In this chapter, Wilkerson has used history and social science to paint a general portrait of the Jim Crow South, on the scale of society as a whole. But here, by describing the average Black person’s experience, she transitions back into the personal perspective that dominates her book. Her goal is to put her readers in her protagonists’ shoes—after all, imagining life under Jim Crow is the best way to understand the dilemma that migrants faced and the difficult decisions that they made. In particular, Wilkerson wants readers to understand how overwhelming feelings of terror, hopelessness, and injustice deeply shaped her protagonists’ experiences and decisions to migrate. Put differently, migrants weren’t just seeking better wages or more political rights—they were also drawn by the
feeling of liberation that they achieved by freeing themselves from Jim Crow.