The Warmth Of Other Suns

Chapter 27 is a snapshot of the lives of Wilkerson’s three central subjects as they grew older and sustained the expected losses of close loved ones. Wilkerson paints loss as a palpable and permanent fixture in the lives of many African-Americans, who had to give up so much to find a place of opportunity. 

Eventually, the book’s three central figures fully assimilated into the North despite their Southern roots. They still faced the frustrations of racism, but they managed to carve out successful lives for themselves. However, they had now been in the North so long that they could witness how Northern cities were changing: Drugs and gangs took over once proud and prominent black neighborhoods. Nevertheless, because Ida Mae Brandon Gladney and George Swanson Starling had experienced the harshness of the South, they held celebrity status in their neighborhoods, which made them off-limits for gang violence as neighbors watched out for and took care of them. 

Wilkerson enters the narrative, describing accompanying her three subjects to various locales.

When Wilkerson first met the 83-year-old Gladney at her home in Chicago, she was shocked at “the craziness” that “has Ida Mae hemmed in on all sides” (467).

George Swanson Starling, now a deacon, believed it “his responsibility to share” (469) the wisdom he acquired through great hardship with younger generations. Starling never truly cut his ties with Florida the way that the other two subjects in Wilkerson’s narrative did: “George comes back to Eustis every two years for the biennial reunion of Curtwright Colored High School” (476).

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a gracious host. His progeny “lead upper-middle class lives” (472), and one of his grandchildren will attend Yale. Friends and former patients who are skeptical of the advice given to them by their doctors still called him for medical advice. 

Chapter 30 is devoted to the daily lives and routines of Wilkerson’s three subjects as they age. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney developed strong familial bonds that sustained her over the years. In contrast, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster slowly lived out the remainder of his life in isolation. 

Wilkerson describes the ultimate health failures and final days of George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, men who led brilliant lives despite all that had been stacked against them. After death, both men are noble and revered figures in their respective communities, whose experiences form a portion of the fabric of American history.

The final chapter of The Warmth of Other Suns focuses solely on Ida Mae Brandon Gladney. Gladney lived into the 21st century, outliving both George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster and having seen things she never dreamed possible as a child in Mississippi.

Wilkerson accompanied Gladney to Mississippi, where she met with old and new relatives. Once, she spontaneously leapt from the car to run into a cotton field to pick cotton, a bold action only possible because Gladney’s sense of herself has fundamentally shifted:

She was a Chicagoan now but had seen and heard so much, so many wondrous, sad, and unspeakable things in her life, that there still wasn’t time enough to tell all that she had witnessed […] She put the disappointments in a lockbox in the back of her mind and lived in the moment, which is all anybody has for sure. She had learned long ago, when things were so much harder in the Old Country she left behind, that, after all she had been through, every day to her was a blessing and every breath she took a gift (525).

Wilkerson ends with the hope that the struggles of migrants would allow their descendants to live freer lives with more possibility. Wilkerson wants the reader to understand how important each individual is to history. 

The Great Migration was influential not only to African-American communities, but also to the United States as a whole: “[b]y the time the Great Migration was over, few Americans had not been touched by it” (527). Descendants of migrants made great strides in all walks of American life, leaving an indelible impression on American popular culture and politics: “the first black mayors in each of the major receiving cities of the North and West were […] participants or sons of the Great Migration” (529).

The migration was important psychologically too, since deciding to leave meant making a choice to exercise freedoms once denied to the African-American community: “The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever that journey led them” (535).