The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

16:32Rebecca:All right. We got to move along. We're going to talk about what it's like. I mean, this is all going to map onto each other. But I think what you have both just said leads quickly into why it's important in the accolades it got. I think people saw what this took, right? Yeah. It was very much recognized at the time as being a remarkable work. So it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, NYT, New York Times, for people that don't know the acronyms that we use or maybe don't think in acronyms, and Publishers Weekly both had in the top 10 overall for the Books of the Year in 2010.

17:06Rebecca:As I said before, it was number two in the New York Times retrospective New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I guess we should say here that the three of us had votes in that. We did. That poll. and I voted for this and I do not, I don't, I don't know if you want to, you, and we didn't talk about review. We talked about our ballots before. I guess at this point, Sharifa, you hadn't read it and Rebecca, you had neither. So you could be voted for it.

17:29Jeff:No.

17:30Rebecca:So having read it now, do you think your votes would have changed?

17:34Jeff:Yes. Yeah. This could have ended up there. I almost went back to my notes about my ballot to, to see what I would have kicked off for it. But yes, absolutely. And I don't care for the number one pick on the New York Times list. So as far as I'm concerned, we can call this the best book of the 21st century so far.

17:56Sharifah Williams:And I'm pretty sure that subconsciously, because I spent so much time pouring over that 100 best books of the 21st century list, that that was one of the reasons I ended up picking up this book when I was thinking about nonfiction to read.

18:09Rebecca:I mean, it makes it it makes a ton of sense. And it does speak to the power of these kinds of lists. And that list, as a quick aside, has been uniquely influential in content making. Like a lot of people suddenly realized, and I will throw a book right into the mix here because we're doing a list or sort of a series of best books of the century so far in various genres because it's not a very genre heavy list. There's some. But I've seen video games. I've seen movies. I've seen TV. I've seen sports moments. So people reckoning with that a quarter of century gives us a chance. So these lists matter.

18:42Rebecca:Gatekeeping matter. Curation matters. I mean, these are all things that feed on each other. So when we have a chance to talk about something and get other people to think about it differently, that's part of the culture work. And it's very interesting and part of what we're trying to do with the show here. And I think maybe most importantly here is that it really does fill in a huge, insofar as one book can. There are like 10 books I'm sure Wilkerson could write in this. I kind of want a whole book about Foster. I'll get to that when we get to the hot takes and straight thoughts. But thinking about this tidal wave of humanity over decades and its relationship to racial politics in the U.S.

19:22Rebecca:basically touches every factor of American life, even with some cameos by future stars in American politics who then go on to affect other counter reactions in American life. It feels so germane even now and so under reported, misunderstood, misunderstood that But I think it just does like history work. It's a historically important document, which we can't really say because it's different when we talk about literary history. But this is like actual life important, not just art life important.

19:53Jeff:Yes, actual life important. And one of the things that blew my mind about it, because like Sharifa, I had less than stellar experiences with history classes in my educational career, was not just that the migration was shaped by the infrastructure of the country. People went where there were interstates and railroad lines, which makes sense when you think about it. But had I ever thought about it? Indeed, I had not. And then they reshaped the country and the politics of the country as well, that what the landscape of the cities is like becomes very different. Cities go from being 1 % Black to being 40 % Black.

20:33Jeff:Cities that have large populations of European immigrants experience all kinds of interesting and scary tension when those immigrants are faced with the migrants coming up from the South. And it's not just the story of Black people going into white cities. It's really melting pot, like all American, like every issue of American life is present in the stuff that Wilkerson is documenting here. Yeah.

20:58Sharifah Williams:And I will say also, like, as an African-American person, like the whole idea of studying your genealogy is like so out there for us. But, you know, I am a product of the Great Migration. And even as somebody who is a product of the Great Migration, I didn't have all of that information about like where everybody ended up moving, how some like my family can end up from North Carolina to Oakland. Like, how does that happen? And so this was so eye opening. It's it does absolutely speak to the broader American population, but it also gives something to the African-American population of like, well, this is a way to help you start understanding the story of your own lives and your own families and how you got where you are.

21:53Rebecca:The figures here even are startled by Wilkerson sort of telling them they're part of this larger story. They're like, I didn't really think of myself as being part of a great migration. That sense of being a part of something else and you're not alone and this is a broad piece of history is quite powerful and I think illuminative in so many different kinds of ways. And it feels like Wilkerson maybe was uniquely positioned to write this book. And reading her biography, she herself is a product of the great migration. she's in Chicago she's the bureau chief of the New York Times she was at um Howard and was the editor of the newspaper here so like she was around these people as a black woman but also in these circles and in these moments and started to get a sense from her own life that there was a story to be told and took a long time telling it and I think yeah I kept thinking that when I had was rereading the book is like, could anyone have done this?

22:51Rebecca:No, could any Wellenthal's have done this? I mean, someone, there could have been other versions of this, but I have this down there in straight thoughts and maybe it's worth saying here. I think it's so important that she's a journalist first and not an academic in terms of the way this was presented, her sort of inductive reasoning, sort of taking individual stories and building and building and building out of that. And then thinking from a journalist's eye for story and shape and character, an academic could write this book about the Great Migration and maybe do the same kinds of research, but not be as interested or not believe or have been taught, I should say, about certain kinds of modes about perspective and individual and specificity that I think will make this book readable and resonate for generations in a way that an academic book can matter, but wouldn't be read by normies like us.

23:40Rebecca:you know, 10, 15, 30, 50 years down the road.

23:43Jeff:And The Wormth of Other Suns kind of astonishingly did not win the Pulitzer, which we can... I don't understand. I don't understand. We can have a moment about all of that in a little while. But Wilkerson won the Pulitzer before she wrote this. She was the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer for journalism in 1994 for coverage of big 1993 floods in the Midwest and then also profiles of teenage boys living in Chicago that she had written. And after she wins the Pulitzer, she said someone came and asked her if you could write a book what it would be about. I assume this is an editor who was like, who is this Isabel Wilkerson who's winning Pulitzers for journalism?

24:22Jeff:And she already knew that it was going to be the Great Migration, that her parents left Virginia, moved to Washington, D.C., and that's where she was raised. And she grew up hearing details of their stories, but not the whole story, which, like you were saying, Sharifa, that seems like a pretty common experience among children of the folks who migrated, that they didn't necessarily talk about it that much for all kinds of reasons. And then having an opportunity to tell Wilkerson their story, to read the book. I listened to an interview that Gilbert Cruz from The New York Times did with her last summer around the time of the big 21st century list coming out.

24:59Jeff:And she said that Like, this is going to make me cry. She heard from families of some of her participants, some of these 1 ,200 people, who said, your book was the last one my parent read before they passed. And it gave them a new sense. It's really incredible. A new sense of really what it meant, what they did with their lives and this risk that they took.

25:18Sharifah Williams:Well, I know what I'm going to listen to.

25:24Rebecca:She's a fascinating person. And she doesn't have 25 books. She came to writing books a little bit later. She has a long career as a journalist. And I hope over time, Cast was very well regarded. A fascinating book. You can see her wheels turning in similar sort of parallel motion, but on a broader global spectrum there. As well, I'm sort of capped off with the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2016. Quite a moment there. B.O. himself makes a cameo appearance at the end of this book in a very fascinating and moving way with Ida May going to her local police precinct meeting.

26:05Rebecca:And a young Illinois senator comes to press the flesh there. Okay, let's get personal for a second, talking about our first reading experiences. Sharifa, we've teased this. Tell us about how you picked this up and what it was like to come to this the first time.

26:20Sharifah Williams:Yeah, I mean, I have been thinking about a lot about U.S. history and politics lately, and I have always felt like I sort of had a lot of gaps in my education about this country's history. And I have been wanting to fill in those gaps, but there are so many books out there. And, you know, and finding one that I, a person who does not read a lot of nonfiction, could sink my teeth into felt like a insurmountable task. But I kept seeing this book brought up. And I will also say that our former colleague, Amanda Nelson's post, there was one post and I cannot remember what of the millions she has put up.

27:08Sharifah Williams:But there was a bunch of comments of people recommending this book. And I was like, okay, this is it. This is like my final signal I needed to pick up the book and just like be ready to sit down with a door stopper. And the minute I started it, I was like, I have made the correct decision. What a good feeling. It was so satisfying. And now I feel like I just want more. It opened a whole door for me.

