'The Warmth of Other Suns' sheds light on America's Great Migration

When Richard Wright fled Mississippi for Chicago in 1927, he imagined he was taking a part of the South with him "to transplant in alien soil."

As he later wrote, he wondered "if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom."

Wright had lots of company. Between 1915 and 1970, six million southern blacks moved to other parts of the country.

Isabel Wilkerson's majestic The Warmth of Other Suns shows that not everyone bloomed, but the migrants Wilkerson prefers to think of them as domestic immigrants remade the entire country, North and South.

It's a monumental job of writing and reporting that lives up to its subtitle: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The New York Times in 1994 and now teaches at Boston University , is a child of that migration.

The seeds of her book were sewn as she grew up in Washington, D.C., with "parents who had migrated from the South and sent me to an affluent white grade school that they themselves could never have dreamed of attending."

Classmates told of "ancestors coming from Ireland or Scandinavia with little in their pockets and making something of themselves in the New World. Over time, I came to realize that the same could be said of my family and of millions of other black Americans who had journeyed north during the Great Migration."

She tells the bigger story through the lives of three main subjects: a sharecropper's wife from Mississippi who became a hospital aide in Chicago, a surgeon from Louisiana who became Ray Charles ' doctor in Los Angeles and a fruit picker who escaped a Florida lynching to work as a railroad porter.

Writing with a novelist's flair, Wilkinson is best re-creating the world left behind, from its daily indignities to the threat of violence that amounted to domestic terrorism.

Although repetitive at times, the book takes disparate memories and shapes them into a lyrical narrative in a you-are-there style of writing.

It gives new meaning to picking cotton: "Fifty cents for a hundred pounds of cotton in the 1920s, the gold standard of cotton picking.

"It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust It took some seventy bolls to make a single pound of cotton The hands got cramped from the repetitive motion of picking, the fingers fairly locked in place and callused from the pricks of the barbed, five-pointed cockleburs that cupped each precious boll."

The writing is more personal than most journalism or history. It's descriptive and analytical, making use of more scholarly studies.

None of her three main subjects lived long enough to see the book published, but I think they'd be proud, even if many of their memories were painful.

Each found disappointments and racism elsewhere, but Wilkerson concludes, "They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.'

In a larger lesson, she sees the Great Migration as "the final break from an abusive union with the South. It was a step in freeing not just the people who fled, but the country whose mountains they passed. Their exodus left a still imperfect but far different landscape than before the Migration began."