 147th Street, "Do you like living in New York City?" The man said:
Ahm in New York, but New York ain't in me. You understand? Ahm in New York, but New York ain't in me. What do I mean? Listen. I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. Been in New York twenty-five years. I'm a New Yorker! Yuh understand? Naw, naw, yuh don't get me. What do they do; take Lenox Avenue. Take Seventh Avenue; take Sugar Hill! Pimps. Numbers. Cheating those poor people out a whut they got. Shooting, cutting, backbiting, all them things. Yuh see? Yuh see what Ah mean? I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me!
Ellison took all that down, on a nice neat form. He was asking because it was his job to ask: he was muddling through the Depression on a paycheck from the Works Progress Administration, which people liked to call the Whiste, Piss, and Argue department but which was something to do, anyway, and better than the dole. At its peak, the W.P.A.'s Federal Writers' Project employed more than six thousand writers—from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of living by writing and couldn't anymore—including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, and Richard Wright. (At the time, one in four people in publishing was out of work.) It was mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, you had to take a pauper's oath to get hired, and the whole thing was axed, four years after it got started, by people in Congress who were convinced it was a Communist front. But, before that, Ellison and all those thousands of other writers chronicled American life by interviewing ordinary people.
They also reinvented the interview and changed American journalism forever. The project's folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, had a mad, beautiful vision. He wanted to turn "the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature." From more than ten thousand interviews, the Writers' Project produced some eight hundred books, including "A Treasury of American Folklore" and, in 1939, a volume called "These Are Our Lives." That's not counting the novels, though, which is where a lot of those interviews wound up. In "Invisible Man," which won the National Book Award when it was published, in 1952, an old woman, up from the South, saves Ellison's narrator, a newer arrival, after he collapses on Lenox Avenue, telling him, "You have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean?"
That man in Eddie's Bar, who left Jacksonville, Florida, at the beginning of the First World War, was part of what historians call the Great Migration, which can be confusing, because historians also talk about the Great Migration of Puritans who left England between 1630 and 1641. There's great, and then there's great. The seventeenth-century migration to New England—twenty thousand people— was great because the Puritans thought it was great, and said so every time they got within ten paces of a pulpit: I am founding a city on a hill, a beacon unto the world! I am leading an errand into the wilderness! The twentieth-century migration from the Cotton Belt was great in numbers, but whether it was great for the people who made it was something to wonder about. Was this really the promised land? Was this, Seventh Avenue, home? "Should I have come here?" Richard Wright, who was born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago in 1927, asked, in "Black Boy." Between 1915 and 1918, five hundred thousand blacks left the South; 1.3 million between 1920 and 1930. They drove; they hitched rides; they saved till they could buy a train ticket. They went to cities, especially Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, They fled Jim Crow, laws put on the books after Reconstruction. Georgia was the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891; five years later came Plessy v. Ferguson. By 1905, every Southern state had a streetcar law, and more: in courthouses, separate Bibles; in bars separate sections; in post offices, separate windows; in libraries, separate branches. In Birmingham, it was a crime for blacks and whites to play checkers together in a public park. By the nineteen-seventies, after civil rights put an end to Jim Crow and the Great Migration stopped, six million people had left their homes. It was bigger than the Gold Rush. It was bigger than the Dust Bowl Okies, Before the Great Migration, ninety per cent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South; after it, forty-seven per cent lived someplace else. Today, more African-Americans live in the city of Chicago than in the state of Mississippi. In "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (Random House; $30), Isabel Wilkerson, who earned a Pulitzer while working as the Times Chicago bureau chief, and now directs the narrative-nonfiction program at Boston University, calls the exodus "the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century."
