The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns

by

Isabel Wilkerson

The second of Isabel Wilkerson’s three protagonists, George Swanson Starling is a brilliant, socially conscious working-class man from the small central Florida town of Eustis. He moves to New York in 1945. When George is a young man, his father forces him to drop out of college for financial reasons, and he reacts by impulsively marrying his girlfriend Inez—ruining any chance of ever finishing his education. He briefly works in a Detroit factory during World War II, then takes up the only steady work available to Black men in Eustis: picking fruit in the citrus groves. But when he starts organizing with the other workers to demand better wages, the white grove owners start plotting to kill him, so he flees to Harlem in New York (where his aunt and many of his friends live). He manages to buy a house and get a stable job working on the same train that brought him north, which allows him to watch the Great Migration in action over the course of several decades. He does what little he can to support the civil rights movement, raising money for protestors and encouraging his passengers to integrate the train. Yet he deeply regrets many of his decisions: he always feels that he has fallen far short of his potential, his relationship with Inez is never particularly happy, and his children Gerard and Sonya make poor decisions that ruin their lives. Still, he always loves Harlem and never regrets his decision to leave the South. He dies in 1998. His story captures the dangers of life under Jim Crow, the role that ordinary people played in the civil rights movement, and the bittersweet side of the Migration, which created a new set of problems for its participants—like disconnection, loneliness, and the vices of urban life—even as it resolved the earlier, deeper issues they faced in the South.

George Swanson Starling Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns

The The Warmth of Other Suns quotes below are all either spoken by George Swanson Starling or refer to George Swanson Starling. 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:
Migration and Freedom Theme Icon
).
Part Two: Robert Joseph Pershing Foster Quotes

They and Ida Mae and George and Pershing and children all over the South were growing up, trying to comprehend the caste they were born into, adjusting or resisting, lying in bed at night and imagining a world that was different and free, and knowing it was out there because they had seen it in the casual airs, the haughtiness even, and the clothes and the stories of the people from the North. Now nothing around them made sense, and everything that happened to them imprinted itself into their psyches and loomed larger because they had glimpsed what was possible outside the bars of their own existence.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: The Awakening Quotes

A series of unpredictable events and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: Breaking Away Quotes

The Great Migration ran along three main tributaries and emptied into reservoirs all over the North and West. One stream, the one George Starling was about to embark upon, carried people from the coastal states of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up the eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and their satellites. A second current, Ida Mae’s, traced the central spine of the continent, paralleling the Father of Waters, from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh. A third and later stream carried people like Pershing from Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast, with some black southerners traveling farther than many modern-day immigrants.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Four: Transplanted in Alien Soil Quotes

The posted concessions, addressed to white neighbors with a sense of defeat and resignation, offered a glimpse into the differences between the North and South. The South, totalitarian and unyielding, was at that very moment succeeding at what white Harlem leaders were so desperately trying to do, that is, controlling the movements of blacks by controlling the minds of whites.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Page Number: 250-251
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Four: To Bend in Strange Winds Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Related Symbols: Trains
Page Number: 294
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: More North and West Than South Quotes

The Great Migration had played out before his very eyes. Now it was coming to a close from a demographic, macroeconomic point of view. […] Many of his passengers were born and raised in the North and were making their first visits to the South, rather than returning to a place they had known.

He could tell the original migrants. They were requiring more help getting up the steps, beginning to need canes, many still speaking in their southern accents. […] Mean and ornery as it may have been, the South was still the Old Country, the land where their fathers and mothers were buried, and these original migrants were heading home to it, at least for now.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Page Number: 459
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: Redemption Quotes

He had once seen a black man and a white woman walking down the street in downtown Tavares, the county seat and the domain of old Willis McCall. George was having a hard time getting used to seeing what could have gotten him killed in his day.

“I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would walk down the street holding hands with a white woman,” he said. “It amazes me when I see the intermingling. When I was a boy down here, when you went through the white neighborhood you had to be practically running. Now black people are living in there. They all mixed up with the whites right there in Eustis.”

Related Characters: George Swanson Starling (speaker), Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 474
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: The Winter of Their Lives Quotes

As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, [George] has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Page Number: 492
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: The Emancipation of Ida Mae Quotes

Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true.

[…] Each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 524
Explanation and Analysis:
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George Swanson Starling Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns

The The Warmth of Other Suns quotes below are all either spoken by George Swanson Starling or refer to George Swanson Starling. 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:
Migration and Freedom Theme Icon
).
Part Two: Robert Joseph Pershing Foster Quotes

They and Ida Mae and George and Pershing and children all over the South were growing up, trying to comprehend the caste they were born into, adjusting or resisting, lying in bed at night and imagining a world that was different and free, and knowing it was out there because they had seen it in the casual airs, the haughtiness even, and the clothes and the stories of the people from the North. Now nothing around them made sense, and everything that happened to them imprinted itself into their psyches and loomed larger because they had glimpsed what was possible outside the bars of their own existence.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: The Awakening Quotes

A series of unpredictable events and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: Breaking Away Quotes

The Great Migration ran along three main tributaries and emptied into reservoirs all over the North and West. One stream, the one George Starling was about to embark upon, carried people from the coastal states of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up the eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and their satellites. A second current, Ida Mae’s, traced the central spine of the continent, paralleling the Father of Waters, from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh. A third and later stream carried people like Pershing from Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast, with some black southerners traveling farther than many modern-day immigrants.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Four: Transplanted in Alien Soil Quotes

The posted concessions, addressed to white neighbors with a sense of defeat and resignation, offered a glimpse into the differences between the North and South. The South, totalitarian and unyielding, was at that very moment succeeding at what white Harlem leaders were so desperately trying to do, that is, controlling the movements of blacks by controlling the minds of whites.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Page Number: 250-251
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Four: To Bend in Strange Winds Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Related Symbols: Trains
Page Number: 294
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: More North and West Than South Quotes

The Great Migration had played out before his very eyes. Now it was coming to a close from a demographic, macroeconomic point of view. […] Many of his passengers were born and raised in the North and were making their first visits to the South, rather than returning to a place they had known.

He could tell the original migrants. They were requiring more help getting up the steps, beginning to need canes, many still speaking in their southern accents. […] Mean and ornery as it may have been, the South was still the Old Country, the land where their fathers and mothers were buried, and these original migrants were heading home to it, at least for now.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Page Number: 459
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: Redemption Quotes

He had once seen a black man and a white woman walking down the street in downtown Tavares, the county seat and the domain of old Willis McCall. George was having a hard time getting used to seeing what could have gotten him killed in his day.

“I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would walk down the street holding hands with a white woman,” he said. “It amazes me when I see the intermingling. When I was a boy down here, when you went through the white neighborhood you had to be practically running. Now black people are living in there. They all mixed up with the whites right there in Eustis.”

Related Characters: George Swanson Starling (speaker), Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 474
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: The Winter of Their Lives Quotes

As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, [George] has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), George Swanson Starling
Page Number: 492
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: The Emancipation of Ida Mae Quotes

Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true.

[…] Each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Page Number: 524
Explanation and Analysis: