Aftermath

This is the aftermath of the stargazer lilies BeautifulLife gave me for my birthday, and it's my excuse to rave about a book that might be the single most important non-fiction book I've ever read, The Warmth of Other Suns.

Thanks to my unplugged cat-sitting, I just finished a book which I have been reading for a few months now. I didn't want it to end. First, it is some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read. Here's just a random example: "In the dark hours of the morning, Pershing Foster pulled away from his father and brother, the house on Louise Anne Avenue, and his caged existence in the caste-bound, isolated South. The night clouds crawled eastward, the sky itself floating in the opposite direction from him in the damp, cool air. He pointed his Buick Roadmaster to the west, away from Monroe, and settled into the tufted bench seat for the nearly two thousand miles of road ahead of him, the distance that now stood between him and California, between Jim Crow and freedom" (186).

As powerful as that is, the grand finale of the book is Part Five: Aftermath (434-525), which is where Isabel Wilkerson tells what happened to the three people she follows throughout the book: the man who fled Florida for New York City in 1945 and became a railroad porter, the woman who escaped Mississippi for Chicago in 1937 and worked as a nurse's aid, and the physician who drove from Louisiana to California in 1953, forced to drive through the nights because no lodgings on the way admitted black people.

In Aftermath, Wilkerson tells how their lives ended--what they made of it all, what their final judgments were, having left their homeland for parts north and west, having lived in exile in the midst of virulent racism that manifested differently from the way it did in the south but scarred all their lives. The book follows three people through their migrations out of the south, and Wilkerson, who interviewed 1200 people about their experience of migration, was present at the end of these three subjects' lives, held their hands, became part of their stories. As I approach my summing-up time myself, I hold these three people and their lives in my heart as tenderly as I hold my own life. Through Wilkerson's craft, I have come to love them.

Among the epigraphs Wilkerson uses for her main chapters is this from James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son: "I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.... The wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive."

To understand all that is truly important about the USA, read this book. To understand the Americans in the Olympics, to understand American violence, to understand the prison system and the caste system that is the USA, read this book. Without these stories, no one can know how this country came to be what it is, how hard it has been for so many, how amazing is the triumph of those who have survived, how vast the suffering, how bitter the legacy, how joyful the life-making of people who can say of soul-food, that it's so good, "it make you want to hurt yourself" (482).

If you can spare fifteen minutes, listen to Wilkerson talk about the book herself. It took her fifteen years to write this book. It is a work of genius: the organization, the craft, the depth of the research, the brilliance of the writing. I'm going to read it again now.