The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration  (Random House 2010) by Isabel Wilkerson

Not that Isabel Wilkerson needs any endorsement from me.  She's a Pulitzer Prize winning author and this book reveals why. It's an amazing story of the African-American migration from the southern states to the north and west following WWI.  

Rich with incredible details but most of all filled with poignant and suspense-filled moments in the lives of three individuals whom she chronicles along their journey to real freedom within their own country, these United States.

I was a junior in High School the summer of 1963 when I was chosen along with 13 other high school students from throughout Wisconsin to spend two weeks in the inner city of Chicago staying at a Methodist church there and working to clean it of the gritty, sooty Chicago dirt accumulated through the years.  Our companions were young black men and women from the congregation who with our chaperones took us around their city on weekends and afternoons, heading to the beaches, visiting museums, riding the elevated train and discovering urban life and especially rousing Sunday morning services. It was quite a contrast for a kid from a farm several hours north.

One day, we made a decision to protest along with our companions, at the Chicago Board of Education that at the time had no black members on their board.  I was a little hazy about what was really going on and none of us were arrested as we sat in the hallway and had our photos taken and run in the next day's Chicago's Sun. But I learned more; and later participated in more civil rights non-violent protests in my home state. What I never learned though, was just what it must have been like for so many African-Americans to suffer -- I use that word purposefully -- under Jim Crow laws, to fear being whisked away because you were home with your family while there were apricots to be picked; to arrange for transport by a coffin to come north so you wouldn't be stopped by authorities who didn't want you to leave Mississippi; to watch as a brother, wrongly accused, was hung until dead.

Even as I discovered more about civil rights and the great divide based on race, I had no idea of the personal cost and the challenges faced by immigrants.  For that's what they were, really, people migrating to a region to which they weren't native.

Kafka wrote that a "book should be the axe to the frozen sea within us."  This book is an axe.  It opened my eyes to part of what I have so loved about writing stories based on real people, especially women.  Many of them were seekers of a better life too.  Jane Sherar, Marie Dorion, Ivy Stranahan, Emma Giesy, Jessie Gaebele, Helga Estby and now Hulda Klager of lilac fame.  Like these African-American immigrants coming north, the Europeans arrived as people with greater desire to give to their families, to make a better life than what they had.  They were often better educated than their northern counterparts and in Emma and Helga's case, often better educated than those already here in the west.  Their perseverance and drive, their love of family, are all wrapped into the story of those who seek a better life in the warmth of other suns.

Isabel Wilkerson has captured not only the African-American experience of migration, but she's shed light on that journey of my ancestors, too. This book will truly warm your soul.