To report that story, Wilkerson became something of a one-woman W.P.A. project. Her research took more than ten years, and is not unlike another chunk of work done by the Federal Writers' Project: documenting the history of slavery, before its memory faded altogether. In the nineteen-thirties, about a hundred thousand people who had once been owned by other people were still alive. Writers' Project writers fanned out to find them, and collected two thousand life stories. Before this, all that historians writing about slavery had was a handful of slave narratives by people who had escaped; accounts written, here and there, by travellers to the South; and tottering piles of letters and diaries left by slave owners. Oral histories are, as evidence, not without problems. Much depends upon the sensitivity, acuity, and fidelity of the interviewer. But without those W.P.A. interviews—firsthand accounts by people who lived, for part of their lives, as slaves—much of the history of slavery would be unrecoverable.
Wilkerson, realizing that the generation of Americans who lived under Jim Crow won't be around much longer, set out to talk to them. Her own parents left the South: her mother migrated from Georgia, her father from Virginia. She'd heard their stories from childhood. She wanted to hear more. She interviewed more than twelve hundred people, from all over the country. She found them at pensioners' clubs, senior centers, and funerals, walking with walkers, hair grizzled. ("I hung around playgrounds; I hung around the street, the bars," Ellison said of his W.P.A. interviews. "I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. I would tell some stories to get people going and then I'd sit back and try to get it down as accurately as I could. Sometimes you would find people sitting around on Eighth Avenue just dying to talk.") Wilkerson spoke at length with three dozen people and then chose three, whom she interviewed for hundreds of hours. Her book is the story of those three lives, told, really, as an act of love. She takes her title from a passage in Wright's "Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth":
I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom.
And her deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book can be read as an elegant homage to Wright's "12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States." (Wright's text accompanied photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration.) Wright expressed, in vernacular, an argument of the Chicago School of sociologists, who, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, had been studying the Great Migration, crunching the numbers, calculating averages, compiling reports (presaging Moynihan's), about black life in the urban North. "Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city," Wright wrote. In the Chicago School argument, the folk, in the city, crash into modernity, uprooting means loss, especially loss of community, an argument that has long been debated, and that Wilkerson doesn't so much take on as steer clear of. Her folk don't crash; they struggle, they study, they strive and even thrive. More to the point, she doesn't call them folk, and, for all that her work shares with Wright's, her project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about the collective (if you could just talk to enough people, take enough photographs, conduct enough surveys, you could, finally, record what it meant to be human), than with the new narrative journalism of the nineteen-sixties, which was always about the individual (if you could just find the right person to talk to, and it had to be an ordinary person, you could write the story of everyone). Wilkerson's work, in other words, is more novelistic than documentary, more "Invisible Man' than 12 Million Black Voices," and less Studs Terkel (another Writers' Project writer) than J. Anthony Lukas (who, like Wilkerson, spent much of his career at the Times).
Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century—a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar—and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky, it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd. In "The Warmth of Other Suns," three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million? Do they have to? Your answers probably depend, mostly, on your intellectual proclivities. You're reading this magazine; chances are you lean toward thinking that stories, good stories, explain. But if you're an empiricist the only real way to decide is to see it tried. And so, of six million lives, of three stories, here's one.
Mae Ida Brandon was born in a wood house in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in 1913. She was ornery, and a tomboy, and told people to call her Ida Mae—it sounded less old-fashioned—as soon as she could tell anybody what to do. She walked a mile to a one-room schoolhouse that went up to the eighth grade, which was as high as you could go, and where she was once whipped with a switch for misspelling Philadelphia, a place she had never heard of. She hated picking cotton, but she liked killing snakes. Once, when she was six or seven—sometime, anyway, before her father died—she rode a horse to the blacksmith's to get a piece of plow sharpened, and the blacksmith's two sons, white boys, dangled her over a well to watch her squirm. When she was thirteen, the Carter brothers, two black boys, said something to some white lady, as best she could remember, and were promptly lynched. "If it is necessary, every negro in the state will be lynched," James. K. Vardaman had said in 1903, the year that he was first elected governor of Mississippi; the year Ida Mae was born was the year that he joined the U.S. Senate. In those years, by one reckoning, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The rest of the Carters moved to Milwaukee, which Ida Mae hadn't heard of, either.
George Gladney came to court Ida Mae Brandon in 1928, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-two, and though her mother, Miss Theenie, thought him too dark and too old ("He's old enough for your daddy"), he was serious. "He wasn't no smiling man," Ida Mae said. In 1929, she married him. They moved to a cabin near the Natchez Trace, becoming sharecroppers for a man named Edd Pearson. They worked all day and all year, and at the end of it they usually broke even, which was considered lucky, because most sharecroppers ended up with nothing but debt to show for their labor, at least by the boss's accounting. A woman was expected to pick a hundred pounds of cotton a day. ("It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers," Wilkerson writes, "a hundred pounds of lint dust." That description takes on more meaning, late in the book, after Wilkerson travels to Chickasaw with Ida Mae, and they pick a few bolls of cotton together.) Ida Mae learned to make blackberry cobbler and tomato pie. She kept chickens and wore a dress made out of a flour sack. Before long, she had her first baby, a girl they named Velma. It felt like thunder: "I could see the pain comin' down on top of the house and keep comin’." Another girl came soon enough but she was taken by the flux. The next was a boy, whom they named James, after a white boy in town Ida Mae took care of, thinking that it might bring him luck.
One night in 1937, someone on the door—Mr. Edd and four other white men, with guns. They were looking for George's cousin Joe Lee, sure that he had stolen some turkeys. They found him, sneaking out the back They tied him with hog wire and dragged him to the woods and beat him with chains and then drove him to town and left him in jail. The turkeys, which had wandered off, wandered back in the morning. George got Joe Lee out of jail, and used grease to peel his clothes off him, because they were stuck on with blood. He went home and told Ida Mae, "This the last crop we making." They sold almost everything they owned, piece by piece, on the sly, and told anyone who asked, "We just running out of room." They got a ride in a truck from Miss Theenie's house to the depot, carrying quilts and the children and a Bible and a box of fried chicken, and boarded the Mobile and Ohio j Railroad. They stopped in Chicago. "What did it look like at that time, Chicago?" Wilkerson asked. "It looked like Heaven to me then," Ida Mae said.
They got off the train in Milwaukee, where Ida Mae's sister had gone. Ida Mae had told no one that she was pregnant, and now she wanted to go home to have the baby. She gave birth to a girl, in 1938, in Miss Theenie’s house, and named her Eleanor, for the First Lady. That year, Theodore Bilbo, a U.S. senator from Mississippi, helped filibuster against a bill that would make lynching a federal crime. "If you succeed in the passage of this bill," Bilbo said, "you will open the floodgates of Hell." When Ida Mae went back North, she didn’t go to Milwaukee; she went to Chicago, where George had found work as an iceman. In 1940, she went to a firehouse on the South Side of Chicago and voted, for the first time in her life, Roosevelt defeated Willkie. George got a job at the Campbell's Soup factory. Ida Mae worked at Walther Memorial, as a hospital aide. She liked to watch the babies being born: They always come out hollering."
In 1966, when Ida Mae Gladney was fifty-three, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago. "Chicago has not turned out to be the New Jerusalem," he told the crowd. ("They had him way up on something high,” Ida Mae recalled. "I never did get to see him good,") The next year, Ida Mae and her family— James and Eleanor had married and had their own children—bought a house together, a three-family in South Shore, for thirty thousand dollars. Soon, every white family on the block had moved out. "Lord, they move quick," Ida Mae said.
Isabel Wilkerson met Ida Mae Gladney in 1996, when Ida Mae was eighty-three years old. She was still living in the house that her family had bought in 1967, in the second-floor apartment. She sat, and looked out her bay window at the street. Watching her, Wilkerson writes, as if from her notebook:
A man is selling drugs out of a trash can. She can see, plain as day, where he puts them and how he gets them out of the trash can for the white customers in their SUVs with suburban license plates. Another hides his stash in his mouth. And when customers come up, he pulls a piece of inventory from his tongue.
They call Ida Mae "Grandma." They warn her when not to come out, "because we don't know what time we gon' start shootin’.”
Not long after Wilkerson met Ida Mae, she went with her to a neighborhood-watch meeting, in Beat 421, at the South Shore Presbyterian Church. Beat 421 is in District 13, which, in 1997, had a new state senator. When Barack Obama came to Beat 421 to explain what state senators do, Ida Mae listened politely.
The story of Ida Mae Gladney’s life, as told by Wilkerson, makes an argument, or, really, a bunch of arguments. (It is also, of course, a compact history of the twentieth century.) In the Great Migration, initially more men than women left the South. Women went because their husbands decided to go; usually, they didn't have much choice. People who went North were generally better educated than people who didn't. Up to a point, their move follows the patterns of other immigrants, although, as Wilkerson writes, nearly everyone she spoke to balked at being called an immigrant. (Wilkerson considers the exodus "an unrecognized immigration.") The Great Migration was not about the boll weevil, which is what economists often concluded. Cotton was getting harder to grow; the soil was exhausted; the boll weevil had arrived; everyone was broke, But, of the twelve hundred people she interviewed, Wilkerson points out, none of them, when asked why they left the South, mentioned the boll weevil. Instead, they talked about Jim Crow, and about lynching, and about violence and humiliation and misery—Ida Mae being held by the ankles by two white boys over a well, where if she were dropped no one would ever find her. "We cannot fight back," Wright wrote, "we have no arms; we cannot vote; and the law is white." There was surely no escaping it, except you did hear stories. Ellison interviewed a man in Harlem named Leo Gurley, who told him a tall tale about a man named Sweet, in Florence, South Carolina. "He was one sucker who didn't give 'a damn bout the crackers," Gurley said. "Sweet could make himself invisible."
Leaving the South took extraordinary fortitude. What dreams and disappointments the North and the West held no one could have foreseen. Wilkerson, somewhat too sketchily, considers postwar urban history—white flight, the closing of factories (that Campbell's Soup factory has been closed for more than two decades), the disappearance of industrial jobs. Now that there's no more Jim Crow, she observes, there's "hyper-segregation": in the 2000 census, Detroit's population was eighty per cent black; Dearborn's was one per cent. Most often, she outlines debates about what historians call "the second ghetto," only to dismiss them. "Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations," she writes, "but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long."
The questions of social scientists (What is the structure of poverty?) and of policymakers (How can this be fixed?) are not Wilkerson's questions, "We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain," Wright wrote. "The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back" When Ellison read "12 Million Black Voices," he fell apart. He wept and wept. He wrote to Wright, "God! It makes you want to write and write and write, or murder." He wrote and wrote. The people on Ida Mae's street, Wilkerson tells us, echoing Wright, "are the lost grandchildren of the Migration." This is narrative non-fiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn't argument at all; it's compassion. Hush, and listen.
That old man in Eddie's Bar told Ralph Ellison, in 1939, "Son, if Ah had-a got New York in me Ahd a-been dead a long time ago," When Ida Mae Gladney visited Mississippi with Isabel Wilkerson, someone asked, "Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?" "No," she said, "I'm gonna be in Chicago," She lived to be ninety-one. She died in her sleep, in 2004, at home. She had spent years sitting in a baby-blue plastic-covered armchair, looking out at the streets of her city. 'The half ain't been told," she once said. Wilkerson took that down.
reprinted from The New Yorker, September 6, 2010
They also reinvented the interview and changed American journalism forever. The project's folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, had a mad, beautiful vision. He wanted to turn "the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature." From more than ten thousand interviews, the Writers' Project produced some eight hundred books, including "A Treasury of American Folklore" and, in 1939, a volume called "These Are Our Lives." That's not counting the novels, though, which is where a lot of those interviews wound up. In "Invisible Man," which won the National Book Award when it was published, in 1952, an old woman, up from the South, saves Ellison's narrator, a newer arrival, after he collapses on Lenox Avenue, telling him, "You have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean?"