27:44Rebecca:That's the delightful and terrible thing about a book like this, where it's singular in a lot of ways. And so there's not a lot of amazing read-alikes, which we'll talk about. Like this is not something you find every day, even as we wish we could. Rebecca, so this was a little bit more work homework for you. I mean, I know you were looking forward to it and wanted to read it. What was your reading experience like?

28:07Jeff:Oh, it was. This was incredible. I'd had it on my list forever. I missed it. And I wasn't working in books full time in 2010. You know, I was a marketing person. So this was not on my radar until I started working in books and hearing about it. And we read so much of new releases all the time, Jeff. Like Jeff and I, that's a huge part of our jobs, that going back to a 650-page book from several years ago is just not something that I make time for, that I feel like I have time for. And this podcast has been a wonderful opportunity to create excuses for myself to pick up things that I have been wanting to read, to make it a priority.

28:47Jeff:And it was this specific timing was a product of Sharifa picking it up, raving about it. And like Sharifa, not known to just be effusive about all kinds of things. Like it's meaningful.

28:59Rebecca:A high signal to noise ratio.

29:02Jeff:Yes. So when there are Sharifa exclamation points and they appear in multiple newsletters and multiple posts on the site and she's just kind of talking about it, I pay attention. And I'm so glad that I finally got a chance to read it.

29:17Rebecca:Yeah, I read it the year it came out. This was a weird, not a weird, it was a specific moment in my reading life. I guess they always are. Between when I was done with grad school and before we started BR and I had kids. So like a two year window where I was like free range reading, which was I wish I had I wish I had a better list of all the books I read. So I could kind of read whatever I was interested, what was in the news. And this was in the news for sure. And I was very interested as a student of African-American literary history, the Richard Wright title and then the idea of it. And then I should say, too, I think it matters that we were in the Pax Obama back then, too, in 2010.

29:57Rebecca:And we were especially, I think, interested in these stories. They were more welcomed into the market. People were looking for them. Now, of course, this was not a reaction to that moment because it was 15 years in the making. So I do think there was some zeitgeist timing that really mattered for its popularity. I think it would have been critically acclaimed. And the work is the work no matter what. But I think it entered into warm waters. And I was one of those people that, you know, narrative nonfiction. Rebecca and I have talked about this in the BR pod and other places. Like this is not something you get a lot in school.

30:29Rebecca:And one thing that happens to people that do become lifelong readers or maintain lifelong readership is discovering narrative nonfiction that they like. You know, we talk about, what is it, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, Rebecca. Like we wish more people knew books like that existed while they're in their formative reading years, because you can find and this is not like this, but it's more along the lines of this than a big sort of the kind of book that wins the National Book Award for history, which is like a history book. This is a story. This is a reading experience that happens to be nonfiction that can delight and amaze and astound and sustain all kinds of readers.

31:02Rebecca:So that's when I read there and I was completely awestruck. buy it there. It's not just something you made. It's the privilege that you get to work with your hands. It's building something that serves a purpose. Proof that you have the grit to keep going. At Timberland, we understand you take your craft seriously, and we do too, which is why our products are built to the highest quality. We put in the work so you can perfect yours with purpose in every detail and crafted with intention. Timberland, built on craft. Visit Timberland.com to shop.

32:09Jeff:3026 yet for details.

32:11Rebecca:TaxAct can think of a million things more fun than filing taxes. TaxAct is going to name some now. Sitting in traffic. Folding a fitted bed sheet. Listening to your co-worker talk about his fantasy team. Digging a hole. Digging an even larger hole next to that original hole. Unfortunately, TaxAct's filing software can't make taxes fun. But TaxAct can help you get them done. Tax Act. Let's get them over with. What's it like to read this? What's it all about? I think it's a little bit different for us, Rebecca, because it's about what it is about. We don't do a lot of English major bullshit to be like, here are the main themes and whatever.

32:52Rebecca:So maybe we can talk about what the reading experience and the notable sort of theses that she has throughout the course of the book. Sharif, we talked a lot about, can you put into qualitative prose what it is like to read this book? And the virtues and the kind of ups and downs, not in terms of quality, but like she takes you on a journey, I guess. And it's a different kind of journey than we're used to being taken to in a book, I think.

33:19Sharifah Williams:Yeah. I mean, immersive is definitely the word I felt in my bones while I was reading this because it felt like I was truly transported to these times and places I have never been and experienced. And it really felt like I was in the mix in the lives of these individuals and feeling the suffering they went to, the frustrations they experienced, the terrors of living in the Jim Crow South. And also the huge uncertainty of migrating to a completely different place with only like the words of family and friends who have been out there before. And, you know, whatever papers they could find about like trying to convince them to move out there and really just starting their lives over again.

34:16Sharifah Williams:So it was a very powerful experience to like go through, like you said, this journey with them and an unforgettable experience.

34:29Rebecca:Rebecca, you have a note here about this. Oh, yeah. Maybe you're right into the structure.

34:32Jeff:Yeah, it's just like really, I'll talk about that too. But I found it just along the lines of what Sharif was saying, this really potent and unusual mixture of harrowing and hopeful. Like when Robert Foster leaves Texas or leaves Louisiana to drive across and ultimately go to California and he's driving for like 24 hours straight.

34:54Rebecca:A survival thriller horror novel in like 15.

34:57Jeff:Yes, you can leave the Jim Crow South, but it's not like as soon as you cross over into a non Jim Crow state, everything is hunky dory and safe for you immediately. And how detailed and terrifying that experience was and how Wilkerson renders it. It does feel like you're on the edge of your seat. But Toni Morrison, also not known for just blurb and stuff willy-nilly, called it profound, necessary, and a delight to read. And I think that totally captures it. But to me, the structure is the magic that Ida Mae, George, and Robert live and migrate at different times. But rather than showing each of their stories individually or dropping us in to visit them at various points on the timeline, which is a way that a lot of these kinds of books work.

35:46Jeff:It's like, here we are in 1940 and Ida Mae is doing one thing and George is doing something else and Robert would be doing something else. The thing Wilkerson does is organize their stories by seasons of life. So we see all of them as young people together. And then we see all of them at the moment that they decide to leave. And then we see all of them as they have made the journey and all of them becoming established in their new lives. And that makes it easier to connect and follow what's happening because the emotional arc points in one direction. and I just thought that was such a genius choice, and I haven't seen anybody do that with a book like this.

36:23Rebecca:That's a great point. And roughly the first third is this, and so their stories are interleaved, the three main, I don't want to say characters because they're real people, but we'll use characters here because I don't have a better word for it right now, are then interleaved with some historical context. Protagonists. Yeah, protagons. We do get quotes from other scholars. We do get Wilkerson's remarkable archival work. This is another interesting thing about the genesis of this book. It was a transitional time in terms of research. She didn't have access to Google and JSTOR. She was doing more of the traditional archival stuff that some of us, I'll throw us all in the same basket here, though I'm a little bit older, were doing in high school.

37:04Rebecca:Or would have done in some of our college papers before the technological innovations we have today, which is the grunt work, the gumshoe report. detective, but of reportage is really important there. And so you do get how she connects these individual protagonists to the larger stories. And because she has done such copious interviews, she has the ability to pick sort of the perfect troika to show the diversity of experience, but also shared experiences at the same time. And that's what she's really trying to do. She's saying these are representative of larger conditions, larger experiences, and you spend time with them at different points of their lives where by the time they sort of strike out, you're like, oh my God, I totally get it while you're doing this, right?

37:50Rebecca:And then the middle third of the book is them sort of surviving, coming to North, finding their place of the world, making it or breaking it. And then the last third is like the consequence of that integration or lack thereof and what has changed and what hasn't in their own relationship to their lives in the south and sort of where they die. I had forgotten that how emotional I got in the last third as these people exit stage right. And it is not a story of the migration, the Great Migration being triumphant, nor a disaster. It is the story of humans on the move, and all that entails, and some of them are highs, and some of their lows.

38:32Rebecca:It was not an unalloyed success, nor was it a mistake for all these characters. And I think that truth is part of the bittersweet beauty of it. And I'm not sure, Sharifa, how did you find your experience as you come to the end? Was there a lesson here? Like, did you buy Wilkerson's argument? Like, did you have sort of an emotional or intellectual takeaway from the book?

