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Part One: The Great Migration, 1915–1970
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, 1996. When elderly Ida Mae Brandon Gladney looks out her window, she sees local drug dealers doing business down on the street. The South Side of Chicago hasn’t always been “so dangerously absurd.” But the whole neighborhood respects her. She starts to tell Wilkerson her story.
Before flashing back to Ida Mae’s upbringing, Wilkerson opens with a portrait of her in the present. This contrast between the past and the present highlights how the fateful decision to migrate transformed her life forever.
Themes
Van Vleet, Mississippi, 1928. When Ida Mae is 15, two suitors in their twenties start visiting her every Sunday after church. David McIntosh has a horse, so he arrives first, while the quieter George Gladney—who walks miles to see Ida Mae—stays longer. Miss Theenie thinks they’re too old and dark-skinned for Ida Mae, but Ida Mae ignores her. Ida Mae has always been fearless: she likes to kill snakes, climb trees, and hunt rabbits with her brothers.
Ida Mae’s bucolic but impoverished rural childhood represents the experiences of one important cohort of migrants: the sharecroppers who continued working on plantations even after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished. These anecdotes show that Ida Mae’s family and community adhere to the traditional values that she will later bring with her to the North.
Themes
Ida Mae’s family lives in the northeastern hills of Mississippi. When she’s little, her father, Joseph Brandon, struggles to grow cotton and raise hogs on a parcel of depleted land. Ida Mae is no good at picking cotton, but she accompanies her father to the fields anyway. In 1923, he gets sick after chasing his hogs through floodwater. There are no Black doctors in town, so he never gets medical attention. Ida Mae thinks that he’s still alive and in a coma when the family buries him.
Joseph Brandon’s life and death speak to the adverse conditions and striking lack of basic services that Black Southerners faced well into the 20th century—particularly in rural areas. It’s easy to draw a direct line between these conditions and the system of slavery that preceded them, and it’s easy to see why people like Ida Mae would choose to leave the South in order to escape them.
Themes
As a child, Ida Mae has to walk a mile each way to Chickasaw County’s one-room schoolhouse. After her father dies, she has to fend for herself. Her one-legged teacher, Mr. Kirks, whips her for misspelling “Philadelphia,” and a local farmer ruins her holidays by telling her that Santa Claus isn’t real. This year, Miss Theenie can’t afford Christmas presents. Later, a boy beats Ida Mae nearly to death after she lets his horse run loose.
In the highly patriarchal society where Ida Mae lives, others will not respect her unless she has a father, brother, or husband. Thus, her childhood is full of minor tragedies—and her memories of it are defined by loneliness and deprivation. Grasping these circumstances is crucial to understanding her decision to migrate.
Themes
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Soon, boys are interested in Ida Mae for other reasons. She meets steely-faced 22-year-old George Gladney at a community party one summer. She doesn’t pay him much attention: she is already in love with Alfonso Banks. But Alfonso brings another girl to the party, so Ida Mae hits him in the head with an umbrella. Meanwhile, George Gladney falls in love with Ida Mae at the party, and then he starts visiting her every week. The next year, she agrees to marry him, but she doesn’t tell Miss Theenie—who finds out the day before the wedding and reluctantly agrees to support it. Ida Mae follows George to Edd Pearson’s plantation, where he starts sharecropping.
Ida Mae and George’s marriage is largely the product of circumstance. Like Ida Mae’s eventual decision to migrate, it promises her an escape from the confined life that she has lived—even if, at the end of the day, it only improves her situation incrementally. Yet none of this means that she is a helpless or passive person. Rather, as the episode with the umbrella suggests, she is spirited, freethinking, and self-reliant. However, she also recognizes that she won’t have many opportunities as a young, single woman in rural Mississippi. Thus, her decision to marry George is actually a testament to her grit, and not any kind of feminine weakness.
Themes
In 1920s Mississippi, white people have absolute power over Black people in every realm of life. But most Black people have very little contact with white people. When Ida Mae is seven, she visits a white blacksmith to run an errand for her father, and the blacksmith’s sons dangle her over a well and threaten to kill her by dropping her inside. She also helps a white neighbor gather and sell eggs. But one day, while they’re selling eggs in town, a white customer calls Ida Mae a racial slur. Her neighbor is horrified, but she stops working with Ida Mae because she doesn’t want to alienate other white people.
So far, Wilkerson’s portrait of Ida Mae’s childhood has focused on the lack of resources, services, and opportunities that she faced in rural Mississippi—but not on the caste system that fundamentally underlies these problems. Unlike the book’s other protagonists, Ida Mae is largely insulated from this system because she lives in a rural, all-Black community. But her occasional run-ins with white people make it clear that she will never truly be able to escape subordinate status if she stays in the South.
Themes
Ida Mae has other, more perilous run-ins with white people. A local white farmer often gets drunk on Friday evenings, rides down to Ida Mae’s farm, and shoots at anyone he sees. Ida Mae and her family learn to hide from him—one day, she barely survives by sheltering in a barrel of cornmeal. And when Ida Mae is 13, white people lynch two local Black boys for allegedly insulting a white woman. After this, the rest of the Carter family moves north. Eventually, Ida Mae will follow them.
For Ida Mae and other Black southerners living under Jim Crow, white terrorist violence is an ordinary fact of life. The graphic violence of lynching is horrifying, but actually, it’s far more insidious than it initially seems. Its real purpose is not merely to target individuals, but rather to deter the whole Black community from challenging the racial caste system. In other words, lynching is as much about punishing individuals as about preserving the South’s white supremacist society in general.
Themes