That man in Eddie's Bar, who left Jacksonville, Florida, at the beginning of the First World War, was part of what historians call the Great Migration, which can be confusing, because historians also talk about the Great Migration of Puritans who left England between 1630 and 1641. There's great, and then there's great. The seventeenth-century migration to New England—twenty thousand people— was great because the Puritans thought it was great, and said so every time they got within ten paces of a pulpit: I am founding a city on a hill, a beacon unto the world! I am leading an errand into the wilderness! The twentieth-century migration from the Cotton Belt was great in numbers, but whether it was great for the people who made it was something to wonder about. Was this really the promised land? Was this, Seventh Avenue, home? "Should I have come here?" Richard Wright, who was born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago in 1927, asked, in "Black Boy." Between 1915 and 1918, five hundred thousand blacks left the South; 1.3 million between 1920 and 1930. They drove; they hitched rides; they saved till they could buy a train ticket. They went to cities, especially Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, They fled Jim Crow, laws put on the books after Reconstruction. Georgia was the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891; five years later came Plessy v. Ferguson. By 1905, every Southern state had a streetcar law, and more: in courthouses, separate Bibles; in bars separate sections; in post offices, separate windows; in libraries, separate branches. In Birmingham, it was a crime for blacks and whites to play checkers together in a public park. By the nineteen-seventies, after civil rights put an end to Jim Crow and the Great Migration stopped, six million people had left their homes. It was bigger than the Gold Rush. It was bigger than the Dust Bowl Okies, Before the Great Migration, ninety per cent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South; after it, forty-seven per cent lived someplace else. Today, more African-Americans live in the city of Chicago than in the state of Mississippi. In "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (Random House; $30), Isabel Wilkerson, who earned a Pulitzer while working as the Times Chicago bureau chief, and now directs the narrative-nonfiction program at Boston University, calls the exodus "the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century."
To report that story, Wilkerson became something of a one-woman W.P.A. project. Her research took more than ten years, and is not unlike another chunk of work done by the Federal Writers' Project: documenting the history of slavery, before its memory faded altogether. In the nineteen-thirties, about a hundred thousand people who had once been owned by other people were still alive. Writers' Project writers fanned out to find them, and collected two thousand life stories. Before this, all that historians writing about slavery had was a handful of slave narratives by people who had escaped; accounts written, here and there, by travellers to the South; and tottering piles of letters and diaries left by slave owners. Oral histories are, as evidence, not without problems. Much depends upon the sensitivity, acuity, and fidelity of the interviewer. But without those W.P.A. interviews—firsthand accounts by people who lived, for part of their lives, as slaves—much of the history of slavery would be unrecoverable.
Wilkerson, realizing that the generation of Americans who lived under Jim Crow won't be around much longer, set out to talk to them. Her own parents left the South: her mother migrated from Georgia, her father from Virginia. She'd heard their stories from childhood. She wanted to hear more. She interviewed more than twelve hundred people, from all over the country. She found them at pensioners' clubs, senior centers, and funerals, walking with walkers, hair grizzled. ("I hung around playgrounds; I hung around the street, the bars," Ellison said of his W.P.A. interviews. "I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. I would tell some stories to get people going and then I'd sit back and try to get it down as accurately as I could. Sometimes you would find people sitting around on Eighth Avenue just dying to talk.") Wilkerson spoke at length with three dozen people and then chose three, whom she interviewed for hundreds of hours. Her book is the story of those three lives, told, really, as an act of love. She takes her title from a passage in Wright's "Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth":
I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom.