38:52Sharifah Williams:Well, it was interesting because I definitely found that Wilkerson was sympathetic to these individuals without, you know, obscuring their flaws and, you know, Robert's ego, for instance, and the gambling, you know, all of that stuff. And then like, when you come to the ends of their lives, there isn't this sense of like, intense satisfaction, like everything is there's so much closure, everything is is put neatly away, they got what they're they wanted. But that was better for me because it's a complex story that deserves to be told honestly. And there was no sort of neat thesis for me at the end of this book.

39:47Sharifah Williams:It was just that this was something that was huge and is still rippling across our timeline. And it will continue to affect the generations that follow these individuals after they leave us. And you see that even in the, you know, sort of mention of the children of these people. And it's not like we see their stories fully fleshed out, but you know, because you've been through the whole thing with them, that those stories, their lives are affected by their parents' decisions and how they chose to move on or not. Mm-hmm.

40:32Jeff:It's a rule of fiction that specifics are what help you convey the universal. And Wilkerson, I think, ports that over wonderfully here, that the specifics of these three characters, these three protagonists, the varieties of their motivation and experience serve to remind us that the people who made these moves were not monolithic. monolithic. And it invites you to consider if this is what it was like for three different people, how many other millions of versions of that experience were there. Sharifa, I love the note that you have in our outline talking about this and the other things that Wilkerson is inviting us to consider, if you would talk about that a little bit.

41:15Sharifah Williams:Yeah. One of the things that really stood out to me was that you are not only getting the story of the people who were, whether they knew it or not participants in the Great Migration, you are also getting the stories of the people who chose not to move north, who chose to stay in the South. And you see that in different ways in the different stories of these people. Like, you know, Ida Mae goes back home at the very end of the book and she sees some old friends from her past life and she sees how they have, how things have turned out for them. And then Robert has this more stark situation where, you know, the family he married into, the Clements, are established in the South, in Atlanta.

42:06Sharifah Williams:And Dr. Clement is doing big things in the South for Black people.

42:12Jeff:And working against WBE Beach Boys. Yes, right. Getting him kicked out of the university. Like, that is bold.

42:19Sharifah Williams:No big deal. Just like making a huge name for himself. But Robert really feels like he has to prove himself that his choice, his decision was correct in moving to the West. And he sees his brother setting up this practice and helping people in his hometown community in the South who do not get the care they need. And so there's this tension. And there's also like the way the established Northerners, the Black Americans in the North, look at their incoming kin from the South. There's so much there. There's this tension and friction. And there is, you could write a whole other book about the people who chose to stay.

43:06Yeah.

43:07Rebecca:And there's so many specific details. I think this is the journalist I will. She knows a good illuminative detail when she sees one. So, you know, getting your car washed a mile outside of town when you're coming back for Easter so that you put on the right show. You get George talking to post Jim Crow, sort of trying to figure out which of the black passengers on the train would be amenable to hearing, you don't have to move when they come say you should be moving. And doing this, the most sort of complicated social negotiation, I can frankly imagine for sort of moderate stakes. Like it's dehumanizing, but it is actually just moving from train car to train car.

43:47Rebecca:It's not like Underground Railroad, but it's part of his work. It's part of his life's mission. It's part of his service to black people and as part of his history. And then you also see that Wilkerson has chosen three protagonists from various socioeconomic backgrounds to try to get some breath where Ida May is more working class. George for the time is more of a middle class. You know, working on the train is more of a middle class job. And then Dr. Foster is sort of upper class as you can get at this moment and into sort of the real meaningful upper class in California later, gambling addiction aside there at the end.

44:25Rebecca:And I think another thing that is so fascinating, too, is to see her weave in history and academics, but also the art, the poems and stories and quotes and newspaper articles. Like there's a multitextual element, multitextual element to this that I think really captures or does as well as you can captures the broad impact of this movement on all walks of absolutely black American life, but American life in total. And there's one moment that I marked, and I don't actually think I highlighted it, but she includes a lengthy excerpt. She doesn't do many lengthy excerpts. But one is a survey, I think it was in Chicago Defender, asking folks who had come north to sort of talk about their experience.

45:08Rebecca:And the first question is, why did you come? And there's like 12 answers. And the first 11, the first word is freedom. Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom. And I think that is the thing that she is trying to capture, that freedom is the thing. But what are all of the other ramifications of that move? And it's not simple, and it's not always, and maybe mostly realized. But this is a story about people looking for freedom. And one of my favorite ideas from this book that I found so beautiful, meaningful, and illuminative is this was the first affirmative movement by Black Americans to seek their own freedom at scale.

45:46Rebecca:This moving from one place to another and the effects of who, what kinds of Black people, because not all Black people are the same, even the certain kinds of personalities and experiences and dreams led some kind of people to move and some to stay. And that had ramifications for who remained in those communities and then affected the cities to which they moved. And I think that for me is like kind of the most brain opening, mind expanding idea, especially. And I'm not sure which of us I had this thought, but I think one of you wrote it about. Boy, is this idea about who is migrating and who isn't and how we think about migrants and new people in the community.

46:21Rebecca:Today, when a lot of people are walking out and sitting home, it feels so fascinating to think about how this is not just a specific experience possibly, but this is a data point. This is another river in the idea of how we think about how people want to move towards freedom and opportunity and how people react to people coming for freedom and opportunity. So I don't want to do a whole thing necessarily myself. I don't feel qualified or ready to do it, but I certainly felt it in my gut, especially as I was getting ready this morning. So I'm not sure if there's anything else there, but I thought I would mention that.

46:53Jeff:I want to just touch back briefly on what you were saying about how she incorporates so much from other history and other pieces of Black art. Like, Isabel Wilkerson has read all the books. Yeah. She has read all the books. She has read all of the journals. She's read all of the academic articles. And this book never, ever feels like an author going, look how much research I've done. And that in itself is astonishing. I also think that like choosing to put all the notes at the back, there are no footnotes on any of these pages. Amazing choice. There are not even any numbers in the text to tell you where there's a note in the back.

47:31Jeff:Like you can find all of her resources, but that the reading experience is uninterrupted from start to finish. and you just know, well, there's 100 pages of references at the back if I want to go there. You can, but that is such a smart choice and not nearly enough nonfiction writers do it.

47:49Rebecca:And a super quiet flex. Like, I've got the receipts and I don't feel the need to put them on every page.

47:55Jeff:I mean, it's just, it was wonderful. It was one of those things that occurred to me, like, near the end of the reading experience where I was like, oh, right. She's referring to so much other research and to such a deep body of already academic investigation and also drawing on these people's life stories. And like the train thing as well. I'm like picking up threads from your last comment, Jeff. We spend so much time on trains. So many trains. And the specific stories that she chooses on the trains really, I thought, illustrated the absurdity of Jim Crow in a way that we don't get specifics of very often.

48:32Jeff:I grew up in the Midwest hearing stories about, you know, like, I grew up in Kansas and Black people and white people could drink from the same water fountain. But if you go 20 miles east into Missouri, they would have had to drink from different ones. Like, that's theoretical knowledge. But when you watch or read the scene in this book where you see Wilkerson walks us through, the train crosses the Mason-Dixon and people get up and reshuffle. And if you're going north, that's great because then you can sit wherever you want, but maybe you're afraid to move. And if you're going south, it becomes really absurd that black and white people had been sitting next to each other on the train and they cross an invisible line and someone gets up and puts a sign into a holder that says white's here and black's here and people have to move themselves to do it.

49:23Jeff:And having that illustrated and moments like that happen dozens of times throughout these stories. But the way that Wilkerson just lets her protagonist show us these things, like the whole book is an exercise in show, don't tell. But really drives home the absurdity of it.

49:39Sharifah Williams:Yeah, some of the most eye opening scenes for me were from George's perspective as a porter on the trains and seeing all these goings on and as somebody who was used to and who found it natural to rise up against what he saw around him, you know, unionizing and gathering together as a community and going up against things and, you know, having to secretly let people in on that they didn't. have to move and, you know, doing the calculus of like, who do I tell and who do I keep it from? And I thought there was this really great quote Wilkerson had about George and the porters where she writes, he and other colored porters were men in red caps and white uniforms, but they functioned as the midwives of the great migration, helping the migrants gather themselves and disembark at the station and thus delivering to the world a new wave of newcomers with each arriving train.

50:41Sharifah Williams:And I thought that was just so beautifully told because so much of the motion of the migration, even though Robert had a very different journey in his car, a horrible journey, like a lot of that happened on these trains. And a lot of what George saw people putting their pinkies up when they were drinking because they were acting like they thought the Northerners did And just these little interactions, these little details that told you so much about the expectations of migrating and like just the uncertainty of what life would look like for them and how they should act in this new world, I thought was astounding.

51:23Jeff:Just like how scary this must have been and how much courage it took to do it, you know, to get like now if we want to move across the country, you can Google to within an inch of your life, you know, what the neighborhoods are, which one has the coffee shop that you want, which neighborhood is the right vibe for me. You can look on Facebook and see if you know people who are there. But a lot of these folks are the first people in their families and their communities to get on a train and make this move. Or they're going, but the only person they have a connection to in their new city is like some neighbors, cousins, friends.

52:00Rebecca:Who they maybe lost the address for and they have to spend a couple of days on the couch to remember.

52:05Jeff:And that also, but that person was ready on the other end to receive them, that you could arrive in a new city and be like, we are connected, but like 19 degrees removed, and they would help each other out. And that level of community commitment is a form of activism in itself, just individual one-to-one helping in addition to the kinds of stuff that George gets into repeatedly over the course of his life, organizing for labor. He becomes kind of a grassroots organizer multiple times over. But it gave me some insight into how steps along the way that we have become disconnected from each other in the political process that our communities, especially Black people's community, to make this kind of move used to require a willingness to help people you didn't know and a willingness to trust people you didn't know.

52:56Jeff:And that those were that those acts of trust were born out here is really just really powerful. But the bravery that it took to get on that train, like Ida Mae has two little babies when she makes this move. And then shortly after she makes the move, she's pregnant and she she goes back to the south to have her babies because she doesn't trust doctors in the north. And I felt like, oh, my God, being super pregnant on a train, going back into a place where you felt unsafe to try to keep your family safe and make a move. There were no good choices and the ways that these people made these decisions.

53:35Jeff:Specificity is the word that I keep coming back to and that we keep circling around. But it is really just astonishing. I think Wilkerson does a necessary and important and good job.

53:45Rebecca:And this is a note I have here is like every time I'm reeducated about the racial violence of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow and into the even the present moment of the book, I'm sort of appalled anew. Like my moral immune system keeps rejecting the memory of these stories. Like I kind of can't keep them in because they're so horrible. And she gives us the stories, both as education, but also to show the human motivation of these people to get away from this really Dante-level, Hieronymus Bosch. The imaginative cruelty of white racism in America boggles the mind. And that's just something to know.

54:24Rebecca:And I have this in the Maybe Not For You If. Like it's an important, it's important to fit those things squarely, but it is not easy and it's not for the faint of heart and it will turn your stomach and turn your soul. And we get those because they're important as a historical document, but they stand alongside to understand why George has to get out of Dodge when the people are like, we've got, we've got someone who's like a proto unionist. We understand Robert Foster, like, wetting himself on a train because he's afraid of using the wrong bathroom. Or Ida Mae taking her kids on a very sort of dangerous, unknown journey because the alternative is worse.

55:01Jeff:Or the, like, Ocean's Eleven level organization that had to happen to smuggle some people out of the South in coffins.

55:09Rebecca:Wilkerson couldn't help herself. She's like, that is too much. I have to put that in there.

55:13Jeff:Yeah. Who had smuggled them out in coffins with the participation of undertakers on both ends of the train lines. The morticians, baby.

55:22Rebecca:We didn't even know.

55:23Jeff:It just blew my mind. What a great story.

55:28Sharifah Williams:Yeah, that was a historical anecdote I will never forget in my whole life. Yeah, I have a hard time even, especially when we're thinking about like the things they had to accomplish to get where they got and the way things had to work out. It's hard to fathom today how that how any of this would work, like how it would be possible because you do have to have that big, deep rooted community. You do have to have that trust. You do have to have that, I don't know, ability to fling yourself into the unknown. And it's just not something that I feel exists in the modern era, like that sentiment and that willingness.

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56:48Rebecca:rated t for team hey everyone it's the best in the world cm punk back to shake up wwe 2k 26 This year, the show never stops. You're running the greatest spectacle on earth with the biggest roster we've ever had. Over 400 superstars and legends from every era. Stack the tables, break the rules, burn it all down. And yeah, my very own showcase. Telling my story the way it should have been told. Because when the show never stops, anything is possible.

57:15Sharifah Williams:Available March 13th. Pre-order now. Spring is here. And there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness, dial it up, or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry, or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender. Because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks.

57:39Rebecca:And I'll spoil one of my reading suggestions that I was going to unleash on Rebecca to see what she thought, because I know we both love Salido by Javier Zamora. But that book I kept thinking about. It's like, OK, you know how you would imagine it? What are the pathways that people from Latin and Central America are using to get to wherever they're going? Like, what is the story of Somalis in Minneapolis? It's like they're going to be different in specifics, but in reading Solito, like the people, the coyotes, the people you knew, the trust in other people, you were hazarding your life in a lot of different ways.

58:15Rebecca:But also you had some sense of the odds and the odds were that their people wanted you to succeed on the other end of the line or along the line. And it's different. It's different. But I think it's so similar. The homologous structures of feeling and structure are so remarkable, too. And, like, Wilkerson does a really good job. And this is a problem of history and, frankly, a problem of understanding the world for me, I'll say, is trying to bridge the gap between sort of each individual's experiences and motivations and big structural wheels of time stuff. Right? Because both are part of it. And I think it's dehumanizing to just do the system stuff.

58:51Rebecca:And it's too weird and idiosyncratic to not do the system stuff. And I think this is about as close as you can get to trying to sort of take the bull by the horns of that and ride it a little bit.

59:01Jeff:Yeah, it's one thing to be like, there are established systems that shape people's lives and there were racist structures and many of them are still in place. But Wilkerson shows us that.

59:11Rebecca:It's just not the same. Like one story of someone mailing himself in a box and being put upside down accidentally for six hours, like I feel like is more impactful than like structural racism is real, even though structural racism is more sort of, quote unquote, important or effectual there. So I think that's one of the other sort of, I guess, narrative political lessons of the book is how you deal with that reality at one at the same time. All right. I think this is my favorite section of the show, Sharifa, our stray thoughts section. Would you like to lead off with a stray thought here?

59:44Sharifah Williams:Oh, my gosh. I had a lot of stray thoughts, but, I mean, I already mentioned Ida Mae, George's, and Robert's memories and the way they were able to tell their story in such a, I don't know. I wish I had this memory. I can't tell you what I did yesterday.

1:00:06Rebecca:Sharif has two twin toddlers right now. So she is probably not at her highest memory point right now. It won't always be this way.

1:00:15Sharifah Williams:I hope not. But I think one of the things that really struck me as I was reading was this feeling of like, it must have been hard to live up to these expectations that you made this big move and now you have to prove yourself. Like, you have to almost prove that you got success, whether or not you did, like, sending more money than you really have to support yourself back home so you can show your family. Yeah. And like I I had been reading a while before I picked up The Warmth of Other Suns, Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. And there's in the introduction to the book, she's talking about like she's actually saying like, I know that when I go down to Eatonville to collect, you know, African-American folk tales, people aren't going to really be running up to my car to see how fans are.

1:01:18Sharifah Williams:see I am and stuff. But I was thinking about like that. You even have to say that, like, because it was a big deal to show up. People did, as you said, you know, wash their car before they went back to their hometown. They had to show up like they were on top of the world. And it must have been so difficult not only to migrate, to go up north, not knowing what your future looked like, but to have to kind of fake it till you made it in a way so that you could tell yourself and your family and friends that you did the right thing. I just thought that was

1:01:59Jeff:astounding. Just like the ultimate and imposter syndrome for some of them. Like Robert never feels like he has succeeded when by all outward measures he has. But that's just a bottomless pit that he's trying to shovel assurance to himself and his community into. And what an impossible position to be in.

1:02:17Sharifah Williams:Yeah, Robert is one of the most successful of them when it comes to money, you know, wealth and place in society. But I think Ida Mae ends up being the most satisfied of them. And, you know, she comes from this really blue collar background and almost made the trip up north because she had to, because her husband had made the decision. And, you know, it's this sort of like, how do you find satisfaction? How do you find, how do you settle yourself, like, in your soul with this new life and this new place you've moved to is a question I'm, you know, I'm still grappling with after reading this book.

