An Enormous Book of Enormous Consequence

The Neland Women’s Book Club met tonight (yes, they’ve met more often than I have recorded, because I’ve been unable to attend for a couple of months now). We talked about The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. This book is about the Great Migration, the massive movement of African Americans from the southern states to the north in the 20^th century. I’ll say right now that I did not finish the book, so some of this is inferred information from the group. Ladies, if I have something wrong, please correct me in the comments!

Our leader of the month, Sue, helped us wade through the issues and information presented by the book. She mentioned that Wilkerson is a journalist, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1994. She was interested in the subject of the migration because of her own parents’ migration, and she spent 15 years researching and interviewing 1200 people for this project.

Between World War I and the 1970s about 6 million African Americans migrated north. That’s in comparison, for example, to the 300,000 “Okies” who famously left the Oklahoma area for the west coast during the Dust Bowl. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and an extremely restrictive caste system led the people of the Great Migration to leave all they knew, in mostly rural areas, to have more freedoms and opportunities. Unfortunately, they tended to find it difficult to gain employment, restricted housing options and cities infected with crime.

The recently migrated were willing to work hard to make a life for themselves, but their children found it frustrating to live with a lack of prospects, and they were living in community with African-Americans who had already been living in the north and who were already frustrated.

Wilkerson uses a form called narrative nonfiction to follow three people in particular: Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster and George Starling. Sue noted that George was from the same area in Florida where Trayvon Martin lost his life. Wilkerson says she used three books as her models: The Grapes of Wrath, Avalon, and The Joy Luck Club.

I personally was utterly floored to find out that immediately after emancipation, former slaves had many rights, and that those were slowly taken away. I had always been under the impression that Jim Crow laws were pretty much in force from Day 1 after emancipation. And so the former slaves, who had at least a forced and artificial relationship with the white community, had children and grandchildren who had basically zero relationship with the white community. The white community over the years built up a sort of hysteria, basically psychotically afraid of giving black neighbors any power or rights.

Sue said that it is amazing to realize that all of this happened basically in her lifetime, and she was so unaware. Alice said it is one of the saddest books she’s ever read, but she hastened to add that it was excellent. Both of them remembered a time long ago in their Chicago-area neighborhood when the white church community there felt threatened by the arrival of African Americans.

The only criticism that we heard was that the book was somewhat repetitive. That criticism was, fittingly enough, repeated by several people. However, there was some feeling that with all the information presented, some repetition helps the reader retain the important points.

We talked some about how this informs our perspective on our own town of Grand Rapids. Certainly people migrated to GR, and GR suffered white flight. We questioned the role of Christian schools in making our city more segregated, since in the early days the Christian schools served a white community. We wonder how much racism prevails even now, when we don’t even realize it.

A line from the book about Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who was a educated as a medical doctor and ran into obstacles everywhere he went because of his skin color: “Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.” What bars are right in front of us that we never notice? And how does that affect us in ways that we don’t realize?

In a speech, Wilkerson said this: “I believe that the next migration has to be for us as individuals, as human beings, to recognize that we have so much more in common than we are led to believe. And to recognize that when everyone does better, everyone does better."

Mudbound: The Story of Us

The title says it all. Hillary Jordan's book Mudbound describes characters sucked into the ooze partly of their own making and partly of what has happened to them in their time, place and circumstance, just as we all are. This might sound like a complete downer, and it certainly has some terrible moments, but it is a good read. A compelling storyline and characters we can relate to (even when we wish we can't) make it a fairly quick yet meaningful book.

The book begins and ends with the burial scene of Pappy, the twisted, hateful patriarch of the white McAllan family. He is being buried in the rain, in the sodden, lonely fields of Mudbound, the farm that his son, Henry, has finally purchased after a lifetime of saving and dreaming. Not even to dust or ashes, Pappy is going to mud.

Henry is the stalwart, stoic eldest son who marries Laura later in life. Laura, a college-educated almost-spinster, is uprooted from her city life to become a farmwife. Henry's younger brother Jamie is a charmer who comes back from World War II with a hole in his heart.

The black Jackson family shares the farm as one of the tenants. Hap Jackson is determined to make more of his life than the fate of a sharecropper. His strong, intelligent wife Florence partners with him to make his dreams come true. Their hopes and dreams are also invested in their oldest son, Ronsel, another WWII vet. Ronsel's "got a shine to him"--he hopes for further education and a different life. He has trouble adjusting to the racism and Jim Crow laws of his Mississippi home after feeling freed from some of it in Europe during the war.

The interred Pappy is not the only one trapped by the land. Sharecroppers are fettered to the land and their landlords. Henry is sucked in to the land by his own "landsickness," a desire for the land that goes beyond what he feels for his wife and family. Ronsel is embedded in a community that can't see past his skin color, but he can't leave because he must help his family farm.

The good women of the Neland book club spent some time talking about the structure of the book. It is told from six different points of view, so the chapters go from character to character, giving us insight into each of their thoughts. Sometimes the voices were not as distinct as we might wish. Books like The Help and The Poisonwood Bible have been stronger in this respect. While we might not always be able to discern the actual voice of each character, we still see their perspectives distinctly. Many times we wish we didn't have to hear exactly what they were thinking. Jordan stays true to the time and place, and the racism of even the less racist characters angered us as we read, even as we could empathize with other aspects of the characters.

None of the characters is a true out-and-out hero, though there is still potential. Each are mired in their own natures--each a strange cocktail of their own experience, knowledge, hate, love, compassion, fear and pride. Some come close to heroism at different points, but can't really pull it off. Which would probably be true for about 99% of the human race.

The story rings true in other ways, too. One strand of the history of the U.S. is that of people looking for freedom and land, and using what power they have to realize that dream, even at the cost of marginalizing others.
Jordan's novel won the Bellwether Prize, which is a prize awarded to a previously unpublished novel that supports social change. There was a bit of discussion about whether or not Mudbound is a bit heavy-handed, but the consensus seemed to be that it really wasn't.
I definitely recommend it. And I will say, if I had any illusions that I might enjoy being a farmwife (which I really don't--I'm too lazy and enjoy city comforts), they are gone forever. If nothing else, the book might make you more thankful for your toilet and shower. Hopefully it will also raise your consciousness on other issues as well.