And her deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book can be read as an elegant homage to Wright's "12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States." (Wright's text accompanied photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration.) Wright expressed, in vernacular, an argument of the Chicago School of sociologists, who, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, had been studying the Great Migration, crunching the numbers, calculating averages, compiling reports (presaging Moynihan's), about black life in the urban North. "Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city," Wright wrote. In the Chicago School argument, the folk, in the city, crash into modernity, uprooting means loss, especially loss of community, an argument that has long been debated, and that Wilkerson doesn't so much take on as steer clear of. Her folk don't crash; they struggle, they study, they strive and even thrive. More to the point, she doesn't call them folk, and, for all that her work shares with Wright's, her project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about the collective (if you could just talk to enough people, take enough photographs, conduct enough surveys, you could, finally, record what it meant to be human), than with the new narrative journalism of the nineteen-sixties, which was always about the individual (if you could just find the right person to talk to, and it had to be an ordinary person, you could write the story of everyone). Wilkerson's work, in other words, is more novelistic than documentary, more "Invisible Man' than 12 Million Black Voices," and less Studs Terkel (another Writers' Project writer) than J. Anthony Lukas (who, like Wilkerson, spent much of his career at the Times).
Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century—a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar—and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky, it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd. In "The Warmth of Other Suns," three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million? Do they have to? Your answers probably depend, mostly, on your intellectual proclivities. You're reading this magazine; chances are you lean toward thinking that stories, good stories, explain. But if you're an empiricist the only real way to decide is to see it tried. And so, of six million lives, of three stories, here's one.
Mae Ida Brandon was born in a wood house in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in 1913. She was ornery, and a tomboy, and told people to call her Ida Mae—it sounded less old-fashioned—as soon as she could tell anybody what to do. She walked a mile to a one-room schoolhouse that went up to the eighth grade, which was as high as you could go, and where she was once whipped with a switch for misspelling Philadelphia, a place she had never heard of. She hated picking cotton, but she liked killing snakes. Once, when she was six or seven—sometime, anyway, before her father died—she rode a horse to the blacksmith's to get a piece of plow sharpened, and the blacksmith's two sons, white boys, dangled her over a well to watch her squirm. When she was thirteen, the Carter brothers, two black boys, said something to some white lady, as best she could remember, and were promptly lynched. "If it is necessary, every negro in the state will be lynched," James. K. Vardaman had said in 1903, the year that he was first elected governor of Mississippi; the year Ida Mae was born was the year that he joined the U.S. Senate. In those years, by one reckoning, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The rest of the Carters moved to Milwaukee, which Ida Mae hadn't heard of, either.
George Gladney came to court Ida Mae Brandon in 1928, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-two, and though her mother, Miss Theenie, thought him too dark and too old ("He's old enough for your daddy"), he was serious. "He wasn't no smiling man," Ida Mae said. In 1929, she married him. They moved to a cabin near the Natchez Trace, becoming sharecroppers for a man named Edd Pearson. They worked all day and all year, and at the end of it they usually broke even, which was considered lucky, because most sharecroppers ended up with nothing but debt to show for their labor, at least by the boss's accounting. A woman was expected to pick a hundred pounds of cotton a day. ("It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers," Wilkerson writes, "a hundred pounds of lint dust." That description takes on more meaning, late in the book, after Wilkerson travels to Chickasaw with Ida Mae, and they pick a few bolls of cotton together.) Ida Mae learned to make blackberry cobbler and tomato pie. She kept chickens and wore a dress made out of a flour sack. Before long, she had her first baby, a girl they named Velma. It felt like thunder: "I could see the pain comin' down on top of the house and keep comin’." Another girl came soon enough but she was taken by the flux. The next was a boy, whom they named James, after a white boy in town Ida Mae took care of, thinking that it might bring him luck.