1:03:01Rebecca:Yeah. What is Isabel Wilkerson up to right now was my number one stray thought. Like when I kind of warmed back up to the book and reminded me, I was like, oh, my God. And I had read Cast and Cast is very good, but I don't think it didn't hit me in the same way this particular book did. And I don't, I mean, I have no idea. When she mentioned that her father was a Tuskegee airman, I'm like, I would read, I mean, I will read whatever she wrote, but it made me think, I wonder, black people in the military over time, because that's one of the specters of influence of here of like people going to war, but also the war.

1:03:36Rebecca:but it could be something else. Like with Caste, she's taken a wider spectrum to look at Caste and how that affects cultures around the world. I would believe anything at this point, but I would certainly be excited to see it. I also had the thought that a companion anthology of poetry and primary sources by itself would be a landmark work. You know, firsthand accounts, diary entries, poems, plays, oral histories, like, you know, kind of the Showa project for the Holocaust, but for the Great Migration would be a fascinating document and museum or whatever else. I mean, it could sustain its own museum within American history as well.

1:04:13Jeff:That takes me to my most repeated straight thought through this reading experience. Release the tapes! Yeah. Release the tapes! Like, I want to hear some of these interviews. It made me think about, like, enhanced audiobook experiences that I wondered about the audio.

1:04:30Rebecca:None of us did this on audio, right?

1:04:31Jeff:No. I mean, this would take a billion hours.

1:04:34Sharifah Williams:I went between the physical book and the audio. Oh, you did. How is that? It was fantastic on audio. It was so good. And I did not find it. It didn't slow me down in any way. It was it was actually really helpful to be able to go between the two. But, you know, I am a specific reader.

1:04:54Jeff:OK. Yeah. I love the idea of like a version of this audio book that is Wilkerson narrating some of the structure and then getting to hear Ida May or getting to hear George or hear Robert or even like we get little tidbits of stories that are presumably from the others of the 1 ,200 people that she interviewed. Like it would be so wonderful. And like, what a gift. They are like, those tapes are somewhere. Where are Isabel Wilkerson?

1:05:22Rebecca:I hope they're in an archive somewhere. Like where are these archives?

1:05:25Jeff:I want the tapes. And the other thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about is that it is just absolutely criminal that this book didn't win all of the awards the year that it came out.

1:05:35Rebecca:I mean, I love Patti Smith, but oh boy. Right.

1:05:37Jeff:Patti Smith won the National Book Award for nonfiction that year. The rest of the finalists are books that we have not thought about since 2010. Like, what were we doing? What were we doing? Eric Foner won the Pulitzer for History. That was awarded in 2011 for 2010 books for a book the fiery trial that was about Lincoln rethinking and examining his...

1:06:00Rebecca:Foner is great, but that's the kind of book I didn't want... That's the kind of book that puts people off history books.

1:06:05Jeff:Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

1:06:06Rebecca:That's for people who like to read history books. I think this is the kind of book that people who just are interested in reading will try and find approachable.

1:06:14Jeff:What were we doing? If you were on the 2010 National Book Award Committee, you owe us some apologies. And I kind of wondered, like, Patti Smith is an adored artistic figure, And there was a lot of hype around Just Kids. So I understand that. But on a broader level, I wondered if the fact that Wilkerson makes it look so easy is part of what worked against her maybe for this. Not to mention all of the ways and reasons that publishing consistently undervalues Black stories. But this is like an impossible task. It is so hard to do what she did. And she did it and she does it seamlessly and she makes it enjoyable and immersive.

1:06:59Jeff:And when you pull off a magic trick and you make it look that easy, I think it's often underappreciated.

1:07:05Rebecca:Also, this was her debut, which is hard. She didn't have a lot of cash. Oh my gosh, I forgot. Who comes out the gate like this? Like she's won a Pulitzer for journalism. So I don't want to yada yada that. But in terms of a book construction, it is, I would imagine Wilkerson herself would be the first to say, in the time it took to write this, a different kettle of fish. But still, no one knew who Isabel Wilkerson was when this came out. So I do, well, they do know Patti Smith. And sometimes this certainly happens, the Oscars, you win it for like the movie after the movie. You should have won it for a lifetime achievement kind of thing.

1:07:37Jeff:And the National Book Awards can be a little artist giving other artists, you know, congratulations. populations um but any other straight thoughts let's we need to like retroactively fix that

1:07:49Sharifah Williams:i know i think retroactive awards should be a thing just for this book like i just learned i

1:07:56Jeff:just learned this that like one of i can't remember which sport it is jeff maybe you can help me but one of the sports has like the hall of fame voting and then it that the journalists do the voting for and then years later like there's another board that can come back and be like, you know what? The journalist got this one wrong.

1:08:14Rebecca:And this legacy board or like, you know, it's the real heads.

1:08:19Jeff:Can we the people of publishing and bookdom decide like we need to do some retroactive national book awards and some retroactive Pulitzers? Because come on, just give this woman all the trophies.

1:08:31Rebecca:My last straight thought I had is this is one of the great titles of all time. And if you're a novelist or a nonfiction writer, I implore you to use a snippet of a poem as you're it just this work this is this is work this works this worked for Faulkner this works for Hemingway this works for Isabel Wilkerson just find a snippet of a poem and use it for your title I mean it works every time and how many book titles are taken from Shakespeare right exactly like but also this idea of the warmth of other sons that Richard Wright who's writing about like it's an unbelievable beautiful evocative sentiment and I think her bringing in the poetry from poets.

1:09:13Rebecca:And I don't know if she was doing this intentionally to write it pretty plain, like let this back. I mean, it's well written. Don't get me wrong. But there's not a like individual sentence you're to look at just for like sentence level stuff. She's navigating ideas and people in detail elegantly and difficultly. But then she kind of like lets the poets do the poetry part, which is kind of amazing.

1:09:33Jeff:I had this in trivia, but since you're on Richard Wright, I'll read it now that the title in the epigraph of the book come from Richard Wright's Black Boy where he says, I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds and respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps to bloom.

1:09:58Rebecca:I misattributed that. I thought it was from 12 Million Black Voices, which also gets included here. Yes. But that's Black Boy is Richard Wright's autobiography. And that is a writer doing writerly things with those sentences. And Wilkerson doesn't do that herself, but she'll bring it in when she sees one that's particularly good there. Yes, she has great taste.

1:10:16Jeff:Let's do some more quotes, Sharifa. You've got some good stuff here.

1:10:19Rebecca:Yeah, that's a good transition to quotes. Yeah, when I was thinking about, you know, why it's important to read this book now,

1:10:28Sharifah Williams:One of the quotes that really stood out to me was about violent clashes involving groups that are pitted against each other. And in this case, Wilkerson was talking about poor white Southerners who were also migrating north around the same time. And she writes, they were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin. And many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight. And I just thought, you know, and I think this is why I wanted to read cast as well, because I just thought this is such a profound part of the American experience.

1:11:18Sharifah Williams:is just like everybody is chasing a slice of the American pie. And so often there is this feeling that there is not enough for all of us. So we have to fight over it, like within our communities, against other communities. And that just like I had to sit with that quote for a while and think about it in relation to our times.

1:11:46Rebecca:Yeah, this thing that should be or could be a source of solidarity is this sort of separation. Like that's one of the great tragedies of American life. And I think she definitely talks about that in caste as well. Like that's a dynamic that's not just an American story.

1:12:01Jeff:That takes me to one of my quotes, what few people seem to realize or perhaps dare to admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group's supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank or either race in that world. And when you get to cast Sharifa, which is wonderful, you see in Warmth of Other Suns all the seeds of it.

1:12:40Jeff:But her choice from the very beginning of telling this story and then the subtitle of cast is The Origins of Our Discontent, that it's not just race, but this caste system that the country is built on, of which race is a part, a significant part. But she's doing such a holistic thing here, and it's woven throughout the text.

1:13:01Rebecca:I'll do one long one. I've got a bunch. Though I didn't highlight as many as is in our fiction, just because I think you get ideas. We're talking about ideas and strategies much more than individual sentences, though we could have probably if we had done it differently. It's like our 10 most fascinating anecdotes or mini stories could have subsided for the quotes.

