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Professor Foster
George Gladney is Ida Mae’s husband. He is stoic, honest, generous, wise, and extremely hardworking—his marriage to Ida Mae is far more loving and supportive than George Starling and Robert Foster’s marriages. After falling in love with Ida Mae, he walks miles to visit her every Sunday until she agrees to marry him. She moves in with him at the Pearson plantation, where he lives and works as a sharecropper. They pick cotton, farm vegetables, and raise animals, until Pearson nearly kills George’s cousin Joe Lee and George decides to move to the North. In Chicago, he starts delivering ice, but he eventually settles into a stable—if monotonous and physically demanding—job at the Campbell Soup factory. He is a loyal husband and father, and he dies after a series of heart attacks in 1975.
George Gladney Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns
The The Warmth of Other Suns quotes below are all either spoken by George Gladney or refer to George Gladney. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part Two: The Awakening
Quotes
On the drive back home, George searched himself, hard and deep. This wasn’t the first beating, and it wouldn’t be the last. Joe Lee had lived, but he just as easily could have died. And there was not a thing anybody could do about it. As it was, Ida Mae felt George was in danger for asking Mr. Edd about it at all. Next time, it could be him. George had a brother in Chicago. Ida Mae’s big sister, Irene, was in Milwaukee and had been agitating for them to come north.
He made up his mind on the way back. He drove into the yard and went into the cabin to break the news to Ida Mae.
“This the last crop we making,” he said.
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Part Two: Breaking Away
Quotes
George could have left after settlement without saying a word. It was a risk to say too much. The planter could rescind the settlement, say he misfigured, turn a credit into a debit, take back the money, evict the family or whip the sharecropper on the spot, or worse. Some sharecroppers, knowing they might not get paid anyway, fled from the field, right in midhoe, on the first thing going north.
The planters could not conceive of why their sharecroppers would want to leave. The dance of the compliant sharecropper conceding to the big planter year in and year out made it seem as if the ritual actually made sense, that the sharecropper, having been given no choice, actually saw the tilted scales as fair. The sharecropper’s forced silence was part of the collusion that fed the mythology.
Part Four: The Other Side of Jordan
Quotes
Overall, however, what was becoming clear was that, north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.
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George Gladney Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns
The The Warmth of Other Suns quotes below are all either spoken by George Gladney or refer to George Gladney. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part Two: The Awakening
Quotes
On the drive back home, George searched himself, hard and deep. This wasn’t the first beating, and it wouldn’t be the last. Joe Lee had lived, but he just as easily could have died. And there was not a thing anybody could do about it. As it was, Ida Mae felt George was in danger for asking Mr. Edd about it at all. Next time, it could be him. George had a brother in Chicago. Ida Mae’s big sister, Irene, was in Milwaukee and had been agitating for them to come north.
He made up his mind on the way back. He drove into the yard and went into the cabin to break the news to Ida Mae.
“This the last crop we making,” he said.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: Breaking Away
Quotes
George could have left after settlement without saying a word. It was a risk to say too much. The planter could rescind the settlement, say he misfigured, turn a credit into a debit, take back the money, evict the family or whip the sharecropper on the spot, or worse. Some sharecroppers, knowing they might not get paid anyway, fled from the field, right in midhoe, on the first thing going north.
The planters could not conceive of why their sharecroppers would want to leave. The dance of the compliant sharecropper conceding to the big planter year in and year out made it seem as if the ritual actually made sense, that the sharecropper, having been given no choice, actually saw the tilted scales as fair. The sharecropper’s forced silence was part of the collusion that fed the mythology.
Part Four: The Other Side of Jordan
Quotes
Overall, however, what was becoming clear was that, north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.
