In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson utilizes the technique of immersion journalism to fully encapsulate the experience of those who partook in the Great Migration. Through numerous, exhaustive interviews, she immerses herself in the memories of her three protagonists and weaves them into detailed narratives and stories, closing the gap between the reader and the events of the Great Migration. Thus, the text portrays the Great Migration not merely as a historical phenomenon or a collection of facts and statistics, but also as a lived reality the reader can connect to emotionally. Creating this vivid reality is important because, as Wilkerson notes, the Great Migration is often neglected and underestimated as a momentous historical event. In comparison, the Dust Bowl Migration, in which almost 2.5 million Americans shifted out of “dust bowl” states like Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma during the Great Depression, has historically received more attention. Yet the Great Migration was longer-lasting and larger in scale, seeing over six million people migrate from the American South to the North and the West. 

One manner in which Wilkerson builds the evocative reality of the Great Migration is by furnishing the text with sensory and emotional detail, such as when recounting Ida Mae’s work in a cotton plantation. The cotton fiber is described as light as “lint”; this detail is presented alongside the image of hundred pounds of cotton, a day’s desired “good haul,” evoking the back-breaking labor which would be involved in picking enough lint to make a hundred-pound load. Wilkerson notes in an interview that through her text she wanted readers to be on the train with Ida Mae and George Starling to and race across America with Robert Pershing Foster in his Buick. The crowded Jim Crow cars, packed with “chickens,” and “egg crates,” the shiny chrome of Pershing Foster’s car, the citrus groves of Florida and the tenements of Chicago—these are all sharply recreated spaces which allow the reader to experience the lives of three protagonists.

Further, the sensory details also help capture the movement of the migrants as they navigate the unfamiliar. The movement represents a rebirth of sorts, and indeed George Starling, a conductor on a train ferrying many new migrants to New York is described as a “midwife,” helping their passage into a new world. Because the migrants are experiencing a new world, their senses are extra keen to the new sights, sounds, and smells. The sensory details also place their destinations in the North and West in contrast to the languid, warm South the migrants left behind. The cities they come into are “polyglot”—with the sounds of “clipped accents”—and chilled and concrete in feel, whereas the South they have left behind is a place of “syrupy” accents and “velvet” nights. Thus, the sensory contrasts show that leaving the South is a painful process for most migrants. However, they must leave, because, in the poet Langston Hughes’s words, the South’s “warmth” is exceeded by her “cruel[ty],” driving the Blacks to the “cold-faced” but “kinder” North. 

Isabel Wilkerson punctuates her text with epigraphs taken from the writings of Black American authors such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, as well as from the Bible and from Black spiritual songs. Apart from throwing light on the themes of the text, these passages from Black writers offer a meta-comment on how the Great Migration changed American society and culture, including literature, for the better: most of the passages are written by writers who were Southern Black migrants or their descendants. Thus, the epigraphs show that the Great Migration was an event which reshaped America...