1:13:20Jeff:I don't want to spoil anything for anybody. Yeah, I know. That's that's a great point.

1:13:24Rebecca:That's a wonderful point. Here's my lengthy one. Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it's not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place, or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not dream the American dream. They willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing.

1:13:52Rebecca:They did not ask to be accepted, but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognize, But they had always been deep within their hearts. So it doesn't get a lot more evocative and weirdly patriotic and indicting at the same time. Any other quotes you all want to make sure we enter into the official record before we move along down the line?

1:14:16Jeff:I mean, I love near the beginning, they did what human beings looking for freedom throughout history have often done. They left. Then she contextualizes the participants of the Great Migration inside, like all of the migratory movements that happened before it, all of the groups of immigrants that have come to the United States, the groups of immigrants that are still coming to the United States, and the ways that we see people immigrating, seeking better lives all across the globe. And that versions of this tension happen everywhere that that takes place. We are seeing it right now in Minneapolis.

1:14:50Jeff:We're seeing tension between various communities and the government trying to enforce certain things. I think this book is especially relevant. Like a lot of historians and political commentators are talking about ICE right now as being like a modern version of slave patrols. And The Warmth of Other Suns gives you a lot of context for understanding how we got from the end of slavery to this place 150 years later, where it's still happening. Versions of it are still happening.

1:15:20Rebecca:A lot more missing links to in this book than I ever knew about, about even after, during Reconstruction, trying to keep Black people from moving north and sort of these weird quasi-legalistic machinations to keep people or prevent them from going. Just frankly ripping up Black people's train tickets like in front of them so they can't go. So it's not just slave patrols, everything's cool, ice. The flame has been kept alive, unfortunately, in a lot of different ways. And I think Wilkerson does a really fascinating job of tracking these other modes of oppression and control that aren't illegal or legal.

1:15:59Rebecca:They're just there. And enforcement is part of the deal at the same time. OK. The for you. Is it not for you? Who would like to go on the is it for you? Where do you want to go?

1:16:10Jeff:I think honestly, unless you're already deeply familiar with this moment in American history, you should seriously consider reading this. Yeah.

1:16:18Sharifah Williams:And I think that, like I said before, if you do not think that you will like U.S. history because you also have that memory of textbooks, then you should absolutely read this because this will change your mind and help you to. I know it's singular, but it's still an example of how history can be told in a really compelling way. Could have a reparative experience there. Yeah, exactly.

1:16:47Rebecca:I'll take the con. It's not a con. It's just, I guess, warning signs look out for. If you're not an American, it will be interesting for sure. And all the things we said about Wilkerson's trade craft still exists, but it may not hit you as viscerally to those of us who live here and are interested in whether we want to be or not in these concerns. Also, it's worth noting terrifying true stories of racial violence that Dante would have been like, whoa, about. As bad as it gets. That's part of the story. As bad as it gets and worse than you can imagine at moments. So I'm not sure what else to say, but we like to let people know what they're walking into.

1:17:29Rebecca:And that is part of the deal in American history and this book as well. Interesting to turn to our Myrtle questions that Art asked Rebecca. We haven't applied these to nonfiction before. Or I have not previewed this to my own self, so we'll see how we go. Sharifa can help us translate if this makes sense. Which of the primary questions here? What is the good life? What do I am a neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? And a new addition to our ranks, free will or not so much?

1:18:04Rebecca:As I read those, wildly applicable even to this, it seems to me.

1:18:09Jeff:Yes. Because, I mean, these people are asking these questions in making the decision to change their lives in this way. They are looking for the good life. They're showing up for their neighbors. They're relying on their neighbors. There's a little bit less of the existential, like metaphysical, how do I know what I know? Is this all there is stuff? But they certainly have to reckon with the certainty of death. What else might there be is a real question. Their spiritual lives do sort of come into play, especially for Ida Mae. I mean, and what's the deal with good and evil written all over this one?

1:18:43Jeff:But free will, real or no, like this is a solid yes. Fascinating. Free will, yes.

1:18:48Rebecca:Fascinating.

1:18:49Jeff:Free will is here. You've got it.

1:18:51Rebecca:It's like free will, but also everyone else is behaving similarly to you in similar circumstances. So is that really your individual opportunity working or not? Sharifa, do any of these speak to you as a reader of this book as being especially interested in what this book is about?

1:19:05Sharifah Williams:I think, I mean, it is the very obvious what's the deal with good and evil. It just like that is the story of this book. And I mean, also the what do I owe my neighbor? Because that's so important to the story of these people moving across the country and able to accomplish what they accomplished is they really had to rely on their neighbors and their friends and their family and people they did not know. know. So that was a big one.

1:19:38Rebecca:I was thinking about this a little bit. I think when you're talking about the free will question and what was, which book was that? Was it the last, I don't remember where we, it was a Go Tell It on the Mountain when we were talking about that. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Yeah, right. I had a thought and maybe this is the right time to entertain another edition. Maybe eventually by the time we've done a hundred books, we'll have a hundred questions, but like, how did we get here? I think is a question that a lot of techs ask. And this one is very much, I mean, if this was in the record, probably this would be primary or one of the top three here.

1:20:09Rebecca:But how did we get here is very much in play for a lot of the books that we care about that speak to us over time and place. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? Sharifa, I'll tell you, and I'm not sure if you've heard us talk about this before, the joke here is that most of them are, even if they don't seem about there. The craft of Wilkerson's writing and the work that goes into it is fascinating. But in terms of the stories and the words we get on the page, how much is this or not about art and writing, Sharifa, to your estimation?

1:20:43Sharifah Williams:That's a good question, because in some ways it feels like it really is, because there is so much art. There is poetry here mingled in with these stories and historical facts. And so So it is employed in the telling of this story. I don't know if this feels like, yes, this is about art and writing to me, though.

1:21:11Jeff:Yeah, I think one of Wilkerson's thesis statements of the book is that these stories have to be written down and transmitted and understood. And so it's maybe about writing sort of implicitly, but not about. Recording. It's not like, there's nothing artsy-fartsy about the words of other sons at all.

1:21:31Rebecca:Except the title and the poetry and anyway, sorry. Yeah.

1:21:35Jeff:It's artistic and beautiful, but not artsy-fartsy.

1:21:38Rebecca:I mean, if we turn it just a little to make it to say about stories, then it's absolutely about stories. And that is the unit of history that she understands as each individual story. Could you get the most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation, Rebecca?

1:21:52Jeff:There is not one. There is not a signal adaptation.

1:21:55Rebecca:Which then leads us to this question, Rebecca, which would be, if we were to make a signal adaptation, movie musical, musicable? That's not a word. Movie musical, TV series, or Muppets?

1:22:07Jeff:I mean, I also had Ken Burns in my marginalia, Jeff. I see your Ken Burns bat signal. Yes, the bat signal.

1:22:14Rebecca:Where are you? A bad haircut silhouetted in the sky.

1:22:18Jeff:Like, just this would make for such an incredible documentary. And if you infused it with like the music of the time as we follow these people through, it would be incredible. What did you think, Sharifa? How do you want to see this?

1:22:29Sharifah Williams:Well, now that we've been talking, I initially was like, oh, yeah, an adaptation inspired by the book, like, you know, make it a little bit more film. But now I'm like, when we're thinking about all of these tapes out there, like a serial podcast. Please. And you could just like, you know, this American life it or some, you know, you could really do a lot with the, all of the stuff that Wilkerson has collected over the course of interviewing these individuals.

1:23:06Jeff:I thought about this a little bit more this morning. I was thinking about the Apple TV adaptation of Pachinko, which is like multiple generations of people in the same family. And I think if you had Apple, like I'm not really interested in a fictionalized version of this, but if somebody wanted to do it and you could get the Apple bajillions of dollars and make it gorgeous and sort of set the structure up in that same way where we move between timelines and we want like in and out of these people's experiences, the worlds would be rich and colorful and also horrible, like horrible and horrifying.

1:23:42Jeff:like watching the Barry Jenkins adaptation of the Underground Railroad at times. But it could be done. But I think I'm on the camp with Sharifa here. Like, just release the tapes. So just give us the tapes. That's all I want.

