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Part Five: The Winter of Their Lives
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Warmth of Other Suns, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Migration and Freedom
History, Memory, and Identity
The Legacy of the Migration
The Economics of Racism
Love and Family
Decision, Consequence, and Regret
Summary
Analysis
Chicago, October 15, 1998. Ida Mae visits Mississippi, where she hasn’t been since she went to see her dying sister 15 years ago. Wilkerson goes with her. They drive into Chickasaw County, past bales and fields of cotton. At one point, Ida Mae gets out of the car and picks some of it, just for fun. Then, they continue down unnamed dirt streets to Ida Mae’s sister-in-law Jessie’s house. Jessie and her husband moved back from Chicago to Mississippi for retirement, but her husband has since died, so she’s living alone now. She and Ida Mae chat about their cotton-picking days, the family, the drugs infesting Chicago, and their late husbands.
It's clear that Wilkerson views the opportunity to visit Mississippi with Ida Mae as an immense privilege—and a perfect opportunity to close her book with reflections on the overall historical course of the Great Migration. While brief, the scene in which Ida Mae picks cotton by the roadside is extremely significant: she goes from being forced to pick cotton in order to survive to being able to do it freely, on her own terms. This change shows how, all things considered, migrating profoundly improved her life by freeing her from the brutality of sharecropping. But it’s also a metaphor for the overall progress that Black Americans have made since the end of enslavement, and particularly the way that the Great Migration enabled them to achieve true freedom from the South’s system of racial exploitation for the first time.
Themes
Ida Mae, her brother-in-law Aubrey, and Wilkerson drive around the peaceful Mississippi woods. They encounter a dilapidated old shack that may or may not have been Miss Theenie’s, a new cotton-picking machine, and many of Ida Mae’s old friends. Most haven’t seen her in 60 years, but some still recognize her. They visit her family at the church cemetery, but Ida Mae insists that she’ll be buried in Chicago. Lastly, they visit David McIntosh, the man who used to visit Ida Mae on horseback every Sunday and wanted to marry her. Of course, she decided to marry George Gladney instead. She wonders whether she would still be living in Mississippi if she had chosen to marry David instead.
Ida Mae’s tour of her past shows her at once all that she left behind in Mississippi, how much she has gained by going to Chicago, and how things might have been different if she had made other decisions. Yet she also recognizes that nobody can ever fully understand all of the consequences of their decisions at the time when they make them. For instance, as a young woman, Ida Mae assumed that she would stay in Mississippi—she never thought that marrying George or David would determine where she lived the rest of her life. This all highlights one of Wilkerson’s central points throughout the book: Americans must remember the Great Migration chiefly through the eyes of its participants, as a life-altering decision that required a profound leap of faith but also gave them an opportunity to take control over their lives, often for the first time in countless generations.
Themes
Chicago, March 5, 1999. Ida Mae puts up new blinds in her living room. Then, everyone comes over to celebrate her 86th birthday. Her granddaughter Karen brings a new boyfriend, Mike, and her friend Wilks reports that his mother was just diagnosed with cancer. But Ida Mae promises that “God don’t make no mistakes.” Everyone prays and eats, and Ida Mae starts telling Mike about moving north from Mississippi. But it turns out that he did too—he came in 1969, at the very end of the Great Migration. It’s snowing outside, which is as normal in Chicago as cotton is in Mississippi.
This anecdote about Ida Mae’s birthday party shows how two specific factors underpin her total, untarnished happiness: her loving family and her steadfast faith. Meanwhile, Mike’s story once again highlights the Great Migration’s vast reach. Two generations after Ida Mae, he undertook the same transformative journey from the same place. He did so under very different circumstances, but for the same basic reason: to seek the kind of better life that Ida Mae has achieved.
Themes
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This final portrait of Ida Mae brings the book full circle, because Wilkerson opened it with the story of Ida Mae leaving the South in the 1930s. Sixty-five years later, Ida Mae is nearing the end of her life—she will die later the same year. It’s clear that her life, while far from perfect, was rich, meaningful, and full of love. Above all, it was far better than her enslaved ancestors’ lives, or than hers would have been had she stayed in Mississippi.
Themes
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Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling joined the Great Migration “during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes.” Their lives in the North were far from perfect, but they all found their own versions of happiness there. Leaving the South allowed them to exercise their freedom, and none of them ultimately regretted it.
Wilkerson reminds the reader about the key commonalities and differences among the book’s three protagonists, whom she chose to represent the Great Migration as a whole. Her overarching message is simple: no matter how much the migrants differed in class, occupation, gender, age, luck, hometown, destination city, and precise life experiences, they all made the harrowing, risky decision to leave the South because they believed—usually correctly—that they could live better, freer lives elsewhere. While some of them may have regretted it, on the whole, the Great Migration had tremendously positive impacts on both Black Americans in particular and the U.S. as a whole.
Themes
For Ida Mae, Chicago will always be home, even though “Mississippi [is] deep inside her” too. In fact, she’s one of the last remaining Chicagoans who left the South before World War II, and she feels that every day of life is a blessing.
Ida Mae’s mix of North and South represents the way the Great Migration transformed American culture forever by spreading Black Americans throughout the nation. Moreover, her status as one of the last remaining migrants underlines why it was so important for Wilkerson to write this book and, in doing so, preserve her protagonists' memories.
Themes