One night in 1937, someone on the door—Mr. Edd and four other white men, with guns. They were looking for George's cousin Joe Lee, sure that he had stolen some turkeys. They found him, sneaking out the back They tied him with hog wire and dragged him to the woods and beat him with chains and then drove him to town and left him in jail. The turkeys, which had wandered off, wandered back in the morning. George got Joe Lee out of jail, and used grease to peel his clothes off him, because they were stuck on with blood. He went home and told Ida Mae, "This the last crop we making." They sold almost everything they owned, piece by piece, on the sly, and told anyone who asked, "We just running out of room." They got a ride in a truck from Miss Theenie's house to the depot, carrying quilts and the children and a Bible and a box of fried chicken, and boarded the Mobile and Ohio j Railroad. They stopped in Chicago. "What did it look like at that time, Chicago?" Wilkerson asked. "It looked like Heaven to me then," Ida Mae said.
They got off the train in Milwaukee, where Ida Mae's sister had gone. Ida Mae had told no one that she was pregnant, and now she wanted to go home to have the baby. She gave birth to a girl, in 1938, in Miss Theenie’s house, and named her Eleanor, for the First Lady. That year, Theodore Bilbo, a U.S. senator from Mississippi, helped filibuster against a bill that would make lynching a federal crime. "If you succeed in the passage of this bill," Bilbo said, "you will open the floodgates of Hell." When Ida Mae went back North, she didn’t go to Milwaukee; she went to Chicago, where George had found work as an iceman. In 1940, she went to a firehouse on the South Side of Chicago and voted, for the first time in her life, Roosevelt defeated Willkie. George got a job at the Campbell's Soup factory. Ida Mae worked at Walther Memorial, as a hospital aide. She liked to watch the babies being born: They always come out hollering."
In 1966, when Ida Mae Gladney was fifty-three, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago. "Chicago has not turned out to be the New Jerusalem," he told the crowd. ("They had him way up on something high,” Ida Mae recalled. "I never did get to see him good,") The next year, Ida Mae and her family— James and Eleanor had married and had their own children—bought a house together, a three-family in South Shore, for thirty thousand dollars. Soon, every white family on the block had moved out. "Lord, they move quick," Ida Mae said.
Isabel Wilkerson met Ida Mae Gladney in 1996, when Ida Mae was eighty-three years old. She was still living in the house that her family had bought in 1967, in the second-floor apartment. She sat, and looked out her bay window at the street. Watching her, Wilkerson writes, as if from her notebook:
A man is selling drugs out of a trash can. She can see, plain as day, where he puts them and how he gets them out of the trash can for the white customers in their SUVs with suburban license plates. Another hides his stash in his mouth. And when customers come up, he pulls a piece of inventory from his tongue.
They call Ida Mae "Grandma." They warn her when not to come out, "because we don't know what time we gon' start shootin’.”
Not long after Wilkerson met Ida Mae, she went with her to a neighborhood-watch meeting, in Beat 421, at the South Shore Presbyterian Church. Beat 421 is in District 13, which, in 1997, had a new state senator. When Barack Obama came to Beat 421 to explain what state senators do, Ida Mae listened politely.
The story of Ida Mae Gladney’s life, as told by Wilkerson, makes an argument, or, really, a bunch of arguments. (It is also, of course, a compact history of the twentieth century.) In the Great Migration, initially more men than women left the South. Women went because their husbands decided to go; usually, they didn't have much choice. People who went North were generally better educated than people who didn't. Up to a point, their move follows the patterns of other immigrants, although, as Wilkerson writes, nearly everyone she spoke to balked at being called an immigrant. (Wilkerson considers the exodus "an unrecognized immigration.") The Great Migration was not about the boll weevil, which is what economists often concluded. Cotton was getting harder to grow; the soil was exhausted; the boll weevil had arrived; everyone was broke, But, of the twelve hundred people she interviewed, Wilkerson points out, none of them, when asked why they left the South, mentioned the boll weevil. Instead, they talked about Jim Crow, and about lynching, and about violence and humiliation and misery—Ida Mae being held by the ankles by two white boys over a well, where if she were dropped no one would ever find her. "We cannot fight back," Wright wrote, "we have no arms; we cannot vote; and the law is white." There was surely no escaping it, except you did hear stories. Ellison interviewed a man in Harlem named Leo Gurley, who told him a tall tale about a man named Sweet, in Florence, South Carolina. "He was one sucker who didn't give 'a damn bout the crackers," Gurley said. "Sweet could make himself invisible."
Leaving the South took extraordinary fortitude. What dreams and disappointments the North and the West held no one could have foreseen. Wilkerson, somewhat too sketchily, considers postwar urban history—white flight, the closing of factories (that Campbell's Soup factory has been closed for more than two decades), the disappearance of industrial jobs. Now that there's no more Jim Crow, she observes, there's "hyper-segregation": in the 2000 census, Detroit's population was eighty per cent black; Dearborn's was one per cent. Most often, she outlines debates about what historians call "the second ghetto," only to dismiss them. "Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations," she writes, "but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long."
The questions of social scientists (What is the structure of poverty?) and of policymakers (How can this be fixed?) are not Wilkerson's questions, "We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain," Wright wrote. "The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back" When Ellison read "12 Million Black Voices," he fell apart. He wept and wept. He wrote to Wright, "God! It makes you want to write and write and write, or murder." He wrote and wrote. The people on Ida Mae's street, Wilkerson tells us, echoing Wright, "are the lost grandchildren of the Migration." This is narrative non-fiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn't argument at all; it's compassion. Hush, and listen.
That old man in Eddie's Bar told Ralph Ellison, in 1939, "Son, if Ah had-a got New York in me Ahd a-been dead a long time ago," When Ida Mae Gladney visited Mississippi with Isabel Wilkerson, someone asked, "Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?" "No," she said, "I'm gonna be in Chicago," She lived to be ninety-one. She died in her sleep, in 2004, at home. She had spent years sitting in a baby-blue plastic-covered armchair, looking out at the streets of her city. 'The half ain't been told," she once said. Wilkerson took that down.
reprinted from The New Yorker, September 6, 2010
1 comment:
That's a really interesting connection between the WPA interview and the minor character in Invisible Man (which, if I'm not mistaken, won the National Book Award in 1953, the year after it was published).
According to the biography by Lawrence Jackson ("Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius"), Ellison lived for a time at 749 St. Nicholas Avenue (between 147th and 148 Streets). I think that's the "tiny-ground floor-rear apartment" he recalls in his 1955 essay "Living With Music." It sounds like you may already know that!
I think he was probably living at that address at the time of the Harlem Riot of 1935 (which he reported on for the NY Post), because according to the same biographer, he had been out of town, and upon returning to Harlem, he "exited the A train subway station at 145th and St. Nicholas Ave. [...] When he reached his apartment, he received a message from the New York Post..[and then].. hastened out of his apartment into the early morning of August 2 to cover the story, catching the subway down to 127th Street and Eighth Avenue."
I found the apartment building on the Internet:
http://www.corcoran.com/property/listing.aspx?ListingID=810678&Region=NYC
It's interesting to me because I used to have a regular 3-night-a-week gig at a club on the next block working with a Hammond organist named Jack McDuff. It was called "Dude's Lounge" at the time but later changed to "St. Nick's Pub." That was in the early 1980s but since that time I've read most of Ellison's work, but at that time, of course, I didn't make the connection.
I read Invisible Man around 1975-'76 while living in Cambridge, Mass. At that time I was working in the house band at a newly-opened Inman Sq. jazz club called the 1369 Club (currently a coffee house). Here's a photo:
http://tinyurl.com/2ubejzx
You might recall that that's the number of light bulbs in the Invisible Man's apartment. How's that for a bizarre connection?
I noticed the review of this particular history of the Great Migration in the NY Times and if the library gets it in I may read it, however, I already have a copy of Columbia University professor Nicholas Lemann's "The Promised Land," which I've yet to read.
Anyway, thank you for the really interesting blog post.
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