1:23:57Rebecca:Yeah, I think I want, it doesn't have to be Ken Burns, but I would take a multi-part documentary. Because one thing, I have this down in Trivian Adaptations, but the final editor didn't want the book to be intimidating, sort of on the Barnes and Noble shelf to people buying it because they thought they had something here that a lot of people, that it could be a crossover hit into sort of non-history readers. And so she asked for the pages to be thinner, the actual thinner pages. So the actual physical object is smaller dimensions. And one thing I was surprised by when I read it the first time, and I have my edition here, is there's not like a middle section with a bunch of pictures, because you know Wilkerson has them.

1:24:34Rebecca:And the music and the stories and the oracular nature and her tapes. I think she's got all the raw materials for one of those kinds of stories. So I'd like to see that there. Also, a nonfiction doc about the making of the book, I think, would be a fascinating document of itself. Yes.

1:24:54Sharifah Williams:That would be amazing.

1:24:57Rebecca:Miscellaneous trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, and et cetera. These are unsigned by us. So I'll leave you to pick who entered what here.

1:25:05Jeff:Well, I talked already about the origin of the title and the epigraph. Also, in that wonderful interview that Gilbert Cruz did with Wilkerson, she talked about using the Grapes of Wrath as a template for telling the story. Makes total sense. Yeah. So that was really interesting to hear. Sharif, I think you have a couple others.

1:25:24Sharifah Williams:I don't know if I put any down.

1:25:26Rebecca:I think these are maybe mine. Sorry, I should have signed them. That's why we assign these to avoid this sort of awkwardness. My bad.

1:25:31Sharifah Williams:I will say that I did clock while I was researching this book that an editor wrote that the book was basically fine, but that it didn't take into account how much this country has done to bridge the racial divide. Oh, my God. Oh, dear. And I laughed out loud and was like, I really hope that critic looks back on that quote and feels a little bit of shame. A lot of it is a penalty box with that person.

1:26:11Jeff:They can go stand with the National Book Award Committee.

1:26:14Sharifah Williams:Yeah. I know. But oh, my goodness. That's a take. That took me.

1:26:20Rebecca:I'm sure there's some stories to tell about people who help. But boy, oh, boy, that's kind of reading the room incorrectly. I've got a few here. There was one other main story that was sort of the last to get cut, a woman named Ruby who had, and I didn't write the name down, so I apologize to Ruby and her kin, that had about six middle names. And Wilkerson said that same gives some indication of her life and marital history. That would make for an amazing story. So that must have been extraordinarily difficult. When you have a lot of good information, like making a show like this and a book like this, leaving stuff out is maybe the most painful and difficult part to do because you have so much.

1:26:54Rebecca:Both the editor at Random House who acquired the book and the subsequent editor left during the editing and publication process. Well, 15 years. I don't think that's anything about the book or them. There's a lot of turnover and people move around at that side too. And I told my story about the pages being thinner. Hot takes. These we did sign.

1:27:15Jeff:Yes. Just put Isabel Wilkerson in charge of the curriculum. I don't care what she wants to write about next. I just want her to pick another important thing and I will read her books about it.

1:27:26Sharifah Williams:I am right there with you. Yeah.

1:27:29Rebecca:I think this would be another good episode for maybe the beer pod or a Patreon or something. Which courses of living people we'd want to take when we're retired and we're just taking courses for no reason? Isabel Wilkerson's creative nonfiction course might be number one on my list. Like, how the hell do you, how would you tell me, a neophyte, anything about how to accomplish something like that? Rebecca, you said that, but I think, Sharifa, maybe you were making a similar take, but a degree or two hotter even.

1:27:59Sharifah Williams:Yeah, because I was thinking, like, if I did have to assign required reading to everybody in the U.S., this would definitely be at the top of my list. I feel like there is nobody in this country who couldn't benefit from reading this book. And I would hazard to guess that a lot of this would be news to a vast majority of Americans.

1:28:26Rebecca:Yeah, I agree with that. I think the actual subject matter is clearly important, the most important. But I think equally important was like the sensibility and worldview and the way of seeing Wilkerson is bringing to the story.

1:28:39Sharifah Williams:Yeah.

1:28:40Rebecca:Is part of what would make that so powerful. My hot take is this should sit right alongside the power broker as a clout farming big American history read that people are performing about. Let's get people performative reading Warmth of Other Suns. We've done the power broker.

1:28:54Sharifah Williams:I agree. Yeah.

1:28:55Rebecca:Yeah. I don't want to trust as hot as Sharifah's, it's just more specific. So there we go. Further reading. Read-alikes. Book inspired by this one. Sharifah, you have cast here. The Origins of Our Winter. Did you read that too? I know Rebecca did. Have you read that or had you not read that yet?

1:29:12Sharifah Williams:I have not read it. This was my first Wilkerson. And now I'm just, I can't stop. I just want more of her writing. And so I'm hoping that this will, you know, help me feel less sad about saying goodbye to the world of others.

1:29:31Jeff:Like how many more years we might have to wait for another Isabel Wilkerson.

1:29:36Sharifah Williams:Right, exactly. And I mean, Oprah ended up choosing it for a 2020 book club pick. And she like there's a quote from her saying every book I've ever chosen for Oprah's book club selection I've done with care and with passion. But I don't think there has ever been another pick that has been as vital as this one. So I was like, and this book might it might well save us. I'm like, I guess I got to read that book. I was already sold, but I'm extra sold.

1:30:04Jeff:It's wonderful. My read-alikes, especially stuff we've talked about on the show already, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston for a story set in the Jim Crow South. You know, the main characters of that book stay in the South, but this is happening around them in their lives. Go Tell It on the Mountain for autofiction about the first generation of kids in New York after the Great Migration. And then something more recent, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, certainly feels like a descendant of this generation of writers and thinkers. And then like for an incredible narrative nonfiction experience on a totally different topic.

1:30:43Jeff:But since we were talking about that at the top of the show and how reading experiences like this are pretty rare, if that's what you sank your teeth into and you want more like show me that I can love nonfiction, that it can have a compelling story. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which is a big biography of cancer, as he describes it, came out the same year. It won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 2010. So like other side hot take, was 2010 the best year for Pollock for narrative nonfiction we've had this century? Like you get The Emperor of All Maladies and The Warmth of Other Suns in the same year.

1:31:19Rebecca:Yeah, you defanged. I was ready to have a hot take about what was the Pulitzer doing in 2020? 2010, 2010. And I saw this like, oh, no. Oh, no. What would I have done?

1:31:31Jeff:I mean, Wilkerson could have won the history one that year and she did not.

1:31:35Rebecca:I have Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which came out around the same time. Again, it is telling the story of a particular black person, but also a wider phenomenon of black people and medical research and the history of science and cancer. That sold extremely well, got made into a movie. Oprah has her fingerprints all over a lot of these books we're talking about. she picked cast for the Oprah book club. I don't know if Sharifah mentioned that before.

1:31:57Jeff:Ava DuVernay adapted cast for a film as well.

1:31:59Rebecca:Yes, and something that I never saw. And it sounds like they integrated some of Wilkerson's own personal story into that. They did a bit of a meta thing, which always sounds interesting, but I have not watched it.

1:32:08Jeff:The adaptation is called Origin, but it is based on cast.

1:32:12Rebecca:Oh my goodness.

1:32:14Jeff:I didn't realize that.

1:32:15Rebecca:Yeah, I know. That's one problem you have, Sharifah, when you switch titles is that happens, even the interest that sometimes are.

1:32:21Jeff:But the main character of the movie is Isabel Wilkerson. like as she is researching cast. Wow.

1:32:28Rebecca:I was going to surprise everyone with Salito by Javier Samora, but I could not, I shot my, I couldn't keep my powder dry for that one. I think that it's an individual. It doesn't have the historical elements, but it's a poet's heart and his own story of being a migrant and coming up from Central America and the harrowing experience there. And it's been a while since I read this one, and I'm not sure. It's received some criticism in the later years that I think is worth taking seriously, but maybe not something that disqualifies. It's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, which is the story of American expansions in the American West and what happens to Native American people there.

1:33:11Rebecca:So in terms of vector, it's kind of the opposite of migration, Black people leaving white spaces or leaving certain white spaces for others. This is the encroachment of white spaces on an extant population there. Again, also takes its title from a poem. So, you know, there are some other similarities going on there. A bestseller for many, many years. All right. Time for Cocktail Party Crib Sheet. Two to three takeaways. Who wants to go first? Anybody?

1:33:42Jeff:Sharifa, you take it.

1:33:44Sharifah Williams:Okay. Well, I just have one here, and I think that this is the thing I would take away from this book is that Jim Crow is not a relic of U.S. history. It really does. And as you read this book, you realize it represents the systemic ways we have and continue to oppress Black Americans to enrich the white ruling class. It becomes so obvious when you read this book. So I thought that was an easy one to use out there.

1:34:15Jeff:We touched on mine a little bit through the show, but I think Wilkerson really captures that the personal is political, even when we don't recognize our personal choices as being political. And she's using really intimate portraits here of people who participated in the Great Migration to remind us that historical moments and political movements are made up of individuals who are making countless decisions, big and small, that change their lives, but that literally change and reshape the world. And the way that she moves between these individuals and the impact that they had on the U.S., their cities, like every layer of community is really incredible.

1:34:54Rebecca:I've kind of previewed mine a little bit. Sometimes a media anecdote gets people hooked. So maybe tell the story of the logistics of the Jim Crow train cars, which are horrible and specific. And if they weren't so horrible and specific, they would be silly and ridiculous and like a theater of racism, like almost a chaplain-esque theater of bias that seems so arbitrary in the time. I was thinking, Rebecca, about something you said earlier. It hadn't occurred to me. At least I think we grew up with sort of similar well-meaning but flawed educational backgrounds when it came with U.S. history. The dominance of the drinking fountain as the symbol of Jim Crow is a weird—I'd never thought about it before, and I guess that's a point of these kinds of hegemonic avatars, where it seems sort of arbitrary because often the drinking fountains were right next to each other.

1:35:44Rebecca:And it does show this arbitrariness of Jim Crow. But I also think it defangs these other moments where like how dangerous it was. And the one that caught me this time that I don't think I'd ever heard before is sort of the unwritten politics of four way stop signs, where if you're black and the white person gets there first or even close, like all the gymnastics you have to do that are unwritten, as far as I can tell. of how gin crow seeped into all of these other places. So like these specific moments and then the racial violence stuff, the one that got me this time too was the Mississippi journalist, I'm sorry, I can remember the guy's name, who was challenging segregation and he just got institutionalized.

1:36:29Rebecca:He just did. Just put him in an institution. There was no pretense that it has anything to do with anything other than wanting to silence somebody. The drinking fountain is so banal that has come to be a metonym for this structure that actually isn't representative like a metonym is supposed to be.

1:36:48Jeff:In my Midwestern education, the way the Great Migration was spoken of was like, and then black people moved and they got better lives.

1:36:56Rebecca:And to make P-51 Mustangs during the war, to be riveters, because we needed black people to help with the war effort.

1:37:02Jeff:It was like a straight, easy line from Emancipation Proclamation to Reconstruction, Shruggy Man, to like Black people had freedom and they got on the train and they just went to New York or Chicago and then things were better.

1:37:18Rebecca:And Jackie Robinson and Motown and we fixed it. Great job, everyone.

1:37:22Jeff:Yeah, you're pointing out the way that like a powerful anecdote can get people hooked. Gave me this mental image of like, maybe Sharifa said that we can achieve this goal of getting everyone to read this. The thing we all do now is we all have to go to dinner parties and we bust out these anecdotes. And when people are like, oh my God, we just reach under our chairs and we're like, you get one and you get one. You just have one and you can just keep them on your person at all times. Yeah, just everybody's invited to my house once a month on Friday night or something. Like you don't know it, but you're going home with Isabel Wilkerson.

1:37:53Sharifah Williams:Yes, I think that that should absolutely, I'm going to order my extra copies. I'm going to - Yeah, vigilante reading recommendations. Let's do it.

1:38:03Rebecca:Our final beat here is our zero to well-read score. Each one of these categories gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. The five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read cred, and oh damn factor. Can we just give our 10s across the board? Well, again, this is really constructed for a sort of a literary document. So like the importance of the history in this book is a 10. So I don't know. The book itself then by nature also gets a 10. I don't see a way around that.

1:38:34Jeff:It will continue to be an important historical document.

1:38:38Rebecca:Readability is fascinating. It's long. There's multiple interweaved individual stories along with historical and archival research. So I guess, Sharifa, just to orient ourselves, the ultimate 10 is like a patron mystery that you take down in one gulp. This is not that, but it's not that far away from that. Do you have a sense of what you would do yourself, Sharifa? Do it, Sharifa. Do it.

1:39:00Sharifah Williams:Do it. I have such a hard time not giving this a 10 because it was a 10.

1:39:07Rebecca:Rebecca knows I'm not going to step on that since you were the inspiration for us to get that.

1:39:13Sharifah Williams:It's just like I had such a hard time putting it down.

1:39:18Jeff:It read like that for me.

1:39:19Rebecca:That's a 10. Yeah. That's a 10 for you.

1:39:20Jeff:I think I even want to say, like, we need to stop being like, this book is long. Like, just think of it as value over replacement to novels you were going to read that won't be as good as this. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's a good way to think.

1:39:33Rebecca:Current relevance of central questions.

1:39:35Jeff:Forty five.

1:39:39Jeff:Maybe 700.

1:39:41Rebecca:Just yes. Just yes. Another 10. Book nerd read cred. So this one for your first time listening, like if you said, oh, I've read that. How impressed will other people be? How much shine will we get off your freshly cleaned reading Buick when you roll into town having read The Warmth of Other Suns? I don't think this one is a 10, but I think it's an 8 at the very least.

1:40:07Jeff:It only has 117 ,000 Goodreads ratings. I don't like that, Rebecca.

1:40:11Rebecca:Please don't say that.

1:40:12Jeff:I just looked it up, which means that having read this is much, much rarer than it should be. Now, it does also have an average rating of 4.48 stars, which is incredibly high in the Goodreads universe.

1:40:22Rebecca:As high as you get for anything with a meaningful number of...

1:40:24Jeff:That's a really high average. So I think the read credit is higher because it is relatively... If this number is any indication, it's relatively under read.

1:40:32Rebecca:I still think we have a title recognition thing, like where a lot of people maybe will have heard of it, but could they tell you what it's about or who wrote it? Again, this is about optics, not about reality. So eight, eight and a half, somewhere in there.

1:40:45Jeff:I'm going 9.9. Oh, my God. Okay.

1:40:50Rebecca:Great inflation.

1:40:50Jeff:Sorry, you're just not in charge today.

1:40:52Rebecca:All right, that's fine.

1:40:54Jeff:Sharifa and I are just going to... Banging the gavel. It's so nice to have a buddy, Sharifa.

1:40:59Rebecca:I didn't think this was going to go this way, Sharifa.

1:41:02Jeff:I'm here to give Wilkerson tens across the board.

1:41:05Rebecca:This is a real position I want to be in. It's like, maybe it should be a nine and I'm the bad guy and I'm the hater.

1:41:10Jeff:Oh, Jeff, this is how you get aggregated. This is how you get aggregated. Yeah, yeah.

1:41:15Rebecca:Great. It's a real look I want to be having right now. Oh, damn fact, you're the ten. Just fine.

1:41:22Sharifah Williams:There you go. There you go. Wasn't that hard?

1:41:27Rebecca:I think what I found is my zero to well-read score dictum does not hold up very well to a titanic work of nonfiction. That's what I'm thinking right now. It's a little bit different. But look, it's a fantastic book. I don't know what to say. What a pleasure to get to talk to you both about it and have an excuse to read it again. And I think because it is, even at the moment, it was both timeless and timely, for as long as race is a factor in American life, this is going to be a signal work and important and monumental work. So we're going to stick around for a few minutes for our Office Hours listeners here.

1:42:04Rebecca:You can find patreon.com slash Joe DeWellred for detailed show notes, the free newsletter, and the membership options that include signing up to listen to us have what I'm sure will be a rollicking discussion. I've got a couple of questions in the bank for Sharifa and Rebecca that they don't know about. It should be fun to spring upon them. It'll mostly about how I am right and they are wrong. No, I'm kidding. Follow us on socials. That always works super well for you. It backfires, right? I really wily coyote myself with that kind of stuff. You can shoot us an email at zerotowellread at bookriot.com.

1:42:36Rebecca:I want to thank Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. and mention that Zero Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. We did it, Sharifa. We did it, Rebecca. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel.

1:42:51Jeff:Come back soon, Sharifa. Oh, I will.

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